In December 2017, the former national intelligence director James Clapper asserted that Trump was, in effect, an intelligence “asset”* serving Russian president Vladimir Putin.[7] And in 2019, the former CIA director John Brennan declared Trump to be “wholly in the pocket of Putin” and went further on Meet the Press, where he added that he had

Among the many categories in Soviet intelligence, it was important to differentiate assets and agents. Agents were recruited and could be tasked to perform specific assignments. They were knowledgeable and self-aware. “Recruitment applies to agents only,” Shvets told me. “Recruitment is a procedure where you sit down with a human asset, and you

president’s son Donald Trump Jr. accepting an honorarium of $50,000 plus, as the Wall Street Journal reported, to give a speech at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on October 11, 2016, just one month before the election, sponsored by the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs (CPFA), a French think tank.[14] But Don Jr.’s appearance takes on a different

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.

Trump’s trip began on July 4, 1987. Independence Day.*[9] The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote about it in some detail, in Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, as resembling “a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support.”[10] And, as this book will show, new facts have come to

And the Bayrock Group, the real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he’d lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments—all of which made the perpetually bankrupt Donald Trump rich again and would lead to a new

According to Yuri, that’s what was going on with his own recruit, John Helmer—Socrates—who was being force-fed KGB talking points in meetings with Soviet experts on arms control, foreign policy, and the like. “They would be telling him our views, our sound bites,” Shvets told me. “These were our active measures.”

But what remains exceedingly curious is that several key figures on the board of the Catholic Information Center—Attorney General William Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, among others—ended up becoming central figures in Trump’s Praetorian Guard.

For the KGB and its successors, under the broad category of assets, there were both agents and contacts. According to Shvets, the agent is someone who clearly understands that he works for Russian intelligence and is knowingly tasked to complete specific assignments.