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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.
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“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.
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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 operations by leveraging its domestic authority inside the USSR – particularly in terms of surveillance, entrapment, and visa oversight for foreign visitors.
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