MOSCOW, Sept 10 — The Kremlin today played down US media reports of a CIA spy inside Russia’s presidential administration, calling them “pulp fiction”, but said a low-level official who Russian media suggested was the agent had worked there before being fired.
CNN reported yesterday that the United States had successfully extracted one of its highest-level covert sources inside Russia in 2017. The New York Times later said the informant had sent secrets to Washington for decades.
Russian daily newspaper Kommersant said today the official may have been a man called Oleg Smolenkov, who is reported to have disappeared with his wife and three children while on holiday in Montenegro in 2017 and is now reported to be living in the United States.
Kommersant published a picture of a house in Virginia which it said had been bought by a man called Smolenkov in 2018.
Asked about the matter, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Smolenkov had really worked in the Russian presidential administration but had been fired in 2016/17.
“It is true that Smolenkov worked in the presidential administration, but he was fired several years ago. His job was not at a senior official level,” he said.
Smolenkov did not have direct access to President Vladimir Putin, Peskov added, declining with a laugh to confirm whether he had been a US agent or not.
“I can’t confirm that ... I don’t know whether he was an agent. I can only confirm that there was such a person in the presidential administration, who was later sacked.
“All this US media speculation about who urgently extracted who and saved who from who and so on — this is more the genre of pulp fiction, crime reading, so let’s leave it up to them,” said Peskov.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said separately today he had never heard of Smolenkov.
“I have never seen this man, have never met him, and have never monitored his career or movements,” Lavrov said.
CNN reported yesterday that the US decision to extract its informant had occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which US President Donald Trump had discussed highly classified intelligence with Lavrov.
Lavrov said today that nobody had divulged any secrets to him at the meeting with Trump.
US officials had no immediate comment. — Reuters pic
