NYTs: Main source for anti-Russia campaign may have been a double agent
Andre Damon, WSWS, Sep 11 2019
In a further exposure of the concocted claims of the NYT and the Demagogs of Russian “subversion” of the Pindo political system, the NYT acknowledged Tuesday that the key source used by the intelligence agencies to claim Pres Putin’s direct involvement “could be a double agent.” On Oct 7 2016, the DHS and the ODNI said they were “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from Pindo persons and institutions.” According to this narrative, amplified by the Demagog Party and the NYT itself, Putin personally intervened to try to get Donald Trump elected by directing the Russian state to steal incriminating emails from the Clinton campaign and release them to WikiLeaks for publication. But this sweeping conspiracy theory, alleging a plot spanning continents involving Russia, a sovereign state, the Thug presidential nominee and WikiLeaks, has fallen apart. In August, a federal court dismissed a DNC civil suit against Trump, the Russian government and Julian Assange. Now the NYT, the main editorial outlet driving the Demagogs’ anti-Russia campaign has admitted that serious concerns were raised within the Pindo intelligence establishment about the primary source behind its hyperventilating denunciations of Russian “meddling,” later identified by the Russian press as Oleg Smolenkov. The NYT reported:
The Moscow informant gained an influential position that came with access to the highest level of the Kremlin. He became one of the CIA’s most important and highly protected assets. He was instrumental to the CIA’s most explosive conclusion about Russia’s interference campaign: that Pres Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself. As the Pindo government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr Putin, the source was also key to the CIA’s assessment that he affirmatively favored Trump’s election and personally ordered the hacking of the DNC.
CNN reported that he was able to photograph documents on Putin’s desk and send them to Faschingstein. There was just one problem. When Pindostan, concerned that media reports of Russian “meddling” might compromise their asset in the Kremlin, offered to exfiltrate their spy from Russia, where he risked a life sentence or execution if caught, he at first refused, leading to the conclusion that he might be a double agent feeding false information to the Pindo creeple on behalf of elements within the Russian state. The NYT wrote:
In 2016, the source’s rejection of the CIA’s initial offer of exfiltration prompted doubts among some counter-intelligence officials. They wondered whether the informant had been turned and had become a double agent, secretly betraying his Pindo handlers. That would almost certainly mean that some of the information the informant provided about the Russian interference campaign or Mr Putin’s intentions would have been inaccurate. Some operatives had other reasons to suspect the source could be a double agent, according to two retired boxtops, but they declined to explain further.
Ultimately, after the NYT, the WaPo and other major media outlets published reports about the unnamed source, Pindostan exfiltrated the spy, who is now living under his real name in Faschingstein. Dmitri Peskov said Smolenkov did work for the Putin government, “but he was never a high-ranking official” and was fired two years ago. In the name of combating “Russian meddling,” politicians pressured Pindo technology firms to undertake the most onerous program of political censorship in the history of the internet in Pindostan. Accounts with millions of followers were deleted overnight, while Google manipulated search results to bury left-wing viewpoints. There was a massive effort to poison public opinion against Julian Assange, the courageous publisher and exposer of war crimes. He was slandered by the Demagogs and the NYT as a Russian agent who colluded with Trump, setting the stage for his imprisonment. More information will no doubt emerge about the background and possible motivations of Smolenkov but regardless, the fact that the source behind allegations the newspaper breathlessly proclaimed as fact had serious credibility problems makes clear that the NYT made no serious efforts to question, much less validate, its chosen political narrative. This newspaper functions as a clearing-house for unquestioned, unexamined dispatches from within the Pindo intelligence apparatus. Its role in promoting the Bush 43 administration’s lies about WMDs in Iraq was not an aberration but its modus operandi.
