by Craig Unger
First published 2021
Craig Unger builds a case that Donald Trump has served as a Russian intelligence asset for decades. Drawing on exclusive interviews with CIA, FBI, and KGB officers plus thousands of pages of investigations, Unger traces how Soviet intelligence allegedly first spotted Trump through his business dealings with a KGB-connected electronics store in Manhattan over forty years ago. The book details Trump's 1987 Moscow trip, arranged by KGB General Ivan Gromakov, and reveals how Trump subsequently placed newspaper ads promoting Soviet-favored policies. Unger also examines Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking network as a kompromat operation, showing how Epstein gained wealth through Robert Maxwell and created compromising material on powerful figures. The investigation connects Russian intelligence operations to Silicon Valley through young women with possible intelligence ties. Unger offers readers the first detailed narrative attempting to answer whether America's former president worked as a foreign asset.
Genres: history, american, political-science, non-fiction, 21st-century, espionage
Vibes: suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Manhattan, Moscow, Silicon Valley
Period: 1987
368 pages · Hardcover · Dutton