Exclusive: aided by Ivana Trump’s father, intelligence service with KGB ties
targeted high-level government information, files show
The communist intelligence service in Prague 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”l.
Czechoslovakia’s Statni bezpe?nost (StB) carried out a long-term spying mission
against Trump following his marriage in 1977 to his first wife, Ivana Zelni?kova.
Ivana’s father, Milo? Zelni?ek, 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. Zelni?ek 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 the Czech magazine Respekt show
the StB’s growing interest in Trump after the 1988 US presidential election, won
by George HW Bush.
The files do not say if the Soviet Union ordered or shaped the decade-long StB
Trump operation. But Czechoslovakian spies routinely shared secrets with KGB
colleagues and the Moscow 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 materialise.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/trump-czechoslovakia-communism-spying
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