The former Czechoslovakian State Security (StB) stepped up its spying campaign against Donald Trump in the late 1980s, targeting him to gain information about the “upper echelons of the US government,” archive files and testimony from former cold war spies reveal.
The StB carried out a long-term spying mission against Trump following his marriage in 1977 to his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova. The operation was run out of Zlin, the provincial town in southwestern Czechoslovakia where Zelnickova was born and grew up.
Her father, Milos Zelnicek, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelnicek was classified as a “conspiratorial” informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.
New archive records obtained by the Guardian and Czech magazine Respekt show the StB’s growing interest in Trump after the 1988 US presidential election, won by George H.W. Bush.
The StB’s first directorate responsible for foreign espionage sought to “deepen” its Trump-related activity.
A former StB official, Vlastimil Danek — tracked down to the village of Zadni Arnostov, 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,” Danek added.
He said his senior colleagues at StB headquarters in Prague were also focused on Trump.
“It wasn’t only us who paid attention to him. The first department of the StB were interested in him. I don’t know if the first directorate shared information on Trump with the KGB. I can’t verify or deny,” he said.
“I don’t want to tell you any more details. It’s a past I would like to forget. I don’t want to have any problems,” he added.
The files do not say whether the Soviet Union ordered or shaped the decade-long StB Trump operation, but Czechoslovakian spies routinely shared secrets with KGB colleagues and the Moscow-based 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, an undercover KGB outfit.
Soon after returning from Moscow, Trump announced he was thinking of running for president. That presidential bid failed to materialize.
In October 1988, on the eve of the US election, Ivana Trump visited her parents in Zlin, known at the time as Gottwaldov.
According to the files, she “confidently” predicted Bush’s victory to her father, who in turn passed the tip to local StB officers.
“The outcome of the election confirmed the veracity of this information,” StB field agent Lieutenant Peter Sury wrote in a document dated Jan. 23, 1989, and marked “secret.”
The prediction came “from the highest echelons of power in the US,” it said.
Ivana was “not only a well-heeled US citizen,” but moved in “very top political circles,” Sury said.
He listed a number of “action points” that might be taken. They included remaining in “conspiratorial contact” with Zelnicek. The StB’s goal was to gain more information about US foreign policy, politics and economy, plus “the activities of America’s intelligence agencies.”
Sury, who was deputy head of the local StB, still lives in Zlin.
“Yes, I wrote that file,” he said, speaking about it publicly for the first time. “Trump was a rich businessman and interesting for us. I didn’t work on him, though. My colleagues did. The first department focused on him. I don’t know details.”
The comments by former StB officers suggest that Moscow and Prague were intensely interested in Trump in the late Cold War era. Spy agencies in both socialist capitals noted Trump’s growing political ambitions and sought to exploit his in-laws and family ties, using them as a dynamic intelligence channel.
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, a bout 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 then-KGB chaiman 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 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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS