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Krasnov - Before Mussayev there was Shvets saying Trump was a Russian asset [1]
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Date: 2025-04-12
Yes, it was Alnur Mussayev that identified Donald Trump with the codename Krasnov, but years before, there was Yuri Shvets, a Major in the KGB. He was stationed in Washington DC In 1985 to 1987, with his cover being a correspondent for TASS, a Soviet news agency.
He featured prominently in the 2021 book American Kompromat, by Craig Unger. Kompromat means compromising material.
There is an exerpt available on Random House books website.
Here are some relevant parts from that exerpt. You all remember the July, 2018 Helsinki news conference where he agreed with Putin that there was no Russian interference on the 2016 election and ignored 17 national security agencies?
"Why did he pull out the troops from Syria --- as Putin wanted? Why did he cut back troops in Germany --- as Putin wished? Why did Trump say nothing when it was widely reported Russia was offering bounties to be paid to Afghan troops who killed American soldiers?"
"In a New York Times op-ed written 3 months before the 2016 election, the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Morell answered the last question in the affirmative (about Trump being an 'asset'), writing, 'In the intelligence business, we would say Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.'"
Others said Trump was "a useful idiot," and "a clear and present danger."
"In December 2017, former National Intelligence director James Clapper asserted that Trump was, in effect, an intelligence 'asset' serving Russian President Vladimir Putin. And in 2019, the former CIA director John Brennan declared Trump to be 'wholly in the pocket of Putin.'"
Glenn Carle, a former CIA intelligence officer, in January 2016 "was deeply alarmed by the various connections he saw between Trump's team and the Russians, but he wasn't sure who to talk to. 'I was hopping up and down about this. I couldn't sit here without telling someone that they were about to have The Manchurian Candidate realized.'"
"There was already plenty of evidence that Russian intelligence had focused enormous amounts of attention on Trump, his family members, and people who had access to him."
These are our own expert intelligence people telling us that Trump was an asset in 2016 and since. We don't even need Mussayev and Shvets to add to the mix, but they confirm what was done on the Russian side.
Much of what follows is part of a article in The Guardian in 2021.
Shvets moved to the US in 1983 and became a US citizen. He has worked as a corporate security investigator and was a partner with Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated In London in 2006.
Trump took that fateful trip to Moscow in 1987 with his Czech wife Ivana, with the intention of making a deal to build two hotels in Moscow.
Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics. This is exactly how Mussayev described the trip.
Shvets said, "For the KGB it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information about his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was very vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery."
Exactly what anyone in their right mind has been saying. Now you've got the KGB confirming it.
"This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be President of the United States one day."
On September 2, 1987, Trump placed a full page ad in The New York Times. In it, he accused Japan of exploiting the United States and expressed skepticism at US participation in NATO. It was an open letter to the American people "on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves." Trump has been talking this nonsense about NATO and our allies since 1987. The Russians got to him a long time ago. If he isn't a Russian asset he's doing everything to be one.
Shvets was at the headquarters of the KGB's first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful "active measure" executed by a new KGB asset.
Shvets: "It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the West but it did and, finally, this guy became president."
Shvets was disappointed with the Mueller report because "There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow."
The New York Times had an article in 2018 describing a Russian who bilked American spies out of $100,000 the previous year and part of it was cyber weapons and a promise of material on Donald Trump. Agencies were trying to figure out whether the information could be trusted or if a deal could be made. There was also the problem of Trump being president and getting compromising information on him.
"The Russian claimed to have access to a staggering collection of secrets that included everything from computer code for the cyber weapons stolen from the CIA and the NSA, to what he said was a video of Mr. Trump consorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, according to American and European officials and the Russian who agreed to be interviewed in Germany on the condition of anonymity. There remains no evidence that such a video exists."
But, the existence of the video became back in the spotlight with the Steele Dossier. You can read it here online.
Since the controversy of the Steele Dossier came to light back then, "... four Russians with espionage and underworld connections have appeared in Central and Eastern Europe, offering to sell kompromat to American political operatives, private investigators and spies that would corroborate the dossier, American and European intelligence official said."
The Times got their hands on four of the documents in question, without paying for them, and they had Yuri Shvets take a look at them. He said they looked like they would have been compiled from news articles and contained stylistic and grammatical usages, which are not seen in Russian intelligence reports.
A political operative named Cody Shearer had two reports he generated out of work in 2016 that also included talk of the video and Russian payoffs to Trump associates. Nobody has seen the reports.
Trump made an interesting comment during Monday's cabinet meeting, where he said that he was "activated last week."
Let's give this some context. Trump pointed out that Musk was standing by him even as Tesla showrooms were being attacked.
"I did get activated last week when I saw what they were doing. I said he makes an incredible product and we're going to go out and tell people you can't do that stuff."
Many are reading way too much into this I think. He could have easily have meant "agitated" instead of "activated." I would never be defending Trump, but I think he just said the wrong word because of the disconnect between his brain and his mouth.
There is the fact that Yuri Shvets and Aknur Mussayev have the same stories in the same 1987 time frame. Both were high enough in the KGB to know details. There has been no profit motive in either one of them coming forward.
Mussayev also said, "I have no doubt that Russia has kompromat on the US president, that over the course of many years the Kremlin has been promoting Trump to the post of President of the main world power."
Shortly after Mussayev made his claim, another former KGB agent living now in France, named Sergei Zhyrnov, backed the claim in an interview with a Ukranian journalist.
According to Zhyrnov, Trump would have been closely monitored in Moscow, surrounded by KGB operatives, including his driver, hotel maid, and possibly even the women he encountered. He claimed that every move Trump made would have been documented, and that he may have been compromised through a "honey trap" ("All foreign currency prostitutes were KGB --- one hundred percent," he said) or recorded bribing Moscow city officials while pursuing the hotel project in Moscow.
I found a YouTube video with Zhyrnov, dated Feb. 23rd, but unfortunately it's in Russian, and if you ask for subtitles you get Russian subtitles. No one has translated or transcribed it.
Here is another video of Sergei with a Ukrainian journalist on YouTube, but it's 2 years old, still in Russian with Russian subtitles.
I truly wish there was more from Zhyrnov and Mussayev that could be traced and documented.
Shvets doesn't seem to have been interviewed by anyone else since Craig Unger's American Kompromat. It's almost like somebody got to him and told him to shut up or paid him off.
We've still got the mystery of whether Trump is a knowingly Russian asset. That he is unknowingly is patently obvious for all the things he does which are against U.S. interests. The people he's picked for his cabinet and other high positions are all doing everything they can to destroy America's security and position in the world. Trump's tariff insanity seems designed to destroy the U.S. economy.
Trump told the U.S. cyber security agencies to stop attacking Russia. The pretense assumed was this was to get Russia to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war. Then Trump, when Putin supposedly wouldn't negotiate, got mad and threatened sanctions. There's not much left to sanction. And nobody has said he told the cyber folks to go after Russia again.
Each step Trump takes seems designed to help Russia. From undermining Ukraine, to helping Russia's economy recover by only doing just enough to seem the U.S. is still fighting against Russia.
How many former U.S. intelligence agency directors do we need to say that Trump is a Russian asset before the claim is believable? They all had access to material that never will see the light of day.
If he walks like an asset, talks like an asset, and acts like an asset, don't let that fool you. He really is an asset.
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