Article content continuedUnger says his book is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources, including former officers in the CIA, former FBI counterintelligence agents and former Soviet KGB agents, including Shvets. In the book, Shvets says the KGB “began cultivating Trump as a prospective asset” in the early 1980s, the Daily Mail reports. Trump allegedly first came to the KGB’s attention in 1980, when he opened the Grand Hyatt hotel, his first major Manhattan real estate project. Unger writes that, for the Soviets, Trump’s “most appealing quality” was his personality — “vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery, and greed,” the Daily Mail reports. “Deeply insecure intellectually, highly suggestible, exceedingly susceptible to flattery, Trump was anxious to acquire some real intellectual validation — and the KGB would be more than happy to humor him.”

Source: National Post January 29, 2021 12:03 UTC