So earlier today, the Daily Beast’s Isabel van Brugen published a bombshell story about allegations by Kazakh Spy Chief Alnur Mussayev that the KGB had recruited Donald Trump as a Soviet Asset way back in 1987 under the code name “Krasnov.” I expected...
I dunno, someone might’ve paid him to try to get some info, but “recruited as a spy”? He’d be the worst spy in the entire world.
“Hello fellow fatcat businessman, I am a simple fatcat businessman just like you. Would you like to tell me any secrets you have that my friend Mr. Gorba-- I mean Mr. Smith would be interested in?”
The main thing they look for in an asset, apart from access and connections, is leverage. You want someone who can be easily manipulated - for example through flattery, someone indebted who can be made desperate, someone venal who can be bribed, someone unscrupulous who can be made to compromise themselves, someone with sexual or other secrets they need to keep secret. Trump would absolutely be the ideal candidate.
Now imagine your asset becomes the president of the United States. All of a sudden, he is the most useful and important intelligence asset in the history of intelligence assets.
I dunno, someone might’ve paid him to try to get some info, but “recruited as a spy”? He’d be the worst spy in the entire world.
“Hello fellow fatcat businessman, I am a simple fatcat businessman just like you. Would you like to tell me any secrets you have that my friend Mr. Gorba-- I mean Mr. Smith would be interested in?”
The main thing they look for in an asset, apart from access and connections, is leverage. You want someone who can be easily manipulated - for example through flattery, someone indebted who can be made desperate, someone venal who can be bribed, someone unscrupulous who can be made to compromise themselves, someone with sexual or other secrets they need to keep secret. Trump would absolutely be the ideal candidate.
No idea if this story is true or not. Weird it got published, and weirder that it got scrubbed.
As far as intelligence assets go, from what I’ve read you want as many as you can get, just in case they become useful eventually.
Now imagine your asset becomes the president of the United States. All of a sudden, he is the most useful and important intelligence asset in the history of intelligence assets.
Spies often don’t know they are spies…
Like someone selling manuals for a piece of defense tech may not know why the buyer wants it… but yet…