Ex-officer in Vienna

Code name “Krasnov”: Trump recruited by the KGB in 1987?

The personal file of "Krasnow" is now said to be privately managed by a close associate of Putin.

(Bild: TATYANA MAKEYEVA/AFP)

The former head of the Kazakh secret service KNB, Alnur Mussajew, who lives in Vienna, has made serious accusations against US President Donald Trump. According to Mussayev, he was recruited for the KGB in Moscow in 1987 under the pseudonym "Krasnov". Russian experts are skeptical about Mussaev's statement.

Officially, he had worked in an object protection department of the Soviet police in 1987, but he had been ordered there as an employee of the sixth administration of the Soviet KGB, which was responsible for counter-espionage in the economy at the time, Mussaev explained in a telephone conversation with APA. As an employee of this KGB department, he was involved in the recruitment of the then US businessman Donald Trump during his stay in Moscow.

"Specifically, I checked out places where meetings with him were to take place, checked entrances and exits, clarified which people could appear there and whether they could be American diplomats," he said. Specifically, he named the Moscow Hotel in Moscow as one of the places that would have played a role in the operation at the time.

Musayev: Three or four volumes of KGB information about Trump
The KGB had a "large amount" of information about Trump; the employees of the Sixth Administration involved were shown three or four thick volumes classified as "top secret" in preparation for the operation. These included information from socialist brother states. The personal file of "Krasnov" is now being managed privately by a close associate of Putin.

"I can't remember the exact phrase from the stories in the office either. But the impression of the employees who had direct dealings with him was that Trump was very happy to make this contact and considered this a high evaluation of his knowledge and personality," said Mussaev, a former comrade-in-arms of the businessman and diplomat Rakhat Alyiev, who fell out of favor in one of his Kazakh homelands.

The latter died in a prison cell in Vienna in 2015. Musayev himself was acquitted by the Vienna Regional Criminal Court a short time later in a trial revolving around allegations of kidnapping and murder in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, he had already been sentenced in absentia to a long prison term in 2008 for economic offenses, among other things.

Skepticism from Russian experts
The Kazakh did not provide any evidence for his claims about Trump. When explicitly asked, he also did not want to give the names of the officers who directly carried out the recruitment. "I am still in contact with some of my colleagues and they are not happy about this whole situation," explained Musayev. This information on Trump's recruitment had also been made available to the US special investigator Robert Mueller some time ago, and employees of the sixth administration had been in contact with the investigation against Trump at the time.

Russian experts, however, express doubts about Musayev's claims. "His statements seem more like personally motivated speculation than historical fact. Without additional evidence, he should not be believed," wrote Daniil Kislov, a journalist specializing in Central Asia, on Facebook on Saturday.

Ex-intelligence officer cannot provide any document on his time with the KGB
Russian intelligence expert and non-fiction author Andrey Soldatov, who lives in exile in the UK, is also skeptical of Musayev's account: "There is no evidence that he ever worked at the KGB headquarters in Moscow," Soldatov explained. Musayev explained that he could not produce any documents proving that he worked in the sixth administration in Moscow. "This can only be found in my personal file (in Kazakhstan and Moscow, editor's note)," he said.

Allegations against Trump not new
However, the accusations that Trump could be a Russian spy are not new. Former KGB spy Yuri Shvets, who was sent to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, told the British Guardian back in 2021 that Trump had been set up as a Russian agent for over 40 years. He had parroted anti-Western propaganda so readily that he was celebrated for it in Moscow, it was said.

According to the report, Trump considered running for the Republican Party shortly after his first visit to Moscow in 1987 and even held a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On September 1, he took out a full-page ad in several US newspapers with the headline: "There's nothing wrong with America's foreign and defense policy that a little backbone can't cure."

In Ronald Reagan's Cold War America, Trump had accused Japan of exploiting the US and expressed skepticism about US participation in NATO. The ad took the form of an open letter to the American people about "why America should no longer pay for the defense of countries that can afford to defend themselves." The similarity to Trump's statements today is striking.