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Multiple Former KGB Agents All Have the Same Story: Trump Was Recruited as a KGB Asset Almost 40 Years Ago

Russia, Russia, Russia, he'll scream.

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I’m nearly certain that Donald Trump, despite his curious seeming loyalty to Vladimir Putin, thought that the Russian scandal was behind him. After all, he was able to out-shout his detractors, nothing ever came of the Mueller investigation, and everyone has very nearly forgotten about all of the coincidences and non-coincidences that led to him firing James Comey.

But there are plenty of folks who haven’t forgotten, and although there still isn’t a smoking gun, there’s more evidence than ever that Trump has been working hand-in-hand with Cold War-era actors from Moscow and the surrounding area.

And while Americans may never see the legendary “pee tape” that the rumor mill made so much of, the endless books, accounts, and anecdotes from people who have been along for the ride cumulatively make up more than just coincidence.

Now the rumor mill is grinding again, and the propulsion for it is accounts from three different former KGB agents who all agree on one thing: That Donald Trump was recruited as a foreign KGB agent in 1987 during a trip to Moscow.

Well, the specific year comes from one of the accounts, anyway. In a recent Facebook post, the former head of Kazakhstan’s intelligence service, Alnur Mussayev, said that the real estate giant had visited Moscow that year, and that his file was in the hands of Putin himself.

Alnur Mussayev? Ex-USSR KGB Chief behind claim of recruiting Trump as russian spy

Kazakhstan is, of course, a former Soviet Republic — although it is now a sovereign country, it was part of the USSR in 1987, at essentially the cartoonish height of the Cold War. Think Red Dawn, Rocky IV, and Spies Like Us kind of stuff. Not coincidentally, 1987 is the year that Trump’s book The Art of the Deal came out.

He was at the pre-presidential height of his own popularity, and therefore a prime target for the KGB to attempt to recruit as a foreign agent. Popular enough that his best-selling book was still being snapped up back in his home country, but not yet infamous enough for the wrong reasons to make him ineffective.

Trump was, most importantly, not seen as a political figure at the time, although his ego would drive him to run for the presidency for the first time just 13 years later.

But what proof does Mussayev have? Well, he already told you: Trump’s file is safely in the hands of Vladimir Putin, who was in the thick of his work at the KGB at the time, having joined the Soviet intelligence service 12 years prior.

Putin was not in Moscow at the time of Trump’s visit. But he was the agent responsible for preserving and burning the cumulative KGB files that had been collected, separating the useful from the items that Russia wanted to hide after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But Mussayev isn’t the only ex-KGB officer to make the claim. Craig Unger, who had already written an entire book on Trump and Putin’s ties back 2018, wrote another one published in 2022 called American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery.

That’s a mouthful, but Unger’s primary source for the book was former KGB major Yuri Shivets, who now lives in D.C. I think you can tell from the subtitle of that book just what kind of information Unger relied on Shivets for. And the fact that Unger’s second book on Trump, the one making these accusations, came during a time when Trump was not president, and the 2024 campaign had not yet begun, makes the corroborating claims both prescient and apolitical.

And as the 80s TV commercials might have said, “But wait… There’s more!”

Mussayev wasn’t just an ex-KGB agent. He was a somebody in the agency. Though he had previously headed the Kazakh National Security Committee, he was in Moscow by 1987, as part of the 6th Directorate of the KGB, which was responsible for counter intelligence within the economy.

One of the Directorate’s primary objectives, Mussayev said, was “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.” That year, when America was the USSR’s primary opponent, any focus on recruiting foreign businessmen would have had Donald Trump at the very top of the list. No, not on the list, at the TOP.

Before the end of his post, Mussayev dropped the bombshell: “In 1987, our directorate recruited Donald Trump under the pseudonym Krasnov.”

He went on to say that the FSB — the successor agency to the KGB in Russia — covered up the entire affair. “Today, the personal file of resident ‘Krasnov’ has been removed from the FSB. It is being privately managed by one of Putin’s close associates,” he wrote.

The post went into much more detail, but the crux of it was that there remains a relationship between Trump and what remains of the Soviet/Russian counterintelligence community, which, under Putin, has returned in a big way.

Two’s not enough, though. Let’s seal the deal, if we can artfully use that phrase.

Sergei Zhyrnov, a THIRD former KGB spy now living in France, backed up Mussayev’s claims in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist almost immediately after Mussayev’s Facebook entry. American historian Alexander Motyl, who specializes in Ukraine, Russia, and the former Soviet Union, saw that interview and provided not just a translation of events, but context.

In an opinion piece for The Hill, Motyl says:

According to Zhyrnov, Trump would have been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room. Zhyrnov said that Trump’s every move would have been recorded and documented, and that he could have been either caught in a “honey trap” (“All foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB — one hundred percent,” he said) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.

Remember the movie references I made earlier? The reason those films were hits was because it may be hard to remember nearly 40 years later, but it was actually like all that. International relations between the world’s only two major nuclear superpowers looked like a storyline from professional wrestling when it was still called the WWF. There was literally a bad guy wrestler named Nikolai Volkoff, and his primary opponent was Corporal Kirchner, who was a real life Army paratrooper who became a professional wrestler, specifically to face off against Russian “bad guys.”

Both nations had a vested interest in portraying themselves to their citizens as the heroes and the last hope for humanity, and both the United States and the USSR went all out. I know I’m stretching your memory here, but you’ll recall (if you’re old enough) that the US itself had been doing similar covert operations around the world.

We armed the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. We trained the Nicaraguan Contras who fought against the Sandinista government. We funded the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende. And throughout, we developed spy planes to take pictures of silos in the USSR, we embedded our own CIA agents inside the KGB, and we bugged their major communications line in Dresden, East Germany — the one overseen by a much younger Vladimir Putin.

Deep breath.

So these three guys, all living in different places, unrelated to one another in branch or service within the KGB, and loyal to three different places within the former USSR — Mussayev from Kazakhstan, Shvets from Ukraine, and Zyhrnov from Russia — all have the same story. The fact that they have no paper evidence but the same exact tale nearly speaks to the veracity of the story itself.

Donald Trump and his then-wife, Ivana Trump, visit St. Petersburg in 1987. Image – Maxim Blokhin/Tass/Getty Images

Adding to that fact is that all three men now have NEW allegiances, to non-Soviet Kazakhstan, the United States (in the case of Shivets), and France, where Zhyrnov made his claims from.

And, as Moltyn points out in his op-ed, “Kompromat on Trump would easily, simply and convincingly explain the president’s animus toward NATO, Europe and Ukraine, his admiration of Vladimir Putin and his endorsement of authoritarian rule.”

That is to say, Trump would be desperate to cover up any history of “Krasnov” himself, and will supplicate to Putin in any way possible to do so. At this point, we’re in the territory of the simplest explanation being the most plausible.

In fact, Motyl bolsters his story with an anecdote about a personal friend of his own, who had a similar experience “at just the same time.”

A left-leaning ladies’ man, he was wined and dined in Moscow for several years in the late 1980s, courted by the ladies — by his round-the-clock interpreter, as well as by a woman who approached him in a department store and invited him home.

Again, we may never know, but it seems pretty clear there is more to all of this than rumors.

This Twitter thread from another investigator lays it out clearly:

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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