Alleged US mole did work in the Kremlin, Putin aide confirms
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S spokesman has confirmed that an alleged American spy did work at the Kremlin but that he had no access to the Russian president.
CNN quoted sources on Monday saying that the CIA had extracted one of its highest-level covert sources in the Russian government in 2017 after fears that Donald Trump’s carelessness with classified intelligence could blow his cover.
The story has raised questions about the US president’s handling of secrets as well as the efficiency of Russia’s counter-intelligence operations.
Online investigators have found a 2017 Russian media report stating that Oleg Smolenkov, identified as an employee of Mr Putin’s managerial affairs department, had gone missing with his wife, Antonina, and three children while in Montenegro in June that year.
“Antonina Smolenkova” and “Oleg Smolenkov” are then said to have bought a six-bedroom home near Washington DC in 2018.
If Mr Smolenkov was indeed the US agent in question, the Russian authorities appear to have been blindsided by his exfiltration, as they began investigating whether he and his family had been murdered in Montenegro.
Although the Kremlin’s managerial affairs department had said it did not employ the man, Dmitry Peskov, a presidential spokesman, told journalists yesterday that Mr Smolenkov had worked in the administration before he was “fired by an internal order a few years ago”.
Asked if Mr Smolenkov had attended meetings with Mr Putin, he said: “This position doesn’t include any such contacts with the president,” adding that he did not know if the former employee had been a CIA agent.
He said there were no problems with the work of Russian counter-intelligence. “All the reasoning by the American media about who urgently extracted whom and who saved whom and so forth is in the genre of pulp fiction,” he added.
However, some reports state that the “super mole” had worked on foreign affairs and was close to top officials including Yury Ushakov, Mr Putin’s key figure on US relations.
An archived copy of the Russian embassy web page showed that he had worked in Washington DC during the decade that Mr Ushakov was ambassador there. Mr Smolenkov was responsible for buying service cars and goods for the embassy store before moving back to Moscow with Mr Ushakov in 2008, state media quoted a former colleague as saying.
Andrei Soldatov, an author of books about Russian intelligence, said the US revelations were a blow to the Putin administration, which has become so central to decision-making. “It places these people in the centre of everything which is going on, from hackers to Donbass (in eastern Ukraine) to security,” he told The Daily Telegraph.