Czechoslovakia ramped up spying on Trump in late 1980s, seeking US intel
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, archive files and testimony from former cold war spies reveal.
Czechoslovakias Státní bezpečnost (StB) carried out a long-term spying mission against Trump following his marriage in 1977 to his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková. The operation was run out of Zlín, the provincial town in south-west Czechoslovakia where Zelníčková was born and grew up.
Ivanas father, Milo Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughters visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-laws career in New York. Zelníček 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 StBs growing interest in Trump after the 1988 US presidential election, won by George HW Bush. The StBs first directorate responsible for foreign espionage sought to deepen its Trump-related activity.
<snip>
The comments by former StB officers suggest Moscow and Prague were intensely interested in Trump in the late cold war era. Spy agencies in both socialist capitals noted Trumps growing political ambitions and sought to exploit his in-laws and family ties, using them as a dynamic intelligence channel.
The scale of Soviet Moscows 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 about 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 the KGB chief, 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 the 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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/trump-czechoslovakia-communism-spying