‘Trump Recruited as Moscow Asset,’ Says Ex-KGB Spy Chief

US President Donald Trump was groomed 37 years ago as a potential Soviet asset, according to Alnur Mussayev, the former head of Kazakhstan’s security services, who had been a KGB officer in Moscow at the time.

In a Facebook post, Mussayev tried to shed light on Trump’s often baffling willingness to mollify Putin: “In 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the USSR KGB in Moscow,” Mussayev wrote on Feb. 20, explaining how “the most important direction of the work of the 6th Administration was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries.”

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

Since his first term as president, Trump has been suspected of being, if not a Russian asset outright, then at least inordinately sympathetic to Vladimir Putin and Russia.

In 2017, just as Trump was taking office after defeating Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, a report put together by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele came to light. The document, initially commissioned by Trump’s Republican adversaries and subsequently taken over by the Democratic opposition, contained salacious accusations from purported Russian intelligence operatives claiming that Moscow had kompromat (compromising material) on Trump dating back to his various visits to Russia – including the infamous and never-corroborated “golden shower” videotape with Trump and a prostitute in a Moscow hotel.

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Although the credibility of the “Steele dossier” has been vehemently contested by Trump supporters, especially for its use of anonymous sources, Mussayev confirms the existence of kompromat on Trump. In a Facebook post from Feb. 18, 2018, the former Kazakh spy chief who now resides in Vienna, Austria, wrote:

“Donald Trump is on the FSB’s hook and is swallowing the bait deeper and deeper. This is evidenced by numerous indirect facts published in the media. There is such a thing as the recruitability of an object. Based on my experience of operational work in the KGB-KNB [the Kazakh successor to the KGB], I can say for sure that Trump belongs to the category of ideally recruitable people. I have no doubt that Russia has kompromat on the US President, that over the course of many years the Kremlin has been promoting Trump to the post of President of the main world power.”

Already seven years ago, Mussayev said that the ruling elite in the US understood well that their president was deeply dependent on the Kremlin, but wouldn’t openly admit it, so as to not jeopardize the US’s status as sole superpower. He predicted the various attempts to remove Trump from power.

Well-worn accusations

Mussayev’s claims are by no means the only ones from former KGB officers.

In “American Kompromat,” a 2021 book by Craig Unger, former KGB officer Yuri Shvets claims that Trump had been recruited by Moscow in the 1980s.

“Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset… and proved so willing to parrot anti-Western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow,” Shvets told the Guardian in 2021.

Shvets was a KGB major during the 1980s with cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Soviet news agency TASS. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He worked as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006, according to the Guardian.

In the book, which relies heavily on Shvets’ recollections, Unger describes how Trump first came to the Russians’ attention in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. In 1979, once she married Donald Trump, already a notable American real estate mogul, Czech Secret Service spied on Ivana at home and abroad, and reportedly questioned her father about the couple after his trips the United States. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later, Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue, near the hotel.

Shvets told the Guardian that Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denied that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

A 2017 Politico article by Luke Harding sustains that “according to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan.”

Harding adds that the agents who undertook this task were code-named Al Jarza and Lubos. “They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father, Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or ‘cover.’”

Unger, however, has been quick to point out that the Trump recruitment process was almost fortuitous. “He was an asset,” Shvets said of Trump. “It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started… the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

Shvets noted that Trump was the perfect target: “His vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election,” he said, referring to the 2016 election.

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Now, as Trump continually makes moves – particularly with regard to Russia and its brutal war against Ukraine – that would seem to benefit only Moscow, former KGB recruiters such as Mussayev are convinced that the US president is “deeper and deeper” on the hook.