by Craig Unger
Lavish comforts aside, coming back to Yasenevo was not exactly what Yuri Shvets was expecting career-wise. Throughout the early eighties, Yuri and his colleagues were regularly berated by the top brass for their failure to recruit Americans. “Theoretically, every field officer in the KGB was supposed to look for, identify, develop, and recruit agents,” said Shvets, who was tasked to do precisely that in the United States.
Recruit, recruit, recruit—that was the KGB mantra. But in truth, going out cold and trying to win over a new recruit rarely happened. There were plenty of spies in the United States, but most of the double agents working for the Soviets were walk-ins, who sometimes literally walked into the Soviet embassy, as Aldrich Ames did, or devised a system of anonymous cold drops, as Robert Hanssen did; and they did it for the money. In fact, when Shvets looked back over the period between 1970 and 1985 and the hundreds of KGB field officers in Washington, New York, and San Francisco, he could find only one other case of a KGB officer actually recruiting an American spy who was not a walk-in.
The officer who brought in the recruit happened to be none other than General Oleg Kalugin, later the KGB’s head of counterintelligence, who had found, identified, developed, and recruited an agent all by himself.
So what kind of reward did Kalugin get for his triumph? He was sent back to the Soviet Union, accused—probably wrongly so—of having recruited a spy who was really an American disinformation agent. In the end, Kalugin was demoted to deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in what was a severe blow to his career.
Which was very similar what had happened to Shvets, who had managed to recruit two sources of political intelligence: the former White House adviser and journalist, who was code-named Socrates, and his wife, also a journalist, code-named Sputnitsa.
Socrates was later identified by Shvets as John Helmer, an Australian native who graduated from Harvard and became a White House aide to Jimmy Carter. His wife, Claudia Wright, a.k.a. Sputnitsa, was an Australian journalist who worked for National Public Radio, the New Statesman, and other media outlets.7 (Helmer moved to Moscow in 1989, where he wrote for the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, and other newspapers.8 Claudia Wright died in 2005.) These were the Reagan years, of course, so Helmer was no longer an administration insider, but he delivered intel to Shvets on the Iran-Contra scandal before it became public, on US relations with Libya, and on other foreign policy issues, which KGB analysts assessed as being both highly sensitive and highly valuable.
But, as with Kalugin, instead of being hailed as a hero for recruiting new assets, Shvets was sent back to Moscow in March 1987, where his bosses put him under a microscope. “They were positive Socrates was actually a CIA plant, and it wasn’t me who recruited someone; it was the CIA who was trying to develop and recruit me,” he told me.
As it happened, Shvets had had the good sense to make sure Socrates was coming in from Washington to Yasenevo a few weeks later. That meant his colleagues would have a chance to cross-examine Socrates themselves. Much of the top brass thought Yuri had been conned by Socrates. Yuri himself said that it was almost impossible to recruit the genuine article. The only way to find out the truth was to spend hours with Socrates, cross-examining him, pumping him full of KGB talking points, and assessing whether he was ready to cooperate.
Shvets and Socrates weren’t the only ones being sent to Moscow. Donald Trump was coming, too. In January 1987, Yuri Dubinin, who had already finished his brief two-month term as permanent resident to the UN and had become the chief Soviet envoy to Washington, wrote Trump a letter. According to The Art of the Deal, Dubinin told Trump there was “good news from Moscow,” namely that Goscomintourist, the leading Soviet tourist agency, “had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.”
Trump’s trip began on July 4, 1987. Independence Day.*9 The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote about it in some detail, in Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, as resembling “a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support.”10 And, as this book will show, new facts have come to light regarding Trump’s visit that make it difficult to believe that the trip was anything other than a means of activating Trump’s relationship with the KGB.
First, according to Shvets, the letter inviting Trump was written at the behest of General Ivan Gromakov in the First Chief Directorate’s rezidentura in Washington. Gromakov, who died in 2009, was a high-level operative who headed the Fourth Department of the First Chief Directorate and in the early eighties attended meetings with then–KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov, First Chief Directorate head Vladimir Kryuchov, and other top brass overseeing the Stasi with East German spymaster Markus Wolf.11
“It was an established procedure for the KGB stations in the US to use Ambassador Dubinin to pass on invitations to Americans to visit Moscow,” said Shvets. “Usually, those trips were used for ‘deep development,’ recruitment, or for a meeting with the KGB handlers. In most cases the trips were organized by Goscomintourist, the Soviet government traveler agency that was better known as Intourist and served as a front for the KGB. If the trip included all expenses paid by Intourist, it was a clear indication that the KGB was behind it.”
By all accounts, Trump was thrilled with the invitation. But there is no evidence that he was aware of General Gromakov’s role or the widely known fact that Intourist was a KGB-run operation that allowed the Soviets to keep an eye on virtually any foreigner who made it to the Soviet Union.
Before Trump was brought to Moscow, Shvets says, the KGB in New York City would have done what they called a “preliminary evaluation” of his personality. For this they got information on him from their human assets in his entourage—Kislin, perhaps; maybe David Bogatin, who had bought five condos in Trump Tower; or possibly Natalia Dubinina, another alleged operative.
Next came the professional evaluation, for which Trump would have had to meet with an experienced operative at least three or four times. “In terms of his personality,” Shvets added, “the guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
Traveling with his wife Ivana, Trump stayed at the National Hotel, where Vladimir Lenin and his wife had stayed in 1917 and where Trump was almost certainly under constant observation. During the trip, Trump saw half a dozen potential building sites, none of which were as close to the Kremlin as he had hoped.12
To the CIA’s former Moscow station chief Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, in this relatively early stage of Trump’s career, when he was prominent in New York but hardly an international figure, there was no question that the KGB would be all over Trump when he visited Russia. “There’s no way they would overlook a guy like Trump,” Mowatt-Larssen told me. “He’s a prominent American. Any trip—he goes to Moscow—it’s going to be a full-court press.”
Meanwhile, he was given a grand tour of Moscow and entertained lavishly. Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB counterintelligence head, has speculated that the KGB may have deployed prostitutes as “honey traps” for Trump in hopes of entrapping the future president. Kalugin, who did not claim to have seen such materials, told me, “I would not be surprised if the Russians have, and Trump knows about them, files on him during his trip to Russia and his involvement with meeting young ladies that were controlled [by Soviet intelligence].”13
But now that Trump had come to Moscow, the KGB had to figure out what to do with him. “When you have a new source,” says Shvets, “you start thinking, How are you going to use the guy? When we were taught how to recruit, they said, ‘Recruit us anybody—we’ll find how to use him.’”
At the time, the KGB was also concerned about losing aging assets such as Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer, who had had an intimate and intriguing relationship with the Soviets that went back decades. Dating back
to the early 1920s, Soviet leaders, from Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev, had used Hammer as a valuable tool in opening Western capital markets to the Soviets.14 For decades, he had aided the flow of funds and technology into the USSR, bribed foreign officials, and acted as a facilitator for the Soviet intelligence in such a way that Edward Jay Epstein, the author of the Hammer biography Dossier, called the industrialist “a virtual spy” for the Soviet Union. He had continued to get lucrative contracts from the Soviets because he had special skills in laundering money and distributing it to Soviet intelligence.15
Among the many categories in Soviet intelligence, it was important to differentiate assets and agents. Agents were recruited and could be tasked to perform specific assignments. They were knowledgeable and self-aware. “Recruitment applies to agents only,” Shvets told me. “Recruitment is a procedure where you sit down with a human asset, and you make a deal. Actually, you say, ‘Look, I’m KGB officer, and we’ve been working with you for quite a while, so let’s make an arrangement that you work for us and you do something for us, we’ll do something for you.’” Agents always understand who they are working for.
But what Shvets called “a trusted contact” was a very different kind of asset. “Trusted contacts are not recruited,” Shvets said. “Relations with them are cultivated over time. You just build relations over time with them.”
And within that context, Armand Hammer was, according to Shvets, what the KGB called a “special unofficial contact.” In Hammer’s case, that meant he was an enormously wealthy businessman who had access to the corridors of power in the Kremlin and the White House, and could be called on at various times to perform sensitive favors.
Whether Trump could fill Hammer’s shoes was a long shot. But Hammer’s best days were clearly behind him. And, according to Shvets, Trump’s ongoing fixation with his nuclear negotiations provided an opening to the KGB that made him a highly plausible possibility. “They’d say, ‘You have great potential. Someday you’ll be a big politician. You have such an unorthodox approach! What great ideas! Such people as you should lead the United States. And then together we can change the world. Maybe we should just be friends and forget about hostilities. There is a growing admiration in the Kremlin about your successes as a businessman, and we are looking for new ideas and opportunities, and I believe that there is an opportunity for your business in Russia.’
“This bullshit. It looks like he was intoxicated by this. ‘We want to explain our position on different issues, and here they are.’ He may be taking notes, or he might be given a printout. The KGB called them ‘teases,’ but you might call them sound bites or active-measure instructions.”
According to Yuri, that’s what was going on with his own recruit, John Helmer—Socrates—who was being force-fed KGB talking points in meetings with Soviet experts on arms control, foreign policy, and the like. “They would be telling him our views, our sound bites,” Shvets told me. “These were our active measures.”
Though he had no direct contact with the Trump party when they arrived, Shvets, who was still in Yasenevo, wasn’t out of the loop. “The New York desk, where Natalia Dubinina worked, was located just two doors away from the room where I worked. On a regular basis, we had business meetings where we were discussing professional matters. We didn’t discuss specific cases in this giant meeting, but you could have an understanding of generally what’s going on.”16
As he saw it, Trump was going through the same process that Helmer had been put through.
And indeed, when Trump returned to New York, he took the opportunity to get the New York Times to report, with no attribution, that he had “met with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The ostensible subject of their meeting was the possible development of luxury hotels in the Soviet Union by Mr. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s calls for nuclear disarmament were also well-known to the Russians.”17
But in fact no such encounter ever took place. The New York Times later posted a correction. In the meantime, however, the paper of record, which plays such a huge role in defining the national conversation, had validated Donald Trump as an expert on nuclear disarmament capable of standing on the world stage with the likes of Gorbachev.18 That was untrue, of course. He was nothing of the kind.
In addition, Trump’s loyalty to Gorbachev—or lack thereof—was another indication that Trump was taking his cues about the Soviet leader from the KGB.
Initially, when Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, the hawkish Vladimir Kryuchkov, then head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, got along with him far better than expected. “[Kryuchkov] was like a pussycat to Gorbachev, because he wanted to be promoted to the rank of four-star general,” said Shvets.
Widely admired in the West for facilitating the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev was loathed by the hawkish Chekist operatives in the KGB for precisely the same reformist policies that were leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the West, most Americans warmly embraced the Soviet reformer with his new concerns for openness and human rights. But there was one notable exception: Donald Trump.
Of course, when Gorbachev first appeared on the world stage, Trump had nothing but praise for him, and made no secret of it—pestering Nobel laureate Bernard Lown and telling reporters about meetings with the great leader that had never even taken place. In December 1988, when Gorbachev visited New York, Trump sent out word to the Washington Post and other outlets “that he had been contacted by Gorbachev’s office and informed that the Soviet leader wished to meet him and tour Trump Tower, his Fifth Avenue office-shopping-condo complex, when he comes to New York next week.”
‘‘It’s a great honor for me,’’ Trump told the New York Daily News. “His office called and said it was one of the places he wanted to see. Most likely, I’ll show him the atrium, maybe my office and a few apartments.”19
But, as with Trump’s claim of meeting Gorbachev during his 1987 trip to Moscow, the New York meeting never took place. Gorbachev remembered that the Cold War was still on. How would it have looked for the leader of the communist world to promenade about in Trump’s Disneyland of conspicuous consumption and luxury goods?
Trump remained so eager for a meeting, however, that on December 7, when a man resembling Gorbachev showed up unexpectedly at Trump Tower, the future president descended from his twenty-sixth-floor office and greeted him warmly, only to be widely derided later. He had fallen for an imposter, Gorbachev look-alike Ronald Knapp.20
In an interview that took place in late 1989, however, Trump dramatically revised his opinion of Gorbachev. As he told Playboy, “Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand. . . . Yet Gorbachev is getting credit for being a wonderful leader—and we should continue giving him credit, because he’s destroying the Soviet Union.”21
At a time when America was swooning over the Soviet leader, Trump put forth a startling prediction about Gorbachev: “I predict he will be overthrown because he has shown extraordinary weakness.”
The timing of Trump’s remark was critical. “It would have been a different story if Trump had changed his line on Gorbachev earlier,” said Yuri Shvets. “In 1989, only people inside the KGB could suggest someday Gorbachev would be overthrown, because in public he was in a strong position. Everything was fine. Everybody believed that Gorbachev will succeed. You couldn’t find anything saying that in the Soviet mass media in 1989.
“So if Trump said this in 1989, it’s an indication that he was fed information by somebody with inside knowledge of what was going on—namely, the KGB.”
Meanwhile, Vladimir Kryuchkov had gotten his promotion to run the KGB in 1988 and was increasingly appalled at the declining status of the Soviet Union.22 By 1990, reformers and hard-liners alike had joined Kryuchkov in training their sights on Gorbachev, but for the most part such sentiments were closely held within t
he intelligence community and were not shared by the general public.
In addition, there was another significant aspect to Trump’s trip to Moscow that was not widely noted. It first surfaced on July 24, 1987, just after Trump returned to the United States, in an intriguing report from the unlikely pages of the Executive Intelligence Review. The voice of the cultlike Lyndon LaRouche movement, the Executive Intelligence Review, as Yale professor and author Timothy Snyder has pointed out, sometimes “echoes Kremlin propaganda,” but in this case its journalism is of note because its pages appear to be the first to assert that the Soviets were looking “more kindly on a possible presidential bid by Donald Trump.”23 And in fact, Donald Trump did decide to make a highly improbable, quixotic, and, as it turned out, short-lived exploration of running for president in the 1988 presidential primaries against George H. W. Bush, then the incumbent vice president.
To get started, Trump turned to Roger Stone, a dirty trickster from the Nixon era who was then with the firm of Black, Manafort and Stone, a seamy K Street lobbying outfit that was just becoming known as the lobby shop of choice for tyrannical dictators all over the world. In the early eighties, Stone and his colleague Paul Manafort had come to Trump through hardball fixer Roy Cohn. To help establish himself as a potential candidate, Trump decided to promote his newly acquired foreign policy expertise that had been fed to him by the KGB when he visited earlier that summer.
In early September, after Trump had returned to New York, Yuri was still in Yasenevo when a new cable came across his desk that today appears far, far more significant than it did at the time. “I remember receiving a cable that was an assessment of activities in general terms of KGB intelligence stations in the United States,” he told me.
