How Russia Seeks to Hurt America (aka The Trump/MAGA Playbook)

  Vladimir Putin’s playbook for destroying western democracy found a useful idiot in Donald Trump, because that’s exactly what the “Make America Great Again” theme is all about.

That’s a bold statement, and I realize it will annoy the disgraced president’s fan base, so  let me spell it out for them.

I was a student of Russian and of the Soviet Union for several years in the 1960s. As such I even subscribed to Izvestia for a year, and I visited the Soviet Union four times — once as a tourist with an MIT alumni group in 1978 and three times as a “citizen diplomat” with the Center for Soviet-American Dialogue in the Gorbachev era of the late 1980s.

“Disinformation” didn’t appear in English dictionaries until the late 1980s, but I first learned that term in the early 1960s as the Russian word дезинформация. It is indeed a Soviet concept introduced and perfected by the KGB and one of its premiere chiefs, Vladimir Putin.

The United States is not the only western democracy in which disinformation has been, and continues to be, deployed by the Russians. It played a big and successful role in the Brexit campaign, since breaking up the European Union is as much a goal of Vladimir Putin as is the creating of chaos and irreparable partisanship in the United States.  And this Monday, a news item caught my attention that Russia is mounting a similar effort in Germany to support the election of an anti-EU candidate to succeed Angela Merkel.

“America First” is just what Putin wanted, which is why he mobilized multiple social media channels in the United States to turn public opinion against his arch-enemy Hillary Clinton toward electing Donald Trump.

At first Putin merely sought revenge against Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, had attacked Putin’s own election victory as corrupt, but the election of a president, Doanld Trump, who would balk at supporting NATO and who also publicly supported Brexit, was a dream come true for him.

As I wrote in my Nov. 15, 2018, page 3 column, “Yes, the Russians Wanted Trump Over Hillary, But Their Real Goal Is to Divide Americans.” You can download it at www.JimSmithColumns.com. Also check out my Feb. 27, 2020, column, “Why Wouldn’t the Russians Want Trump Re-Elected? Look at His Accomplishments.”

I’ve also written previously that the MAGA playbook is also inspired by the playbook of fascism, in that it includes the concerted effort to reduce trust in the country’s electoral system, in the free press, and in the university system. I also wrote in my April 9, 2020, “Talking Turkey” column (see it at www.TalkingTurkey.online) about how Donald Trump’s mentor and legal counsel, Roy Cohn, taught Trump the key rules to be followed by an aspiring autocrat: 1) Never settle or admit anything, never admit a mistake; 2) If someone hits you, hit back harder and never stop; 3) Even when you lose, claim victory; 4) Tell a lie long enough and people will think it’s the truth. 5) Use lawsuits like machine gun bullets; and 6) Take no prisoners.

Creating distrust in the free media and university professors is essential for success, because they are the ones who know the history I outlined above and are going to educate the public about it, so they must be labeled as “fake news” or “elites.” Throw in “socialist” and “communist” and repeat, repeat, repeat until believed.

We still don’t know the reason that Donald Trump would never say a negative word about Putin. We know that even during the 2016 campaign (which he thought he’d lose), he had his “fixer” Michael Cohen trying to secure from Putin a Trump Tower in Moscow, but what was exchanged during his secret solitary meeting with Putin in Helsinki, following which he confiscated his interpreter’s notes?  Was he just a “useful idiot” or was something more sinister going on?

 

 

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

Many of us not under Trump’s spell have wondered what Putin has on Donald Trump, given the former President’s reluctance to criticize the Russian leader, even when it was reported that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers. A new book by journalist Craig Unger appears to answer that question. Here’s a review of it from The Guardian. The writer is David Smith, and this review was published on Yahoo.com on Friday, Jan. 29, at 1:00 a.m.  

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.”

I'm drawn to post regularly about politics

I am recasting this blog as my personal blog, now that all my real estate postings are at www.GoldenREblog.com.  If you're not interested in what I have to say politically, you may want to unsubscribe!

The reason I feel the need to write about politics (and journalism) is that I don't feel that the Democrats and the media are doing a good job of providing perspective on what is happening, both within and about the Trump administration as well as other matters.

To give just one example, remember when Ford said they were going to stop making cars (except the Mustang) in America and concentrate on trucks and SUVs?  The media parroted that narrative, which might more accurately have been that "Ford is moving its car production to Mexico and elsewhere, except for the Mustang."  After all, I can't imagine that they won't manufacture such best sellers as the Taurus, Focus and Fiesta somewhere. The official narrative was probably designed to avoid criticism from Trump about moving manufacturing out of the country, and the media bought into it. The Democrats didn't pick up on it at all!

Regarding the Russia story, I have some background I can bring to bear, having studied Russian during the Cold War (in prep school), and having traveled to the Soviet Union four times - once in 1978 as a tourist with fellow MIT alumni, twice in the late 1980s as a "citizen diplomat" with the Center for Soviet-American Dialogue, and one more time as a businessman negotiating a joint venture with a Soviet ministry.  I have a perspective on the KGB's methodologies that many journalists lack.  I will be writing about disinformation then and now and even about sex as an espionage tool, similar to what was used against Trump during the Miss Universe event in Moscow.

So stay tuned.  I may be posting rather often, commenting on what's in the news -- and there's a lot in the news every day!