What the Hell is Going on with the Trump KGB Stories?

American media scrubs any mention of explosive bombshell allegations

Photo by Aurelien Romain on Unsplash

Late last week, a former Soviet intelligence officer named Alnur Mussayev allegedly wrote a bombshell Facebook post claiming that the KGB recruited Donald Trump in 1987. Mussayev is a former KGB apparatchik, who served as the head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Mussayev also claims that the Trump/Krasnov file was removed from KGB headquarters and is now personally managed by one of Putin’s closest confidants.

I have no idea whether this Facebook page really belongs to Mussayev or, if it does, whether he is telling the truth. Mussayev has a colorful history. Almost twenty years ago, he defected from Kazakhstan to Austria after he accused the Kazakh government of corruption and was, in turn, convicted in absentia on criminal and political charges. A year after his defection, Mussayev and his translator were the targets of a failed kidnapping by Russian-speaking men on the streets of Vienna. A decade ago, he was tried in Austria for aiding in the abduction and murder of two bankers in Kazakhstan nearly a decade prior. The main suspect, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s president who had defected with Mussayev to Austria after a falling out with his father-in-law, was found hanged in his Viennese prison cell before trial. Mussayev was ultimately cleared of all charges in the murder of the bankers.

I would not rush to take Mussayev’s claims at face value simply because you may not like Trump. Still, regardless of the story’s veracity, it is well-established that Trump had been a KGB recruitment target before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 1987, the year that Mussayev claims the KGB recruited our current president, Trump was consistently splashed across tabloids as the embodiment of the “Greed is Good” decade. That September, Newsweek ran a cover story about him titled “Trump: A Billion Dollar Empire and An Ego to Match.”

Donald John Trump —real-estate developer, casino operator, corporate raider and perhaps future politician—is a symbol of an era. He is a man with the Midas fist. For better or worse, in the 1980s it is OK to be fiercely ambitious, staggeringly rich and utterly at ease in bragging about it. He is the latest of a breed unique to the decade: the businessman who becomes larger than life, like a star athlete or popular actor. Trump has made it into that rarefied group as fast as anyone, and he revels in his high celebrity status as few have before him. "There is no one my age who has accomplished more," he boasts openly.

But the truth was starkly different — and successfully hidden from public view. Decades later, when The New York Times obtained years of Trump’s tax returns, the extent of Trump’s financial difficulties during this period became apparent.

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

One mystery from the leaked Trump tax returns has never been clarified. According to the Times:

One number from Mr. Trump’s tax returns is particularly striking — and particularly hard to explain: the $52.9 million in interest income he reported in 1989.

Mr. Trump reported $460,566 in interest income in 1986. That number grew to $5.5 million the next year, and $11.8 million the next. Then came the outlier 1989.

Taxpayers can receive interest income from a variety of sources, including bonds, bank accounts and mortgages. High-yield bonds, though less common today, were popular with institutional investors in the 1980s. And to make $52.9 million in interest, for example, Mr. Trump would have had to own roughly $378 million in bonds generating 14 percent a year.

Hard data on most of Mr. Trump’s business life is hard to come by, but public findings from New Jersey casino regulators show no evidence that he owned anything capable of generating close to $52.9 million annually in interest income.

A few years before the Newsweek article ran, the KGB determined that its ability to recruit foreign assets based on ideological sympathy was waning. Instead, the Soviets would turn what they perceived to be the hallmarks of capitalism — avarice and moral relativism — against the West, much as Putin would later use the First Amendment as a weapon to spread misinformation in the United States.

Politico picks up the thread:

The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985 this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”

The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the “subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”? And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”

Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”

At the time, Trump was married to his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovak immigrant who had once been on the Czechoslovak junior ski team. His marriage to a woman from the Eastern Bloc would have interested intelligence operatives. The Czechoslovak authorities had allowed Ivana to immigrate after she married her first husband, an Austria ski instructor. In the 1970s, moving abroad from behind the Iron Curtain without defecting or working for the government was almost unheard of and yet Ivana was able to shuttle back and forth between the United States and her native country, visiting her parents when other immigrants were banned from setting foot back home. More from Politico:

As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.

Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”

According to Natalia Dubinina, the approach to Trump actually happened six months before the Lauder lunch, when Dubinin first arrived in the United States as the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. She had already been living in New York with her family as part of the U.N. delegation.

Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.

The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”

Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”

(Let us pause here for one moment to reflect on the absurdity of this story. As anyone with a basic knowledge of New York architecture and geography can attest, Trump Tower is a mid-sized building that has never particularly stood out either aesthetically or vertically. Are we really to believe that a newly arrived ambassador was so floored by Trump Tower — and not by the many more remarkable buildings that dominated the skyline in the 1980s — that he would have barged his way into a meeting with its owner on his way in from the airport, even before greeting his own staff at the Soviet mission ten blocks north? The only way this tale makes any sense is if there had been an ulterior motive for Dubinin casing Trump’s building as the first order of business upon landing in New York.)

In the summer of 1987, Trump and Ivana flew to Moscow for the first time and stayed at the National Hotel, not far from Red Square, which was adjacent to the Intourist complex next door. Intourist, the Soviet tourism agency, was completely under KGB control, with its tour guides reporting back every detail about the foreigners whom they accompanied everywhere. The Trumps’ suite at the National would have been bugged and their every move would have been surveilled.

By Trump’s own account, the Soviets floated real estate deals for him in the heart of Moscow, after which Trump Tower Moscow became Trump’s white whale for decades. After he returned home, he suddenly began to muse publicly about running for president — including in the Newsweek cover story that ran mere months later.

What all this means is unclear but what is absolutely indisputable is that American media outlets, including The Daily Beast and Yahoo, posted stories about Mussayev’s explosive allegations as soon as he made them late last week. Then, almost as soon as they ran, those stories disappeared without a trace or any explanation. Here is what happens when you visit the link to the Daily Beast’s story:

No explanation, no attribution. The link is just… broken. (You can read the deleted story via the Wayback Machine.)

The same thing happened at Yahoo, which published a story on Friday with the headline, Former Intelligence Officer Claims KGB Recruited Trump. Yet when you click on the link, it brings you to this:

Interestingly, Yahoo UK (a country with much stricter libel laws than ours) is still running the same story on its site.

Yahoo is owned by Apollo Asset Management, a major Trump donor whose CEO was on the shortlist to serve as Trump’s Treasury Secretary. The Daily Beast is owned by IAC, whose chairman, Barry Diller, has been a harsh Trump critic in the past.

Why is American media pulling its punches, without providing any explanation? Were the Daily Beast, Yahoo and others threatened by the Department of Justice or some other entity? Did their corporate owners insist that they pull the articles after publication?

The questions grow all the more insistent the more these outlets refuse to provide an explanation for why they took these stories down after publication.

At the end, does it really matter if Trump was wittingly playing the long game with the KGB? Regardless of whether he has really been an asset for nearly four decades, he is a willing tool of the Russians now.

Since becoming president, Trump has effectively given Ukraine away to Putin, while striking a blow at the NATO alliance that may prove to be fatal. He has accused Ukraine of instigating the war, while letting Russia entirely off the hook. He has extorted Ukraine while refusing to provide any tangible security guarantees. He has destroyed the Pax Americana and has given the back of the hand to our European allies. He has made the United States an unreliable partner, which has undermined American power around the world.

During his first term, he sided with Putin against our own intelligence agencies and has now brought the Russian president in from the cold, agreeing to meet with him and insisting that Russia rejoin the G-7, from which it was kicked out after its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. He is validating Russia’s might makes right approach to territorial acquisition by threatening to annex Greenland and Canada and take back the Panama Canal.

Of all the people Trump could have nominated as his vice-president, he chose Putin apologist JD Vance. Of all the people he could have made his partner in governing, he has chosen Putin phone buddy Elon Musk. Of all the people he could have placed in charge of our nation’s intelligence services, he chose Putin mouthpiece Tulsi Gabbard. Of all the people he could have put in charge of the FBI, he chose Kash Patel, who received money from a Russian national running a pro-Russian influence campaign. Of all the people he could have put in charge of the Pentagon, he chose Pete Hegseth, who is purging our military of its most experienced servicemen and women, weakening it for at least a generation.

Trump has made Americans questions their institutions, from the courts to the Congress to the military, from the FBI and the CIA to our diplomatic and military alliances. He has launched an assault on everything that has made this nation a beacon for the world: the institutions of higher learning that educated millions of foreign students and thus exported American values abroad; the arts, which promoted American culture around the world; the sanctity of our electoral process. The very notion of e pluribus unum.

It hardly matters whether Trump is doing this because Mussayev is telling the truth. Whatever his motives, he has done more to destabilize the United States and the West and more to benefit the former Soviet spy who sits in the Kremlin today than any KGB handler could ever have dreamed.