https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/
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
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.
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.
When Donald Trump brought Miss Universe to Moscow
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173
Donald Trump and Miss Universe 2012 Olivia Culpo show off on the red carpet at the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. | Getty
05/15/2016 07:45 AM EDT
Updated: 05/15/2016 05:01 PM EDT
On June 18, 2013, Donald Trump had some exciting news: He would soon be whisking dozens of the world’s most beautiful women to Russia.
“The Miss Universe Pageant will be broadcast live from MOSCOW, RUSSIA on November 9th,” Trump tweeted that day, referring to the beauty pageant he owned at the time. “A big deal that will bring our countries together!”
And maybe not just the countries, Trump said: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant,” he tweeted later that day. “[I]f so, will he become my new best friend?”
Now that he’s headed for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump talks often about establishing warmer relations with Vladimir Putin. That’s a sharp break from the Washington establishment consensus for punishing Russia’s president over his policies in Ukraine and Syria.
Trump has said his understanding of Russia is based in part on the 2013 Miss Universe event in Moscow, where the Manhattan mogul watched 86 contestants don shimmering evening gowns and skimpy swimsuits for what he would call “the world’s biggest and most iconic beauty contest.”
“I know Russia well,” Trump told Fox News on May 6. “I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event.” Asked whether he had met with Putin there, Trump declined to say, though he added: “I got to meet a lot of people.”
“And you know what?” he continued. “They want to be friendly with the United States. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with somebody?”
Critics ridiculed the idea that Trump gleaned any real understanding of Russia from hosting a beauty pageant there. But the deeper story of how he brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow — a classic Trumpian tale of money, power and pulchritude — does shed fresh light on the business interests and personal contacts that have helped to shape his views about the country. It also reveals more about his personal courtship of Putin, which long predates his presidential bid.
At the heart of the episode is Trump’s relationship with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate mogul with ties to Putin, and Agalarov’s rakish son, Emin, 36, a dance-pop singer with ambitions to international stardom who got Trump to appear in one of his music videos.
The father and son are two of several ultra-wealthy Russians to whom Trump is connected and with whom he has pursued real estate deals. “I have always been interested in building in Russia,” he told the New York Post just after his return from Moscow. He also boasted upon his return from the pageant that “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”
The elder Agalarov was born in Azerbaijan in 1956 and has made a Forbes-estimated fortune of nearly $1.3 billion in real estate development. His company, Crocus Group, has won contracts from Putin’s Kremlin, including for two World Cub 2018 stadiums. Putin himself recognized Agalarov’s commercial work in a 2013 ceremony at the Kremlin, where he pinned a medal of honor on Agalarov’s lapel.
Agalarov, 60, shares Trump’s taste for material excess. He developed a luxury housing community outside of Moscow that features a manmade beach waterfall, and housing for his residents’ hundreds of bodyguards. The company’s deluxe shopping mall in Moscow, says its website, “elevat[es] shopping to an art form.”
But it’s Agalarov’s musician son, Emin, who started the chain of events that brought Trump to Moscow.
Emin’s website describes him as having “rock star good looks,” and his music is in the Euro-club style, featuring risque lyrics over thumping dance beats. While Emin claims some commercial success in Russia, his family fortune ensures he can afford a hedonistic lifestyle, one he chronicles on his Instagram account, where he poses on beaches, in swimming pools and at nightclubs — often wearing hats and T-shirts with slogans like “Surprise, I’m Drunk Again” and “Your Girlfriend Hates My Alarm Clock.”
Emin Agalarov’s connection to Donald Trump runs through a beauty queen. In 2013 Emin filmed the video for his single “Amor,” in which the young singer pursues Miss Universe 2012, Olivia Culpo, through darkened city streets with a flashlight. Miss Universe representatives later came to Moscow with Culpo to meet with the Agalarovs, and subsequently introduced the Russians to Trump.
Beauty pageants have long appealed to Trump on both aesthetic and commercial grounds. “Honestly, when I bought [Miss Universe], the bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher and the ratings went up,” he told Vanity Fair in January. Trump purchased the contest in 1996 and entered into a joint partnership with NBC six years later. After NBC protested his inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants last year, Trump bought out the network’s share of the organization, then sold his entire stake a few days later.
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Soon after meeting Trump, the Agalarovs persuaded him to bring the 2013 pageant to one of their marquee properties: Crocus City Hall, a 7,500-seat concert hall they had opened four years earlier. “We just had a meeting … we all seemed to like each other, shook hands and signed our contract within a week’s time,” Emin said in his Forbes interview, adding that the pageant would cost $20 million to host.
Trump announced the venue in June 2013, saying Russia had beaten out 17 other countries. “Moscow right now in the world is a very, very important place,” he said. “We wanted Moscow all the way.” Trump added of the Agalarovs: “One of the great families in Russia is our partner in this endeavor.”
The New York mogul didn’t mention another motive for befriending that family: his hopes for big real estate projects in Moscow, which he would discuss during his visit there.
But as the day of big event approached, Trump seemed particularly excited about his proximity to Putin — even as the Russian’s image in the U.S. was growing more nefarious. Two weeks after Trump revealed his pageant was headed to Moscow, Putin signed a harsh new law that banned pro-gay “propaganda” and criminalized public expressions of gay pride. Around the same time, Edward Snowden landed in Moscow, fleeing U.S. authorities after leaking some of America’s most sensitive intelligence secrets.
Although Trump suggested that Snowden should be executed — “you know what we used to do to traitors, right?” he asked a Fox News host last July — the anti-gay law cast the darker shadow over the pageant. The event’s openly gay host, actor Andy Cohen, backed out, saying he “didn’t feel right as a gay man stepping foot into Russia.” More than 30,000 people signed a Change.org petition urging the pageant to pull out of Moscow. One person who spoke to Trump at the time told Politico that he advised the mogul to relocate the pageant, but Trump wasn’t interested.
Trump argued that the “many [gay] people” who work for the pageant urged him to carry on, saying that while he didn’t like the anti-gay law, “we can go over there and maybe make a difference.” He even found another openly gay host in MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts.
Whether Trump also considered Putin’s potential reaction isn’t known. But he clearly sought the Russian president’s favor. A few weeks before departing for Moscow, Trump made clear he still hoped to see the Russian leader at his Nov. 9 gala.
“I know for a fact that he wants very much to come, but we’ll have to see. We haven’t heard yet, but we have invited him,” Trump told an interviewer that October.
Snowden, not so much. “Message to Edward Snowden, you’re banned from [Miss Universe]. Unless you want me to take you back home to face justice!” Trump tweeted.
Hours before the pageant, Trump tweeted that he’d just been given a tour of Moscow: “fantastic, hard-working people. CITY IS REALLY ENERGIZED.”
Trump arrived that evening on a red carpet, delighting onlookers with trademark declarations of “You’re fired!” before posing for photos with the Agalarovs. A Moscow Times reporter noted that Trump “had to dodge some uncomfortable questions” about whether Emin, who performed at the event in a lineup that included bigger names, like Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, had earned his place on merit.
Trump also described his criteria for a Miss Universe winner. “You have to have the outer beauty, but you also have to have the inner beauty,” he said. “We have some women that are incredibly beautiful, but they don’t have the heart. And if you don’t have the heart, you can’t have the great beauty.”
Putin never showed. But the pageant went off smoothly, crowning 25-year-old Gabriela Isler of Venezuela before what NBC claims was a worldwide audience of 1 billion. (To the disappointment of some LGBT activists, no mention was made of the anti-gay law.) After the contest, Trump attended a vodka-infused 1 a.m. afterparty at which ticket holders were promised a meeting with the New Yorker, along with the pageant contestants.
He also met with the Agalarovs to talk business.
Trump had explored real estate projects in Russia before. In 1987, he visited Moscow and St. Petersburg at the invitation of the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., though he doubted the standards of Soviet construction firms and never followed through. In 2008, his son Donald Jr. visited Moscow to explore licensing the Trump name to properties there, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. The paper also reported that, a few years earlier, Trump had considered aiding the reconstruction of the city’s Moskva and Rossiya hotels.
Joining Trump’s November 2013 meeting with the Agalarovs were Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, a pair of New York-based Russian developers who helped to develop the Trump Soho hotel and condominium project in Manhattan. Sapir later told New York’s Real Estate Weekly that Russian visitors to the Trump Soho “have been telling us they wish there was something modern and hip like it in Moscow. … A lot of people from the oil and gas businesses have come to us asking to be partners in building a product like Trump Soho there.”
“The Russian market is attracted to me,” the article quotes Trump as saying — along with his boast that “almost all the oligarchs” had attended the Moscow Miss Universe event.
Trump also attended a business lunch in the city, according to social media posts by Yulia Alferova, a wealthy young Muscovite who belongs to local civic and business organizations — and who earned a brief measure of fame last year after she posted pictures online of her cat eating caviar.
“I just got back from Russia-learned lots & lots,” Trump tweeted upon his return to the U.S. “Moscow is a very interesting and amazing place! U.S. MUST BE VERY SMART AND VERY STRATEGIC.”
He thanked the Agalarovs specifically: “I had a great weekend with you and your family … TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.”
There is no evidence that such talk led anywhere, however — perhaps because Trump soon turned his attention to his run for the White House.
But the Agalarovs have not forgotten their powerful American friend. Soon after Trump’s visit, Emin released a video for his song “In Another Life,” in which he dozes off during a boardroom meeting and dreams about lounging around his apartment as scantily clad Miss Universe contestants parade around. The video ends back in the boardroom, where Trump himself has appeared at the head of the table.
“Emin, wake up!” the mogul barks. “You’re always late. You’re just another pretty face. I’m really tired of you. You’re fired!”
The next year, Trump opened a video produced for Emin’s 35th birthday and posted on YouTube. “Emin, I can’t believe you’re turning 35. … You’re a winner, you’re a champ!” he says, just before a drum beat kicks in to unleash an Emin Europop ballad.
As for Putin, Trump isn’t saying whether he met with the Russian leader. But he does claim some understanding of how the Russians he met around the Miss Universe pageant feel about their president.
Putin “has a tremendous popularity in Russia,” Trump told Fox News last July. “They love what he’s doing. They love what he represents.”
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- DONALD TRUMP
EXCLUSIVE: Trump was compromised by Russian spies when he went to Moscow in 1987 and has been used by the Kremlin for DECADES, bombshell new book claims
- Author Craig Unger was told by a top KGB general that there is no doubt Trump would have been compromised when he was invited to Moscow in 1987
- He went with his first wife Ivana but Oleg Kalugin, then KGB’s head of counterintelligence says he would have had ‘many young ladies at his disposal’
- ‘House of Trump, House of Putin’, which has been obtained by DailyMail.com, claims that Trump is a ‘Russian asset’ whose greed made him ‘easy prey’
- It says he has dealings with shady Russians with spy ties as far back as the 1970s and took Russian money for condos from the 1990s on
- Trump properties were bought through company which Unger says was a front for Russian spies to keep tags on what oligarchs were spending
- Controversial author Unger was heavily quoted in Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ movie thanks to his book alleging the Bush family had huge Saudi links
By DANIEL BATES FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 11:43 EDT, 9 August 2018 | UPDATED: 01:10 EDT, 10 August 2018
Donald Trump was likely to have been compromised by Russian intelligence agents on a trip to Moscow 31 years ago, a bombshell new book claims.
The president would have been filmed in 1987 with Russian prostitutes sent to him as a ‘honey trap’ even though he traveled with then-wife Ivana, making him vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin, its then top spy told the book’s author.
The material would have been carefully conserved by spies since then.
Oleg Kalugin, the former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told author Craig Unger that Trump would have had ‘many young ladies at his disposal’ – and Russia would have been watching. he had been officially invited by a senior diplomat to discuss possible property developments.
Kalugin claimed that Trump probably even knows about the existence of the files about him containing material the Russians call ‘kompromat’.
The extraordinary claim is in ‘House of Trump, House of Putin; the Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia’, a forensic look at Trump’s long ties to Russia, which is out next week, written Unger.
The author, a Vanity Fair journalist, previously targeted the Bush family over alleged links to the Saudis, and was heavily quoted in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 movie.
The book, a copy of which has been obtained by DailyMail.com, claims that Trump is a ‘Russian asset’ whose greed made him ‘easy prey’ to Soviet intelligence officers decades ago.
It has no direct evidence of the existence of such tapes, however.
Russian visit: Donald Trump went with Ivana Trump to Moscow and to St Petersburg in 1987 at the personal invitation of the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. The KGB’s then head of counterintelligence now says he would certainly have been compromised
Notorious visit: Donald Trump staged Miss Universe in Moscow in 2013, a trip which has become notorious for the so-called ‘golden showers dossier’ – a string of unverified claims, including one of degrading sex acts, which Trump says is a Democratic smear. But author Craig Unger says he would have been compromised already
‘House of Trump’ also details how two Trump associates who in 2013 went to a party held by a notorious Russian criminal overlord and talked about ‘getting together with Vova’ – meaning Vladimir Putin.
Speculation about Trump’s ties to Russian and possible collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016 election has reached fever pitch as the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into meddling in the vote gathers steam.
While Mueller has already indicted 32 people and three Russian companies, the Russia involvement all relates to hacking, which US intelligence agencies have concluded definitely did take place.
Accusation: Unger calls Trump ‘Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House’ and claims that Trump’s real estate business, The Trump Organization, has likely laundered billions for organized crime in Russia
Despite this Trump has been soft on Russia, Unger says, and at his summit with Putin in Helsinki last month shocked the world by saying that the Kremlin did not conduct any meddling.
In a devastating opening chapter author Unger says that the reason is simple: with Trump, Russia ‘implanted either a willfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House’.
Unger calls Trump ‘Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House’ and claims that Trump’s real estate business, The Trump Organization, has likely laundered billions for organized crime in Russia.
The White House directed DailyMail.com to the president’s personal attorneys.
A lawyer for the president was not immediately available to comment on Trump’s alleged conduct, as detailed in Unger’s book.
‘House of Trump’ says that Trump’s associations with shady Russians dates back to the 1970s in Brighton Beach, a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn where his father Fred owned dozens of properties.
Among them were Semon Kislin and Tamir Sapir, Russian emigres who supposedly had ties to Russian crime families and started an electronics store which was used by KGB agents to buy their supplies.
Another was David Bogatin, a Russian born Soviet Army veteran turned U.S. citizen who later pleaded guilty to running a gasoline bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters.
Trump had no problem with Bogatin buying five luxury condos in Trump Tower, his brand new apartment block on Fifth Avenue in New York, in the mid-1980s for $6 million.
Although that is the equivalent of $14.5 million today when adjusted for inflation, property prices in New York have far outstripped regular inflation, making the equivalent price today far higher than that.
In fact Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York at the time that allowed people to buy condos using shell companies which disguised who the buyer was.
‘House of Trump’ says that whether Trump knew it or not, when he closed the deal with Bogatin he had ‘just helped launder money for the Russian mafia’.
Trump had ambitions beyond New York and when he began to take control of the family business he looked abroad – and found willing partners in what is now Russia.
In January 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was invited by the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, to visit Moscow to talk about opening a new hotel there.
Trump flew with his first wife Ivana and two unnamed associates to what was then still Soviet Russia.
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Links: Tamir Sapir, who died in 2014, was a Soviet emigre who Trump knew Trump since the 1970s and who put him together with Bayrock Capital. Unger says the company was a shell set up to allow Russians to launder money under Kremlin supervision
He stayed at the National Hotel in Moscow and during his entire trip was almost certainly under 24 hour surveillance from the KGB.
Kalugin, who headed the KGB’s branch of the First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for foreign operations and intelligence gathering, said that it was widespread practice at the time to use prostitutes to entrap foreign businessmen.
‘In your world, many times, you ask your young men to stand up and proudly serve their country,’ Kalugin once told a reporter. ‘In Russia, sometimes we ask our women just to lie down.’
In an interview for ‘House of Trump’ Kalugin – who was one of the KGB’s most senior officers at a time that Putin was a more junior officer – said that Trump would probably have ‘had many young ladies at his disposal.’
He said: ‘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)’.
The trip was long before Trump’s 2013 visit to Moscow to attend the Miss Universe pageant. It was that visit which led to allegations that he was filmed watching prostitutes urinate on a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama – claims he has denied as false and ‘fake news’, but which have led to the notorious ‘golden showers’ dossier.
The claim was first made in the dossier prepared for former British spy Christopher Steele who was commissioned during Trump’s election campaign by Fusion GPS, a Washington ‘research firm’ to look into his Russian ties.
Fusion GPS was commissioned in turn, first by the conservative-leaning Washington Beacon and then by lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to dig up dirt on the Republican candidate. The Free Beacon says Steele was not commissioned by them and that he was used by Fusion GPS after the Free Beacon’s involvement had ended.
Trump’s ties to Russia deepened in the 1990s after his casinos in Atlantic City began to go bankrupt and his companies went into $3.4 billion of debt.
Unable to get cash from banks in the US Trump went to Russians to get what is known as ‘alternative financing’, Unger writes.
As Propublica have reported, this involved Trump using money from wealthy Russians to buy half of the new condos in his new apartment blocks so that he could get financing for the rest.
During the late 1990s around 20 per cent of Trump branded condos, or 1,300 luxury properties, were sold to anonymous shell companies, the equivalent of $1.5 billion in value.
Around this time Bayrock Group LLC entered Trump’s world courtesy of Tamir Sapir, the Russian emigre who knew Trump from his Brighton Beach days and by now had become a billionaire.
Trump admits Don Jr. met with Russians to get Hillary dirt
Money laundering and spies: Craig Unger says Trump condos were sold to Russian figures through shell companies and Bayrock Capital, from its office two floors below Trump’s was a key part of the scheme. Ex-KGB general Oleg Kalugin says Trump would have been targeted in 1987
Bayrock was a real estate company that Unger describes as ‘largely staffed, owned and financed by emigres from Russia and the former Soviet Union’.
Bayrock’s leadership were even more dubious and were a ‘cozy family of billionaire oligarchs from the former Soviet Union’.
Trump apparently had no problem with this and Bayrock moved into Trump Tower and set up office on the 24th floor. Trump’s office was on the 26th.
Unger says that it is ‘murky’ where it got its funding but with Bayrock’s help – and his appearance on the The Apprentice – Trump was back.
Trump signed deals to license his name to an 813-unit development called Trump Towers in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida and a 35-story tower in White Plains, New York, among other projects.
Bayrock was involved in Trump SoHo,
But ‘House of Trump’ suggests that Bayrock had an ulterior motive and was little more than a modern day version of the old KGB trick of creating a shell company that would launder Russian money and gather intelligence on Western targets.
In Trump’s case, the future president was ‘indirectly providing Putin with a regular flow of intelligence on what the oligarchs were doing with their money in the US’, Unger writes.
He quotes federal prosecutor Kenneth McCallion who previously pursued Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and notorious Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich.
McCallion said: ‘I believe that Christopher Steele was right.
‘Initially, Trump wasn’t that important to Putin. But now that Trump was getting investments from the Russians, Putin could keep track of where their money went because Bayrock kept a ledger that Moscow likely had access to.
‘It was not just about buying condos, which was the tail wagging the dog. It was direct capital investment into Trump projects.
HAS MICHAEL MOORE’S FAVORITE AUTHOR LANDED A BLOW ON TRUMP?
Harvard-educated author and journalist Craig Unger has a history of digging up dirt on public figures and turning it into best selling books, but reviewers have not always been kind to him.
Unger’s best known book is ‘House of Bush, House of Saud’, which explored the links between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family.
It alleged that over 30 years the Saudis had made $1.4 billion of payments in the form of contracts and investments to the Bushes to curry favor with them.
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Controversial: Author Craig Unger
The book was featured in Michael Moore’s film ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and became a New York Times best seller.
But it attracted controversy for what the New York Times in its review called ‘conspiracymongering’ and ‘relying heavily on innuendo and circumstantial evidence’.
The Times review said that Unger’s ‘charges are so extreme – and so varied -that you finish the book expecting to read that the Bushes and Saudis were also behind the Knicks’ lousy record last season’.
Unger’s journalism has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York magazine and Esquire.
His other books include ‘Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power’, about George W. Bush’s chief of staff, and ‘The Fall of the House of Bush’.
The New York Times again was blunt and said in its review that the book was a ‘sprawling hodgepodge of the persuasive and the speculative, the well researched and the hastily assembled, the original and the highly derivative’.
‘Putin didn’t stop the expatriation of billions of dollars because he benefited from it, but it was a serious problem for the Russian economy. Billions of dollars were going out and he really wanted to keep track of it for a variety of reasons, to see what the financial strength was of the oligarchs.’
‘House of Trump’ says that In February 2013 two Trump associates turned up at the 55th birthday of Sergei Mikhailov, who is thought to be the leader of the Russian Solntsevo crime gang.
The event took place at the Radisson Royal in Moscow and to celebrate Mogilevich, the crime overlord, had taken over an entire floor.
The two associates of Trump claimed they were there to talk about putative Trump Towers in Moscow and Kazakhstan, possibly with Solntsevo as a partner.
A source said that the Americans talked about a meeting they had had with Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter. They also talked about ‘getting together with Vova’, meaning meeting up with Putin.
Unger writes: ‘The Americans, the source said, were not introduced to everyone by name.
‘One of them, however, was described as being five foot eight or nine, heavyset, with curly hair and a receding hairline, ‘definitely not slim, and having a California smile.’
‘Later, the source thought that he was likely Felix Sater, ‘because (he) saw his pictures’.
Sater is a Soviet-born former adviser to Trump, a convicted felon and onetime stock scammer who is at the center of the Trump Russia nexis – he was also managing director of Bayrock.
During the 2010s Trump’s connections to Russia and his reliance on Russian money appeared to deepen.
In a 2104 interview with Trump’s son Eric, who was by then helping to run The Trump Organization, golf writer James Dodson claimed that he admitted this was the case.
Dodson said that Eric Trump told him: ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia’.
Dodson replied: ‘Really?’ and Eric Trump said: ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’
Eric Trump also supposedly said that they had ‘access to $100 million’ for their newest golf course in North Carolina.
Eric Trump denied the conversation had taken place and said in 2017: ‘This story is completely fabricated and just another example of why there is such a deep distrust of the media in our country #FakeNews.’ Dodson, however, stands by his account.
Before, during and after the 2016 election Trump has furiously denied that he worked with Russia to get elected and in dozens of tweets has said there is ‘No Collusion!’
The President sees it as an affront to his ego that the Russians could have helped him beat Hillary Clinton and is unable to separate the Kremlin’s meddling from his victory, the book says.
The most serious of Trump’s campaign troubles has become the notorious meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 in which Russians with ties to the Kremlin offered him ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton.
The meeting was attended by Trump Jr, the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer.
Trump long denied that he knew about the meeting in advance but in a recent Tweet he admitted its true purpose.
The President wrote: ‘This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!’
Trump has now reportedly been told to stop tweeting about the meeting by his lawyers who feel it is harming him and adding oxygen to the interest in what took place.
Another link to Russia is that the Robert Mueller Special Counsel’s investigation was begun after Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from leading it, saying it was because of his involvement in the Trump campaign.
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Unger accuses him of actually stepping back because he lied to Congress about his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US – although Sessions denies that charge.
And then there is Manafort who made $60 million from political consultancy work for pro-Putin politicians in Ukraine, and who is currently on trial charged with bank and tax fraud.
When that trial is over he will stand a second trial in which the charges will include conspiracy against the United States.
