The Guardian reveals that the Státní bezpečnost (StB), the Czechoslovakian intelligence service, first noticed Donald Trump when he was a celebrity-seeking real estate developer more than 40 years ago.
The StB had been interested in Trump since 1977, when he married a Czechoslovakian-born woman, Ivana Zelníčková. News of the wedding reached the StB bureau in Zlín, the town in Moravia where Ivana grew up and where her parents lived. Ivana’s father, Miloš, regularly gave the StB information on his daughter’s visits from the US and his son-in-law’s burgeoning career.
The StB’s work on Donald and Ivana intensified in the late 1980s, after Trump let it be known he was thinking of running for president. The StB’s first foreign department sat up. Inside the Soviet bloc, Czechoslovakia’s spies were reputed to be skilled professionals, competent and versatile English speakers who were a match for the CIA and MI6.
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Jarda was one of four StB collaborators who spied on the Trumps during the cold war. Jarda’s real name was Jaroslav Jansa ...
... Now aged 74, and living in an apartment bloc on the outskirts of Prague, Jansa is reluctant to talk about his past. When the Guardian and the Czech magazine Respekt knocked on his door, he refused to open it. In an email, he said he was tired and wanted to be left in peace. He added: “You are trying to put me in the tomb.”
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It’s unclear to what degree the KGB and StB shared or coordinated Trump material. The two spy agencies worked closely together, signing cooperation agreements in 1972 and October 1986. The KGB was always the dominant partner – it would have closely monitored Trump when he and Ivana visited the USSR in summer 1987, following a Kremlin invitation.
New archive records obtained by the Guardian and the Czech magazine Respekt show the StB’s growing interest in Trump after the 1988 US presidential election, won by George HW Bush. The StB’s first directorate responsible for foreign espionage sought to “deepen” its Trump-related activity.
A former StB official, Vlastimil Daněk – tracked down to the village of Zadní Arnoštov, where he lives in retirement – confirmed the Trump operation. Addressing the matter publicly for the first time, he said: “Trump was of course a very interesting person for us. He was a businessman, he had a lot of contacts, even in US politics.
“We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future.”
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The files do not say if the Soviet Union ordered or shaped the decade-long StB Trump operation. But Czechoslovakian spies routinely shared secrets with KGB colleagues and the Moscow security agency had a large liaison office in Prague. Many StB officers also worked directly for the KGB, known as “the friends”.
In summer 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump visited Moscow and Leningrad, following a personal invitation from the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Yuri Dubinin. The trip was arranged by Intourist, a travel agency that was also an undercover KGB outfit. Soon after returning from Moscow, Trump announced he was thinking of running for president. That presidential bid failed to materialise.
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The scale of Soviet Moscow’s spying operation on Trump is unknown. No documents are public. It is unclear when the KGB began a file on the future president. In Prague about 60,000 StB documents were declassified in the mid-1990s, after the collapse of communism. The StB destroyed most records.
However, secret memos written by the KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the mid-1980s reveal that he berated his officers for their failure to cultivate top-level Americans. Kryuchkov circulated a confidential personality questionnaire to KGB heads of station abroad, setting out the qualities wanted from a potential asset.
According to instructions leaked to British intelligence by the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky, they included corruption, vanity, narcissism, marital infidelity and poor analytical skills. The KGB should focus on personalities who were upwardly mobile in business and politics, especially Americans, the document said.
Security expert John Schindler adds some more context in an opinion piece for The Observer:
Although existing StB files don’t indicate that Donald Trump himself was ever recruited by the StB, the November 1979 report includes a tantalizing fact, namely that among the StB organizations copied on it for distribution was the service’s 1st Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm. Specifically, its 23rd Department was copied on the report.
The highly secretive 23rd Department was no ordinary StB office, but part of the elite Illegals sub-directorate. Illegals were the StB’s crème de la crème, hand-selected deep-cover spies dispatched to the West, without the benefit of diplomatic protection; if caught, they were on their own. They posed as ordinary people, often immigrants, but they reported to the StB. The 23rd Department had the demanding job of selecting, training, and managing Illegals in the field. There was no more sensitive office in the service.
Why was the super-secret 23rd Department copied on a mundane information report about the Trump family? To those versed in the ways of Soviet bloc espionage, there can only be one answer: Because the StB either had (or was planning to have) an Illegal close to the Trump family ...
'A very different world' - inside the Czech spying operation on Trump (The Guardian)
Czechoslovakia ramped up spying on Trump in late 1980s, seeking US intel (The Guardian)
The Mystery of Donald Trump’s Secret Kremlin Ties Just Got a Lot Deeper (The Observer)