Press briefing with Craig Unger, author of American Kompromat and Yuri Borysovych Shvets - a former Major in the KGB, operating between 1980 and 1990. Ian Williams, President of the Foreign Press Association interviews.
Unger’s new book exposes how a relatively trivial targeting operation by the KGB’s New York station over forty years ago tried to recruit a prominent local property developer as an asset—and triggered events that morphed into the greatest intelligence bonanza in history. It recounts how this compromised coterie reached all the way into the office of the Attorney General, advancing themselves and their influence.
Based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—Soviets who resigned from the KGB and moved to the United States, former CIA officers, FBI counterintelligence agents, lawyers at white-shoe Washington firms--and analysis of thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian, American Kompromat shows that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat operations leveraged the murky secrets of some the most powerful people in the US into potent weapons for Moscow.
Joining us on the panel, Yuri Borysovych Shvets - a former Major in the KGB, operating between 1980 and 1990. From April 1985 to 1987 he worked in the Washington, D.C. Rezidentura of the First Chief Directorate. While there, he held a cover job as a correspondent for TASS, a Soviet state-owned news agency.
