The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex‑KGB spy

Date: 29‑01‑2021

Source: The Guardian

The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

Donald Trump’s election win in 2016 was welcomed by Moscow.

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti‑western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.