US President Donald Trump is likely to have been compromised by Russian intelligence on a trip to Moscow over 30 years ago, claims a new book.
During Trump and then-wife Ivana'stravelled to Russia in 1987, after being invited by a senior diplomat to discuss property developments, it's believed Trump would have been filmed with Russian prostitutes sent to him as a "honey trap", making him vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin, its then top spy told the book's author.
Former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, Oleg Kalugin, told author Craig Unger that the material would have been protected by spies since then.
In January 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was invited by the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, to visit Moscow to talk about opening a new hotel there.
Trump flew with his first wife Ivana and two unnamed associates to what was then Soviet Russia.
He stayed at the National Hotel in Moscow and during his entire trip was almost certainly under 24-hour surveillance by the KGB.
Kalugin, who was responsible for foreign operations and intelligence gathering, said that it was widespread practice at the time to use prostitutes to entrap foreign businessmen.
"In your world, many times, you ask your young men to stand up and proudly serve their country," Kalugin once told a reporter. "In Russia, sometimes we ask our women just to lie down."
However, there is no direct evidence of the existence of such tapes.
In an interview for House of Trump, Kalugin he said: "I would not be surprised if the Russians have, and Trump knows about them, files on him during his trip to Russia and his involvement with meeting young ladies that were controlled [by Soviet intelligence]."
The trip was long before Trump's 2013 visit to Moscow to attend the Miss Universe pageant. It was that visit which led to allegations that he was filmed watching prostitutes urinate on a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama – claims he has denied as false and "fake news", but which have led to the notorious "golden showers" dossier.
The claim was first made in the dossier prepared for former British spy Christopher Steele, who was commissioned during Trump's election campaign by Fusion GPS, a Washington "research firm" to look into his Russian ties.
Kalugin insists that Trump is probably aware of the existence of the "kompromat," what Russians call compromising material.
These and many other shocking claims are detailed in Craig Unger's latest book 'House of Trump, House of Putin; the Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia.'
Unger, a Vanity Fair journalist, previously targeted the Bush family over alleged links to the Saudis, and was heavily quoted in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 movie.
The book claims that Trump is a "Russian asset" whose greed made him "easy prey" to Soviet intelligence officers decades ago, the Daily Mail reports.
House of Trump also details Trump's ties to Russia and possible collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016 election that saw him elected US President.
Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the meddling of the vote gathering stream has seen 32 people indicted and three Russian companies, the US intelligence agencies have concluded hacking occurred.
Unger says, Trump has been soft on Russia, last month shocking the world by saying that the Kremlin did not conduct any meddling.
In the opening chapter Unger's book, he says that the reason is simple: with Trump, Russia "implanted either a wilfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House".
Unger calls Trump "Vladimir Putin's man in the White House" and claims that Trump's real estate business, The Trump Organization, has likely laundered billions for organised crime in Russia.
House of Trump says that Trump's associations with shady Russians dates back to the 1970s in Brighton Beach, a working-class neighbourhood in Brooklyn where his father Fred owned dozens of properties.
Among them were Semon Kislin and Tamir Sapir, Russian emigres who supposedly had ties to Russian crime families and started an electronics store which was used by KGB agents to buy their supplies.
Another was David Bogatin, a Russian-born Soviet Army veteran turned US citizen who later pleaded guilty to running a gasoline bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters.
Bogatin bought five luxury condos in Trump Tower, the brand-new apartment block on Fifth Avenue in New York, in the mid-1980s for US$6 million.
Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York at the time that allowed people to buy condos using shell companies which disguised who the buyer was.
House of Trump says that whether Trump knew it or not, when he closed the deal with Bogatin he had "just helped launder money for the Russian mafia".
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