The Most Successful Intelligence Operation in History

How Russia Put a Spy at the Top of the World’s Sole Superpower and Is Proceeding to Destroy It and Democracy

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a 2,500-year-old military classic, states a number of profound aphorisms that have guided countless military leaders. The two we are most interested in are:

• The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

• All warfare is based on deception.

These can be synthesized into a cohesive strategy that few states can resist:

• The most successful war is the war you never fight. The most successful path to victory is to destroy the enemy from within by deception.

Over the last forty some years, this is precisely what Russia has done to its arch enemy, the United States. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has completely vanquished the US, not by war, but by relentless spycraft combined with a global propaganda machine.

On January 20, 2025 Russia conquered the US without firing a single shot, by placing a Russian agent in the White House and gaining control of all three branches of US government. This required Trump winning election to his first term, in order to gain control of the Supreme Court by appointing three pro-Trump justices. Winning both elections required first winning the propaganda war so overwhelmingly, and so unobtrusively, that the true ruling power of the United States is now Russia and the US doesn’t even realize what has actually happened.

The US under Donald Trump now openly sides with Russia against Ukraine, NATO, and the Western world, as seen in stark headlines like these:

• Meeting Again in Paris, European Leaders Try to Recalibrate After Trump Sides With Russia (February 19, 2025, The New York Times)

• Trump is surrendering a century’s worth of U.S. global power in a matter of weeks (March 3, 2025, Los Angeles Times)

Simultaneously, Trump is swiftly destroying American democracy and its economy. This destruction has the effect of also destroying global democracy, given America’s former role as the exemplar of the benefits of democracy and the world’s leading promoter of the spread of democracy. This of course is exactly what every authoritarian wants. The headlines are dire:

• Trump and Musk’s dismantling of government is shaking the foundations of US democracy (February 5, 2025, AP News)

• ‘In a real sense, US democracy has died’: How Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán (February 7, 2025, The Guardian)

• Trump’s War Against Democracy and the Rules-Based World Order (March 3, 2015, The Globalist)

Destroying an enemy as powerful as the US from within by deception is not easy. Russia used an extremely well-managed, two-pronged long-term strategy: (1) Plant or recruit long-term agents within the enemy who over time rise to positions of high influence, as Trump and others have, and (2) Inject a sophisticated stream of propaganda into the enemy at its weakest points. If the plan succeeds, it leads to election of Russian agents who support Russia over the US and authoritarianism over democracy, a stance that would normally be anathema to most voters in any democracy.

Russia’s strategy has succeeded so spectacularly that historians will someday characterize it as the most successful intelligence operation in history. Donald Trump and other elected US politicians (we don’t currently know how many) are active Russian agents who have completely taken over US government, a fact that non-MAGA citizens and the mainstream press do not yet fully acknowledge. Instead, they are confused by a blizzard of deceptive distractions (like making Canada the 51^st state, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and on-again off-again tariffs) and clever propagandic terms that have been drummed into their minds for years.

The facts are there. Trump is not a “useful idiot” or “Putin’s puppet” or “transactional.” Nor is he somehow “compromised.” He is a cunning Russian agent under the continual direction of Russia’s GRU and Putin. He is also a terrific charismatic actor (a trait common to con men) posing as an erratic wealthy businessman who just happened to get lucky in politics and who just happens to like Putin. Trump’s quip that “I will only be a dictator on day one” was only partly true. He is a dictator on all days, as is his boss, Vladimir Putin.

Russian propaganda has worked so well that most Americans fall into two groups. One has been deceived into actively supporting Trump, especially his MAGA base.

The other group, non-Trump supporters, has mostly been psychologically manipulated into a confused state by a blizzard of deceptive, erratic, often contradictory statements, distractions, and actions by Trump. Those against Trump want to resist but feel overwhelmed by helplessness, confusion, uncertainty, and political angst. This causes inaction and resignation to their fate (part of the Soviet empire), without resistance or complaint, since it’s beyond their control. “This can’t be happening, so it isn’t. But it is and I don’t know why or what to do. Let’s wait and see how this plays out so I and others can figure out what to do.” says their subconsciousness, in a turmoil of cognitive dissonance.

As a result, no cohesive plan or mass people’s revolution has occurred to throw off Trump’s dictatorship, as happened in the “color revolutions” that established liberal democracies in post-Soviet states like Yugoslavia’s Bulldozer Revolution in 2000, followed by Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution in 2005, and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in 2018.

Russia lost the cold war. It remains to be seen whether it wins its war against Ukraine. But it has won the deception war so well the other side doesn’t even know it has lost.

Here is the story of how it was done.

The power of asymmetric warfare

Suppose, like Russia, you are a country with only 144 million people and your enemy, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have 449, 68, and 347 million people for a combined population of 864 million people. The enemy has a 6 to 1 advantage.

Suppose, like Russia, your GDP is $2.2 trillion dollars a year. By comparison, the GDP of the EU, the UK, and the US is $20.3, $3.4, and $29.7, for a combined GDP of $53.4 trillion dollars. The enemy has a 24 to 1 advantage.

What would you do?

You would do what al-Qaeda did on September 11, 2001 against the United States, when 19 terrorists hijacked four airplanes and crashed two into the Twin Towers in New York and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in a field due to a passenger revolt. The attack killed 2,977 people.

Or you would do what Finland did when attacked by Stalin’s Russia in the 105-day Winter War of 1939 to 1940. Finland’s population was 3.7 million people against Russia’s 170 million, giving Russia a 46 to 1 advantage. Soviet leadership expected total victory in a few weeks. The Finns ingeniously adapted to the situation, employing guerrilla tactics, ambushes, use of reindeer to transport supplies, ski troops, dressing in layers for the cold, snow camouflage that made troops almost invisible, and little use of heavy equipment.

Finland’s greatest weakness was lack of anti-tank weapons, so it improvised with logs and crowbars jammed into tank treads to immobilize tanks, and then engineered something much better: Molotov cocktails (a new “miracle weapon”) made from half-liter vodka bottles filled with a mixture of gasoline, ethanol, and a small amount of tar for smoke. These easily ignited tanks or suffocated or blinded their crews. “Aided greatly by their ski-mobility, the Finnish tank-destroyer teams often managed to get within touching distance of their targets, and were able to throw their missiles straight into the steel grilles covering their engine compartments, often with dramatic results.” Shown is a Finnish solder, in snow camouflage, with a Molotov cocktail. Also see this article.

The result was Finland inflicted such heavy losses on Russia, estimated at 321,000 to 381,000 casualties (about half the invading force) while Finland suffered only 70,000 casualties (about 22% of the Finnish army), that Russia was forced to negotiate for peace. Instead of total capitulation, Finland ceded 9% of its territory to the Soviet Union.

These two examples illustrate what Russia has done. They have pursued the only possible winning strategy: asymmetric warfare based on careful study of the entire situation. One looks for asymmetric advantages in the enemy that can be exploited, while at the same time preventing the enemy from doing the same to you.

Russia’s asymmetric advantage over Western democracies has three main factors. These are common to modern authoritarian states like Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea.

1. Russia is a closed society, while the West is open. Being a police state with absolute power over its population, Russia controls any behavior, information, and population flow deemed harmful to Kremlin interests. This includes population surveillance and restrictions on internet content, media of any kind, the work of non-governmental organizations, and border crossing. By contrast, the West has freedom of behavior and relatively open flow of information and people. – The advantage is this allows easy insertion of propaganda and agents into the West, while insertion from the West into Russia is much harder.

2. Russia is a pseudo democracy with controlled elections, while the West enjoys true democracy, where elections are free and fair, and open to all candidates. – This allows Russian agents to be easily elected in true democracies, while Russia is immune from the same practice.

3. Russia employs continuous propaganda on its population to ensure support for the ruling elite and hatred of its (falsely manufactured) main enemy, the West, while the West does no such thing. – This gives Russia high expertise in propaganda. At the same time, it causes the West to lack high expertise in propaganda (because they don’t do it as much), including how to combat propaganda from external state actors like Russia. It also causes the small amounts of Western propaganda that do make it into Russia to have little effect, since they are competing with a much larger stream of state propaganda.

These asymmetric differences are large. With careful planning, rapid strikes so the enemy cannot respond in time, and continuous learning to stay ahead of the enemy and adapt to situational change, they are easily exploited.

Accordingly, Russia’s central military strategy to extend its empire is not to win on the battlefield, but to win by destroying the enemy from within, by use of highly refined forms of spycraft and propaganda. These two weapons cannot be employed nearly as well by the West due to Russia’s asymmetric advantages. The next section examines the first of these strategies.

Strategy 1. Plant or recruit long-term agents within the enemy who over time rise to positions of high influence

The best part about the right asymmetric warfare strategy is you don’t have to do it well. You only have to do it.

Let’s explain. If a high-quality strategy is chosen, only medium-quality tactics are required for success. A medium-quality strategy requires high-quality tactics. This jeopardizes success, since day-after-day perfection of plan execution for decades is close to impossible. A low-quality strategy is guaranteed to fail, since no amount of tactical quality will lead to success.

Albert Dittrich, born in East Germany in 1949, was a Russian sleeper agent recruited in his senior year in college to work for the KGB. Trained in both East Berlin and Moscow, his cover in East Germany was a rising diplomat. Later his cover was that he was working abroad at a top-secret facility related to the Soviet space program. Dittrich is the proto-typical American Soviet agent of the cold war period and his story is widely told.

Once Dittrich slipped into the United States in 1978, he became Jack Barsky with a completely different six-page cover story he memorized: Barsky had a “tough start in life” in New Jersey and was a high school dropout who had been a farmhand for years before moving to New York City. He received weekly encrypted radio transmissions and sent the KGB microfilm in dead drops, returning to East Germany every two years for debriefing, using fake passports since he had no America passport. Barsky’s general mission was:

I was sent to the United States to establish myself as a citizen and then make contact, to the extent possible, at the highest levels possible of decision makers - particularly political decision makers.

His specific mission was:

…to establish contacts with foreign policy think tanks, and in particular President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was given little guidance as to how he should do this, or even how best to blend into US society. The people who trained him had little feeling for the real fabric of America, its visceral, unquantifiable essence. “It’s as if they had spent time looking at fish swimming in an aquarium, and now they are training you to be a fish,” Barsky says. “But they don’t actually know what it’s like to be a fish.”

His handlers’ advice on how to blend in:

…turned out to be, at minimum weak, at worst, totally false. I'll give you an example. One of the things I was told explicitly was to stay away from the Jews. Now, obviously, there is anti-Semitism in there, but secondly, the stupidity of that statement is that they sent me to New York. There are more Jews in New York than in Israel, I think.

But this poor advice didn’t matter, because Russia had the right asymmetric warfare strategy: Plant or recruit long term agents within the enemy who over time rise to positions of high influence. Russia only had to implement that strategy with a modest level of quality. The rest would take care of itself.

Barsky never did establish contact with high-ranking political decision makers and got nowhere close to Brzezinski. However, he was able to provide the KGB with valuable work, including theft of MetLife’s proprietary banking code, monitoring of Soviet defectors, assessing Western public opinion, and recruitment profiling.

19 years after first entering the US, in 1997 Barsky was taken into custody by the FBI for espionage. Upon being confronted, among his first words were “What took you so long?” By then he was no longer an active spy, was let free, and became a valuable source of intelligence about the KGB’s spy program. Barsky has since revealed who he really is to all, including his wife and family in the US and his other wife and family in Germany.

But another recruited agent, Donald Trump, was not only able to establish contact with high-ranking political decision makers. He became one himself.

It takes a spy to know a spy.

According to Yuri Shvets, a resident spy in Washington, D.C. from 1985 to 1987 and a major in the KGB from 1980 to 1990, there was no “super-sophisticated master plan [which] finally climaxed with Trump’s election as president of the United States” in his first term. Instead:

What happened with Trump can best be seen as a series of sequential and sometimes unrelated operations that played into one another over more than four decades. According to Shvets, [Russian] standard tradecraft has been to develop assets and data that might not have an immediate payoff but that could offer far more value years or even decades in the future. “That’s a big difference between the KGB and some Western HUMINT (human intelligence) agencies,” Shvets told me. “The KGB is very patient. It can work a case for years. Americans want results yesterday or maximum today; as a result, they have none. (From the book American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, by Craig Unger, 2021, p11.)

In American Kompromat, Craig Unger then describes Russia’s program:

Starting back in the Soviet era, the KGB and its successors methodically studied various components of the American body politic and the economic forces behind it—campaign finance, the US legal system, social media, the tech sector, K Street Lobbyists, corporate lawyers, and the real estate industry—and exploited every loophole they could find. In the end, they began subverting one institution after another that was designed to provide checks and balances to safeguard our democracy, including our elections, our executive branch, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence sector. (p11)

While that sounds like a high-quality strategy implemented with high-quality tactics, that’s Craig Unger’s viewpoint. Yuri Shvets own viewpoint, from his 1994 book My Life as a KGB Spy in America, paints a picture of a bungled implementation. Reviewing the book, Daniel Wick writes that:

Much of Shvets’ book is devoted to… lamenting the incredible stupidity and shortsightedness of the KGB hierarchy, which he convincingly portrays as a babble of bureaucrats too timid to report anything controversial to the Politburo and too dumb to recognize worthwhile intelligence when it came their way.

Why then did the Russian intelligence program succeed so well that on January 20, 2025, Russia conquered the US without firing a single shot? Because of the right asymmetric warfare strategy. Medium quality tactics or sometimes worse, as described in Shvets’ book, did not matter because the strategy was so overwhelmingly superior to anything the West devised. What Craig Unger described was the strategic elements of the program, not the tactics.

In American Kompromat, Yuri Shvets describes how Trump first caught the eye of the KGB in 1977 when he married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Thereafter he was monitored. But that’s only the first step of recruitment and doesn’t happen in all cases.

Three years later in 1980 when Trump opened his first large development, the Grand Hyatt New York Hotel, he bought 200 television sets from Joy-Lud electronics. This was run by Semyon Kislin, a Soviet spotter-assessor agent. He identified Trump, a sharp young businessman on the rise with powerful connections, as a valuable and vulnerable potential asset worth pursuit, the second step of recruitment. The target is then evaluated, which may involve meetings to test their receptivity to an offer and evaluate their vulnerability. A relationship may be formed.

In 1987 Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, was dissatisfied with agent recruitment of US citizens. In his 2017 book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, Luke Harding describers how:

In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.” Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.

This led to the third step of recruitment: the final approach, the offer, and demonstration of commitment. After that, the agent is hooked.

Thinking creatively, “The top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged [Trump’s] 1987 Moscow visit.” This came as a result of Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Yuri Dubinin, visiting Trump on the top floor of the Trump Tower. Dubinin was “fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations,” and charmed Trump. Describing the visit, Dubinin’s daughter said “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it, he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him like honey to a bee.” In fact, this is a planted story to cover up the true nature of the KGB’s relationship with Trump. (American Kompromat, p75-80)

Shortly thereafter, Trump received a letter from Dubinin saying “It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.” The letter “expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.” (Here we have an example of high-quality tactics when they matter the most.)

American Kompromat takes up the story from there. On July 4, 1987 Trump and his wife Ivana visited Moscow for the first time. Trump was ushered around, met with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and was fed carefully constructed talking points. These flattered Trump with the idea that he should go into politics (since that would put him in a high level of influence). Yuri Shvets describes how, in a review of the book by The Guardian:

For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. It was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.

Taking one’s first “active measures” means demonstration of commitment to follow orders by taking strong actions that benefit Russia and harm the enemy. This is the test new agents must pass as proof of loyalty, and is designed to be a decisive psychological life-changing event, as the asset shifts from commitment to their present ideology to a new ideology and mission that defines their future life.

Sometime during or around Trump’s visit, it can be surmised that his handlers made him an offer and stipulated, using their charm offensive, that he must immediately demonstrate commitment or their relationship would not work out. Russia would not be able to help Trump develop his business career and run for president, and a real estate deal would not be possible.

Soon after his return to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and planned an October campaign rally in New Hampshire. Most importantly, less than sixty days after leaving Russia, on September 2, 1987 Trump took out identical full-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe at a total cost of $94,801.

The ads strongly criticized US foreign policy, taking the form of “An open letter to the American people on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”. This would have been a KGB supplied propaganda element (if not the entire ad), one Trump continues to repeat today. The letter argued that “America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves” and that “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States. … The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As intended, the ads fueled speculation Trump was planning to run for office. On the same day, a New York Times article titled Trump Gives a Vague Hint of Candidacy said:

Mr. Trump, a Republican, bought full-page advertisements in three major newspapers around the country this morning to air his foreign-policy views. … While some campaign consultants scoffed at the notion of a landlord and casino owner as candidate, Mr. Trump, whose total holdings are estimated at $3 billion, stoked the speculation with a statement from a spokesman that said: ''There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor or United States senator. He will not comment about the Presidency.''

With publication of the ads and his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Trump became a celebrity and appeared on the TV talk show circuit, with hosts like Larry King, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, and Howard Stern’s radio show. He was commonly asked some version of “Have you considered running for president?”

The ads were cause for celebration in the KGB. A few days after their release Shvets was back in Russia when he received a cable touting the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new valuable KGB asset. Shvets remembers how, in The Guardian review of American Kompromat:

It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russian active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.

Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity and narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.

And that is the short story of how Russia recruited and managed Trump, with exceptional long-term results.

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A followup article will explain Russia’s second asymmetric warfare strategy: Inject a sophisticated stream of propaganda into the enemy at its weakest points. This article is not yet written.

The original version of this article had a section on “Reframing the debate.” That has been moved to another article. It was moved because this article was too long.