#3 The Invitation: How the Soviet Union Rolled Out the Red Carpet for Donald Trump

You know that moment in a con when the mark gets invited to the house? That’s when you know they’ve already fallen for it.

In Essay 1 and Essay 2, I showed how the KGB identified Trump as a target and how his early real estate deals created the financial entanglements that made him useful. Now comes the part where they rolled out the red carpet - literally.

In July 1987, Donald Trump flew to Moscow with his wife Ivana after being invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, who had first approached Trump at Trump Tower and later cultivated the relationship at a New York luncheon hosted by Leonard Lauder.[1] They told Trump it was about luxury tourism. According to former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, the KGB had spotted Trump years before - and they’d been mapping out something else entirely.

Trump showed up and the red carpet was actually red. Not metaphorical. Real velvet, real orchestration, real flattery at the highest levels of Soviet hospitality. And Trump, who’d built his entire personality around getting the best rooms and the most attention, walked straight into something he didn’t understand he was walking into.

What’s wild is how obvious this all is once you see it written down.

The KGB had a system for this. Not some improvised thing. A deliberate, documented method they’d been perfecting since at least the 1950s. It had steps. It had psychology behind it. It had a name that sounds almost quaint now: cultivation. The idea was to identify someone vulnerable, build a relationship with them, create some kind of commitment, and then - over years, maybe decades - slowly steer them toward being useful.

Yuri Shvets was a KGB officer stationed in Washington DC during the 1980s. Decades later, in 2021, Shvets talked about Trump - for author Craig Unger’s book and to the Guardian. He said the feeling in the KGB was that Trump was “extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.” He was, according to Shvets, “the perfect target in a lot of ways: His vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit.”[3]

But I don’t think they recruited him the way they recruited spies. I think they used him the way spy agencies use what they call “agents of influence.” In the KGB’s own handbook, an agent of influence takes instructions - but the term also gets used for people who are steered without ever realizing it.[8][9]

The 1987 trip was arranged through Intourist, which was officially the Soviet state tourism agency. Except it wasn’t.

Intourist was run by the KGB. Not affiliated with. Run by. Former GRU agent Viktor Suvorov confirmed it: “In my time it was KGB. They gave permission for people to visit.”[1][10] Intourist’s hotels had surveillance equipment. The staff reported back to intelligence officers. Western visitors got the luxury hotel treatment, the flattery, the sense that they were important enough to deserve this level of attention. It was a system designed to make people feel special and valued, which is exactly what someone like Trump needed.

Trump “melted at once,” according to Dubinin’s daughter Natalia, when her father dropped in on him at Trump Tower. Melted. That’s her word. She added: “He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it, he likes it.”[1]

The whole thing was a setup dressed as a business trip. The Soviet Union didn’t need Donald Trump to teach them about hotels. They had a guy with connections to American political circles, a massive ego, and zero foreign policy experience, and they wanted to see what they could do with him.

But the real tell comes after he got home.

Less than two months after returning from Moscow, Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.[2][5] The whole thing cost about $95,000. And it was Donald Trump, who had never given a public speech about foreign policy, who had never involved himself in political advocacy, suddenly using his own money to demand that America’s allies - Japan and Saudi Arabia by name - pay up.

The ad attacked the United States for “paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.” It said America should stop being the world’s police. It said “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.”[4][5] The next year, he told Lehigh University’s graduating class that “our friends are making billions of dollars and stripping us of our dignity.”[2]

Until then, the only foreign policy Trump was known to talk about was how he could negotiate a nuclear arms deal with the Soviets. Suddenly, he’s paying $95,000 to broadcast a message that, as public policy professor Philip Auerswald puts it, “aligned perfectly with the KGB’s talking points at the time.” Soviet influence operations - called “active measures” - had been pushing those talking points for years.[2] Weakening NATO. Breaking the alliance structure. Making Americans resentful about defending Western Europe. That was a strategic priority of the Soviet Union, and Trump was paying to broadcast it.

According to Shvets, during the Moscow trip KGB operatives fed Trump talking points, flattered him and floated the idea that he should go into politics.[11] They didn’t ask him to be a spy. They acted, Shvets says, like he should be president one day. They gave him something to say, and he said it.

Are you catching on here?

The same week that ad ran, Trump started hinting he was thinking about running for president. He talked about it publicly. He began exploring a presidential run, including a trip to New Hampshire. And then, when he decided not to run that year, he told Oprah he’d “never want to rule it out totally.”

How do foreign intelligence agencies know about Trump’s presidential ambitions before most Americans do? Because Czech intelligence was tracking him too.

Czechoslovak intelligence - the StB - had been monitoring Trump since 1977, when he married Ivana. Ivana’s father, Miloš, regularly provided the StB with information about his daughter’s visits from the United States.[6][7] By the late 1980s, the StB files documented that Trump was actively exploring a presidential run. Back in 1979, the StB’s 23rd Department - the unit responsible for managing illegals, its deep-cover spies abroad - was even copied on one otherwise routine report about the Trump family.[6]

A Soviet-allied intelligence service, in internal classified documents, was tracking and documenting Trump’s path toward politics. This is espionage tradecraft documentation showing that Czechoslovak intelligence considered Trump a person of strategic interest. The files themselves, as intelligence historian John Schindler has noted, don’t indicate Trump himself was ever recruited by the StB - but the 23rd Department’s involvement, he argues, means the StB either had or was planning to have an illegal, a deep-cover spy, close to the Trump family.[6]

The KGB’s recruitment process - the method they taught their officers - had steps.[8] Here’s how I break them down.

Step one was identification of vulnerabilities. Trump had them. Financial pressures on his Atlantic City casinos. A craving for status that could never be satisfied. An ego that responded to flattery like a plant responds to water.

Step two was relationship building through gradual approach. Hello, Ambassador Dubinin. Hello, invitation to Moscow. Hello, red carpet treatment.

Step three was creating some kind of commitment. Financial or reputational. The ads cost money. Running for president required commitments. These things created an investment on Trump’s part.

Step four was long-term control. Steering decisions without the target realizing they’re being steered.

Step five was protection. Making sure your asset stays functional and useful.

Trump wasn’t some conscious Soviet agent. There’s no sign the KGB ever had him sign anything. That’s not how agents of influence work. Agents of influence are people you guide toward conclusions they think are their own. You flatter them. You float ideas to them. You create situations where the idea they’re being guided toward feels like something they came up with themselves. It’s slower. It’s subtler. It’s a lot more effective than blackmail because the target never even realizes they’re compromised.

And by the time Trump came back from Moscow, he already was.

The ads are the evidence. I don’t think they’re Trump thinking for himself. They’re Trump, a guy whose only known foreign policy talk had been about nuclear arms, suddenly articulating Soviet strategic priorities in a way that’s almost suspiciously aligned. He didn’t know this was happening to him. He probably still doesn’t. But what matters is that it happened.

Yuri Shvets says Trump was “cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”[3] Forty years. That starts in the 1980s, which means it starts here. It starts with an ambassador who understood exactly how to flatter a man with a specific kind of ego. It starts with a trip to Moscow, where everyone treated him like he was important. It starts with the KGB, as Shvets tells it, using a real estate developer as a tool to push a political message.

And it ends - or maybe it doesn’t end at all - with an American president who talks about NATO like the KGB wanted him to talk about NATO. Who looks at Russia with a softness that doesn’t match what the Russians have done. Who seems, to anyone paying attention, like he’s still following a script that was written in Moscow in July 1987.

Trump thought he was being invited to build a hotel. He was being invited into a game he didn’t know he was playing. And by the time he came home and put those ads in the New York Times, he was already a piece on someone else’s board.

But Moscow was only the beginning. Because while the KGB was cultivating Trump from above, something else was happening at street level. Since the mid-1970s, a wave of Soviet émigrés had been settling into a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Brighton Beach - and some of them were already buying into Trump’s buildings.

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Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said Trump’s 1987 ads were about NATO - they never mention NATO; they named Japan and Saudi Arabia. It quoted the ads saying our allies were “making billions of dollars and stripping us of our dignity” - Trump said that in a 1988 speech. It said Trump had never cared about foreign policy - he’d been talking about negotiating a nuclear arms deal since at least 1985. It put a reporter’s summary of Yuri Shvets in quotation marks as his words, and left two words out of another Shvets quote. It said Trump “melted at once” when he got the Moscow invitation - Dubinin’s daughter said that about her father’s visit to Trump Tower. It said Trump started hinting at a run two months after the ads - it was the same week. It said the StB’s 23rd Department was copied on reports in the late 1980s - it was one report, from 1979 - and it overstated what John Schindler wrote about the StB files. And it said the Brighton Beach wave came in the late 1980s - it started in the mid-1970s.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so and which calls are my own, the ad caption now says the $95,000 paid for ads in three papers, the “agents of influence” line now gives the KGB’s own definition, and the sources now include the KGB’s own handbook and Shvets’s 2021 Guardian interview.