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TThe former head of the CIA station in Moscow launched leaks to CNN and other people about an American informant inside the Kremlin – which led to a possible identification of the source – qualifying the program for motivated and "extraordinarily dangerous" disclosure.
"It seems to me that somebody had a program that was to manage that and use it for political purposes," said CIA veteran Dan Hoffman. Washington Examiner. "And that's not why we are conducting intelligence operations."
A CNN report last week reported that a high-ranking informant close to the Kremlin, who was transmitting to the US information on the direct involvement of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the country's interference in the 2016 US presidential election, was withdrawn around the month of May. 2017. The decision to exfiltrate the informant, while he feared to be exposed, was taken after Trump met with Russian officials at the Oval Office in May 2017 and leaked them to them. classified information, according to the story.
The CIA immediately pushed back. "The erroneous speculation that the President's handling of the most sensitive information in our country – to which he has access every day – has led to an alleged exfiltration operation is inaccurate," the spokesman of the CIA, Brittany Bramell, last week.
But the New York Times Subsequently, the CIA had for the first time attempted to withdraw the source in 2016, citing sources that insisted that the media review, and not Trump's actions, undermine the source.
The Russian media, then the US media, reported the former Russian leader's name and said he was living openly under his own name, just outside of Washington, where reporters came to his home before to be turned back, probably by government agents. The alleged Russian spy has reportedly moved, but it has not been confirmed that he was the source.
Hoffman stated that he was not criticizing Jim Sciutto from CNN, but leaks.
"It seems to me that someone has given him information on covert operations of the CIA sensitive," he said.
"All of this is extremely dangerous," added Hoffman.
Russians suspected of working for the West are threatened by Putin, he said.
Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who worked as a British double agent, was poisoned with his daughter by Novichok, a nerve agent developed in Russia, in March 2018 in England. Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, also from the United Kingdom, was killed in London in 2006 after being poisoned by Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope. Russia is suspected of being behind both attacks.
The former CIA officer expressed his concern that the release of this source could make others less likely to believe that their identities would remain secret.
"We know more about a source than about the people who exhibit the type, and I do not think it's fair," said Hoffman.
This is not the first time that alleged Russian sources working for the United States in the Kremlin have been reported. A number of articles from 2016 alluded to it. The case of former British spy Christopher Steele, written at the request of the opposition research firm funded by the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, has been widely circulated among reporters. .
The assessment of US intelligence services released early January 2017 concluded that "Putin had ordered" the efforts of Russia and that "Putin and the Russian government have clearly expressed their preference for President-elect Trump". It was assumed that this information could mean that the United States had a Kremlin mole.
An article from Washington Post in June 2017 – at about the same time that the informant was exfiltrated – revealed the existence of a source of the Kremlin close to Putin who claimed that the intervention of Russia was led by him. CIA director John Brennan reportedly passed on the sensitive material to President Barack Obama and a small circle of collaborators.
A day after Trump granted Attorney General William Barr a wide declassification power as part of his review of the Trump-Russia inquiry in May 2019, the New York Times alludes to fears that Barr's investigators' investigation could endanger American sources, although it apparently left Russia two years earlier.
"I am confident that the Attorney General will work with the intelligence community in accordance with long established standards to protect highly sensitive classified information," Dan Coats, National Intelligence Director, said at the time.
After the Kremlin mole was named this week, the Russian government weighed in.
"I can only say that he was an employee and that he had been fired, but we do not know whether he was a spy or not," Putin's press secretary said. "It's a problem for the special services that do their job."
The Russian Foreign Ministry asked Interpol to locate the alleged defector. Russian media and authorities have insinuated about it, as US intelligence experts warn that it could be a Russian misinformation that discredits it.
"As a former director of the CIA, I do not often talk about this stuff," said Tuesday US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about CNN's story. "These are just the occasions when I think people are at risk, when the reporting is so egregious that they are generating huge risks for the United States of America, that I even comment on what I just done. "
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