American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  Shvets’s analysis is based not so much on inside information about the people behind the MK article as on his training and knowledge as a former KGB agent who was well versed in the same modi operandi and had seen and run active-measure operations from the inside; who knew how to recruit an American agent and had actually done it himself; and who knew what the tells were in intelligence operations, how to look for them, and how to avoid them. He had acquired this experience working with the KGB in Washington at the same time that Dubinina worked in the sister rezidentura in New York. He also worked at the same department with Alexander Yelagin and Yuri Antipov, acting chief of the KGB’s NY rezidentura in the mid-1980s. As a result, his familiarity with tradecraft and protocols that governed operations for both Yuri Dubinin and his daughter helped uncover inconsistencies in her account that are quite revealing.

  Among other things, Shvets noted anomalies in Natalia’s life that left the two years after her graduation from Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the prestigious Soviet foreign policy university, shrouded in mystery. That happens a lot, Shvets says, to young intelligence officers who train at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute (the same spy school that trained Shvets) and need to cover up those years with fictitious employment before they engage in operational work. “After graduation, and before you go into operational work, you spend one to three years in training. And you just drop out of sight for a period of time. But then, when you compose your official biography, you need to cover those two or three years.”

  And when he looked into Dubinina’s past, he found plenty of unanswered questions. “In different Russian publications the place of Natalia’s employment at the time sounds weird: the Problem Laboratory for Systems Analysis of International Relations (Лаборатория проблемного анализа международных отношений),” he said. “In fact, there was no such lab in the Soviet Union at the time, and the closest name was Scientific Center of Information (НЦИ—Научный Центр Информации), which was the unofficial name of the KGB First Chief Directorate.”

  Using that as a cover for the time she spent training at the spy school was lousy tradecraft, he pointed out, speculating that Natalia apparently thought no one would bother looking into it. And no one did until MK published her interview and Shvets looked into it.

  Then there was the question of timing. “Dubinina had kept silent from 1986 until the day after Trump’s election,” said Shvets. “And suddenly she comes out with a big interview published the very same day. So it had to be prepared in advance. Her interview to MK was an important part of a major Russian HUMINT cover-up operation designed to camouflage the roots of DT’s contacts with the Russians. Instead, it blew them up.”

  The publication itself, Moskovsky Komsomolets, is of interest as well, because, according to The Guardian, it has aided both Soviet and Russian intelligence in the past, including publishing disinformation suggesting that Alexander Litvinenko, the renegade anti-Putin FSB agent who died of polonium poisoning in London, may have been killed by Americans.13

  Shvets also says that MK has been used by the KGB, the FSB, and the SVR for active measures on many occasions. “I know firsthand that Moskovsky Komsomolets was used for active measures by the Russian intelligence community,” Shvets wrote me in a text message. “I know their modus operandi, because I was trained by the same textbooks as Putin and those who are running Russian intelligence services. The content [in the Dubinina interview] was highly sensitive. It was not something the editor could print without authorization from the Kremlin.” He believes the article was edited “to the letter at the top of the Russian HUMINT and scrutinized by the Kremlin” before publication.

  Shvets added, “The KGB modus operandi clearly shows that Natalia was a KGB officer, and her story in MK, together with some other Russian media publications, indicates that her interview was an attempt to cover up the true nature of the KGB contact with Trump.”14

  In this case, Shvets said, the Dubinina interview reminds him of one that took place in 2009 when Vladimir Putin appointed Patriarch Kirill as the new head of the Russian Orthodox Church, shortly after which a retired KGB agent spoke out to the press about his long friendship with Kirill. “Everyone realized it was an interview with the KGB handler for the patriarch. It was absolutely clear. It was the KGB message to the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, saying, ‘Look, guys. We remember who you were, since you were our agent. Nothing is forgotten, so you must follow the party line.’ The same is true with respect to Natalia’s interview.”

  But this time, the FSB was saying hello to Donald Trump, obscuring the origins of his cultivation from journalists and investigators.

  Then, as we have already seen, Dubinina’s claims that she met her father at the airport on his arrival, took him on an impromptu tour of New York, and went up to Donald Trump’s office to meet him violate every protocol in the book. Normal procedure was for the ambassador to be met at the airport by a group of Soviet diplomats and immediately taken to their offices. There were no impromptu outings.

  At the time, the same rules applied to the Washington rezidentura where Shvets worked and in New York where Dubinina worked. As a result, Soviet diplomats, unless they were intelligence officers, avoided all unauthorized, unofficial contacts with Americans. Intelligence operatives were in a different category because it was their job to make such contacts. After all, how could they possibly recruit spies unless they were out and about?

  But according to Shvets, career Soviet diplomats who were not spies—the KGB referred to them as “clean”—rarely left their offices unless it was for a hearing on Capitol Hill, a public presentation of some report, or a run to the State Department to pick up official documents. They rigorously avoided face-to-face meetings with Americans, during which the FBI might try to recruit them. So it was fairly easy to tell who among Soviet diplomats and journalists actually worked for the KGB. Only KGB guys were free and active in their contacts in the United States, and by 1985, the FBI had begun to figure that out.

  Finally, even if one accepts Natalia’s account in which she and her father violated such strictly enforced protocols on his very first day as ambassador, there is another problem—namely, her assertion that her father, with his great command of the English language, dazzled Trump so thoroughly that he “immediately melted.”

  Quite simply, it’s not true.

  Far from being fluent in English, Yuri Dubinin’s English was so bad that his failure to learn the language was cited in the Washington Post,15 the New York Times, United Press International,16 the Chicago Tribune,17 Newsweek,18 and many other publications as being an unusual and major deficit for an ambassador in such a highly visible position.

  According to Newsweek, after he arrived in the United States—that is, after he and Natalia met with Trump—Dubinin began to study English with a tutor,19 but even then he had to rely on interpreters to take questions in English at press conferences.20 In May 1986, just two months after moving to New York as ambassador to the United Nations, Dubinin was given an even more prestigious post as Soviet ambassador to the United States. The Washington Post reported that his selection was “a surprise choice” because “Moscow broke with its practice of appointing experts on American affairs and fluent English speakers to its top diplomatic job in Washington.”21

  Similarly, the New York Times noted that Dubinin’s appointment as the ambassador “startled some diplomats,” given that he had the “handicap” of needing “an interpreter in conversing with English-speakers here.”22

  From Shvets’s point of view—that of a KGB major working in the First Chief Directorate’s Washington station and having regular contact with his colleagues in New York—Dubinin’s inability to speak English was no accident, and may even have been one of the reasons he was chosen for such a prominent post.

  At the time, Shvets was visitin
g the Soviet embassy nearly every day. “Because Ambassador Dubinin didn’t speak English, he just sat in his cubicle at the embassy without even leaving the premises of the building. He was occupying the third floor, and he lived in complete seclusion. He didn’t show up even for meals at the embassy. For meals, his wife would go down to the cafeteria. She would place an order, choosing the meals the ambassador would want, and then she would take them upstairs. He would never go down.

  “He was living as a hermit in the Soviet embassy. For at least a year and a half, after becoming the ambassador, he didn’t sign any cable coming from the United States to Moscow. Because he said, ‘Look, I don’t speak English. I don’t understand what they’re talking about on TV, what they write in the newspapers.’”

  Until then, Anatoly Dobrynin, a legend in Soviet diplomacy, had served as ambassador to the United States for twenty-four years, spanning the terms of six presidents and dating back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But he had been recalled by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to play a key role with the Kremlin in reformulating Soviet relations with the United States. He was so close to Henry Kissinger that he dined with him as often as four times a week and cruised with him aboard the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security advisor under Jimmy Carter, the shift—bringing Dobrynin back to Moscow—was a signal that Gorbachev was ready to pursue an active policy of détente with the United States.23

  All of which meant that the Kremlin didn’t want to replace Dobrynin with a powerful new voice in Washington shooting his mouth off and gumming up the works. So instead they got Dubinin, whom the New York Times termed a “gray-faced apparatchik” and whose hard-line positions and attentiveness to tonsorial matters earned him the description “a Molotov with a pompadour.”24

  “Dubinin was supposed to be a Mr. Nobody,” said Shvets. “They didn’t want a competing voice to be heard in Washington, and that’s why they picked a guy who didn’t speak any English. His role was to lay low, make no waves.”

  But if Dubinin didn’t speak the language, that meant the initial contact with Trump came from someone else. And that leaves Natalia as a likely KGB operative who may have been in contact with Trump during this period.

  And if Dubinina was, as she contends, merely another Soviet apparatchik working at the United Nations, she would not have been authorized to meet with Trump, because it was not her job. After all, at the time, the spy wars were still going full blast. With virtually any Soviet citizen considered a ripe target for the FBI, making unauthorized outside contacts with Americans was a fairly certain way to get in trouble with the KGB and win a one-way ticket back to the motherland. Unless, of course, she was already with the KGB at the time.

  Mind you, this was a period during which the Soviet Mission to the United Nations was widely seen as a nesting place for the KGB. Indeed, in March 1986, the United States had demanded that the Soviet Mission cut personnel because of concerns they were engaged in nondiplomatic activities including spying.25 According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Soviet Mission had been widely infiltrated by the KGB, which led to the expulsion of twenty-five diplomats attached to the Soviet Mission to the UN later in 1986 and a total of more than one hundred by March 1988.26

  “They violate our law with impunity,” said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). “They know that we know they are doing it. Not to stop them invites contempt and in my view deserves contempt.”27

  But back to Dubinina for a moment. It may seem a small thing, perhaps—a self-promoting article in a Russian newspaper with a number of errors and lies. What’s the big deal? Why does it really matter so much if Natalia rather than her father reached out to Trump?

  The significance of the Dubinina interview, Shvets said, was that it was the “origin story” for Trump’s relationship to Russia, the whole point of which was to conceal the ties between Trump and the KGB. But, according to Shvets, Dubinina inadvertently showed her hand “and exposed the fact that, as of 1986, Donald Trump was a contact of the KGB station in New York run out of Moscow by the KGB First Chief Directorate and its key First Department.”28

  And that goes right to the heart of how Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset. Obscuring the real story appears to have been important enough that Russian intelligence would plant a phony story about it thirty years later. “One of the key elements of the article was to camouflage the fact that it was the KGB intelligence that had an original contact with Trump and brought him to Moscow,” said Shvets. “This is crucial. If it was Russian HUMINT that established the initial contact, all subsequent contacts with Russian representatives had to be ultimately controlled by the KGB/FSB/SVR and were part of one big intelligence operation, which significantly contributed to his election as the US president in 2016.

  “So, Natalia was trying to show it was her father—not her—and the contact was official and had nothing to do with Soviet intelligence. That was purpose number one.

  “And number two, the KGB believed that Trump would read this article or translation of this article. It was like a reminder saying, ‘Guys, we remember. And you see, we are lying. . . . We are camouflaging our relationship, but we remember everything.’”

  Finally, there was the initial premise of the relationship between Trump and Moscow—the Soviet Union’s infatuation with the idea of building a Trump Tower in Moscow. “It’s all bullshit, because the chances for his Trump Tower in Moscow were zero. But this is how they put people on the hook and say, ‘Look, I’d like you to come over and just discuss this thing with you.’ And this silly guy, he couldn’t understand what’s going on in Russia or in the Soviet Union in Moscow. Yes, he is flattered. He is happy. He sees beautiful women. He is like a peacock.”

  And that, according to Shvets, is the story of how Donald Trump was invited to Russia.

  Finally, knowing what we know about Donald Trump, what makes more sense: that Trump was wooed by Yuri Dubinin, then a non-English-speaking man in his midfifties who was renowned as a hard-liner, or his daughter, Natalia, an attractive twenty-nine-year-old woman who spoke fluent English and just may have happened to work for the KGB?

  Natalia Dubinina declined to respond to multiple phone calls and text messages.

  CHAPTER SIX

  YASENEVO DAYS

  To the general public, the KGB often calls to mind images of Lubyanka, the massive neobaroque Moscow building where Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik revolutionary and foe of Joseph Stalin, was wrongfully charged in 1937 with plotting to kill Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin and sentenced to death in a show trial. More than a thousand prisoners were executed in the basement of the central KGB building between 1944 and the early 1960s.1 The locus of countless Stalinist purges that has now become a fabled museum of fear, it was also where some of the architects of those purges, such as Lavrentiy Beria, were executed themselves. It has a dark, harrowing history.

  By contrast, the home of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate in Yasenevo, a suburban district on Moscow’s southwest perimeter, is a more obscure, heavily restricted compound in an area surrounded by hills covered with birch trees, green pastures, and, in summer, fields of wheat and rye.2 As one approaches it by car, the facility is designated by an intentionally vague signs that read “Sanitary Zone” and “Scientific Research Center.”3 A tree-lined driveway takes one to a modern seven-story building that is the headquarters for KGB counterintelligence. The main Y-shaped office building, now adjoining much taller ones, is flanked on one side by a library and an assembly hall and on the other by a clinic, sports complex, and swimming pool.

  For all the notoriety and history behind Lubyanka, within the KGB, Yasenevo had more prestige—and perks. “It was the dream of KGB officers to work in the First Chief Directorate,” said Shvets. “It was the elite within the KGB.

  “It was Putin’s dream, too,” he added. “He applied for a job but ne
ver got it.”

  Shvets seemed to say that with a tinge of irony, but it’s a matter of some pride that he won admission to this elite assemblage of counterintelligence professionals, and classmate Vladimir Putin did not.

  Referred to as “the Woods,” it was the KGB’s—and later the SVR’s—equivalent of Langley, situated just beyond Moscow’s ring road, a beltway like Washington’s Interstate 495. Bucolic though it was, the headquarters of the First Chief Directorate was guarded more heavily than the Kremlin, its perimeter ringed with barbed wire and electronic sensors and patrolled by guards with attack dogs.

  This was luxury—Soviet-style. The Soviet Union was falling apart economically, but here there were masseuses, lavish private parties, and servants to clean rooms, cook, and tend gardens. There was a swimming pool, tennis courts, a soccer field, saunas, and a gym. As described in Pete Earley’s Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War, the in-house grocery store was stocked with salmon, sausage, cheese, caviar, and fresh produce that were simply not available to the mass of Soviet citizens.4 “They had cinema showing films, movies in foreign languages just to maintain the professional qualifications,” says Shvets. “They had a swimming pool where they had carp, which they would serve for dinner. It was quite a good place for leisure before you took trips abroad. So you would be stationed abroad for three or four years and then come back for two or three years at headquarters.”

  Within the main building, the North American Department (United States and Canada) of the First Chief Directorate occupied half of the fifth floor in one of the building’s wings.5 This was ground zero when it came to spying on the United States. At the time, there were no computers or high-tech equipment whatsoever—just filing cabinets and standard-issue desks in offices that were about 160 square feet. The chief of the directorate and the deputy chief each had his own private office.6