Share

10 September 2019The American spy called by Moscow in 2017 "because it is considered life-threatening", would have played a crucial role in convincing US intelligence that the Kremlin had directly interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections. It would have been him who confirmed that Putin ordered and orchestrated interference in the Russian presidential elections, including the hacking of emails from the Democratic Party. The New York Times reported it, after a CNN scoop revealed that it was President Donald Trump, with his revelations of classified information to the Russians, that endangered the CIA agent in Moscow.

The spy would be recruited and trained by the CIA decades ago: a Russian official arrived to have access to the highest level of the Kremlin. The informant, according to the NYT, was outside Vladimir Putin's inner circle, but he saw it regularly.

According to CNN, the decision to exfiltrate the spy was motivated in part by the unscrupulous management of top secret information by the American president and some of his advisers. The decision, according to CNN, came shortly after a meeting in May 2017 in the Oval Office, in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence information with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the then Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak ; the information concerned ISIS in Syria and was provided by Israel.

It would have been Mike Pompeo, the current Secretary of State and then director of the CIA, to worry about too much news in circulation concerning the presence of a very high-ranking secret agent who worked undercover in Russia. Hence the order to filter the spy. A successful mission, but which represented a bad blow to the American espionage capabilities, which were thus to lose the highest profile spy in Moscow in a period of growing tensions with Washington. A few weeks after the spy's exfiltration, the meeting between Trump and Putin on the sidelines of the G20 in Hamburg in July 2007 only reinforced fears: the contents of the face to face between the two leaders are still unknown today and the tycoon at that time, with an unusual decision, he also delivered the notes of the interpreter, the only witness.

The reaction of the CIA is very critical: "The narration of the CNN is a misleading speculation, writes the public relations manager Brittany Barnell, claiming that the exfiltration was caused by the fact that the president uses our more confidential information, which he does every time day, it is an imprecision ". While the White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham accused the TV network of endangering lives. Trump, at the same time as the CNN scoop, severely attacked the broadcaster on Twitter: "it's bad for the country", he wrote.

CNN confirms its reconstruction, citing five different sources that have worked in the Trump administration, in Congress and in secret services. According to sources in the NYT, there was no public evidence that the tycoon had endangered the source and the push to act was the increasingly detailed information released in the media about CIA sources.