,
8 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
So many questions about this.
And there we go:
CNN: Top CIA spy in Russia extracted after Trump's May 2017 meeting with Lavrov.
NYT: in actual fact, CIA asked him to leave in late 2016, and he relented in the spring of 2017 b/c of "more media inquiries". nytimes.com/2019/09/09/us/…
CNN: Top CIA spy in Russia extracted after Trump's May 2017 meeting with Lavrov.
NYT: in actual fact, CIA asked him to leave in late 2016, and he relented in the spring of 2017 b/c of "more media inquiries". nytimes.com/2019/09/09/us/…
I'm afraid I've come to simply distrust CNN as the source for anything. It's not a compartmentalized problem to their Trump-Russia reporting. On the area I work on, the Middle East, the errors are regularly so overwhelming, and for no political purpose.
From NYT: "The [CIA] informant [exfiltrated from Russia in early 2017] ... was outside of Mr. Putin's inner circle, but saw him regularly and had access to high-level Kremlin decision-making — easily making the source one of the agency's most valuable assets."
This is by far the most interesting part of the story:
In terms of the way the Russians work, this is not even *close* to confirmation that this guy was the CIA's man.
In terms of the way the Russians work, this is not even *close* to confirmation that this guy was the CIA's man.
Cases in mind are Aleksey Kulak and Yuri Nosenko: both defected physically, and even now decades later there is a fierce disagreement within USG counterintelligence circles about whether or to what extent these men were Soviet provocateurs.
Amazing.
To recap:
Stage 1: Story says Trump's untrustworthiness made CIA pull a Russian asset
Stage 2: Correction: the media buzz is what forced the Agency to pull him
Stage 3: Media begins beating a path to the man's front door.
To recap:
Stage 1: Story says Trump's untrustworthiness made CIA pull a Russian asset
Stage 2: Correction: the media buzz is what forced the Agency to pull him
Stage 3: Media begins beating a path to the man's front door.
Perhaps a little too harsh on U.S. media: in Russian-language media the likely name of the CIA's exfiltrated Russian spy is already out there and it seems he bought a house in his own name which ... is a weird thing to have done if he's hiding from Moscow's special services.
