CIA Reportedly Had Asset So Close To Putin That Spy Could Photograph Secret Documents

[Ghost Dog]

23. Obviously intended, since original CNN's Mr. Sciutto's source has to be CIA.

Or similar. There's more:

Leonid Bershidsky (Bloomberg Opinion) ... After the U.S. reports came out, an anonymous, well-informed Russian Telegram channel, The Ruthless PR Guy, reported that the asset was Kremlin official Oleg Smolenkov. On Tuesday morning, the Moscow daily Kommersant published a story confirming that it was him based on anonymous sources and some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence.

Smolenkov, his wife and three children went on vacation to Montenegro on June 14, 2017, and disappeared without a trace. A murder investigation initiated in Moscow got nowhere. Kommersant found a notice in the Washington Post saying a couple named Oleg and Antonina Smolenkov (the wife has the same name as the missing official’s) bought a house in Stafford, Virginia, in June 2018. It also discovered a record of a deed on a Stafford property in Oleg Smolenkov’s name.

On Tuesday, an NBC correspondent apparently visited the property, although the resulting story didn’t mention Smolenkov’s name or the Stafford location. It did say that, once the reporter rang the doorbell, two young men came racing up in an SUV and started asking questions about the purpose of his visit, introducing themselves only as friends of the owner.

If indeed the CIA extracted Smolenkov from Russia, one might question why he continued to use his real name. But the timing of the Smolenkovs’ disappearance and their apparent re-emergence in Virginia, watched over by anonymous “friends,” suggest he could be the mole in question...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/man-prized-u-asset-kremlin-123449914.html