8

Collusion

1984–2017

Moscow–New York

A major effort is required in order to improve performance in the recruitment of Americans.

—KGB ANNUAL REVIEW, 1984

It was 1984 and General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov had a problem. The general occupied one of the KGB’s most exalted posts. He was head of the First Chief Directorate, the prestigious KGB arm responsible for foreign intelligence gathering.

Kryuchkov was one of the USSR’s success stories. His background was proletarian: father a worker, mother a housewife, his first job in a factory. In the evenings he took correspondence classes. This led to a job in a provincial procurator’s office and then to a place at the Soviet foreign ministry’s elite training school.

From there his rise was swift. He spent five years at the Soviet mission in Budapest under Ambassador Yuri Andropov at a time when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956. In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer.

By 1984, Kryuchkov’s directorate was bigger than ever before—twelve thousand officers, up from about three thousand in the 1960s. His headquarters at Yasenevo, on the wooded southern outskirts of Moscow, was expanding: workmen were busy constructing a twenty-two-story annex and a new eleven-story building.

In politics, change was in the air. Soon a new man would arrive in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s policy of detente with the West—a refreshing contrast to the global confrontation of previous general secretaries—meant the directorate’s work abroad was more important than ever.

Kryuchkov faced several challenges. First, a hawkish president, Ronald Reagan, was in power in Washington. The KGB regarded his two predecessors, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as weak. By contrast Reagan was seen as a potent adversary. The directorate was increasingly preoccupied with what it believed—wrongly—was an American plot to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.

The general’s other difficulty had to do with intelligence gathering. The results from KGB officers abroad had been disappointing. Too often they would pretend to have obtained information from secret sources. In reality, they had recycled material from newspapers or picked up gossip over lunch with a journalist. Too many residencies had “paper agents” on their books: targets for recruitment who had nothing to do with real intelligence.

Kryuchkov sent out a series of classified memos to KGB heads of station. Oleg Gordievsky—formerly based in Denmark and then in Great Britain—copied them and passed them to British intelligence. He later copublished them with the historian Christopher Andrew under the title Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975–1985. (I read it in the British Library. It was fascinating. I bought my own copy.)

In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.” Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists, and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.

The Center, according to Andrew and Gordievsky, was especially concerned about its lack of success in recruiting Americans. The PR Line—that is, the Political Intelligence Department stationed in KGB residencies abroad—was given explicit instructions to find “U.S. targets to cultivate or, at the very least, official contacts.” “The main effort must be concentrated on acquiring valuable agents,” Kryuchkov said.

The memo—dated February 1, 1984—was to be destroyed as soon as its contents had been read. It said that despite improvements in “information gathering,” the KGB “has not had great success in operation against the main adversary [America].”

One solution was to make wider use of “the facilities of friendly intelligence services”—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German spy networks.

And:

“Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science.” These should not only “supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”

There were, of course, different stages of recruitment. Typically, a case officer would invite a target to lunch. The target would be classified as an “official contact.” If the target appeared responsive, he (it was rarely she) would be promoted to a “subject of deep study,” an obyekt razrabotki. The officer would build up a file, supplemented by official and covert material. That might include readouts from conversations obtained through bugging by the KGB’s technical team.

The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985 this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”

The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the “subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”? And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft…and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”

Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”

—

When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.

During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet operatives sent by Moscow.

Zelnickova was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelnickova moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.

According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan. (The agents who undertook this task were code-named Al Jarza and Lubos.) They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father, Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or “cover.”

Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?

The KGB wouldn’t invite someone to Moscow out of altruism. Dignitaries flown to the USSR on expenses-paid trips were typically left-leaning writers or cultural figures. The state would expend hard currency; the visitor would say some nice things about Soviet life; the press would report these remarks, seeing in them a stamp of approval.

Despite Gorbachev’s policy of engagement, he was still a Soviet leader. The KGB continued to view the West with deep suspicion. It carried on with efforts to subvert Western institutions and acquire secret sources, with NATO its number one strategic intelligence target. Nor did the KGB foresee imminent political upheaval; its officers assumed the USSR would go on for a long time. Meanwhile, the Soviet war in Afghanistan ground on.

At this point it is unclear how the KGB regarded Trump. To become a full KGB agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction.

According to Andrew and Gordievsky’s book Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, targets who failed to meet these criteria were classified as “confidential contacts.” The Russian word was doveritelnaya svyaz. The aspiration was to turn trusted contacts into full-blown agents, an upper rung of the ladder.

As Kryuchkov explained, KGB residents were urged to abandon “stereotyped methods” of recruitment and use more flexible strategies—if necessary getting their wives or other family members to help.

As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.

Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”

Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina, the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.” The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet ambassador to the UN; Dubinina was already living in the city with her family, and she was part of the Soviet UN delegation.

Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.

Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.

The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”

Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”

This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.

Dubinina’s own role is interesting. According to the Mitrokhin archive, the Soviet mission to the UN was a haven for the KGB and GRU. Many of the three hundred Soviet nationals employed at the UN secretariat were Soviet intelligence officers working undercover, including as personal assistants to secretary-generals. The Soviet UN delegation had greater success in finding agents and gaining political intelligence than the KGB’s New York residency.

Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father—he died in 2013—was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval.

In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes: “In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.”

Meanwhile, some colleagues disliked Dubinin. Andrei Kovalev—a Soviet diplomat who first met him in 1968—described Dubinin as “morally unscrupulous,” “self-promoting,” and vain about his (“admittedly handsome”) appearance—a “preening peacock,” keen to ingratiate himself with those in power at home. Dubinin would have been accompanied everywhere in the United States by a security guard who reported to the KGB, Kovalev told me.

There were many ambitious real estate developers in the United States—why had Moscow picked Trump?

According to Viktor Suvorov—the former GRU military spy—and others, the KGB ran Intourist. It functioned as a subsidiary KGB branch. Initiated in 1929 by Stalin, Intourist was the Soviet Union’s official state travel agency. Its job was to vet and monitor all foreigners coming into the Soviet Union. “In my time it was KGB,” Suvorov said. “They gave permission for people to visit.” The KGB’s first and second directorates routinely received lists of prospective visitors to the country based on their visa applications.

As a GRU operative, Suvorov was personally involved in recruitment, albeit for a rival service to the KGB. Soviet spy agencies were always interested in cultivating “young ambitious people,” he said—an upwardly mobile businessman, a scientist, a “guy with a future.”

Once in Moscow, they received lavish hospitality. “Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “twenty-four-hour control,” with “security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”

These dirty-tricks operations were all about the long term, Suvorov said. The KGB would expend effort on visiting students from the developing world, not least Africa. After ten or twenty years, some of them would be “nobody.” But others would have risen to positions of influence in their own countries.

Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”

Over in the communist German Democratic Republic, one of Kryuchkov’s thirty-four-year-old officers—one Vladimir Putin—was busy trying to recruit students from Latin America. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985, together with his pregnant wife, Lyudmila, and one-year-old daughter, Maria. They lived in a KGB apartment block.

According to the writer Masha Gessen, one of Putin’s tasks was to try to befriend foreigners studying at the Dresden University of Technology. The hope was that, if recruited, the Latin Americans might work in the United States as undercover agents, reporting back to the Center. Putin set about this together with two KGB colleagues and a retired Dresden policeman.

Precisely what Putin did while working for the KGB’s First Directorate in Dresden is unknown. It may have included trying to recruit Westerners visiting Dresden on business and East Germans with relatives in the West. Putin’s efforts, Gessen suggests, were mostly a failure. He did manage to recruit a Colombian student. Overall his operational results were modest.

By January 1987, Trump was closer to the “prominent person” status of Kryuchkov’s note. Dubinin deemed Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to Moscow. Another thirtysomething U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the future UN ambassador—helped put it together. On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant.

Moscow was, Trump wrote, “an extraordinary experience.” The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya, near Red Square. Seventy years earlier, in October 1917, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had spent a week in room 107. The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was—in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.

Meanwhile, the mausoleum containing the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed corpse was a short walk away. Other Soviet leaders were interred beneath the Kremlin’s wall in a communist pantheon: Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov—Kryuchkov’s old mentor—and Dzerzhinsky.

According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.

That July the Soviet press wrote enthusiastically about the visit of a foreign celebrity. This was Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and journalist. Pravda featured a long conversation between the Colombian guest and Gorbachev. García Márquez spoke of how South Americans, himself included, sympathized with socialism and the USSR. Moscow brought García Márquez over for a film festival.

Trump’s visit appears to have attracted less attention. There is no mention of him in Moscow’s Russian State Library newspaper archive. (Either his visit went unreported or any articles featuring it have been quietly removed.) Press clippings do record a visit by a West German official and an Indian cultural festival.

The KGB’s private dossier on Trump, by contrast, would have gotten larger. The agency’s multipage profile would have been enriched with fresh material, including anything gleaned via eavesdropping.

Nothing came of the trip—at least nothing in terms of business opportunities inside Russia. This pattern of failure would be repeated in Trump’s subsequent trips to Moscow. But Trump flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.

Trump was thinking about running for president.

The New York Times story appeared on September 2, 1987—less than two months after Trump’s Intourist adventure. Its headline read: “Trump Gives a Vague Hint of Candidacy.”

The article began:

Donald J. Trump, one of New York’s biggest and certainly one of its most vocal developers, said yesterday that he was not interested in running for political office in New York, but indicated that the Presidency was another matter.

Mr. Trump, a Republican, bought full-page advertisements in three major newspapers around the country this morning to air his foreign-policy views. And an adviser disclosed that Mr. Trump is planning a trip in October to New Hampshire, site of the first Presidential primary.

The advertisement was eye-catching. It appeared in the Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. It was addressed “to the American people” from “Donald John Trump” and headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

It said:

For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.

The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent. Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

Trump took aim at Saudi Arabia—which had refused to lend the Pentagon a mine sweeper. He wrote that Japan, and “others,” had gotten rich by taking advantage of American generosity. It was time, he wrote, to help “our farmers, our sick, our homeless.” “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore,” he concluded.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s message was authentic. He would return to these themes—of America first and freeloading partner nations—in his later actual campaign for the White House. At the same time, Trump’s public proclamation would have pleased Moscow.

General Kryuchkov was always keen to foster disagreement between the United States and its allies, as his secret 1984 work plan showed. The KGB’s “global priorities” included a long list of active measures. These were to be done covertly. According to Andrew and Gordievsky, the second-most-important priority was to “deepen disagreements inside NATO over its approach to implementing specific aspects of the bloc’s military policy.” And: “exacerbating contradictions between the USA, Western Europe and Japan on other matters of principle.”

The Times reported that Trump had recently returned from Russia. It said that he had met with Gorbachev. (If he did, the Soviet press failed to report this.) The paper wrote: “The ostensible subject of their meeting was the possible development of luxury hotels in the Soviet Union by Mr. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s calls for nuclear disarmament were also well-known to the Russians.”

Trump’s announcement remains puzzling. After all, he knew little of foreign policy. “The idea of doing it was his,” ad executive Tom Messner told The Washington Post. Messner had worked on Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign and said that his team had little input in Trump’s letter. The advertisements cost Trump $94,801, paid for—the Times said—with his own money. They appeared in papers with a big New Hampshire readership.

As ever with Trump, it was hard at the time to tell whether his flirtation with a presidential run was another self-branding moment—or something more serious. Mike Dunbar, a prominent and eccentric Republican, invited Trump to visit New Hampshire and launched a “draft Trump movement.” There was talk that Trump might secure the vice president slot, on a ticket with George H. W. Bush. In the end Bush picked Dan Quayle, the senator from Indiana.

Trump’s subsequent attempts to build property in Moscow followed the same unsuccessful model: a bright fizz of publicity followed by nothing much. Were the Soviets stringing him along for their own reasons? Or were the visits to Russia simply Trumpian hyperbole, designed to project him as a global player, at ease in the capitalist West and communist East?

In December 1987 Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev made their first trip to the United States. The visit was historic: the American and Soviet superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals for the first time, with a landmark arms control treaty. Kryuchkov came with Gorbachev. It was the first time a First Chief Directorate boss had accompanied a general secretary on a trip to the West.

Trump told reporters that the Russians had called him and wanted him to show the Gorbachevs Fifth Avenue and Trump Tower. The Soviet first couple never showed. Instead Trump was pranked into meeting with a Gorbachev impersonator, hired by a U.S. TV channel.

In Washington, Kryuchkov had dinner with Robert Gates, the CIA deputy director. Unbeknownst to Gates, Kryuchkov’s instructions to recruit Americans had gotten stunning results. The KGB had two moles inside U.S. intelligence—the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen. Both gave secrets to Moscow and betrayed U.S. agents.

In summer 1991—while Chris Steele was working undercover in Moscow—Kryuchkov led a KGB coup against Gorbachev. The general believed this was the only way to preserve the Soviet Union. He was one of those arrested.

It would be another five years before Trump returned to post-communist Moscow. By this point his marriage to Ivana had ended. He had also survived the worst moment of his career, in 1990, when his credit-fueled business empire fell apart, leaving him virtually bankrupt.

Trump’s 1996 reappearance made the business daily Kommersant. It reported that the “famous businessman” who had been “wealthy, broke and made a fortune again” was interested in Moscow construction projects. Trump wanted to redevelop the Moskva and Rossiya hotels. The latter was a Soviet-era monstrosity occupying a prime spot next to the Kremlin.

How serious was Trump’s latest foray into Yeltsin’s Russia? Not very, it appeared—though in 1996 Trump did begin registering trademark applications in Moscow for eight of his companies. In November that year he flew to Moscow with Howard Lorber, a businessman whose Vector Group had interests in Russia.

Trump met with Zurab Tsereteli, a Georgian-Russian sculptor. Tsereteli’s overblown public works enjoyed official favor. According to The New Yorker’s Mark Singer, Trump discussed erecting a giant statue of Christopher Columbus on the Hudson River. It would be bigger than the Statue of Liberty. The mayor of Moscow would donate the statue to his New York counterpart, Rudy Giuliani, Trump told Singer.

The statue never arrived. Nor did Trump manage to close a hotel deal. And a year later the Russian economy crashed.

As an American and an outsider Trump was never likely to make money inside Russia or obtain favored chunks of real estate. What counted in the lawless Moscow of the 1990s was connections—and buying off people at the top of state structures.

What Trump needed was a Russian friend, a primary partner. Preferably one known to the Kremlin.

—

In October 2007 I was leafing through the morning papers. I was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. The newspaper’s office wasn’t much to boast about: two tiny low-ceilinged Soviet-era apartments knocked together to form a pair of dingy rooms. Mine had a bookshelf and a map of Russia. A mini-kitchen looked onto a strip of green. A short walk along Gruzinsky Pereulok took you to Belorussky train and metro station.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Steele had lived during his Moscow posting in the same building, used by journalists and diplomats. We were on the ground floor, apartments 75 and 76, entrance number three; Steele had lived two floors above us. We had shared a stairwell and a communal mailbox. Not that letters ever arrived.

We assumed our office was bugged. Not from paranoia but because it was made obvious. Sometimes the FSB broke in and left the usual clues: an opened window (unlatched from the inside), a phone taken out of its cradle and left demonstratively on the desk in the early hours. There was electronic surveillance, too. Each time I made a joke about Putin, the landline was cut, replaced by an ominous crackle.

A branch of the Russian foreign ministry, UPDK, managed our apartment. Like Intourist, UPDK used to be KGB. Presumably the FSB had its own set of keys.

I found an article in The Moscow Times with a familiar subject: the antics of the capital’s superrich. It mentioned a new exclusive club at the National Hotel, where Trump had stayed. At this time, according to Forbes magazine, Russia had fifty-three billionaires, a lot of “minigarchs,” and tens of thousands of millionaires. I read on.

The story reported that one wealthy individual—the property developer Aras Agalarov—was planning to create something extraordinary.

Agalarov was building a luxury housing estate on the outskirts of Moscow. It would be a sort of oligarch utopia, with houses costing around $25 to $30 million each, and a gilded retreat from which the poor were invisible. There would be 250 high-end properties, a golf course and clubhouse, a lake, and an artificial beach decked out with white sand imported from Thailand.

I picked up the phone.

Arranging an interview with Agalarov was easy. A few days later I got a lift up to the Istra region, west of Moscow, to a rustic spot dotted with fir trees and white chamomile flowers. Several villas had been completed. Others were being built. Each was different. A Scottish baronial mansion rose above a line of newly planted birch trees. Nearby was a neoclassical palace, a froth of concrete pillars, acanthus capitals, and Greek fluting.

In person, Agalarov was jovial and welcoming. He spoke fluent English. The tycoon was a figure of medium height, at this point in his early fifties, wearing a sports jacket. Forbes had dubbed him the “vainest of the Golden Hundred,” its list of the top one hundred richest Russians. Actually, he was quite charming.

Agalarov gave me a tour. We climbed into a dark blue Land Rover jeep. On the vehicle’s door, I noticed, were the initials AE, approximately a foot and a half in height, standing for Agalarov Estate. A dainty crown floated above the monogram. Agalarov drove; I sat in the front passenger seat.

Agalarov’s son, Emin, had given him the British-made jeep as a present, he said. Emin was a well-known pop star married to one of the daughters of Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, he explained. Agalarov was Azeri-Russian. He was born in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, in 1955, and moved to Moscow in 1981, he told me. He obviously moved in the right circles: Aliyev’s late father, Heydar, was Soviet Azerbaijan’s KGB chief and—like Kryuchkov—an Andropov protégé. In 1993 Heydar became Azerbaijan’s president.

We went past a waterfall. Agalarov’s bodyguards followed us in a sleek black Mercedes, keeping a respectful distance. The tycoon said he’d studied business and economics. He was the first person in Russia to organize international exhibitions—this would become his Crocus Group. He started a chain of shoe stores, he said. There were setbacks: “I lost everything in the crisis of 1997. I closed all my stores. I had a $100 million loan.”

By 2000 Agalarov had bounced back. The same year he built Crocus City—a vast shopping center and exhibition space next to Moscow’s churning MKAD outer ring road.

The idea of an exclusive estate for the rich had come from the United States, I discovered. Agalarov said he’d seen “prototypes” for the kind of community he wanted to create during trips to Alpine in New Jersey and Greenwich in Connecticut. Alpine is an exclusive cliff-top borough, twenty miles north of New York, with property prices greater than West Palm Beach or Beverly Hills. It would shortly become the United States’ most expensive address.

“I had a kind of jealousy. Why can’t we do this in Russia? This was the source of the idea,” Agalarov said. “Then I started to buy land.” As Agalarov’s land holding grew—he would accumulate 320 hectares—so did his vision, to encompass fourteen lakes (“the length of these lakes is 3.5 kilometers”), an eighteen-hole golf course (“designed by a U.S. consultant”), and Agalarov’s personal mansion (“I have not started building my house”).

There were a few wrinkles along the way. Agalarov was keen to demolish properties in a nearby village, believing they spoiled the view. Some villagers didn’t want to sell. The man at number 54—a decrepit redbrick cottage—was holding out despite being offered $1 million. “He’ll sell in the end,” Agalarov told me.

Then there were the customers. As part of his social experiment, Agalarov said he’d drawn up a set of rules for anyone wishing to buy one of his properties. First, bodyguards were banned. They were banished to a purpose-built house on the periphery of the estate, complete with billiard table. Second, residents weren’t allowed to shoot at birds, set off fireworks, or hang out washing. Third, no dogs.

“We want normal rich people here,” Agalarov said. He personally vetted all applicants. “One told me he had an Afghan shepherd dog. I wouldn’t sell him a house. I lost $30 million because of a dog!” When complete, the estate would be the “most beautiful place in Moscow”—superior even to Rublyovka, the exclusive dacha colony set in pine forests west of the capital, where Putin resided.

The migrant workers building Agalarov’s dream came from China, Tajikistan, and Belarus. The country that loomed large in Agalarov’s thinking, however, was America. Agalarov said his nineteen-year-old daughter, Sheila, was studying in New York, at the Fashion Institute of Technology. His wife, Irina, “stayed with her.” Agalarov had a “small house in the United States.” He preferred to live in Russia.

“I don’t like big words like patriotism. You don’t show it. But everything I do is connected to Russia,” he told me. “I can’t stay there [in the United States]. I don’t have anything to do there. My work is here. My life is here. My circle is here.” He spent each day on site (“Saturday and Sunday I’m here”), viewing his bold architectural creation not as toil but as “a hobby.”

Agalarov has been described as Russia’s Trump. Certainly, there were points of overlap: like Trump, Agalarov believed that Forbes willfully understated the size of his fortune. In 2007 Agalarov was ninety-fifth on its rich list, worth $540 million. Agalarov told me the real figure was more like $10 billion. His land assets alone “came to $6 billion.” “It’s wrong for everybody,” he grumbled.

Not that this money was an end in itself. “For me money is nothing. It’s like an instrument to make something crazy,” Agalarov said. And—again like Trump—Agalarov believed in showmanship and visible excess. I asked Agalarov if Moscow’s rich were slowly developing subtler tastes. “No. It’s still about show. Show is continuing,” he replied.

Despite these similarities, there were differences. Unlike Trump, Agalarov existed in a stark political space in which the Kremlin made the rules. Being a member of the Russian elite brought privileges—and obligations. If the presidential administration wanted you to do something, you delivered. The Crocus Group built a federal university near Vladivostok; Agalarov would later agree to construct two soccer stadiums for Russia’s 2018 World Cup, in Kaliningrad and Rostov.

Agalarov’s wealth was provisional, then. Much of his income came from state contracts. If he fell from favor, someone else would take everything away, including his beloved estate and its designer boulders.

Toward the end of my tour, I asked Agalarov if he’d ever paid bribes. He said he had not. He had, he said, impeccable relations with the Moscow region—its ministers and governor—where his utopia was being shaped. The region was separate from Moscow City Hall and had its own HQ next to Crocus City. It was more dynamic, with “one and a half times” more construction, he said.

Though he didn’t mention her by name, one of Agalarov’s lawyers was the region’s top attorney. Her name was Natalia Veselnitskaya. Veselnitskaya’s former husband, Alexander Mitusov, was a former prosecutor who had become the region’s deputy transport minister. Veselnitskaya worked in turn for Mitusov’s boss, Pyotr Katsyv.

It was Katsyv’s son, Denis, who would shortly find himself at the center of an international scandal. He was one of a series of Russian officials accused of involvement in the case of Sergei Magnitsky. At that point Magnitsky, an accountant, was in prison. He had investigated and discovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme involving Katsyv and others. They had allegedly stolen taxes paid by Hermitage Capital, an investment fund run by a U.S.-born British CEO, Bill Browder.

In 2009, Magnitsky died in custody—murdered, Browder said, by the Russian state. Veselnitskaya would later expend much effort seeking to overturn a U.S. law, the Magnitsky Act, that punished the Russians allegedly involved, including Katsyv. She hired a U.S. political research firm to lobby in D.C. This was, ironically enough, Fusion GPS—the same outfit that commissioned Steele.

The Moscow region functioned at a level well below the Kremlin. But Veselnitskaya was known to be close to Russia’s prosecutor general, Yury Chaika. Agalarov would later defend Chaika publicly when he was accused of corruption. According to one person who worked with her, Veselnitskaya was “fastidious” and “extremely smart.” And, the person said, “would never act without authority.” Another associate described her as ambitious and capable, adding: “She wasn’t a Kremlin insider. She deeply wanted to be one.”

Putin was furious about the passage of the Magnitsky Act. He retaliated by banning the adoption of Russian babies by U.S. couples. The Kremlin launched a campaign to overturn the act. It frequently lobbied on the issue of “adoptions”—Kremlin-speak for lifting U.S. sanctions.

So Putin’s interests and Veselnitskaya’s interests neatly coincided. Their common goal: to repeal American sanctions.

—

Trump made further attempts at doing business in Russia. In 2007 he launched his latest product at the “millionaire’s fair.” This was an annual event for the rich and the aspirational, held at Agalarov’s Crocus City Mall. The product was vodka—specifically “super premium” Trump vodka. Around this time Trump sought to register these brands in Russia: Trump, Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Home.

The vodka was another commercial flop. By the time I visited the fair in 2008, it was nowhere to be seen. There were plenty of other things on offer: a beachside villa, for example, and a helicopter to take you there with an interior designed by Versace. I found a luxury German dental clinic, a sculptor selling bronze female nudes, and a yacht stand. There, a UK-made Princess yacht, complete with double bed and plasma TV.

For millionaires entry was free. Everybody else had to pay $64 admission. Many of the men drifted around in tuxedos; young women wore cocktail dresses. “I’m not looking for a rich husband. I’m looking for someone with a big personality,” said Irina, twenty-six, photographing her friend Olga in an Aston Martin car. (After a few seconds of reflection she conceded: “Obviously, if he was an oligarch with a big personality that would be okay.”)

After vodka, Trump tried something else in Russia. From 1996 to 2015 Trump co-owned with NBC the rights to the Miss Universe beauty contest. According to the Russian press, Trump had been thinking about holding the 2013 contest in Paris. It was at this point that Agalarov’s son, Emin—a fan of Trump’s TV show The Apprentice—persuaded Trump to bring the contest to Moscow.

Emin had New York connections: he had studied in Switzerland and at New York’s Manhattan Marymount College. In January 2013 the Agalarovs flew to Las Vegas to meet with Trump, at the Miss America beauty pageant.

Agalarov Sr. backed Miss Universe in Moscow—offering to pay Trump around $14 million in rights to host the contest. Why? The event worked on several levels. There was a state-friendly dimension. It showcased Russia ahead of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, hosted by Moscow. It was good PR at a time when Putin faced Western criticism over his clampdown on civil society.

The contest was also an opportunity to show off the Agalarov brand and to boost Emin’s career as a pop artist. Emin would perform before a global TV audience. Finally, according to the Steele dossier, the Kremlin was actively cultivating Trump—an on-off process that had seemingly begun back in 1987 and resumed, the dossier said, around 2008. The FSB would have known of Trump’s arrival and Ritz-Carlton stay.

Trump offered plenty of possibilities. He was in the midst of an ugly public campaign questioning President Obama’s citizenship and demanding the release of Obama’s birth certificate. Even if Trump didn’t meet the KGB standard for a target in the 1980s, he sure did now.

Ahead of the contest, in June, Trump tweeted:

Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?

Some eighty-six Miss Universe contestants spent three weeks in Moscow. They saw Red Square and the Bolshoi Theatre. They visited the Agalarov estate, shot a round of golf there, and posed in bikinis. Trump arrived in Russia with his Las Vegas business partner, Phil Ruffin. After checking into the Ritz-Carlton, Trump had lunch with the Agalarovs.

The Miss Universe contest took place in Crocus City Mall. The VIPs watching from the balcony formed a microcosm of Putin’s Russia. They included Vladimir Kozhin, Putin’s aide; Leonid Fedun, the vice president of Lukoil; and Aleksey Mitrofanov, an outspoken nationalist deputy in the state Duma. Plus an alleged gangster, a vodka baron, a singer, and the boss of a state-connected media holding company.

Miss Venezuela, Maria Gabriela Isler, won. According to Kommersant, Trump spent the after-party talking to the Miss Universe contestants: “For every girl wearing a sash he found a special word, which he whispered in her ear amid the surrounding disco.”

Agalarov was in another VIP zone, talking to Kozhin, Putin’s representative, the paper reported. A few days before the pageant, Putin presented Agalarov with one of Russia’s highest civilian awards, the Order of Honor. Agalarov posed with Russia’s president. He looked pleased. The medal hung from a sky-blue ribbon.

Trump spent November 8 and 9 in Moscow. He didn’t manage to see Putin. (According to the Agalarovs, Putin sent Trump a friendly note.) A source told The Guardian’s Shaun Walker that a meeting with Trump had been penciled into Putin’s diary by aides. It fell off the schedule a few days before the event.

Trump did have dinner at the Agalarov-backed restaurant Nobu with a group of Russian businessmen, including Herman Gref, a former economics minister. Gref—the CEO of state-controlled Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank—described Trump as “very lively.” Trump had a “good attitude towards Russia,” Gref said.

It was the Agalarovs who became Trump’s new buddies. On November 9 Trump made an early-morning appearance in Emin’s latest music video. Trump reprised his Apprentice role, mock-firing Emin, who performed with Miss Universe models. The shoot took place at the Ritz-Carlton.

There was further talk of Trump’s long-unfulfilled project: a skyscraper in Moscow bearing his name. According to Emin, speaking to Forbes, the idea was to build a Trump Tower and an Agalarov Tower side by side. Back in New York, Trump tweeted:

I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!

But then Trump suddenly had bigger plans than a mere tower. After this trip he was running for president for real. The Agalarovs were enthusiastic supporters of his White House bid, as were other forces in Moscow.

The Agalarovs also knew things about Trump that could—allegedly—damage him very badly, were they to be released.

Steele’s dossier read:

AGALAROV…has been closely involved with TRUMP in Russia and would know most of the details of what the Republican presidential candidate had got up to there.

Birmingham is a city of browns and grays in the English West Midlands. From a concrete tower at its center one can see a metropolis that is industrial, unlovely, depressed. The Victorians had made Birmingham into a place of commerce and prosperity. But by the 1980s much of its heavy industry had vanished.

There was poverty, unemployment, and community tension—which, in the summer of 1981, flamed into race riots in the suburb of Handsworth, home to several ill-sorted ethnic communities. The police raided a pub; locals responded by looting and trashing property and hurling firebombs. Elsewhere, in Balsall Heath, for example, prostitution was rife. As was crime.

The tower belonged to the Birmingham Post and Mail, the city’s paper. Built in the 1960s, it was a modernist slab stuck on a podium. Below, cars, vans, and double-deckers streamed through Colmore Circus. The city’s economic woes and blight were a source of misery. But they provided plenty of fodder for the journalists working in the building’s open-plan office.

In 1983–1984 one of them was Rob Goldstone. Born in Manchester, and in his twenties, Goldstone was an easy-to-spot figure—charming, highly disorganized, and endlessly talkative, in the words of Owen Bowcott, a former Post and Mail colleague. “He was a lovely man, and cheerful. He would generate an enormous amount of chat. A motormouth. He could spout for Britain,” Bowcott said.

True, Goldstone looked as if he’d never seen the inside of a gym. But he had a gift for making contacts and an enthusiasm that made his subjects talk, open up. From Birmingham, he moved to London, working on Fleet Street tabloids and the celebrity beat. Then he became a music promoter and publicist, based in Sydney, London again, and New York.

One of his clients was Emin Agalarov. Agalarov’s sugary music career had never quite taken off outside Azerbaijan. This wasn’t really Goldstone’s fault. He was an assiduous representative. Goldstone plugged Emin’s tours on Facebook, promoted his European concerts, and celebrated Emin’s birthday with him in Baku.

Goldstone’s now-deleted Instagram profile reveals a luxurious lifestyle—fancy dinners, five-star hotels, cocktails, photos with a procession of young companions whom Goldstone dubbed “muppets.” There are numerous trips to Moscow. And a lot of Trump.

The publicist was heavily involved in organizing Miss Universe. In May 2013 he met the Miss Universe team. He returned to Moscow in September and attended the pageant through October and November, posting a photograph of himself in a garish tie. Goldstone met Trump.

In February 2014 he was back in Russia again, one of five or six trips that year, this time with Ivanka Trump and Emin. The Agalarovs and the Trump kids became friends. In May 2015 Emin and Goldstone were back at Trump Tower; the tycoon and the singer posed with upturned thumbs. In March 2016 there was a dinner with Trump in Las Vegas.

In fact, Donald Trump, Jr., spent more time in Moscow than his father. He was an enthusiastic visitor—flying in repeatedly from 2006 onward. He attended a real estate conference in Russia two years later. Trump Jr. was at the Miss Universe pageant. He was meant to oversee Dad’s Moscow tower.

It was therefore logical that when Goldstone—in June 2016—needed to get in touch with Trump on a delicate matter he went via Trump Jr.

Goldstone sent him a series of emails.

On June 3, 2016, at 10:36 a.m., Goldstone wrote:

Good morning.

Emin just called me and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.

The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump—helped along by Aras and Emin.

What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?

I can also send this info to your father via Rhona [Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime assistant] but it is ultra-sensitive so I wanted to send it to you first.

Best

Rob Goldstone

The email was unequivocal. The Russian government was offering Trump damaging material on Clinton as part of its efforts to make Trump president. These “official documents” were arriving through the back door. Naturally enough, this operation was “sensitive.” In classic espionage fashion, the approach was done via intermediaries—a chain stretching from the Kremlin, to Russia’s prosecutor Yury Chaika, to the Agalarovs, to Goldstone, to Trump Jr., to the candidate himself.

At this point Trump Jr. might have notified the FBI. And declined to cooperate with Goldstone, who was acting as emissary for a power with its own agenda.

Instead Trump Jr. answered:

Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?

Later in the summer meant closer to the election—to a time when Moscow-supplied kompromat might cause maximum damage to Clinton. A weekend passed. Then, on Monday, June 6, Goldstone emailed again, this time with the unambiguous subject line: “Russia-Clinton—private and confidential.”

Let me know when you are free to talk with Emin by phone about this Hillary info—you had mentioned early this week so wanted to try to schedule a time and day. Best to you and your family.

Trump Jr. messaged back—“Rob could we speak now?” Goldstone tracked down Emin, who was onstage in Moscow, and arranged for him to call Trump Jr. on his cell phone.

The following day, June 7, Goldstone emailed again:

Hope all is well. Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and the Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday. I believe you are aware of this meeting—and so wondered if 3 p.m. or later on Thursday works for you? I assume it would be at your office.

Trump Jr.:

How about 3 at our offices? Thanks Rob appreciate you helping set it up.

Goldstone:

Perfect…I won’t sit in on the meeting, but will bring them at 3pm and introduce you etc. I will send the names of the two people meeting with you for security when I have them later today.

Trump Jr.:

Great. It will likely be Paul Manafort, my brother in law [Jared Kushner] and me. 725 Fifth Avenue 25th floor.

The next day, June 8, Goldstone sent another email, postponing the meeting by one hour to 4:00 p.m. since the “Russian attorney is in court.” Trump Jr. offered to bring the meeting forward by a day. Goldstone replied that the attorney—Natalia Veselnitskaya, who worked for Agalarov—hadn’t yet arrived from Moscow. Trump Jr. forwarded the whole exchange with its damning subject line to Manafort and Kushner.

Goldstone didn’t act much like an undercover operative. When he arrived at Trump Tower on June 9, he posted his location on Facebook. Veselnitskaya brought several people with her to the meeting. One of them was Rinat Akhmetshin. Akhmetshin was a lobbyist and U.S. citizen who had previously campaigned against the Magnitsky Act.

He was also a former Soviet intelligence officer who had served in Afghanistan. Akhmetshin insisted he was never GRU and had merely worked for a branch of the army that supported the Special Department, a KGB unit attached to the military. But he made no secret of the fact that he was still in contact with people from Russian intelligence. One associate described Akhmetshin as fun, charming, erudite, a gastronome, and “a total sleazebag” who would work for anybody, regardless of whether they were pro- or anti-Kremlin. Indeed, Akhmetshin told the Financial Times that his spy contacts in Moscow didn’t trust him because “they know I’m a mercenary.”

Also in the room was a translator, Anatoli Samochornov, since Veselnitskaya didn’t speak English. Plus Ike Kaveladze, the U.S.-based vice president of Agalarov’s Crocus Group.

Akhmetshin turned up at the meeting in sneakers and jeans. He later said Veselnitskaya handed over a folder of documents to the Trumps—“lawyerly stuff,” as he put it. It concerned a firm linked to Browder’s Hermitage Capital that had donated to Bill Clinton’s foundation. This could be “a great campaign issue,” Veselnitskaya said, according to Akhmetshin.

Veselnitskaya had hired Fusion GPS in 2014. It had supplied her with some of the material on Browder. (Glenn Simpson saw no conflict of interest between the Magnitsky project and his work beginning a year later on Trump. His view: he wasn’t a political activist or a crusader; he was an investigator.)

What was going on at this meeting? Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin had been lobbying against the 2012 Magnitsky Act for some time. They had originally hoped to give evidence in Washington to Congress and its foreign affairs subcommittee. This fell through after Republicans scheduled a full committee hearing. In the meantime, Trump’s political ascent raised their efforts to a new level.

Alex Goldfarb—a friend of Litvinenko’s—spotted Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin four days after the Trump Tower meeting. This was in D.C. They were at a special screening of The Magnitsky Act, a documentary by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov.

The film was bitterly critical of Browder and suggested that his version of Magnitsky’s death was wrong. Goldfarb exchanged a few words with Akhmetshin—a relatively small guy, as he put it, and chubby, who spoke English with some accent but not much. Goldfarb saw Veselnitskaya mingling with guests. The event at Washington’s Newseum ended in a shouting match between members of the audience and the panel. Much of the audience interpreted the film as little more than antisanctions propaganda.

Formally, Veselnitskaya wasn’t in the United States on a government mission, Goldfarb acknowledged. But he said this distinction was meaningless since the lawyer and the people she represented back in Moscow were “all part of the same octopus.” “It’s a big conglomerate, Kremlin Inc., based not on power but on money. They are part of the same club,” he told me.

Why had the Kremlin picked a midlevel lawyer as emissary to the Trumps? “It was purely opportunistic,” Goldfarb said. “You don’t send a gangster like Mogilevich. She had access.”

—

Donald Trump, Jr.’s emails emerged in July 2017. Before that, Trump Jr. had dismissed the suggestion that his father had received furtive help from the Russian government as “disgusting” and “phony.” Now there was proof of collusion.

When the Times first contacted Trump Jr. over the emails, he was evasive. He claimed the meeting with Veselnitskaya had been to discuss something else: the Kremlin’s decision to ban the adoption of Russian babies by U.S. couples. If it was not clear before, “adoption” was Moscow code for lifting sanctions, and it would come up again.

When it emerged that the Times had the emails, Trump Jr.’s explanation changed. He admitted that an acquaintance—Goldstone—had asked him to meet someone who “might have information helpful to the campaign.” Trump Jr. then characterized the meeting as a zero, “the most inane” nonsense—an unevent that left him “actually agitated,” with nothing handed over. Manafort and Kushner claimed not to have read the email chain or clocked its incendiary offer.

What mattered here, though, was intent. Trump’s two relatives and his campaign manager must have believed they might receive covert information from a foreign government. They seemed willing and ready to accept it—and, it appeared, to conceal its provenance. This would be a textbook definition of collusion. It was further material for Bob Mueller, the special prosecutor. Trump said he knew nothing about it. Like most of Trump’s denials—he was in Trump Tower at the time—it wasn’t convincing.

Trump Jr. said he was disclosing the emails in order to be “totally transparent.” But in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity he kept quiet about some of the other characters in the room. He said nothing about Akhmetshin, the former counterintelligence officer.

In the wake of these embarrassing disclosures, the White House’s explanations for its dealings with Russia mutated. First, there were flat denials—there had been no meetings. Then—there were meetings but nothing of importance transpired. Finally, we were offered material, but this was standard political opposition research. By the summer of 2017 Trump’s message amounted to this: Sure, we cheated. But what are you going to do about it?

It had been a long road to get to that point. Putin may not have had much luck in recruiting students from South America. But now—three decades later—he was finally going to meet someone the KGB had talent-spotted all those years ago. Putin was meeting President Trump.