A Shadowy Finger Points to Trump as Russian Agent, Roiling Social Media
Former top CIA officials are wary of a charge by a former KGB official saying Trump was officially recruited in 1987, but Trump's pro-Moscow pivot makes it irrelevant now anyway, they say.
The long-bubbling suspicion that Donald Trump has long been in the pocket of Russian President Valdimir Putin received a fresh supply of ammunition last month when Alnur Mussayev, a former Soviet/Kazakh intelligence chief, alleged on Facebook that the KGB recruited Trump during his Moscow visit in 1987 and gave him the codename “Krasnov.”
The allegation, which has not been specifically corroborated, has caught fire on social media, with tens of millions of hits, but remains untouched by skeptical mainstream media outlets.
We, too, were skeptical when Mussayev—or somebody calling himself Mussayev— posted a startling claim on Facebook that the KGB’s Sixth Directorate, whose task was to target businessmen from capitalist countries, successfully recruited Trump 38 years ago.
“How come such an explosive allegation is popping up just now, nearly a decade after such allegations reached a fever pitch during Trump’s first term?” we asked. “Could it be that the Facebook ‘Mussayev’ is a fake, a sophisticated disinfo op? And why use Facebook, a playground for fake personas and foreign disinformation, to air such a charge (instead of a carefully arranged press conference with documents and the backing of experts)? And to what end?” we asked.
“One possibility,” we mused, “is that it was designed by enemies of Trump — pick a name, any name — to boost anti-Trump fury while he’s on a roll in Washington,” slashing federal agencies with the aid of billionaire Elon Musk’s budget-cutting DOGE teams. “Another, far more devious ploy, but much in the Russian disinfo DNA,” was that the Mussayev post “was actually designed by Moscow to be unmasked in order to embarrass and discredit the legions of people who believe that Valdimir Putin has some sort of direct leverage over Trump.”
A former senior CIA Russia hand advised us that that was indeed possible.
Susan Miller, a recently retired former CIA official who led the intelligence community’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said in an interview Tuesday that she didn’t think much of Mussayev’s allegation. Like us, she thought it could possibly be a Russian disinformation ploy. Despite the Kremlin’s obvious approval of Trump, it’s always looking for ways to sow chaos in American politics.
Then there’s the most banal of all explanations: Drunk posting. According to Miller and Mike Sellers, another former CIA Russia hand we talked with, there’s a small universe of ex-KGB guys who sit around at night tugging on the vodka bottle and shit-posting mischievous stuff.
Mussayev’s known history raises more questions: Online biographies say that in 1987, Mussayev, then 23, was an officer in the KGB’s Sixth Directorate who had been seconded to the central office of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. So according to some researchers, it’s possible that he participated in joint efforts with the Sixth Directorate to recruit foreign capitalist businessmen visiting the Soviet Union. In 2007, however, Mussayev fled to Vienna amid a corruption scandal. In 2015, he faced charges in Austria for the abduction and murder of two Kazakh bankers but was acquitted. Since then, he has been an outspoken critic of Putin, frequently posting condemnations of the Russian leader from Vienna on Facebook. Or so it seems.
In any event, the main reason Miller didn’t put much faith Mussayev’s allegation is that her 2016 elections investigation—which included the FBI, the principal U.S. agency responsible for thwarting foreign subversion—looked beyond Russian meddling to the question of whether Trump was a witting agent of the KGB and found … nothing.
What was the starting point for that? we asked. Take us inside the room. At some point, did somebody wonder aloud, “Is this guy a Russian agent? Is he a recruited guy? Should we look into that?”
"No, it wasn't like that,” said Miller, whose first operational assignment was Moscow in the late 1980s. “It was like, ‘we'd like you to look for everything’—from he had no idea [of Russians attempts to use him] all the way to the other extreme, that he was recruited. And both of those were quickly dismissed.”
Trump , she said, was a “dictator wannabe” who envied Vladimir Putin’s unbridled power.
Like most national security veterans, Miller views Trump’s degradation of NATO and his efforts to bully Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky into a pro-Russia peace deal with a mixture of shock, alarm and disgust. But she suggests that had the KGB recruited and code-named Trump in 1987 as “Krasnov,” U.S. intelligence might’ve come across evidence of that at some point, particularly after the USSR crumbled on Dec. 26, 1991, when many a KGB agent was set adrift.
“We found nothing,” she said. “Doesn't mean he wasn't [recruited], probably. [But] we did search for that, and it was no. And like I said, our assessment was simply that he was not.”
“They wanted us to look at the [entire] spectrum,” Miller said of the assessment authorized by the Obama White House. “They're like, no holds barred. We don't care where you come out, but this is what we want. “
“And did that spectrum,” we asked, “include whether Trump was a witting or unwitting agent?”
“Yeah—I mean, of course it did,” Miller said.
“And your conclusion was—”
“—And the conclusion was there's zero—we can't find any evidence.”
Alternatives
But another former senior CIA Russia hand, John Sipher, believes it’s quite possible that any incriminating paper on “Krasnov” was so tightly held by the KGB that U.S. intelligence wouldn’t have found it. In the late 1980s, he pointed out, the CIA had two KGB agents in the Soviet embassy in Washington on its payroll, but neither knew about the Kremlin’s own moles in the FBI (Robert Hanssen) or CIA (Aldrich Ames), who were being run out of the spy agency’s Washington rezidentura.
“To be honest, we only have a few key sources in Russia,” Sipher said by phone. The agency, he added, wouldn’t have been particularly interested in the KGB’s interest in an American businessman—that’s a constant for the KGB (and its successors). The CIA’s goal is to recruit people who can provide it with high quality military and political secrets, or who can tip it off to moles in its ranks.
As for the code-name Krasnov, “you know, the job of a secret intelligence service is to hide this stuff. Every now and then, we get a source, and we're lucky, and they give us, you know, a slice of things …” But something like the name of a recruited American is rare.
Trump , says former CIA counterintelligence chief Susan Miller, was a “dictator wannabe” who envied Vladimir Putin’s unbridled power.
Following the Miller-led intelligence community assessment of Russian election interference, former FBI Director Robert Mueller led a special counsel’s team that probed numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, concluding that the campaign had welcomed Russia’s meddling and expected to benefit from it. But it found insufficient evidence for accusations, mostly from Democrats, that Trump or his campaign aides were participants in a conspiracy with the Russians.
In 2020, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released the fifth and final volume of its own three-year investigation, which concluded that the Russian government conducted extensive influence operations to help Trump become president and that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well as several other campaign officials, helped Russian agents implement those operations.
But none of those investigations addressed the strong circumstantial evidence that Trump had been recruited by the Russians in one form or another back in the 1980s, when he was pursuing a hotel deal in Moscow and hoping to stage the Miss Universe pageant there.
As the whole world—friends and enemies— seems to recognize now, Trump easily succumbed to flattery—and sexual opportunities, according to numerous sources (including Trump himself in the notorious Access Hollywood tape).
Trump “was on the radar of Soviet intelligence as early as the 1980s,” according to former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, who headed Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S. in the 1980s. Kalugin has said that the KGB “had kompromat on him, including reports of his sexual relationships with women.” In 2019, Kalugin told the Ukrainian magazine Gordon that “it doesn't follow from this that he could have been recruited. But the fact that the State Security Service had materials on him is certain.”
Mussayev’s Facebook post is not the first time he’s been sounding alarms about Trump. In 2018, he wrote on Facebook that “Trump belongs to the category of ideally recruitable people,” adding that Russia had been cultivating Trump to run for the White House. But apparently nobody paid much attention until now. On Feb. 23 someone writing “Morning Truth” on Substack under the pseudonym “Jane Prescott” said that the 2018 post introduced Mussayev’s belief that Trump is compromised. But the piece also noted that the former KGB man failed to present any proof.
We reached out to Mussayev via Facebook asking for an interview, but he declined.
“I continue to get numerous requests for interviews about my statement about Trump’s cooperation with KGB/FSB,” he wrote in a Feb. 26 Facebook posting. But expressing his suspicions of the possible motives behind some of these requests, Mussayev declared: “I bring to the notice of all interested parties, at the moment I DO NOT PLAN TO GIVE INTERVIEWS. . . I do not need PR or publicity. . . .
“Further information,” he said, “will be issued in accordance with the rules of conducting information warfare.”
Hmmm…
We haven’t given up trying to confirm that it was the real Mussayev. Or to see him and demand proof he’s the former KGB man he says he is. Until then, no one can be sure the incendiary posts were written by him.
Sipher, a former Moscow station chief, allows that it could “turn out it's all fucking fake and everybody looks like an idiot.”
Thickening Dots
The circumstantial evidence pointing to Trump as a Russian asset was laid out in encyclopedic detail in a Feb. 23 posting in Prescott’s Morning Truth. The lengthy post cites a Byline Times investigative report in which former KGB Major Yuri Shvets is quoted as saying Russian intelligence targeted Trump as a potential asset as early as the 1970s and that the KGB arranged Trump’s 1987 Moscow visit to encourage him to run for office. Prescott also notes that shortly after Trump’s return from Moscow, he began floating the possibility of a presidential run.
At the time, Trump also paid nearly $100,000 to place full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe, in which he issued his first calls for NATO allies to contribute more for their defense — a long-held Soviet proposal meant to fracture the Western defense alliance and one that Trump has made a cornerstone of his foreign policy since taking office the first time. In 2021, Shvets told The Guardian that Trump “proved so willing to parrot anti-Western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow.”
Prescott also cites published interviews with Kalugin, the former KGB general, in which he asserted Trump’s “vanity and susceptibility to flattery made him a perfect target” for Soviet intelligence. But calling Trump an actual paid agent might be too strong, Kalugin added. He “leans toward viewing Trump as an unwitting ally who said and did things favorable to the USSR/Russia,” Prescott wrote.
Things like refusing to honor NATO’s all-for-one Article 5 commitment to defend any member state that comes under attack. Things like notoriously siding with Putin over his own intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election. Things like refusing to acknowledge that Putin was behind the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, or the assassinations of former Russian intelligence officers in Europe. Or evidence of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
On March 3, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lauded Trump’s new foreign policy, noting that it “largely coincides with our vision.”
It’s a vision that includes an American president taking Russia’s side on Ukraine and virtually abandoning European democracies to their fate.
Veteran U.S. spymasters slowly shake their heads in a kind of stunned disbelief. Whether Mussayev is for real now seems irrelevant.
“Does it even matter?” said another old Russia hand, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“Trump is acting out Putin’s greatest fantasies … “ he said, “It simply doesn’t get any better than this from a Russian perspective.”
Mark Hosenball contributed to this story.
This is the kind of great and necessary reporting we need about Trump and Putin. As a former muckraker investigative reporter for columnist Jack Anderson and investigative author of novels (SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOR), shining lights on what we know and wonder is difficult yet vital. Thanks Jeff!
Agonizing over whether Trump was ever formally recruited by Russian intel becomes idle self-pleasure alongside the overwhelming evidence that he is a de facto agent of influence for Putin, an apologist for his excesses and an active enabler of them, particularly in Ukraine.
Moreover, the recruitment issue becomes in many ways academic if the Russians hold a blackmail card against Trump’s hand, some acutely embarrassing information about his investments, his dalliances or a possible bargain he made to deliver Ukraine to Putin in exchange for electoral help in 2016, or later.
The Mueller people adopted such a crimped definition of collusion – predicated on the idea that it could exist only if there were a written agreement between the two parties -- that there was no injunctive room for what actually happened, a fully understood, implicitly coordinated confluence of mutual interests.
Finally, given that Paul Manafort’s right hand man was a well-connected Russian agent, according to the Senate intelligence report -- and given that Manafort himself was extremely well plugged into Trump’s inner circle (and remains so), it really wouldn’t have mattered if Trump himself were recruited or knowing asset of Putin’s or in legalistically definable collusion with him.
The upshot was the Russians had hidden strings attached to the puppet they could use to make him jump, and – even better -- insider insight into what made Trump tick and how to twang that string to elicit the desired response. It would be fair to assume that their understanding of the man is even better today, and even more likely to facilitate deft manipulation.