21 February 2025 (Bylinetimes.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd \/ Alamy<\/p>\n\n\n\n YOUR SUPPORT MATTERS:<\/p>\n\n\n\n SIGN UP TO EMAILS<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n SUBSCRIBE TO BYLINE TIMES<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Byline Times<\/p>\n\n\n\n Donald Trump Was Recruited by the KGB Under Codename ‘Krasnov’ Claims Former Soviet Spy Chief<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Byline Times<\/em> is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting<\/a> on \u2018what the papers don\u2019t say\u2019 \u2013 without fear or favour<\/mark>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To support its work, subscribe<\/a> to the monthly Byline Times <\/em>print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Help us <\/strong><\/mark>build the better media Britain deserves<\/strong><\/mark><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Aformer senior Soviet KGB spy chief has claimed that Donald Trump<\/a> was recruited as a spy by Russian intelligence<\/a> as early as 38 years ago by his department, and given the codename \u2018Krasnov\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Russia\u2019s \u2018Committee for State Security\u2019, 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<\/a> functions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an extraordinary post on Facebook on 20 February, Alnur Mussayev \u2013 who used to run<\/a> the successor to the Soviet-era KGB in Kazakhstan \u2013 claimed that he was personally aware of Trump\u2019s recruitment by the agency in 1987. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of \u200b\u200bwork of the 6th Directorate was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries\u201d, wrote Mussayev in a Russian language post on Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was that year that our Office recruited 40-year-old businessman from the United States, Donald Trump<\/a>, under the pseudonym \u2018Krasnov\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He later added: \u201cIn the activity of intelligence agencies, as in life, everything is possible, even the wildest and incredible things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor example, recruitment of future leaders of state and even the President of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mussayev\u2019s most recent senior intelligence position was as head of Kazakhstan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to that, however, he was a long-serving KGB officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2007 he fled the country after accusing the government<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EXCLUSIVE<\/p>\n\n\n\n Former followers of the \u2018Dark Enlightenment\u2019 say a planned \u2018neo-reactionary\u2019 hollowing out of government is happening in real time<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nafeez Ahmed<\/p>\n\n\n\n Byline Times<\/em> can confirm based on archived Russian newspaper materials<\/a> that Mussayev first joined active military service in the KGB of the Soviet Union in 1979.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He then joined KGB counterintelligence of the Kazakh special services. From 1986 to 1989 \u2013 the period in which he said he was aware of Donald Trump\u2019s KGB recruitment \u2013 he was seconded to the central office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in Moscow, before returning to the KGB.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Russian language sources on Mussayev\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s operatoins by leveraging its domestic authority inside the USSR \u2013 particularly in terms of surveillance<\/a>, entrapment, and visa oversight for foreign visitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US President\u2019s attempts to extort Ukraine for its natural resources, while abandoning its fate to Russia, is a return to the worst imperial politics of the past, argues Aleksandar Djokic<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aleksandar Djokic<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mussayev\u2019s claims are not the first time that a former senior KGB intelligence officer has publicly claimed that they were aware of Donald Trump\u2019s recruitment to the KGB, but it is the first time that Trump\u2019s alleged Russian codename, \u2018Krasnov\u2019, has been identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Oleg Kalugin<\/a>, a former KGB general, who served in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, and during the Soviet era was Vladimir Putin\u2019s direct superior, Trump was on the radar of Soviet and Russian intelligence as early as the 1980s with claims that the KGB had kompromat<\/em> on him, including reports of his sexual relationships with women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yuri Shvets, another former Soviet spy residing in the US, claims<\/a> that the USSR cultivated Donald Trump since the 1970s, supporting his political ambitions and flattering him. According to him, Trump became a target of Soviet and Czechoslovak intelligence in 1977 after marrying Czech model Ivana Zeln\u00ed\u010dkov\u00e1. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ivana Zeln\u00ed\u010dkov\u00e1, Trump\u2019s first wife, reportedly<\/a> worked with the Czechoslovak security service surveillance, the St\u00e1tn\u00ed Bezpe\u010dnost (StB), according to archive materials studied by the Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and first reported by Czech Television.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The StB formally cooperated with Russia\u2019s KGB, Poland\u2019s SB, East Germany\u2019s Stasi and other Soviet bloc intelligence agencies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Czechoslovakia\u2019s StB monitored Ivana Trump and her family for decades. Reports tracked her marriages, emigration, and ties to Trump, wiretapping her calls and observing her children\u2019s visits, and her father was reportedly pressured to cooperate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shvets claims that in the early 1980s, Trump entered in business interactions with Soviet immigrant Semion Kislin, allegedly linked to the KGB and that during Trump\u2019s visit in Moscow and Leningrad in 1987, KGB agents encouraged him to enter politics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The White House and Alnur Mussayev were both contacted for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nafeez Ahmed and Zarina Zabrisky<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A former senior KGB chief claims Trump was recruited by them in 1987 due to his role as a prominent US businessman Nafeez Ahmed and Zarina Zabrisky 21 February 2025 (Bylinetimes.com) Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. 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