It was more than just celebrity real estate developer and author Donald Trump’s marriage to Ivana that led the StB, as well as possibly agents inside Russia’s KGB, to focus their sights on him. By the late 1980s, Donald Trump had gone public with his intention to possibly run for president, as Britannica explains. And during this period, it’s also known that Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular updates to the StB on his daughter and son-in-law’s whereabouts and activities, as The Guardian also reported in 2018.
During this period it’s also known that Donald Trump held meetings with high-ranking officials both in New York and in Czechoslovakia when he and his wife returned to Eastern Europe to attend her father’s funeral, based on further reporting from The Guardian. Trump and Ivana also visited the USSR in 1987, at the invitation of the Kremlin. That trip included stops in both Moscow and in Leningrad.
Speaking with The Guardian, professor of political science at Drake University, Kieran Williams said the StB, sometimes called Stasi, focused their attention on Trump in particular after the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush to the presidency. Their primary motivation for doing so, Williams said, was less to compromise Trump than to gain information regarding Czechoslovakian defectors living in the west who might have been plotting to bring down the regime, among other types of intelligence. “They were looking at a long-term operation,” William said.
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