Russia said that the report in the channel "CNN" American about the withdrawal of Washington agent from Russia in 2017 that it is a fabric of imagination, and press reports detailing that the supposed agent disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The Kremlin confirmed that the person named in Russian press reports as the alleged agent was a former Kremlin employee before he was fired.
A report published by CNN revealed that Washington evacuated an agent dubbed "origin" in 2017, fearing President Donald Trump would disclose the secret of the spy to Moscow, after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the White House, during which Discuss classified intelligence.
The newspaper "Kommersant" Russian name of the person presumed to be a Washington agent, who had disappeared in the same year under mysterious circumstances during a trip to Montenegro, likely to reside in the United States.
According to the Russian newspaper, the former employee named Oleg Smolenkov, adding that the Russian intelligence then opened an investigation into the possibility of killing him before closing the file after confirming his presence in another country. The paper cited real estate data last year that he and his family bought a home in Virginia.
Data available
"According to the people we talked to, all the evidence confirms that Smolinkov is the person concerned, but curiously, all his details and address are publicly available," said Yelena Chernenko, a writer for Kommersant. "What's more, the Americans have not changed his identity.
The newspaper quoted its sources as saying that Smolinkov previously worked at the Russian Embassy in Washington under Ambassador Yuri Ushakov, who is now the assistant president for international affairs and very close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who oversees the policies of the Kremlin, before moving to work with him in the Kremlin , It seems that he was a trusted one.
Earlier, The New York Times reported that US intelligence offered to withdraw the spy in late 2016, but he refused to justify it for family reasons, raising fears that he had become a double agent, but a few months later he changed his mind.
The newspaper said the spy was an important source of information that allowed US intelligence to conclude that Putin directly plotted Russia's intervention in favor of Trump and against his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections.
The spy, which was considered the most valuable in the capabilities of US intelligence in Russia, linked Putin directly to hacking the e-mail server of the National Democratic Party, which led to the publication of huge amounts of embarrassing messages.
Many view the case, given its details and timing, as another episode in the spy war series between Moscow and Washington, but it differs in importance from its predecessors in relation to Russia's top foreign policy administration, foreshadowing consequences once other facts unfold in the case.