POLITICO Nightly: The AI disinformation wars

 

BY JOANNE KENEN President Joe Biden hands Vice President Kamala Harris the pen he used to sign a new executive order regarding artificial intelligence during an event in the White House on Oct. 30, 2023. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images APOCALYPSE WHEN — Artificial Intelligence will soon be, if it’s not already, better than humans at detecting disinformation, whether it’s about war, or health, or climate or elections. But AI will also be, if it’s not already, better than humans at creating disinformation. This quandary has some experts foreseeing an AI misinformation apocalypse, while others think the threat is overblown. Darren Linvill, co-director of the Media Forensic Hub at Clemson University, thinks the future is somewhere in between. He thinks of it as a speeded up, more automated version of information wars that have gone on for decades. “It’s still the same fundamental tension,” he said. “Bad guys are going to use computers to do their job…Good guys are going to use computers to try to counter the bad guys.” That doesn’t mean that AI won’t make things worse, or that disinformation isn’t pernicious — or that we’ve figured out how to prevent people from falling down rabbit holes of disinformation (or climb back out if they’ve already fallen). But AI, in Linvill’s view, doesn’t make the struggle over what is true a brand new challenge. AI will mean a “leap” in what’s possible on the dissemination of disinformation front. But Linvill said that doesn’t necessarily mean the distance between the bad guys and the good guys will become insurmountable. It’s sort of like a race where the cars are faster and more powerful than in the old days, but both sides have jazzy cars. So far, the disinformation that we’re already awash in isn’t primarily AI generated. We already have viral memes, deep fakes, and all sorts of harmful disinformation online. But AI certainly contributes to that; NewsGuard, a nonprofit which monitors disinformation, has identified hundreds of “unreliable” AI-generated news sites and many false narratives. What Linvill is focused on in the dawning AI age is the pace of creating, spreading and — on the good guy side, identifying — disinformation. And that pace has changed a lot. One classic disinformation episode, Operation INFEKTION, which he has studied , festered for years before it was uncovered, It was a 1983 report in an obscure publication in India called The Patriot, which said — falsely — that the virus that caused AIDS was a bioweapon created at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The Soviets’ KGB had created the Patriot some years earlier, and waited for the right moment to use it. The lie spread from the obscure publication to the fringe to more credible sources — a process called “narrative laundering.” But the origins of INFEKTION were not uncovered for years, until archives were opened after the collapse of the USSR. While AI can speed that up, it’s not wholly AI-dependent. Disinformation can already fly, if not at the speed of light, certainly at the speed of a post on X. “From the inception of social media, and attempts to moderate social media, the same fundamental tension existed that people used automated techniques to try to manipulate that system.” The sites, to various extents, also relied on automation to control it. “ AI is “just the next step in that automation,” he said. But right now, a scary image of a war zone online is more likely to be lifted from a video game than generated by AI and the fake “eyewitness” account on YouTube of some scandal isn’t necessarily AI produced either. AI may be part of it — but it’s not the full blossoming of the science fiction-ish AI nightmare scenarios that people worry about, he said. The reason people believe these false narratives even after they are debunked, whether created via AI or older methods, isn’t because of the technology. It’s because “within the communities that they were intended to bounce around, people wanted to believe them.” He does think AI generated disinformation will cause harm — but that harm won’t be equally distributed. His center has done research on older adults’ susceptibility to fraud and disinformation in the digital age. “My kids — they’ll probably be fine, because they’re going to understand it and be able to navigate it.,” he said. But his own generation — not so much. “We’re always creating new realities. It’s always going to be hard for somebody — in this case,” he said, “it’s probably going to be my generation.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @JoanneKenen .   GLOBAL PLAYBOOK IS TAKING YOU TO DAVOS! Unlock the insider's guide to one of the world's most influential gatherings as POLITICO's Global Playbook takes you behind the scenes of the 2024 World Economic Forum. Author Suzanne Lynch will be on the ground in the Swiss Alps, bringing you the exclusive conversations, shifting power dynamics and groundbreaking ideas shaping the agenda in Davos. Stay in the know with POLITICO's Global Playbook, your VIP pass to the world’s most influential gatherings. SUBSCRIBE NOW .     WHAT'D I MISS? — Conservative justices seem poised to weaken power of federal agencies: Conservative justices on the Supreme Court today pressed the Biden administration on whether ambiguous laws passed by Congress should be interpreted by judges , rather than by federal bureaucrats. The high court’s eventual ruling could hand courts — including the Supreme Court itself — more power to strike down regulations on health care, the environment, immigration and virtually all other policy areas that are administered by federal agencies. That would strip power from the executive branch and make it harder for Joe Biden and future presidents to defend their regulatory agendas against legal challenges. — Texas river border buoys to stay in place while 5th Circuit rehears case: A floating barrier in the Rio Grande erected by Texas to deter migrants will remain in place for now as an appeals court reconsiders earlier court rulings declaring the barrier illegal. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said today that it will rehear the case over Texas’s decision to implement a series of buoys on its river border with Mexico. A federal district judge had ordered the state in September to remove the controversial barrier, and a panel of the 5th Circuit Court upheld that in a 2-1 decision last month. — Judge threatens to kick Trump out of courtroom: A federal judge threatened to kick Donald Trump out of court today after the former president made repeated comments within earshot of the jury hearing a civil defamation trial against him. Trump muttered that the case is a “witch hunt,” among other similar comments, according to a lawyer for the writer E. Jean Carroll, who is suing Trump over derogatory comments he made about her while he was president. The episode prompted a stern rebuke from U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who repeatedly tussled with Trump and his lawyers during a testy courtroom session this morning. — Senate leaders race to pass stopgap spending bill before potential snowstorm: Congressional leaders working on an agreement to quickly pass a temporary funding patch are racing against a potential D.C. snowstorm , trying to avert a shutdown before the Friday weather threatens to sabotage their flights home. Senate leaders expect the funding extension, which would kick government spending deadlines into March, could pass their chamber soon as Thursday. But it’s still unclear how many amendment votes Republicans will want in exchange for the bill’s speedy passage. House leaders plan to take up the legislation quickly after it clears the Senate, and those lawmakers are hoping to avoid a Friday travel catastrophe as well. NIGHTLY ROAD TO 2024 SAY SORRY — The White House chief of staff Jeff Zients called Asa Hutchinson today to apologize for the Democratic National Committee’s snarky comments on the former Arkansas Governor’s dropped bid. Hutchinson dropped out of the race after a sixth-place finish in the Iowa caucus. DNC spokesperson Sarafina Chitika responded to his exit “this news comes as a shock to those of us who could’ve sworn he had already dropped out.” NIKKI HALEY is a DIRTY ENERGY KOCH SOCK PUPPET - Bought & Paid For! NO ONE is scrutinizing her history! Why is she hiding her TAX RETURNS? NIKKI HALEY raised taxes as Governor. How about the $9 BILLION hole in the ground that RATE PAYERS are funding? No one is asking! There's far more! PLAY THE TAPE — Nikki Haley’s campaign released a new video today — first shared with POLITICO — that outlines past moments when Trump praised her . The two-minute compilation shows Trump thanking Haley for her work as governor of South Carolina and U.N. Ambassador during his administration. The release of the video comes as Trump is set to appear at a rally tonight in Portsmouth, N.H. and it appears to be an effort to preempt, what the Haley camp anticipates will be, attacks from the former president. PULLING THE PLUG — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is moving a majority of his campaign staff to South Carolina , and will head back tonight to his home state after attending two events in New Hampshire, reports CBS News. On Friday, he will attend a ceremony for Florida Supreme Court Justice Meredith Sasso, who DeSantis appointed in May. He will then attend campaign events in South Carolina on Saturday and Sunday, CBS News has learned exclusively. His schedule for next Monday and Tuesday, the day of the New Hampshire primary, is still unclear. The move to prioritize South Carolina — and essentially forgo a heavy week of campaigning in the Granite State in the week before the primary — comes after two planned debates DeSantis accepted to attend in New Hampshire (CNN and ABC/WMUR) were canceled. AROUND THE WORLD Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gestures while addressing the assembly at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images DAVOS SNUB — Ukrainian leaders made no secret of wanting to meet with Chinese officials in Switzerland this week but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has headed home without the desired encounter in a blow to Kyiv , reports POLITICO EU. China’s delegation in Switzerland had ample opportunity to sit across from their Ukrainian counterparts, whether in Bern or at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Any meeting would have satisfied a long-standing hope in Kyiv to hold frank, in-person discussions with senior officials from Beijing. Just before a multi-nation peace summit in the Swiss Alps, Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said it was imperative for China to join peace talks and hinted that Zelenskyy would have an opportunity to chat with Chinese Premier Li Qiang. In the end, Ukraine made no headway on getting China to commit to negotiations, and Zelenskyy and Li failed to speak. It’s the latest sign China has no intention of pushing for an end to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war on Ukraine. It has instead sided with Russia, providing its forces with materials for military use which have sustained Moscow’s war effort despite Western pressure and sanctions. Ukraine and its supporters argue halting that pipeline would further derail the Kremlin’s plans. China’s decision not to meet with Ukrainians appeared intentional and not the result of a scheduling problem. One senior U.S. official said Beijing rejected Kyiv’s request for a meeting at some point during their mutual Swiss visits. Another senior U.S. official said China has refused any gatherings after Russia urged it to cease diplomatic encounters with Ukraine. Both countries have engaged in some diplomacy since Russia’s renewed and expanded invasion. Zelenskyy and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke on the phone last April and China’s Ukraine envoy traveled to Kyiv the following month. Relations have gotten far less personal since, though Ukraine maintains hope both sides can restart talks. ARRIVAL NOTICE — A shipment of medicine for dozens of hostages held by Hamas arrived in Gaza today after France and Qatar mediated the first agreement between Israel and the militant group since a weeklong cease-fire in November. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, announced late today on X, formerly Twitter, that the shipment had crossed into Gaza, without saying whether the medicine had been distributed. A senior Hamas official said that for every box provided for the hostages, 1,000 boxes of medicine would be sent in for Palestinians. The deal also includes the delivery of humanitarian aid to residents of the besieged coastal enclave.   YOUR GUIDE TO EMPIRE STATE POLITICS : From the newsroom that doesn’t sleep, POLITICO's New York Playbook is the ultimate guide for power players navigating the intricate landscape of Empire State politics. Stay ahead of the curve with the latest and most important stories from Albany, New York City and around the state, with in-depth, original reporting to stay ahead of policy trends and political developments. Subscribe now to keep up with the daily hustle and bustle of NY politics.      NIGHTLY NUMBER 63 percent The growth rate of enrollment under the Affordable Care Act in Louisiana and West Virginia for 2024 plans, the largest percentage increase in the nation. Last year, more than 20 million people signed up for 2024 plans — a new high. RADAR SWEEP MONKEY BUSINESS — In the Northern Mexico city of Culiacan, the home of one of the most powerful drug cartels, a different underground system exists: the world of exotic pets . People own spider monkeys, tigers and pumas — and their wealthy owners walk them around in the streets like dogs on leashes. In the city these exotic pets equal power and are becoming the typical house pets for cartel members. From the vets that take care of the animals — who never ask what the owners do for a living — to the sanctuaries that inevitably end up taking these animals in when they become too much to care for, Kate Linthicum illustrates the secret life of exotic pets in Culiacan, from TikTok monkeys to the descendants of Pablo Escobar’s hippos. PARTING IMAGE On this date in 2008: Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer dies. Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion Boris Spassky in 1972, later renounced his American citizenship. He is pictured here on Aug. 10, 1971. | AP Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here .   Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh Mia McCarthy @Reporter_Mia   FOLLOW US

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FOCUS: Craig Unger | Did the FBI's Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?

 

02 February 23

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FOCUS: Craig Unger | Did the FBI's Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?
Craig Unger, The New Republic
Unger writes: "In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump's ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?"

The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.

In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?

Specifically, I knew that:

• Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence.


• The Russian mafia laundered millions of dollars through Donald Trump’s real estate by purchasing condos in all-cash transactions through anonymous corporations that did not disclose real ownership.


• Trump Tower was a home away from home for Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal leaders of the Russian mafia, and at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran alleged criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.


• Trump was some $4 billion in debt when the Russians came to bail him out via the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm that was largely staffed, owned, and financed by Soviet émigrés who had ties to Russian intelligence and/or organized crime.

Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.

I’m well aware of the strict secrecy that accompanies ongoing investigations as a matter of procedure. But once the Mueller Report was finally released, it became crystal clear that Robert Mueller’s investigation dealt only with criminal matters, not counterintelligence. Trump had been thoroughly compromised by Russia and was a grave threat to national security. But the FBI wasn’t doing anything about it!

One reason for that may have been that on far too many occasions, FBI men in sensitive positions ended up on the take from the very people they were supposed to be investigating. And on January 23, a bomb dropped: We learned that the latest of these is Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation. McGonigal was indicted in Manhattan on charges of money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions, and other counts relating to his alleged ties to Deripaska. He was also indicted in Washington, where he was accused of concealing $225,000 he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed long ago by Albanian intelligence.

McGonigal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

McGonigal’s troubles began in late 2018, after his wife found out about his girlfriend, Allison Guerriero, who did not know that he was still married. “I was shocked,” Guerriero said, in an interview with Mattathias Schwartz for Business Insider. “I was very much in love with him, and I was so hurt.”

A few months later, Guerriero wrote an angry email about McGonigal to the man who had introduced them as a couple—William Sweeney, who just happened to be assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York City office. On a number of occasions, Guerriero had seen McGonigal leave huge amounts of cash around the house. At first, she thought it must be “buy money” for a sting operation or some other FBI procedure. Then she became suspicious. Among other things, she told Sweeney to look into McGonigal’s dealings in Albania, where McGonigal had traveled extensively and participated in transactions that later appeared in his indictments.

McGonigal had a stellar resume, including working on the Chelsea Manning–WikiLeaks investigation and on Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the bureau’s probe into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.* Though he was not assigned to that operation when he moved to New York, running FBI counterintelligence in New York is a very special, highly sensitive position that affords unquestioned access to a spectacular array of international elites as well as highly sought-after information.

Similarly, Oleg Deripaska is not just another oligarch. Having emerged victorious from the brutal Aluminum Wars as a vital functionary of the Kremlin, he played a key role in financing Putin’s efforts to take over Ukraine from within via a political operation directed by Paul Manafort that put Putin surrogate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine presidency in 2010. Manafort is alleged to have funneled $75 million into offshore accounts in return for his efforts.

What could be more perfect? Having installed a Putin surrogate in the Ukrainian presidency, in 2016, Manafort repeated that feat on a much bigger stage, as campaign manager guiding Trump into the White House. As Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a close observer of Ukraine, points out, “Russia was backing Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.”

Which brings us back to McGonigal. After assuming his new job in October 2016, just a month before the election, he would have been in a position to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Deripaska and Manafort and to sabotage those investigations with disinformation. Similarly, he would have been in a position to leak the information about Anthony Weiner’s laptop that led to the reopening of the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election. Finally, he was in a position to have been a source behind the false exculpatory news published by The New York Times on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, with the headline that seemed give to Trump a clean bill of health: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”

Of course, McGonigal wasn’t the only FBI official who went over to the dark side. In 1997, four years after he had retired and returned to private practice, FBI Director William Sessions traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian mafia. A decade later, however, Sessions had no qualms about taking on as a client Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don” behind the Russian mafia, whom the FBI had put on its “Ten Most Wanted” list.

Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, followed a similar path. His pro-Putin benefactor was Prevezon Holdings, the giant real estate firm that won international attention in 2008 when Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky investigated a tax fraud case involving Prevezon. For his efforts on behalf of Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management, Magnitsky was arrested, imprisoned, assaulted repeatedly, and beaten to death.

As FBI director, Freeh had warned that Russian organized crime posed a grave threat to the United States that far transcended mere criminality. It is not clear how much he was paid by Prevezon after he switched sides, but Freeh later bought a $9.38 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, just a 10-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Then there was the late James Kallstrom, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the mid-’90s and oversaw successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and later the Russian mob. Kallstrom had developed close friendships with two key players in the Trump-Russia saga. He worked closely with then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Cosa Nostra network that led to the famed Mafia Commission Trial of 1985–1986. Going even further back, Kallstrom had also been friends with Donald Trump since around 1973, when Kallstrom was putting together a Trump-funded parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans.

“We just got to be friends,” said Kallstrom in a 2020 interview as the Trump reelection campaign was gearing up. (The interview was done for a 2020 documentary by David Carr-Brown about Trump and the FBI called An American Affair: Donald Trump and the FBI.)

“I went to a few dinners with him, we talked quite often. He was very, very supportive of the bureau. We lose an agent, or somebody gets shot up, he was always there to pay for the food or whatever it took.”

According to The New York Times, Kallstrom had founded the Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit that got more than $1.3 million from Trump, a strikingly generous offering from the usually parsimonious real estate magnate. Under Kallstrom’s aegis, the New York office became known as Trumpland. “I would say we were associates who liked each other,” Kallstrom added in the film. “He [Trump] would call me periodically and try to boost my morale, and then I’d call him when he was in the news and try to boost his morale. But he’s basically a very, very good person and with a big heart that does a lot of things, 90 percent of which nobody knows about. I mean, we stay in touch even today.”

But Trump being Trump, loyalty and generosity came with strings attached. “He [Trump] cultivated FBI people,” says Jeff Stein, editor of the intelligence newsletter SpyTalk, in An American Affair. “And that’s well-known behavior by people who swim in dangerous waters. They want to have a get-out-of-jail card, and that get-out-of-jail is having friendships or being a good source for the FBI.”

Kallstrom insisted that Trump was not an FBI informant, but another agent told Stein that Trump was known within the bureau as a “hip pocket” source—that is, someone who was not officially a source and therefore not in the FBI’s files.

Nevertheless, Trump appears to have gotten exactly what he sought. As it happens, Kallstrom worked closely with McGonigal and cultivated friendships not just with Trump but also with Rudy Giuliani. Together, they are suspected of being party to an internal campaign just before the 2016 election that spurred FBI Director James Comey to publicly announce he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s emails.

Ultimately, of course, America found out that none of Hillary’s emails were classified. The Times story on the subject was misleading at best. The “reopened” investigation was short-lived and appeared to reflect the wishful thinking of the pro-Trump leaker in the bureau, whether it was McGonigal or someone else. Likewise, the Times headline declaring “no link” between Trump and Russia seemed to reflect wishful thinking on the parts of Kallstrom, Giuliani, and McGonigal—not reality.

But the damage had already been done. When voters cast their ballots on November 8, they thought that the FBI had given Trump a clean bill of health but was still investigating Hillary. McGonigal and company may well have made the difference in tipping the election to Trump.

So in the end, the FBI failed miserably at documenting Trump’s four-decade relationship with the Russian mafia and Russian intelligence, and all the financial transactions between them. The bureau failed miserably when it came to assessing how the former president might be compromised.

As Adam Schiff, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Post in 2019, “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.”

Which is a vital distinction. “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,” Schiff 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.”

In other words, as the KGB and its successor agencies know all too well, intelligence operations are designed to operate within the law while exploiting the latitude afforded by lax regulations and lax enforcement.

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 by at the very least turning a blind eye as former Soviet officials laundered millions of dollars 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?

All unanswered questions, leading to perhaps the biggest question of all: If the FBI won’t ask those questions, who will? It will be interesting to see whether they are answered when McGonigal come to trial or, perhaps, if he is the string that, when pulled, will unravel all sorts of unimaginable secrets.

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

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

David Smith in Washington

@smithinamerica

Fri 29 Jan 2021 03.00 EST

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.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.

Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”

He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”

Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

Donald Trump’s election win in 2016 was welcomed by Moscow. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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