Craig Unger + Former KGB Agent Yuri Shvets Discuss American Kompromat, Moderated by Scott Horton

Join Craig Unger and Yuri Shvets as Craig presents his newest book American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery. Joining them in conversation is human rights advocate and author Scott Horton. Purchase a copy here: https://www.strandbooks.com/search-results?page=1&craig%20unger%20American%20Kompromat&searchVal=craig%20unger%20American%20Kompromat&type=product

kompromat n.--Russian for compromising information

This is a story of dirty secrets, and the most powerful people in the world.

Craig Unger's new book, American Kompromat, tells of the spies and salacious events underpinning men's reputations and riches. It tells how a relatively insignificant targeting operation by the KGB's New York rezidentura (New York Station) more than forty years ago--an attempt to recruit an influential businessman as a new asset--triggered a sequence of intelligence protocols that morphed into the greatest intelligence bonanza in history.
Was Donald Trump a Russian asset? Just how compromised was he? And how could such an audacious feat have been accomplished? American Kompromat is situated in the ongoing context of the Trump-Russia scandal and the new era of hybrid warfare, kleptocrats, and authoritarian right-wing populism it helped accelerate. To answer these questions and more, Craig Unger reports, is to understand kompromat--operations that amassed compromising information on the richest and most powerful men on earth, and that leveraged power by appealing to what is for some the most prized possession of all: their vanity.

Craig Unger is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers House of Trump, House of Putin and House of Bush, House of Saud. For fifteen years he was a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, where he covered national security, the Middle East, and other political issues. A frequent analyst on MSNBC and other broadcast outlets, he was a longtime staffer at New York Magazine, has served as editor-in-chief of Boston magazine, and has contributed to Esquire, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He also appears frequently as an analyst on MSNBC, CNN, and other broadcast outlets. Unger has written about the Trump-Russia scandal for The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He is a graduate of Harvard University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Scott Horton is human rights advocate best known for his representation of Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov as well as other figures in the Russian democracy and human rights movement; he is also a lecturer at Columbia University Law School and a Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine, where he writes on legal and national security affairs. His writing for Harper’s received the National Magazine Award in 2011. He has served as a legal and national security commentator for numerous broadcasters including NBC, CBS and ZDF in Germany. Horton is a founder of the American University in Central Asia. He has authored several books including The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare and Private Security Contractors at War, a study of the modern use of mercenaries. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the American Branch of the International Law Association.

Yuri Shvets was a Major in the KGB during the years 1980–1990. From April 1985 to 1987 he worked in the D.C. Rezidentura of the PGU KGB SSSR. Shvets has long been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, with whom he was a college mate at the Academy of the KGB Foreign Intelligence. Since 1998 Shvets has been doing private business security investigations in the former Soviet Union for American and British businesses, including major banks, hedge funds, world top airspace and international oil companies. In 2020, he consulted Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the United States House of Representatives on Russian intelligence activities and money laundering in the U.S. In 1995 he published Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America.

Recorded February 4, 2021

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