American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  But Comey refused to do the president’s bidding—which would have breached the invisible firewall between the executive branch and the FBI—so on May 9, 2017, Trump fired him, too, and then told the world that the entire Trump–Russia thing was a hoax. As he explained to Lester Holt on NBC just two days later, “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.’” He insisted that there was no special relationship between himself and the Russians.

  However, on May 10, the day after he fired Comey, Trump had already set about to make sure his Russian friends were happy and met privately in the Oval Office with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and US ambassador Sergey Kislyak. As the Washington Post noted, even though this unusual meeting with two top Russian officials took place at the seat of American power, no American reporters or photographers were invited.19 The only journalist present was the photographer for TASS, the official Russian news agency. President Trump had decided to keep out the American media because he said they reported “fake news,” and instead invited Russian state news—in fact, the very same outlet whose reporters, such as Yuri Shvets, often did double duty as intelligence officers spying on America.

  The presence of Ambassador Kislyak was also unusual in that he was a key figure in the Trump–Russia investigation and had been present in the secret meetings with former national security advisor Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. “I just fired the head of the F.B.I.,” Trump told Lavrov and Kislyak.20 “He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

  Then, according to current and former US officials, the president proceeded to reveal highly classified intelligence to Lavrov and Kislyak that reportedly jeopardized an important source of information on the Islamic State. The information came from an intelligence-sharing partner that had not given the US permission to share it with Russia. A knowledgeable US official told the Washington Post that the intelligence was classified at one of the highest levels used by American spy agencies as “code-word information.” Trump, he said, “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”21

  And when Trump insisted that the pressure from the Russian probe had been “taken off,” he was being a bit too optimistic. Firing Comey had not ended the investigation; it merely triggered the appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel who was mandated to take over the Comey probe. Specifically, the one-page document signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said, “The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James B. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017.”

  Comey had been reasonably clear in articulating the nature of the investigation when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee in March. “The FBI,” he told the committee, “as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

  And if that is not clear enough, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe was more specific. “We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” McCabe told the New York Times.22

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  The difference between counterintelligence and criminal investigations is not some minor legal distinction. It’s fundamental. Criminal investigations are intended to lead toward prosecution; counterintelligence are not. Instead, they are undertaken to thwart an adversary’s spying, espionage, or sabotage—the adversary in this case, of course, being Russia.

  Even though they are not about breaking the law per se, counterintelligence investigations may well involve issues that are far more serious than criminal probes. In this case, the point of a counterintelligence investigation was to protect the United States from Russian interference in America’s elections. From cyberwarfare. From disinformation. From Russian assets who had been groomed for years, perhaps decades, and were finally in place to do real damage to vital American institutions.

  And yet when the Mueller Report was published, the only part of it dealing with counterintelligence was one solitary paragraph, saying that the FBI “embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send—in writing—summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices. Those communications and other correspondence between the Office and the FBI contain information derived from the investigation, not all of which is contained in this Volume.”

  And that was it.

  When Mueller was first appointed and the Republicans held both houses of Congress, tens of millions of Americans had put their faith in him, with his anvil jaw and his Boy Scout–like reputation for rectitude, as a new American hero, ready to ride in on his steed and restore the rule of law. Who better than Mueller to finally rein in an increasingly sociopathic president who was acting more and more like Putin’s puppet?

  But now that Mueller had delivered, there was no counterintelligence investigation. People at the highest levels of law enforcement were stunned. “I expected that issue [the counterintelligence threat involving President Trump and Russia] and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team,” Andrew McCabe told the Times. “If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”

  Countless hats and T-shirts had trumpeted, “It’s Mueller Time!,” only to wind up in the remainder bin.23 What America got instead was Mueller Lite.

  In the end, of course, the Mueller probe produced enormous amounts of evidence regarding criminal activities that led to the indictment of thirty-four individuals and three companies. Ten men pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes, including seven Trump associates—namely, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, campaign aide Rick Gates, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, campaign aide George Nader, confidant Roger Stone, adviser George Papadopoulos, and Trump attorney/fixer Michael Cohen.

  But as damning as such convictions were, the Stormy Daniels charges and other Mueller indictments were nothing compared with the grave national security threat presented by Trump’s close relationship to Putin and Russian intelligence. So the Mueller Report simply omitted—or perhaps buried—the counterintelligence investigation it had been mandated to do.

  The investigation into Trump’s well-documented four-decade relationship with the Russian Mafia, a de facto state actor, and Russian intelligence, and all the financial transactions between them, was nowhere to be found. As Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Washington Post, “Just as a reminder, this all began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether people around then-candidate Trump were acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign power. So it began as a counterintelligence investigation, not as a criminal investigation.24

  “It may not be a crime for a candidate for president to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power during an election and mislead the country about it,” he added. “But the counterintelligence concerns go beyond mere violation of criminal law. They’re at one time not necessarily a criminal activity and at the same time potentially far more serious than criminal activity because you have the capacity to warp U.S. policy owing to some form of compromise.”

  All of which calls to mind journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what is legal. Sometimes the most egregious and corrupt wrongdoings are perfectl
y lawful. And that is particularly true when it comes to intelligence operations.

  A serious counterintelligence investigation, then, would presumably have asked how the KGB began its relationship with Trump and whether Trump had been compromised first by the Soviets and later by Russia. It would have asked how deeply Trump was indebted to the Russian Mafia, because he had made a fortune laundering millions of dollars from former Soviets through his real estate. How much business had he done with operatives of Russian intelligence and/or the Russian Mafia? Did Russia have kompromat on Trump? Was he a Russian asset? How far back did his relationship go? How much did he make laundering money for them? What about other members of his family, the Trump administration and campaign, other politicians?

  What follows is an attempt to answer some of those questions, based on interviews with more than a dozen former officers from the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI; several friends and associates of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell; officers, priests, and members of Opus Dei; former officials at the Department of Justice; lawyers at white-shoe Washington law firms; and thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and articles on the Internet in English, Russian, and Ukrainian.

  My book will answer some of those questions by telling how a relatively insignificant targeting operation by the KGB’s New York rezidentura (New York station) long ago—an attempt to cultivate an influential businessman as a new asset—triggered a sequence of intelligence protocols that morphed into the greatest intelligence bonanza in history. It will tell how, more than four decades ago, Trump made contact with a suspected KGB operative when he bought hundreds of TV sets from a Soviet electronics store in Manhattan that was a KGB front. It will tell how, in 1987, Trump was named by the KGB’s Service A, the Active Measures directorate, as an operational asset carrying out a so-called active measure by spouting KGB talking points as propaganda in the American press. (“Active measures” is a term used by Soviet and Russian security services for conducting political warfare via disinformation, propaganda, the fabrication of counterfeit official documents, and the establishment of front organizations, assassinations, and political repression, among other means.)

  And it will show that Natalia Dubinina, daughter of the late Soviet ambassador to the United Nations and United States, Yuri Dubinin, allegedly worked for the KGB when she was employed at the UN’s Dag Hammerskjöld Library and first met Donald Trump. It will show that on November 9, 2016, the day after Trump’s election, the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets published a strange interview with Natalia Dubinina about her contacts with Trump in 1986 that, upon closer examination, appears to be an active measure intended to disguise the origins of Trump’s ties to the KGB. And it will show that, in September 1987, Donald Trump, allegedly a newly cultivated asset, took out full-page ads in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe that had disseminated KGB talking points, an event that called for a celebratory memo to be circulated at First Chief Directorate’s headquarters on the perimeter of Moscow.

  It will also tell the story of how William Barr helped cover up Trump’s alliance with Russia and facilitated the ongoing Trump-Russia operation by inflating the powers of the presidency, with the aid of his fellow law firm partners, many of whom had represented Russian interests and some of whom, like Barr himself, are tied to Opus Dei. It will examine how the Jeffrey Epstein–Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking operation provided a source and marketplace for the dirty little secrets of the richest and most powerful men in the world, and how Russian intelligence may have penetrated the Epstein-Maxwell ring and used it to infiltrate the highest levels of Silicon Valley and the worlds of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the Internet.

  And finally, my book will examine how, before, during, and after the 2020 presidential campaign, with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging America, killing more than 250,000 people and infecting more than 12 million, Trump began shutting down oversight of the corruption throughout his administration as he fired one inspector general after another; spreading false information about the pandemic that led to more COVID deaths in the United States than anywhere else in the world; destabilizing the United States Postal Service to make the vote-by-mail operation seem unreliable at a time when in-person voting was likely to be dangerous; and having Attorney General Barr put forth the most autocratic interpretation of the doctrine of the “unitary executive” imaginable, thereby clearing the way for Trump and his cronies to ignore subpoenas, seize Congress’s power of the purse, destroy congressional oversight, end the rule of law, and take on powers that threatened to end American democracy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE SPOTTER

  According to Yuri Shvets, the former high-ranking officer in the KGB, the Soviet spy agency first got its foot in the door more than forty years ago and began cultivating Donald Trump as a prospective asset. Shvets described to me in great detail elements of a long-term series of intelligence tasks and procedures that comprised what was arguably the most successful intelligence operation in history—ending up with a Russian asset in the White House as president of the United States. Of course, many important questions remain unanswered. But in the end, what is now known strongly suggests that Donald Trump was first approached by the Soviet Union’s KGB by 1980, was compromised by its agents repeatedly over the ensuing decades, and has behaved as a Russian asset since, most obviously after he became president.

  The exact date is unclear, but the operation began after Trump, about thirty years old at the time, launched plans to take over the enormous and decrepit Commodore Hotel adjacent to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal in 1976 and convert it into the Grand Hyatt New York.

  The Grand Hyatt, which opened in 1980, was the first big score for Trump, then a brash real estate developer from Queens determined to make his mark across the river in Manhattan. How Trump, under the tutelage of attorney Roy Cohn, the Mafia lawyer and dark satanic prince of the McCarthy era, cashed in countless political favors has been widely reported, including how he got the inside fix on insanely generous tax abatements and the like. Trump, who had paid only one dollar for the option to buy the dilapidated monstrosity, made an immense fortune with the project and was put on the path to becoming a national figure.1

  For all that, one rather banal, obscure, and incidental detail in the development of the Grand Hyatt may be the key to unraveling the mystery of Donald Trump’s ties to Russian intelligence. That detail is the reported purchase by Trump of hundreds of television sets for the new hotel from Semyon “Sam” Kislin, a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated from Odessa in 1972 and co-owned a small electronics store in New York.

  Kislin’s store, Joy-Lud Electronics, was located at 200 Fifth Avenue at Twenty-Third Street, an intersection best known for its proximity to the iconic Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park. Today, the sixteen-story building, which was once the site of the luxurious Fifth Avenue Hotel, is best known as the location for Eataly, the massive marketplace for risotto al tartuffo and various other Italian delicacies. Not a trace remains of Joy-Lud Electronics, which was located there in the eighties, when the building was known as the International Toy Center and provided a home for dozens of businesses in the toy industry.

  Manhattan at the time was awash with cut-rate electronics stores such as 47th Street Photo and Crazy Eddie (“His prices are IN-SA-A-A-A-A-ANE!” went the late-night-TV pitch) selling every electronic gadget imaginable. But Joy-Lud proclaimed its distinctiveness with a sign on its front door proudly asserting, “We speak Russian.” Consequently, Kislin’s store, which he co-owned with Tamir Sapir, another Soviet émigré, carved out a unique niche among the only people allowed to travel abroad under the Soviet system: diplomats, KGB officers, and Politburo members, all of whom bought their electronic equipment there before returning to the Soviet Union.

  The reason for Joy-Lud’s popularity among the Soviets wasn’t solely that they were Russophones. It also had to do with techni
cal specifications. Unlike American television, Soviet TV employed the PAL and SECAM technical standards, which were widely used in Europe and Russia. (The US standard is known as NTSC.) That meant conventional American sets were worthless in the Soviet Union. At the same time, when Soviet diplomats, businessmen, and spies—and there were hundreds of them—returned to the USSR, no one wanted to be empty-handed when it came to having the latest videocassette recorder—be it VHS or Betamax.

  Kislin’s Joy-Lud filled that niche. “For every espionage agent in the United States who had spent four or five years in this country and was returning back to Moscow, it was a must to bring back a TV set,” said Yuri Shvets, who was familiar with the store when he served in the KGB’s Washington station in the mid-eighties. “But you couldn’t buy a TV set in a regular American store which would work in Moscow. The only place was Kislin’s.”

  As a result, their largely Soviet clientele was known as “vacuum cleaners,” a moniker bestowed on officials, émigrés, and tourists who hoovered up vast quantities of electronic equipment and consumer goods to take back to the Soviet Union. As soon as their planes from Moscow landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport, throngs of Soviets asked to be taken to the store, and not merely because its walls were covered with autographed pictures of celebrated Soviet singers, writers, athletes, and cosmonauts who had been customers; Kislin and his partner had learned how to curry favor with the powers that be.2 “They had special refund policies for the elite,” said a Soviet émigré who was familiar with the store. “They would accept the unwanted equipment even without its packaging and give them something else—no questions asked.”

  For Soviet customers, it also wasn’t just techno lust for the latest new gadgets, which, of course, wouldn’t be available in the Soviet Union for eons. There was also their resale value. As the New York Times reported, a video camera that cost $1,000 at Kislin’s store could be resold in the Soviet Union for forty times the average monthly Soviet salary. “They could buy a videotape recorder here, sell it in Russia, and buy a house,” said Kislin’s partner, Sapir, who died in 2014.3 Sony Trinitron TVs, VHS and Betamax videotape players, and Nikon cameras flew off the shelves, ready for resale on the Soviet black market.