His name will and reputation will, perhaps, exceed that of Penkovsky.....
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/t...desk-h22t5pdvj
Top CIA Kremlin spy ‘had access to papers crossing Putin’s desk’
A CIA super-spy at the heart of the Kremlin was identified today as a staffer in President Putin’s administration who fled to the US via the Balkans.
Oleg Smolenkov, thought to be about 45, went missing in June 2017 when he, his wife Antonina and three children disappeared without trace after travelling to Montenegro, ostensibly for a holiday. He is said to have had access to papers on the Russian president’s desk and to have been instrumental in confirming to American intelligence that
Vladimir Putin personally ordered interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
US media reported yesterday that an unnamed CIA informant in the
Russian government was “exfiltrated” to the US in 2017 over fears the source could be exposed. The mole was Mr Smolenkov, whose disappearance at the time prompted a murder investigation, said Russia’s
Kommersant newspaper today, citing a US state department source. The daily also noted a property listing in
The Washington Post showing that an Oleg Smokenkov [sic] and Antonina Smolenkov bought a six-bedroom house in Stafford, Virginia, in June 2018.
NBC News earlier reported that the informant was living in the Washington DC area under his true name. When a correspondent from the channel went to the man’s house and rang the doorbell, two young men, possibly government agents, raced up in an SUV and asked what the reporter was doing.
CNN, which initially reported that the US had successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, said the removal of the Russian was driven in part by concerns that
President Trump mishandled classified intelligence and could expose the covert source as a spy. This was denied by the CIA.
The New York Times said the source was “one of the CIA’s most important — and highly protected — assets” and had been removed after US media picked up on details about the agency’s Kremlin sources. Present and former intelligence officials told the paper that, in the light of the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in the Wiltshire city of Salisbury last year, the mole’s life remains in danger.
A Russian website reported in 2017 that the Smolenkovs and three children had travelled to Montenegro in June that year and disappeared, prompting a murder investigation to be opened in September. Mr Smolenkov had worked in the Russian embassy in Washington and with Yury Ushakov, one of Mr Putin’s top foreign policy advisers. His wife was also a state employee.
A source “informed about the case” speculated to Russia’s
Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper today that Mr Smolenkov and his family may have been taken across the border from Montenegro to Kosovo and then flown to the US from the American Camp Bondsteel army base.
The Russian presidential administration said that nobody by the name of Oleg Smolenkov had worked there.