Donald Trump Was Recruited by the KGB Under Codename ‘Krasnov’ Claims Former Soviet Spy Chief

A former senior Soviet KGB spy chief has claimed that Donald Trump was recruited as a spy by Russian intelligence as early as 38 years ago by his department, and given the codename ‘Krasnov’.

Russia’s ‘Committee for State Security’, abbreviated as KGB, was the main security agency of the Soviet Union between 1954 to 1991, responsible for internal security, foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and secret police functions.

In an extraordinary post on Facebook on 20 February, Alnur Mussayev – who used to run the successor to the Soviet-era KGB in Kazakhstan – claimed that he was personally aware of Trump’s recruitment by the agency in 1987. 

The recruitment, he said, was undertaken by his own KGB department. One of the key roles of that department was to acquire intelligence through business leaders in Western countries.

“In 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of ​​work of the 6th Directorate was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries”, wrote Mussayev in a Russian language post on Facebook.

“It was that year that our Office recruited 40-year-old businessman from the United States, Donald Trump, under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov’”.

He later added: “In the activity of intelligence agencies, as in life, everything is possible, even the wildest and incredible things.

“For example, recruitment of future leaders of state and even the President of the United States.”

Mussayev’s most recent senior intelligence position was as head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB) under the tenure of President Nursultan Nazarbayev from May 1997 to September 1998. He returned for a second term from August 1999 to May 2001.

Prior to that, however, he was a long-serving KGB officer.

In 2007 he fled the country after accusing the government of widespread corruption in the form of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from Western oil giants. Exiled to Austria, in 2008 he survived an attempted kidnapping which he attributed to the Kazakhstan government.

Byline Times can confirm based on archived Russian newspaper materials that Mussayev first joined active military service in the KGB of the Soviet Union in 1979.

He then joined KGB counterintelligence of the Kazakh special services. From 1986 to 1989 – the period in which he said he was aware of Donald Trump’s KGB recruitment – he was seconded to the central office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in Moscow, before returning to the KGB.

The Russian language sources on Mussayev’s KGB career are unclear on which directorate he was involved in. Although in his Facebook post he said he worked for the 6th Directorate, he has also been described as working in the 8th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. Public information on these directorates and how they worked is sparse.

The memoirs of KGB defectors like Oleg Gordievsky, Yuri Bezmenov and Stanislav Levchenko confirm that in this period Western business leaders were frequently the targets of Soviet intelligence. Although the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not typically initiate these operations, these accounts show that it frequently supported or facilitated the KGB’s operatoins by leveraging its domestic authority inside the USSR – particularly in terms of surveillance, entrapment, and visa oversight for foreign visitors.

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A History of Allegations

Mussayev’s claims are not the first time that a former senior KGB intelligence officer has publicly claimed that they were aware of Donald Trump’s recruitment to the KGB, but it is the first time that Trump’s alleged Russian codename, ‘Krasnov’, has been identified.

According to Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general, who served in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, and during the Soviet era was Vladimir Putin’s direct superior, Trump was on the radar of Soviet and Russian intelligence as early as the 1980s with claims that the KGB had kompromat on him, including reports of his sexual relationships with women.

Yuri Shvets, another former Soviet spy residing in the US, claims that the USSR cultivated Donald Trump since the 1970s, supporting his political ambitions and flattering him. According to him, Trump became a target of Soviet and Czechoslovak intelligence in 1977 after marrying Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. 

Ivana Zelníčková, Trump’s first wife, reportedly worked with the Czechoslovak security service surveillance, the Státní Bezpečnost (StB), according to archive materials studied by the Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and first reported by Czech Television.

The StB formally cooperated with Russia’s KGB, Poland’s SB, East Germany’s Stasi and other Soviet bloc intelligence agencies. 

Czechoslovakia’s StB monitored Ivana Trump and her family for decades. Reports tracked her marriages, emigration, and ties to Trump, wiretapping her calls and observing her children’s visits, and her father was reportedly pressured to cooperate.

Shvets claims that in the early 1980s, Trump entered in business interactions with Soviet immigrant Semion Kislin, allegedly linked to the KGB and that during Trump’s visit in Moscow and Leningrad in 1987, KGB agents encouraged him to enter politics. 

The White House and Alnur Mussayev were both contacted for comment.