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Marty Lederhandler/AP Photo

History Dept.


THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF TRUMP’S FIRST TRIP TO MOSCOW

In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB
almost certainly made the trip happen.

By LUKE HARDING

November 19, 2017

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THE FRIDAY COVER

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Luke Harding is a foreign correspondent at the Guardian. Excerpted from the book
Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win
published by Vintage Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2017 by Luke Harding.

It was 1984 and General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov had a problem. The
general occupied one of the KGB’s most exalted posts. He was head of the First
Chief Directorate, the prestigious KGB arm responsible for gathering foreign
intelligence.

Kryuchkov had begun his career with five years at the Soviet mission in Budapest
under Ambassador Yuri Andropov. In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov
went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a
reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer. By 1984, Kryuchkov’s
directorate in Moscow was bigger than ever before—12,000 officers, up from about
3,000 in the 1960s. His headquarters at Yasenevo, on the wooded southern
outskirts of the city, was expanding: Workmen were busy constructing a 22-story
annex and a new 11-story building.



In politics, change was in the air. Soon a new man would arrive in the Kremlin,
Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s policy of detente with the West—a refreshing
contrast to the global confrontation of previous general secretaries—meant the
directorate’s work abroad was more important than ever.

Kryuchkov faced several challenges. First, a hawkish president, Ronald Reagan,
was in power in Washington. The KGB regarded his two predecessors, Gerald Ford
and Jimmy Carter, as weak. By contrast Reagan was seen as a potent adversary.
The directorate was increasingly preoccupied with what it believed—wrongly—was
an American plot to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.

It was around this time that Donald Trump appears to have attracted the
attention of Soviet intelligence. How that happened, and where that relationship
began, is an answer hidden somewhere in the KGB's secret archives. Assuming,
that is, that the documents still exist.

Trump's first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987 looks, with hindsight, to be part
of a pattern. The dossier by the former British intelligence officer Christopher
Steele asserts that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for “at least five
years” before his stunning victory in the 2016 US presidential election. This
would take us back to around 2011 or 2012.

In fact, the Soviet Union was interested in him too, three decades earlier. The
top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged his 1987 Moscow visit. With
assistance from the KGB. It took place while Kryuchkov was seeking to improve
the KGB's operational techniques in one particular and sensitive area. The spy
chief wanted KGB staff abroad to recruit more Americans.

In addition to shifting politics in Moscow, Kryuchkov’s difficulty had to do
with intelligence gathering. The results from KGB officers abroad had been
disappointing. Too often they would pretend to have obtained information from
secret sources. In reality, they had recycled material from newspapers or picked
up gossip over lunch with a journalist. Too many residencies had “paper agents”
on their books: targets for recruitment who had nothing to do with real
intelligence.

Kryuchkov sent out a series of classified memos to KGB heads of station. Oleg
Gordievsky—formerly based in Denmark and then in Great Britain—copied them and
passed them to British intelligence. He later co-published them with the
historian Christopher Andrew under the title Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions:
Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975–1985.

In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in
Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to
improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.”
Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological
sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists and so on. By the mid-1980s
these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material
incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.

The Center, as KGB headquarters was known, was especially concerned about its
lack of success in recruiting US citizens, according to Andrew and Gordievsky.
The PR Line—that is, the Political Intelligence Department stationed in KGB
residencies abroad—was given explicit instructions to find “U.S. targets to
cultivate or, at the very least, official contacts.” “The main effort must be
concentrated on acquiring valuable agents,” Kryuchkov said.

The memo—dated February 1, 1984—was to be destroyed as soon as its contents had
been read. It said that despite improvements in “information gathering,” the KGB
“has not had great success in operation against the main adversary [America].”

One solution was to make wider use of “the facilities of friendly intelligence
services”—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German spy networks.

And: “Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and
wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should
be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and
important representatives of business and science.” These should not only
“supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign
policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”

There were, of course, different stages of recruitment. Typically, a case
officer would invite a target to lunch. The target would be classified as an
“official contact.” If the target appeared responsive, he (it was rarely she)
would be promoted to a “subject of deep study,” an obyekt razrabotki. The
officer would build up a file, supplemented by official and covert material.
That might include readouts from conversations obtained through bugging by the
KGB’s technical team.

The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case
officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985
this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was
to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as
an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”

The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material
circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the
“subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”?
And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism,
ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for:
“Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and
commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of
his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would
compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general
public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”

Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted
to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”

When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc
security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was
the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from
Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was
therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to
the FBI and CIA.

During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and
Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially
in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet
operatives sent by Moscow.

Zelnickova was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her
first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she
moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski
instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files
said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelnickova moved to New York. In April 1977 she
married Trump.

According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye
on the couple in Manhattan. (The agents who undertook this task were code-named
Al Jarza and Lubos.) They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father,
Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional
relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter
was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic
surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald
Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further
spying, or “cover.”

Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their
intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have
been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe.
Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika, or
Communist Party reform—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer
and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing
interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?

The KGB wouldn’t invite someone to Moscow out of altruism. Dignitaries flown to
the USSR on expenses-paid trips were typically left-leaning writers or cultural
figures. The state would expend hard currency; the visitor would say some nice
things about Soviet life; the press would report these remarks, seeing in them a
stamp of approval.

Despite Gorbachev’s policy of engagement, he was still a Soviet leader. The KGB
continued to view the West with deep suspicion. It carried on with efforts to
subvert Western institutions and acquire secret sources, with NATO its No. 1
strategic intelligence target.

At this point it is unclear how the KGB regarded Trump. To become a full KGB
agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or
British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial
collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction.

According to Andrew and Gordievsky’s book Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions,
targets who failed to meet these criteria were classified as “confidential
contacts.” The Russian word was doveritelnaya svyaz. The aspiration was to turn
trusted contacts into full-blown agents, an upper rung of the ladder.

As Kryuchkov explained, KGB residents were urged to abandon “stereotyped
methods” of recruitment and use more flexible strategies—if necessary getting
their wives or other family members to help.

As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found
himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn
1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of
Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew
all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.

Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a
large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the
Soviet government.”

Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina,
the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to
seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of
appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.”
The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet
ambassador to the U.N.; his daughter Dubinina was already living in the city
with her family, and she was part of the Soviet U.N. delegation.

Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an
intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus
in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.

Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in
New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump
Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so
excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the
elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.

The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of
negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the
city is your tower!”

Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat
impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My
father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”

This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s
account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow
wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain,
and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the
Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after
his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.

Dubinina’s own role is interesting. According to a foreign intelligence archive
smuggled to the West, the Soviet mission to the U.N. was a haven for the KGB and
GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Many of the 300 Soviet nationals employed at
the U.N. secretariat were Soviet intelligence officers working undercover,
including as personal assistants to secretary-generals. The Soviet U.N.
delegation had greater success in finding agents and gaining political
intelligence than the KGB’s New York residency.

Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father—he died in 2013—was
on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s
business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding
capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a
classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and
approval.

In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes: “In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri
Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a
pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the
leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had
expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel
in Moscow.”

There were many ambitious real estate developers in the United States—why had
Moscow picked Trump?

According to Viktor Suvorov—a former GRU military spy—and others, the KGB ran
Intourist, the agency to which Trump referred. It functioned as a subsidiary KGB
branch. Initiated in 1929 by Stalin, Intourist was the Soviet Union’s official
state travel agency. Its job was to vet and monitor all foreigners coming into
the Soviet Union. “In my time it was KGB,” Suvorov said. “They gave permission
for people to visit.” The KGB’s first and second directorates routinely received
lists of prospective visitors to the country based on their visa applications.

As a GRU operative, Suvorov was personally involved in recruitment, albeit for a
rival service to the KGB. Soviet spy agencies were always interested in
cultivating “young ambitious people,” he said—an upwardly mobile businessman, a
scientist, a “guy with a future.”

Once in Moscow, they would receive lavish hospitality. “Everything is free.
There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who
knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “24-hour control,” with
“security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To
collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”

These dirty-tricks operations were all about the long term, Suvorov said. The
KGB would expend effort on visiting students from the developing world, not
least Africa. After 10 or 20 years, some of them would be “nobody.” But others
would have risen to positions of influence in their own countries.

Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember
the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You
don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”

Over in the communist German Democratic Republic, one of Kryuchkov’s 34-year-old
officers—one Vladimir Putin—was busy trying to recruit students from Latin
America. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985, together with his pregnant
wife, Lyudmila, and one-year-old daughter, Maria. They lived in a KGB apartment
block.

According to the writer Masha Gessen, one of Putin’s tasks was to try to
befriend foreigners studying at the Dresden University of Technology. The hope
was that, if recruited, the Latin Americans might work in the United States as
undercover agents, reporting back to the Center. Putin set about this together
with two KGB colleagues and a retired Dresden policeman.

New Window

From COLLUSION: SECRET MEETINGS, DIRTY MONEY, AND HOW RUSSIA HELPED DONALD TRUMP
WIN, by Luke Harding

Precisely what Putin did while working for the KGB’s First Directorate in
Dresden is unknown. It may have included trying to recruit Westerners visiting
Dresden on business and East Germans with relatives in the West. Putin’s
efforts, Gessen suggests, were mostly a failure. He did manage to recruit a
Colombian student. Overall his operational results were modest.

By January 1987, Trump was closer to the “prominent person” status of
Kryuchkov’s note. Dubinin deemed Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to
Moscow. Another thirtysomething U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the
future U.N. ambassador—helped put it together. On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to
Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s
Italian-American assistant.

Moscow was, Trump wrote, “an extraordinary experience.” The Trumps stayed in
Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red
Square. Seventy years earlier, in October 1917, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, had spent a week in room 107. The hotel was linked to the
glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was— in effect—under KGB
control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.

Meanwhile, the mausoleum containing the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed corpse was a
short walk away. Other Soviet leaders were interred beneath the Kremlin’s wall
in a communist pantheon: Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov—Kryuchkov’s old mentor—and
Dzerzhinsky.

According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for
a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition
of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later
St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a
suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the
Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.

That July the Soviet press wrote enthusiastically about the visit of a foreign
celebrity. This was Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and
journalist. Pravda featured a long conversation between the Colombian guest and
Gorbachev. García Márquez spoke of how South Americans, himself included,
sympathized with socialism and the USSR. Moscow brought García Márquez over for
a film festival.

Trump’s visit appears to have attracted less attention. There is no mention of
him in Moscow’s Russian State Library newspaper archive. (Either his visit went
unreported or any articles featuring it have been quietly removed.) Press
clippings do record a visit by a West German official and an Indian cultural
festival.

The KGB’s private dossier on Trump, by contrast, would have gotten larger. The
agency’s multipage profile would have been enriched with fresh material,
including anything gleaned via eavesdropping.

Nothing came of the trip—at least nothing in terms of business opportunities
inside Russia. This pattern of failure would be repeated in Trump’s subsequent
trips to Moscow. But Trump flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic
direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was
considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.

Trump was thinking about running for president.

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