The Russian government has denigrated the man who may have been an informant for the CIA, who is now said to be living in the United States after being extracted.
Several American news outlets have detailed how a Russian mole, who has not been named by the U.S. government, led the CIA to conclude President Vladimir Putin ordered interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Russian state media and government officials have identified the alleged spy as Oleg Smolenkov, presenting him as a drunk who abandoned his sick mother and had no access to Putin.
Current and former American officials told the New York Times that the Russian accounts should be considered disinformation and the information about Smolenkov should not be trusted.
Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Putin, said Smolenkov had been fired years ago from his Kremlin position “that did not belong to the category of senior posts.” The position “did not provide for any contacts with the president at all,” Peskov said.
Peskov said he could not confirm whether Smolenkov was the alleged informant extracted from Russia by the CIA in 2017. He called reports in American media “pulp fiction.”
“I never saw him, never met him, and didn’t follow either his career or his movements. And I don’t want to comment on rumors,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
Russian politician Aleksei Pushkov mocked Smolenkov as someone who “supposedly knew everything about everyone.”
A former colleague told state media that Smolenkov’s duties at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., were mostly tasks like buying cars for the embassy car pool and goods for its store. The colleague said Smolenkov “often” drank a “bit more than usual.” Another former colleague said he complained about his salary.
Smolenkov was sent to Washington more than a decade ago to work under the then-Russian ambassador Yuri Ushakov, who later became a foreign policy adviser to Putin in the Kremlin. Smolenkov returned to Russia to serve as an adviser to the government and around 2012 was hired as an aide to Ushakov.
Whoever the CIA’s intelligence asset was, he led the intelligence community to believe with “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee during the election.
Details have not been reported as to how the CIA recruited the informant decades ago.
