The CIA’s former Moscow station chief blasted leaks to CNN and others about a United States informant inside the Kremlin — which led to the source’s possible identification — calling the disclosures agenda-driven and “extraordinarily dangerous.”
“It looks to me like somebody had an agenda which was to run this through the political meat grinder and use it for political purposes,” CIA veteran Dan Hoffman told the Washington Examiner. “And that’s not why we run intelligence operations.”
A CNN story last week reported a high-ranking informant close to the Kremlin, who’d been passing information along to the U.S. about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in the country’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, was pulled out sometime around May 2017. The decision to exfiltrate the informant, amid worries he might be exposed, happened after Trump met with Russian officials in the Oval Office in May 2017 and disclosed some classified information to them, the story alleged.
The CIA immediately pushed back. “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,” CIA spokeswoman Brittany Bramell said last week.
But the New York Times later reported the CIA first tried to pull the source out in 2016, citing sources who insisted media scrutiny alone — not Trump’s actions — jeopardized the source.
Russian media, then U.S. outlets, reported the former Russian official’s name and that he was living openly under his own name just outside Washington, D.C., with journalists showing up at his home only to be turned away, likely by government agents. The alleged Russian spy is believed to have moved, though it hasn’t been confirmed he is the source.
Hoffman said he wasn’t criticizing CNN’s Jim Sciutto but the leakers.
“It looks to me like someone was giving him information about sensitive CIA clandestine operations,” he said.
“That’s all just extraordinarily dangerous,” Hoffman added.
Russians suspected of working for the West face danger from Putin, he said.
Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who worked as a British double agent, was poisoned along with his daughter by Novichok, a Russian-developed nerve agent, in March 2018 in England. Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who also defected to the United Kingdom, was killed in London in 2006 after being poisoned by Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope. Russia is suspected of being behind both attacks.
And the former CIA officer pointed to concerns that this source’s outing might make others less likely to trust that their identifies would remain secret.
“We know more about a source than we do about the people who are exposing the guy, and I don’t think that’s right,” Hoffman said.
This isn’t the first time alleged Russian sources working for the U.S. within the Kremlin were reported. A number of stories in 2016 hinted at it, and British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier — compiled at the behest of the Clinton campaign-funded opposition research firm Fusion GPS and widely circulated to journalists — alleged that information within it was gleaned from Kremlin sources.
The U.S. intelligence community assessment released in early January 2017 concluded “Putin ordered” Russia’s efforts and “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” It was speculated that information this specific might mean the U.S. had a mole in the Kremlin.
An article from the Washington Post in June 2017 — around the same time the informant was exfiltrated — revealed the existence of a Kremlin source close to Putin who claimed that Russian interference was directed by him. CIA Director John Brennan allegedly fed this sensitive material to President Barack Obama and a small circle of aides.
A day after Trump granted Attorney General William Barr broad declassification authority in his review of the Trump-Russia investigation in May 2019, the New York Times hinted at fears that Barr’s investigation of the investigators might put U.S. sources at risk, though the source mentioned in the story apparently left Russia two years prior.
“I am confident that the attorney general will work with the intelligence community in accordance with the long-established standards to protect highly sensitive classified information,” then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said at the time.
After the Kremlin mole was named this week, the Russian government weighed in.
“I can only say that he was an employee and he was fired, but whether or not he was a spy, we don’t know,” Putin’s press secretary said. “This is an issue for the special services, who are doing their work.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry sent a request to Interpol to locate the alleged defector, and Russian outlets and officials have pushed innuendo about him, while U.S. intelligence experts warn this could be Russian disinformation to discredit him.
“As a former CIA director I don’t talk about things like this very often,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of the CNN story on Tuesday. “It is only the occasions that I think put people at risk, when the reporting is so egregious as to create enormous risks to the United States of America, that I even comment the way I just did.”
