Craig Unger begins his book, ‘American Kompromat’ with the initial targeting of Donald Trump as a Russian asset. I am copying in some extracts from the first pages of the book. Many readers will have read the book a few years ago, maybe read the reviews of this best seller, but I have only now come across it:

At the store, Kislin and Sapir had brilliantly positioned themselves to win over Soviet bigwigs as clients, running into, as Sapir did, a boyhood friend from the old country who surfaced as bodyguard to Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, once the longtime KGB chief in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Others who came by included Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; future KGB counterintelligence chief and, subsequently, prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov; and Georgy Arbatov, the Kremlin’s American-based media spokesman.4 But one such client didn’t quite fit in with the rest—Donald J. Trump. Many details about Trump’s transaction with Kislin are not known. In fact, Kislin himself seems to be the only source of it, having told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2017 that he “had sold Trump about 200 televisions on credit.” According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump, who later developed a reputation for stiffing his vendors, made sure he paid Kislin on time. “I gave [Trump] 30 days, and in exactly 30 days he paid me back,” Kislin said. “He never gave me any trouble.”5 But there was more to it than that.

Kislin sold Tv’s which were not NTSC but PAL, so would only work in the Soviet Union. He was from Odessa, Ukraine, and was Jewish.

Soviets had introduced subterfuge into the way they sometimes allowed oppressed Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel and the United States. The strategy was brilliantly designed to exploit legislation sponsored by Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) and Representative Charles A. Vanik (D-OH), who were concerned about the plight of Soviet Jews who weren’t being allowed to leave the country. In a nutshell, the Jackson–Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 allowed the Soviet Union to enjoy normal trade relations with the United States, but only if Jewish refugees were allowed to emigrate. Which turned out to be exactly what the Soviets wanted……..

……..” All well and good, but Kalugin also included a Trojan-horse-like component to what appeared to be the newly benevolent Soviet emigration policy. “We told [the émigrés], you can go, but you will provide us with information. And they pledged their services to us,” Kalugin said.11………..And what was their task after that? “To penetrate all Western institutions. Government, primarily, and business, particularly high technology,” said Kalugin. “That’s something Russia was always behind. But also the government organizations. And some did succeed in that sense.” So in the aftermath of Jackson–Vanik, the Soviet Union magnanimously allowed hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to immigrate to the United States. By any measure, it was an extraordinary achievement in human rights. Jewish dissident Alexander Lerner declared that fulfillment of these promises meant “a profound improvement of the emigration policy and that it should be responded to positively by the world.” But the amendment also had the effect of creating a hole in America’s defenses so massive that huge numbers of Russian criminals and KGB spies could and did inundate the United States. In the last half of the seventies, Kalugin himself sometimes went to Soviet night spots like Rasputin in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach in hope of recruiting new talent—that is, Russian mobsters who would work in tandem with the KGB. “I’d look around, pick up some people, and check their backgrounds with Moscow to see if they were good enough to promote a relationship with.” In the United States, of course, the Italian Mafia would have been at war with the feds, but the Soviets and the Russians were different. They coopted the Russian Mafia. They weaponized organized crime. As Kalugin told me, “The Mafia is one of the branches of the Russian government today.” So, under cover of this new, more humanitarian emigration policy, the Soviets opened the floodgates. Hence, legislation with the goal of allowing Jewish refugees to immigrate to America had the unintended consequence of fueling the growth of the Russian Mafia and a new generation of KGB assets in America—one of whom was Donald Trump.

Q. What triggered Putin to react with intense anger against the West?

A.

How Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech Marked a Cold War Turning Point

Reagan’s words reflected a shift that was underway as Soviet reforms and protests were pressuring the East German government to open barriers to the West.

https://www.history.com/news/ronald-reagan-tear-down-this-wall-speech-berlin-gorbachev