Spy story

RUSSIA SCRAMBLES TO DENY 'HIGHEST LEVEL' ACCESS OF 'CIA SPY' EXTRACTED FROM MOSCOW IN 2017

The Russian government has been scrambling to address reports that a CIA spy with access to the highest levels of the Kremlin was extracted from the country in 2017, after years of feeding intelligence to Langley.

CNN reported on Monday that a Russian official—since named by the Russian Kommersant newspaper as Oleg Smolenkov—had served as a covert CIA source within Russia's presidential administration. According to The New York Times, Smolenkov had been on the U.S. payroll for decades.

But on Tuesday, senior Russian officials released statements characterizing Smolenkov as a low-level staffer who was fired from his post in 2017 before disappearing.

According to Kommersant, Smolenkov went missing along with his wife and children while on holiday in Montenegro in 2017, and is now believed to be living in Virginia.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a blanket denial of any contact with Smolenkov. "I have never seen him, I have never met him, and I have neither kept track of his career nor his movements," the minister said, according to state news agency Tass.

Earlier on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Smolenkov had worked in the Russian Presidential Administration, but that "a few years ago he was dismissed through an internal instruction," Tass reported.