The shocking claim first surfaced in a Facebook post by ex-KGB officer Alnur Mussayev, who said Donald Trump was groomed 37 years ago as a ‘potential Soviet asset’ – operating under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov’
A former UK spy chief has weighed in on the bizarre claims made by an ex-KGB spy that Donald Trump was recruited as a Russian asset over 40 years ago, operating under the codename “Krasnov”.
The shocking claim first surfaced in a Facebook post by ex-KGB officer Alnur Mussayev, who said the US president was groomed 37 years ago as a “potential Soviet asset”. Mussayev, 71, was working in the 6th Directorate of the KGB at the time, which focused on counter-intelligence support within the economy, and claims recruiting capitalists was a key objective.
His Facebook post read: “In 1987, I worked in the 6th Department of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of work of the 6th Department was the acquisition of spies and sources of information from among businessmen of capitalist countries. It was in that year that our Department recruited the 40-year-old businessman from the USA, Donald Trump, nicknamed Krasnov.”
It followed a viral twitter thread of “evidence” by Twitter user @anthony7andrews to back the allegation. He wrote: “Now that it’s been revealed that Trump has been a Russian asset for 40 years named Krasnov by the FSB, I will write a simple thread of various pieces of information that solidifies the truth of everything I’ve written. Please read and share.”
But former spy chief Sir David Omand says he does not give the allegations any credence. Responding to Andrew Marr on LBC, who asked if there is any weight to the claims, he said: “No no. I say that largely because if there had been a real smoking gun then I think it would have surfaced in the years since that story first came out – and there are enough pro-Ukrainian people around in Russia, that it would have surfaced.
“So I don’t give it credence, it’s a bit conspiratorial and actually you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist – it is all in plain sight these days.”
Intelligence reports dating back to the 1980s suggest the KGB was actively working to recruit high-profile Western figures as informants or spies. It has been claimed that Trump’s KGB file remains open and is under the management of a close confidant of Vladimir Putin – but there is yet to be any concrete evidence to back these allegations.
