Ehasalu said, worked for the K.G.B., which chased away freelance sex workers who had not been officially approved. Guests who were judged vulnerable to blackmail were put in a handful of rooms with holes in the walls through which special cameras would film dalliances with prostitutes. Peep Ehasalu, who helped set up the museum, said that 60 of the hotel’s 423 rooms were bugged and reserved for “interesting persons” like foreign businessmen. A remnant can still be seen in Tallinn, the capital of the former Soviet republic Estonia, where the new Finnish owners of the former Intourist hotel have set up a museum to display the surveillance and other techniques used to spy on and blackmail foreign guests. Trump’s hotel suite in 2013, when he visited Moscow to attend a Miss Universe contest, Russia has a long and well-documented record of using kompromat to discredit the Kremlin’s foes and to lean on its potential friends.įor decades, hotels across the former Soviet Union visited by foreigners were equipped with bugging devices and cameras by the K.G.B. “In line with our company standard to protect the privacy of our guests, we do not speak about any individual or group with whom we may have done business,” Irina Zaitseva, the hotel’s marketing and communication manager, said in an email. Trump, can fall victim to the Russian art of “kompromat,” the collection of compromising material as a source of leverage.Ī summary of the former spy’s findings was presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump, who at a news conference on Wednesday denounced publication of the allegations as “fake news.” A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the accusations as “mind-boggling nonsense” and “outrageous drivel.”Ī hotel spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter. Lavishly refurbished and fitted with a spa and special security features, the hotel is now the Ritz-Carlton, a five-star temple of luxurious living that promotes itself as an “unforgettable retreat in the heart of the city.”īut, according to uncorroborated and highly defamatory memos prepared by a former British intelligence operative for a Washington political and corporate research firm, the Ritz has remained a place where foreign guests, including Donald J. Russia’s Intourist hotels have since been sold off, including the travel company’s once dowdy flagship hostelry just down the road from the Kremlin. Also on the payroll were the prostitutes deployed to entrap and blackmail visiting foreign politicians and businessmen. When the Soviet Union set up the Intourist hotel and travel company under Stalin, the bellboys, drivers, cooks and maids all worked for the N.K.V.D., the secret police agency later known as the K.G.B.