Yuri Shvets

And That's not just speculation on my part.

I talked to two former members of the KGB, General Oleg Kalugin, who was head of counterintelligence for the KGB, now lives outside of D.C., And Yuri Shvets, who was a major in the KGB.

And they both told me it.

And so did a former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

They can be tasked with very specific operations.

An asset is a much more looser term.

It means, I mean, Yuri Shvets, who was a major in the KGB, says it really means a trusted contact.

And many things can happen with that.

In 2021, journalist Craig Unger published his book American Compromat, How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump.

The book is built substantially on interviews conducted by the author, including of a man named Yuri Shvets, himself a former KGB major who had operated in Washington in the 1980s, undercover as a TASS correspondent.

That's Russia's state-owned news agency.

The broad claim in the book is that Trump was cultivated as a Soviet asset over four decades and that the Moscow hotel trip in the late 80s was just one chapter in that long-running saga.