Czechoslovakia Spied On Trump in Late 1980s, Looking for U.S. Intel: Report

An intelligence service with KGB ties was allegedly aided by Ivana Trump's father.

October 29, 2018 3:52 pm
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Businessman Donald Trump and Wife Ivana at Trump Plaza Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey January 27 1988. (Jeffrey Asher/ Getty Images)
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The communist intelligence service in Prague stepped up its spying campaign against Donald Trump during the late 1980s in the hope of gaining information about the  “upper echelons of the US government,” files and testimony from former cold war spies reveal, according to The Guardian.

The British newspaper ports that Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) carried out a long-term spying operation against Trump following his first marriage in 1977 to Ivana Zelníčková. The mission was run out of the town where Zelníčková was born and grew up. Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníčková, allegedly gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the U.S., The Guardian writes.

He was classified as a “conspiratorial” informer. His relationship with the intelligence service lasted until the end of the communist regime.

New archive records show the StB’s growing interest in Trump after George H.W. Bush won the 1988 presidential election. The Guardian tracked down a former StB official, Vlastimil Daněk, who confirmed the Trump operation.

“We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future,” he said to The Guardian. 

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