This archive report was first published on 12 September 2019.
Published on September 12, 2019, the Kremlin's reaction to the C.I.A.'s recruitment of a Russian aide has been one of mockery, with officials portraying him as a lowly, boozy nobody.
However, experts suggest that his position may have granted him considerable access, despite the Russians' compartmentalized intelligence system.
As in many governments, Russia's foreign policy professionals have wary relations with their country's intelligence services, particularly the military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., which has been accused of spearheading Moscow's election meddling.
Mr. Smolenkov's known curriculum vitae is so thin that it has prompted speculation on Russian social media that rather than providing the C.I.A. with secret inside information, he merely acted as a 'courier' to the Americans for information obtained by a more highly placed agent who has yet to be exposed.
But such speculation could itself be disinformation, as there is no easier way to thwart the operations of a country's intelligence apparatus than planting seeds of suspicion of hidden traitors.
The Russian and American accounts of Mr. Smolenkov's activities diverge so sharply that even the manner of his escape from Russia is clouded by contradiction.
United States officials describe a secret operation in 2017 to 'exfiltrate' him to safety, while Russia has detailed a far more mundane exit, saying Mr. Smolenkov took his second wife and their three children on holiday to Montenegro, a popular tourist destination for Russians on the Adriatic coast, and then traveled on to the United States, where he bought a house under his own name in Virginia for $925,000 in 2018.
