At this point, probably the only person who thinks Russia did not aid Trump during both his elections is Trump himself, a man with an infinite ability to believe whatever he needs to believe at any given moment. But if you want to find out exactly what the Russians did for him, American Kompromat, by Craig Unger, is not the book that will tell you.
It’s possible I asked too much of it, though. The book’s subtitle is How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery. You’d think the story of the president of the United States betraying his country would fill volumes, that there wouldn’t be a need to expand the page count by “Related Tales,” but I got the feeling that Unger didn’t have enough about Trump for an entire book. As a result, he goes off on all kinds of tangents, some of them pretty far from his main subject.
American Kompromat starts with Semyon Kislin, an immigrant from Russia who sold television sets on Fifth Avenue. Not just any sets, but ones that were compatible with Russian technical standards, meaning that diplomats and spies (or diplomat-spies) could buy them from Kislin and resell them for big bucks back in Russia. Kislin also sold two hundred sets to Trump for one of his hotels.
Unger believes that Trump was recruited by Kislin at that point, but I just don’t see it. Sure, Kislin probably knew every Soviet spy in New York, but he sold them television sets, not state secrets. And yet the not-very-interesting account of Kislin and his electronics store takes up about 5% of my Kindle edition.
The story really seems to start in 1987, when Trump goes to the Soviet Union to make a deal for a hotel near the Kremlin. One of the KGB’s techniques when recruiting someone is to lay on the flattery, and with Trump, who laps up every compliment no matter how implausible, they probably couldn’t believe their luck.
As Unger explains, they weren’t recruiting him as an agent. They didn’t want him to spy on the US. They simply talked to him, all the while implanting their opinions so cleverly that Trump came to believe he thought them up himself. He became what they call a “trusted contact,” or what an earlier regime referred to as a “useful idiot.”
When Trump got back to the US, he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, calling for the US military to leave Japan. It’s also around this time that he started talking about wanting to negotiate with the world’s nuclear powers, that, in fact, his brilliance meant that only he could solve the problem of nuclear weapons. Of course, he didn’t come up with this idea on his own — his handlers suggested it to him.
Unger uses an ex-KGB agent, Yuri Shvets, as his informant. At the time Trump placed his ad, Shvets was working for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. The Directorate would circulate cables whenever one of them had successfully recruited an asset, and Shvets says he saw a cable calling Trump’s ad “one of the most successful KGB operations of that time.” Usually in these cables, he says, an asset’s identity is hidden, but in this case, since the ad was public, there was no need for a disguise and Trump was mentioned by name. If this is true, that cable would be a smoking gun you could see all the way from Moscow.
Shvets is an interesting guy, and he tells a good story. But he’s the only source for a lot of this, and I couldn’t help remembering Bob Woodward’s rule, that he needs two informants for everything he writes. Still, most of what Shvets says fits in pretty well with what’s known about Trump.
Unfortunately, one of the most important pieces of the story, Trump’s money laundering, is only given a few sentences. “For more than three decades, at least thirteen people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties,” Unger writes. “Many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money.” And that’s it. But who were these people? What did they want from him? Did they threaten to expose his criminality, or just give him vague suggestions? How much did he make from these deals? Did they really lift him out of failure and bankruptcy in Atlantic City and return him to billionaire status, as people have claimed?
This is all we get about Trump and Russia, and there’s still half of the book to go. So Unger drags in other topics, some of them so loosely connected they could be coincidence. “Jeffrey Epstein... was hired to teach math and physics at Dalton, the posh co-ed private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at which Donald Barr — the father of Attorney General William Barr — was headmaster,” he writes, suggesting a link that might or might not exist. Or what about: “Epstein wasn’t the only one who was obsessed with artificial intelligence. Vladimir Putin was too”? After a while it all starts to seem like one of those diagrams made out of photos and news clippings and string so beloved by conspiracy theorists.
Unger’s next string leads to Opus Dei, a secretive society within the Catholic Church. (Its most famous member, Unger tells us, is fictional, the albino assassin in The Da Vinci Code.) The organization started in Spain under Francisco Franco, and, not surprisingly, its members believe in blind obedience to authority and oppose separation of church and state. It also bans books.
What is Opus Dei’s relevance to Trump? There isn’t a lot, really. Bonnie Hanssen was the wife of Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who sold secrets to the Soviets, and her family had joined Opus Dei almost at its beginning; her brother was even an Opus Dei priest. William Barr, later Trump’s Attorney General and cover-up artist, led the manhunt for the mole within the FBI but failed to find him, even though the priest brother was Barr’s speech writer at the time. It’s true that this is fairly suspicious, but maybe Barr’s just an idiot.
Barr does know a great many people within Opus Dei — but, unfortunately for Unger’s theories, he denies belonging to it himself. This, of course, doesn’t prove that he isn’t a member, but it doesn’t prove that he is, either.
Barr claims that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president almost unlimited power, and was probably the person who put this idea into Trump’s head. (I would be very surprised if Trump has read the Constitution.) And it’s true that Barr seems to yearn for some great authoritarian leader. He proposed the idea of the “unitary executive” while working as head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush I, and later became Bush’s Attorney General, where he oversaw Iran-Contra pardons. More recently, he worked assiduously to come to Trump’s attention, though why he chose Trump as his next big daddy is not a question I think anyone can answer.
I don’t think any of this rises to ... well, whatever Unger thinks it does. Some weird synergy between Robert Hanssen and the Catholic Church and Russia? (I do agree that Opus Dei is very dangerous, and should be studied closely.)
Another of Unger’s strings leads to Jeffrey Epstein. I didn’t really want to read about Epstein, and I’m sorry I did, because it’s every bit as sordid as you’d think. The connection between Epstein and Russia, like that between Opus Dei and Trump, is very tangential, and not worth the wordage spent on it. Briefly: John Mark Dougan served in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, then resigned, then started a blog that posted anonymous complaints and exposés from Palm Beach officers. Joseph Recarey, another Palm Beach detective, investigated Epstein and allegedly gave Dougan some DVDs that, Recarey said, “concern[ed] Epstein.” Later, Dougan requested asylum in Russia.
Do the Russians have Epstein’s tapes, a source of blackmail for hundreds of important people around the world? I have to say I doubt it. If they did, the world would look very different.
There are more connections here too, of course. Unger looks into Robert Maxwell — the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s procurer — and Robert — surprise! — turns out to have ties to Russia. William Barr’s father, as mentioned earlier, knew Epstein.
It’s all fairly unsatisfying, but maybe that’s because not much is known yet. To really get to the bottom of Trump’s criminality and betrayal we’ll have to wait for the unredacted Mueller Report. And that will probably come out years from now, when we’ll all be worrying about something new —Republicans registering their robots to vote, maybe.