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I dunno, someone might've paid him to try to get some info, but "recruited as a spy"? He'd be the worst spy in the entire world.
"Hello fellow fatcat businessman, I am a simple fatcat businessman just like you. Would you like to tell me any secrets you have that my friend Mr. Gorba-- I mean Mr. Smith would be interested in?"
Spies often don't know they are spies...
Like someone selling manuals for a piece of defense tech may not know why the buyer wants it... but yet....
The main thing they look for in an asset, apart from access and connections, is leverage. You want someone who can be easily manipulated - for example through flattery, someone indebted who can be made desperate, someone venal who can be bribed, someone unscrupulous who can be made to compromise themselves, someone with sexual or other secrets they need to keep secret. Trump would absolutely be the ideal candidate.
The reason that Russia would tap businessmen as assets is to have them buy things and then import them into neutral countries through shell corporations to bypass trade regulations and tariffs and international law. The other major thing would be real estate deals also often facilitated through shell corporations.
He’d be a great asset.
Launder him some Russian money, convince him to go into dodgy deals with others, get blackmail on them, repeat.
And now imagine if you've got some dimwitted pudge-ball rich kid with daddy issues, who admires tough guys and wants to act like he's a mobster. The asset is handed to you on a plate in that case. No need for blackmail, flattery and a bit of dirty money is all it'd take.
No idea if this story is true or not. Weird it got published, and weirder that it got scrubbed.
As far as intelligence assets go, from what I've read you want as many as you can get, just in case they become useful eventually.
Now imagine your asset becomes the president of the United States. All of a sudden, he is the most useful and important intelligence asset in the history of intelligence assets.