Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman and David E. Sanger U.S plucked key spy from Russian in 2017

Decades ago, the CIA recruited and carefully cultivated a midlevel Russian official who began rapidly advancing through the governmental ranks. Eventually, the longtime source landed an influential position that came with access to the highest level of the Kremlin.

As U.S. officials began to realize that Russia was trying to sabotage the 2016 presidential election, the informant became one of the CIA’s most important — and highly protected — assets.

But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia’s election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media began reporting details about the CIA’s Kremlin sources.

CIA officials, worried that the informant’s cover would soon be compromised, made the arduous decision in late 2016 to extract him.

The move brought to an end the career of one of the CIA’s most important sources in Russia. It also effectively blinded U.S. intelligence offi- cials to the view from inside Russia as they sought clues about Kremlin interference in the 2018 midterm elec- tions and next year’s presidential contest.

CNN first reported the 2017 extraction on Monday.

The exfiltration took place sometime after an Oval Office meeting in May 2017, when President Donald Trump held secret discussions with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, said the current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation.

The decision to extract the informant was driven “in part” because of concerns that Trump and his administration had mishan- dled delicate intelligence, CNN reported. But former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Trump directly endangered the source, and other current U.S. officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction.

Trump was first briefed on the intelligence about Russian interference, including material from the prized informant, two weeks before his inauguration. A CIA spokeswoman responding to the CNN report called the assertion that Trump’s handling of intelligence drove the reported extraction “misguided speculation.”

The Moscow informant was instrumental to the CIA’s most explosive conclusion about Russia’s interference campaign: that President Vladimir Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself. As the U.S. government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders from Putin, the source was also key to the CIA’s assessment that he personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

The informant, according to people familiar with the matter, was outside Putin’s inner circle, but saw him regularly and had access to high-level Kremlin decision-making — easily making the source one of the agency’s most valuable assets.

THE NEW YORK TIMES The informant was instrumental to the CIA’s conclusion that Russia’s interference campaign was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin (left).