It has been claimed that when Donald Trump travelled to Moscow for the first time back in 1987, as a 40-year-old real estate developer, he was recruited as a KGB agent
Donald Trump was allegedly recruited as a KGB agent during a trip to Moscow in 1987, a former Soviet intelligence officer has claimed.
Alnur Mussayev, who previously headed Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, said one of his job “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries” – and claimed that one of those recruits was Trump. At the time, the now-US president was a 40-year-old New York real estate developer.
The former Kazakh intelligence chief didn’t provide evidence to support his claim, which he made on Facebook, but this has created further speculation about Trump’s ties to Russia, dating back to his first visit to Moscow 38 years ago. Trump, who was a rising star in the New York property market, travelled to the Soviet Union to explore the possibility of building a hotel in the capital.
Soviet officials reportedly facilitated the trip, raising questions among intelligence analysts about whether it was a routine business opportunity or something more scandalous. Several years ago a report highlighted how, in 1985, the KGB had updated a secret personality questionnaire distributed among its officers, detailing how to identify and recruit Western figures.
The document, according to intelligence sources, instructed agents to target “prominent figures in the West” with the aim of “drawing them into some form of collaboration with us… as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.” Mussayev’s claim appears to suggest that Trump may have been one such target.
Despite years of scrutiny, Trump has vehemently denied having any improper ties to Russia or colluding with President Vladimir Putin. However, some US officials have repeatedly raised concerns about his close relationship with the Kremlin leader, particularly during his first term in office.
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, added to the intrigue during a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics: US podcast. He suggested that Trump’s deference to Putin has puzzled many of his former senior officials.
“I think there is a mysterious ‘hold’ on the president,” he said. Mr Scaramucci did not elaborate on what that “hold” might be but suggested that several former Trump administration officials, including H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, and John Kelly – had also struggled to understand Trump’s affinity for Putin. “I don’t know why it’s like this,” he said. “McMaster couldn’t figure it out, Mattis couldn’t figure it out, Kelly couldn’t figure it out.”
It comes as Trump was branded “Putin’s puppet” in a banner held by a protester during a march in support of Ukraine in London. Thousands of protesters marched on the Russian embassy in the capital on Saturday while calling on the international community not to “betray Ukraine” amid fears the country is being frozen out of peace talks between Moscow and Trump. A coalition of Ukrainian community and UK-based labour organisations attended the rally calling for Russian troops to withdraw, ahead of the third anniversary of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.