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Oleg Smolenkov

The Central Intelligence Agency had a source with high-level access to the Kremlin who played a key role in the assessment that President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the 2016 U.S. election, The New York Times and CNN reported 09 September 2019.

Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the agent could be Oleg Smolenkov, who disappeared along with his wife and three children in 2017. According to an investigation by the Russian media outlet Daily Storm, Smolenkov travelled to Montenegro with his family before disappearing without a trace. At the time, Russian authorities reportedly suspected that he could have been murdered.

The man was recruited while he was still a “midlevel official,” The New York Times reported. Shortly after recruitment, the man began to “rapidly” advance in the ranks until he landed an “influential position” with “access to the highest level of the Kremlin.” The source came into the spotlight, however, after mainstream media in the US began digging into Russia’s alleged meddling with the US 2016 presidential elections. Craving dirt on Trump, the media began “picking up on details about CIA’s Kremlin sources.” It was The Washington Post who reported in 2017 that the CIA’s conclusions were based on “sourcing deep inside the Russian government,” while The New York Times later published details on the source.

A revealing Washington Post piece in June, 2017, called "Obama's Secret Struggle to Punish Russia for Putin's Election Assault", reported how CIA under then-CIA director John Brennan secured a "feat of espionage," obtaining sourcing "deep within the Russian government" that provided him, Brennan, with insights into Russian's electoral interference campaign. Brennan, the Post said, considered the source's intel so valuable that he reportedly hand-delivered its "eyes only" bombshell contents directly to Barack Obama in summer of 2016. The extraction inflicted a significant blow to intelligence, the Times report says. Not only did it end the man’s spying career, it also rendered the intelligence blind to activities in the Kremlin while making future spy recruitment that much harder.

According to the report by CNN chief national correspondent and former Obama administration official Jim Sciutto, the decision to carry out the extraction "occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel."

"CNN's narrative that the Central Intelligence Agency makes life-or-death decisions based on anything other than objective analysis and sound collection is simply false," CIA Director for Public Affairs Brittany Bramell said in the agency's statement. Bramwell continued: "Misguided speculation that the President's handling of our nation's most sensitive intelligence — which he has access to each and every day — drove an alleged exfiltration operation is inaccurate."

Smolenkov worked as a lowly second secretary at the Russian embassy in Washington when Ushakov was ambassador between 1998 and 2008. Upon returning to Moscow, Ushakov worked as deputy chief of staff for the prime minister. Those were the years - 2008 through 2012 - when Putin took the prime minister's job under President Dmitri Medvedev to observe the constitutional ban on serving as president for more than two terms in a row. In 2010, while Smolenkov was a rank-and-file employee on the Russian government's staff - one of numerous advisers under Ushakov - he received a lofty civil service rank equivalent to a major general or rear admiral. It's likely that Smolenkov followed Ushakov to the Kremlin, where the diplomat moved after Putin returned as president in 2012.

Smolenkov, his wife and three children went on vacation to Montenegro on June 14, 2017, and disappeared without a trace. A Moscow unit of the Russian Investigative Committee held a preliminary inquiry and opened a murder case following the disappearance of Smolenkov and his family, Kommersant said with reference to sources in Russian law enforcement agencies. "The investigation continued with several pauses until detectives and Federal Security Service officers found out that the presumed victims were alive and staying in a foreign country," the newspaper said. Kommersant referred to the Washington Post website, which reported the purchase of a house in Stafford, Virginia, by a certain Oleg and Antonina Smolenkov for about $925,000 on July 5, 2018.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a press conference that ex-Russian official Oleg Smolenkov, who has been dubbed a CIA spy in the media, used to work for the presidential administration. He noted that Smolenkov had been fired many years ago and that he never had contact with the Russian president.

"[Smolenkov] was fired several years ago under an internal directive. He didn't hold any high-ranking posts, so called [presidentially]-appointed posts […] All these speculations in US media outlets about urgently extracting him, from whom he was saved and so on - this, you know, is a kind of a 'Pulp Fiction'", he said. At the same time, the spokesman failed to confirm if the man in question had indeed been hired by the CIA to spy on Moscow, citing a lack of such information. He further added that "everything is fine with the work of the Russian counterintelligence service".

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated, responding to the claims about Trump's alleged involvement in the spy's extraction, that the US president never spilled any government secrets during talks in 2017. The American media earlier said that the CIA's urgent move was initiated after a meeting between Lavrov and Trump as intelligence officers feared that the latter could have disclosed the spy's name. "Nobody revealed any state secrets during that conversation or even non-state ones. This, by the way, was confirmed by then-National Security Advisor Herbert McMaster, who was present at the meeting. Other people who are at least a little familiar with what was discussed then can also confirm this," the minister said.

Russian lawmaker Frants Klintsevich, a member of the Russian upper house’s defence and security committee, called the CNN report “clumsy”, and asserted that it was created with the intention of discrediting Trump. "Certainly, that is a clear fake, concocted in a quite clumsy manner. The era of Stierlitzes [a lead character in a popular Soviet novel and film about a Soviet spy] has irreversibly passed, if it ever existed at all, and there cannot be in principle any US informant who could work ‘inside the Russian government’".

Oleg Smolenkov's family members of alleged US informant have left their home in Stafford in the US state of Virginia after spotting a US journalist in their neighbourhood. The people, thought to be Smolenkov’s family, saw a Daily Beast journalist sitting and waiting in his car close to their home, the owner of the house across the street said. Within less than a minute after spotting the Daily Beast journalist, the "Russian family" left in two cars, the man said. A Sputnik correspondent tried to talk to some other neighbors, particularly those who were questioned by the Daily Beast journalist earlier, but nobody opened their door to respond.

The Russian Foreign Ministry sees the string of media reports on former Kremlin official Oleg Smolenkov, who supposedly turned out to be a U.S. spy, as an element of the upcoming presidential election campaign in the United States, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said 12 September 2019. "This is classic propaganda. First an aim is set, and then information is adjusted to match it. So what's the aim? There can be no doubt that it's related to domestic politics - after all, the election campaign in the U.S. has started," Zakharova said at a news briefing.

"In this particular case, the TV channel tried to shoot at the incumbent U.S. president, but it actually hit the previous U.S. president, since the TV channel assumed that a CIA agent worked in Russia during the Obama rule," she said. CNN, which published this whole story, "is working purposefully to foment Russophobic sentiments in the U.S., deliberately causing damage to relations between our countries," Zakharova said.

Commenting on the possible reasons behind the sudden exposé, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, does not rule out that it could be an intentional move by the White House and the CIA. "The deliberate leak of the Smolenkov story is intended to provide cover for another, much more high level American spy in the Kremlin", the CIA veteran suggested. "The US government hopes that the disappearance of Smolenkov will end the search for a mole in Moscow, protecting the spy in place".

Scott Ritter wrote "... the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have reported. There was a Russian spy whose information was used to push a narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; this much appears to be true. Everything else that has been reported is either a mischaracterization of fact or an outright fabrication designed to hide one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history - the use by a CIA director of intelligence data specifically manipulated to interfere in the election of an American president."

Esquire columnist Charlie Pierce, wrote a piece called "The Spies Are Acting as a Check on Our Elected Leaders. This Is Neither Healthy Nor Sustainable." In it, he said: "My guess is that the leak of this remarkable story came from somewhere in the bowels of the intelligence community... The intelligence community is engaged in a cold war of information against the elected political leadership of the country, and a lot of us are finding ourselves on its side. This is neither healthy nor sustainable."