Putin revels in Trump, lies and videotape
Way back in the early 1990's, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I spent the odd night in Moscow's Intourist Hotel. Without fail, at some stage during the night, a young woman would knock on the door offering her services for an hour or so. Whether or not they were sent by Russia's infamous KGB is an open question but it was common knowledge that anyone who did partake in a midnight dalliance could well find themselves in a compromised situation.
Today the Ritz Carlton, where US President-elect Donald Trump is accused of having intimate relations which were apparently caught on tape, sits on the very spot where the Intourist Hotel once stood - at the bottom end of Tverskaya St, just across the road from the Kremlin.
It's an irony probably not lost on Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB. He'd be well aware of the tactics his former employer used to gain leverage over unsuspecting foreigners or to discredit internal enemies of the state.
While both Trump and the Kremlin deny the existence of such tapes, this kind of tactic is a tried and true KGB (now FSB) speciality. It didn't die with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In 1999, Russia's prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov was forced to resign after a tape showing a man who looked like him in bed with two prostitutes was aired on state-run TV. The footage emerged shortly after he announced he was going to investigate several prominent figures for corruption.
Ten years later there were two other tape-related scandals. A British diplomat lost his job after being pictured with two women in a compromising manner in a brothel and an American diplomat was also embroiled in a sex-scandal that the US claimed was fabricated.
Sometimes though, the plan backfires. Apparently it was tried on an Indonesian public figure who was filmed having sex with two women. It's alleged that when he was shown the tape he was quite pleased with his performance and asked for extra copies as he thought it would be good publicity.
http://www.dw.com/en/putin-revels-in-trump-lies-and-videotape/a-37124715
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