The New York Times - 12.09.2019

A6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

of a larger diplomatic strategy.

And in recent years, a few people

in Hong Kong — including a suc-

cession of local booksellers and

one of mainland China’s most po-

litically connected financiers —

have turned up in custody on the

mainland after being suddenly ab-

ducted.

In August, an employee of the

British Consulate in Hong Kong

was detained for weeks after dis-

appearing during a business trip

to Shenzhen. The Chinese govern-

ment said the man, Simon Cheng,

a Hong Kong resident, had been

held under administrative deten-

tion, without specifying what, if

anything, he was accused of hav-

ing done wrong.

Mr. Cheng’s disappearance

prompted fears that China had de-

tained him as a warning either to

Hong Kong protesters or to Brit-

ain, the city’s former colonial oc-

cupier, which has called on Beijing

to honor the 1997 agreement.

Also on Wednesday, one of the

protesters, Joshua Wong, said at a

Berlin news conference that Hong

Kong was “the new Berlin in a new

Cold War,” asking Germany to

support democracy in the city and

to stop selling weapons and equip-

ment to its police. He met this

week with Foreign Minister Heiko

Maas.

A spokeswoman for China’s

Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying,

criticized Germany on Tuesday

for letting Mr. Wong visit the coun-

try and engage in what she called

“anti-China separatist activities."

HONG KONG — A Taiwanese

man who disappeared during a

visit to China is being investigated

for suspected activities that “en-

danger national security,” the Chi-

nese authorities said on Wednes-

day, the latest twist in a mystery

that may dovetail with months of

pro-democracy protests in Hong

Kong.

A spokesman for the Taiwan Af-

fairs Office of China’s State Coun-

cil revealed that the man, Lee

Meng-chu, was under investiga-

tion. Newspapers in Hong Kong

and Taiwan reported that he went

missing about three weeks ago.

He is thought to have entered

the mainland city of Shenzhen,

which borders Hong Kong, on

Aug. 19. A Taiwanese newspaper

soon after published a photo-

graph, which it attributed to Mr.

Lee, of armored vehicles near the

border.

It was unclear from Beijing’s

terse announcement exactly

where Mr. Lee was or whether he

had been taken into custody.

Mr. Lee’s disappearance is sen-

sitive because, as pro-democracy

demonstrations have intensified

this summer in Hong Kong, there

has been rising speculation about

whether China would send its

army into the semiautonomous

territory to quell the protests.

In recent weeks, Chinese state-

run media have published photos

and videos of troop movements in

Shenzhen, but actually sending

troops into the city would be un-

precedented, and politically risky

for China’s president, Xi Jinping.

Hong Kong is a former British

colony that was returned to Chi-

nese control in 1997 under a “one

country, two systems” arrange-

ment that guaranteed it a high de-

gree of autonomy for 50 years, and

gave it special business and trad-

ing privileges with the United

States and other countries.

Mr. Lee works for a volunteer

group, according to reports by

Hong Kong and Taiwanese news-

papers.

In response to a reporter’s

question, the Taiwanese govern-

ment’s Mainland Affairs Council

said in August that contact with

Mr. Lee was lost after he entered

the mainland. Taiwanese officials

have demanded information from

Beijing on his whereabouts.

There were no signs that he had

been detained while in Hong

Kong, which has an independent

legal system. But Hong Kong’s po-

lice force and immigration depart-

ment declined to comment on

Wednesday.

The Shenzhen police previously

told Mr. Lee’s family that they had

no record of him entering the city,

even though Mr. Lee’s friends say

he had shared a meal with them

there, the South China Morning

Post reported on Wednesday.

In late August, The Liberty

Times, a Taiwanese newspaper,

published a photo of Chinese mili-

tary vehicles that it said had been

taken by Mr. Lee on the mainland.

It said that he was thought to have

been in Shenzhen on Aug. 19 and

20.

The newspaper also reported

that Mr. Lee had been expected to

fly to Indonesia from Hong Kong

in late August, but failed to arrive

at his destination.

Chiu Chui-cheng, a deputy min-

ister in Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs

Council, said in August that Mr.

Lee had been heard from while in

Hong Kong but he disappeared af-

ter entering the mainland.

Many people in Taiwan, a self-

governing island with a lively de-

mocracy, view the Chinese gov-

ernment with deep suspicion and

see the demonstrators in Hong

Kong as kindred spirits. Beijing

has long claimed Taiwan as part of

its territory but has never con-

trolled it.

China has a long history of ar-

resting or holding foreigners for

mysterious reasons, often as part

Mystery Involving Missing Taiwanese Man Deepens

By MIKE IVES

Austin Ramzy and Ezra Cheung

contributed reporting from Hong

Kong and Melissa Eddy from

Berlin. Claire Fu contributed re-

search from Beijing.

China says the visitor

is being investigated

by Beijing.

MOSCOW — He drank too
much, abandoned his sick, aged
mother and — in Russia’s own ac-
count of the man portrayed in the
United States as a highly valued
spy burrowed deep into the Krem-
lin — he had no contact whatso-
ever with President Vladimir V.
Putin.
Just hours after The New York
Times and other American news
outlets this week detailed how an
unnamed Russian informant
helped the C.I.A. conclude that Mr.
Putin ordered and orchestrated a
campaign of interference in the
2016 United States election, Rus-
sia fired up its propaganda ma-
chine to provide an entirely differ-
ent picture of the same man, who
the state-controlled news media
identified as Oleg B. Smolenkov.
Instead of a superspy who saw
Mr. Putin regularly and became
“one of the C.I.A.’s most valuable
assets,” he is now being presented
by Russian officials, state-con-
trolled news outlets and pro-
Kremlin newspapers as a boozy
nobody with no access to Kremlin
secrets.
No American official has ever
claimed the C.I.A.’s source was
part of Mr. Putin’s inner circle. But
nevertheless, if Mr. Smolenkov,
now aged 50, was the informant,
he had a position of interest to the
C.I.A.: an aide to a senior official
close to Mr. Putin. Anyone in that
position could have provided a vi-
tal flow of information to the
United States government.
Dmitri Peskov, Mr. Putin’s
spokesman, told journalists on
Tuesday that Mr. Smolenkov had
been fired several years ago from
a modest position in the Kremlin
“that did not belong to the catego-
ry of senior posts.” This job, he
added, “did not provide for any
contacts with the president at all.”
Mr. Peskov said he could not
confirm whether Mr. Smolenkov
is indeed the alleged C.I.A. inform-
ant extracted from Russia in 2017
and described American news
media accounts of the informant’s
escapades as “pulp fiction.”
The C.I.A. declined to comment
and The New York Times was not
able to independently confirm
that Mr. Smolenkov was indeed
the spy extracted by the United
States.
Much of what the Russian gov-
ernment was putting out through
state-controlled media amounts
to disinformation, said current
and former American officials.
The information about Mr.
Smolenkov, they said, could not be
trusted.
Playing down the importance of
a rival’s recruits is as much part of
spycraft as exaggerating the im-
portance of those recruited by
one’s own side.
“It’s pretty standard practice to
magnify your own intelligence tri-
umphs and minimize those of your
rivals,” said Mark Galeotti, an ex-
pert on Russia’s security system
at the School of Slavonic and East
European Studies, University Col-
lege London. This is partly just an
effort to control embarrassing
publicity. But, he added, “the hope
— probably vain — is to cast doubt
in the minds of the other side’s in-
telligence managers and con-
sumers of the real value of the
source’s insights.”
Whether the former Kremlin of-

ficial was as valuable as the Amer-

icans describe him or as derelict

as the Russians now claim is a

question of paramount impor-

tance.

On his bona fides rests an issue

at the heart not only of Washing-

ton’s relations with Moscow but

also American politics: just how

accurate was the U.S. intelligence

community’s conclusion, made

public in a declassified report in

January, 2017, that Mr. Putin per-

sonally “ordered an influence

campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S.

presidential election” and devel-

oped “a clear preference for Presi-

dent-elect Trump?”

The informant extracted from

Russia in 2017, whoever it was,

had proved vital to the intelli-

gence assessment about

Moscow’s interference campaign.

The informant’s reports in 2016

detailed Mr. Putin’s intentions and

orders, and led to the C.I.A.’s dec-

laration with “high confidence”

that the hack of the Democratic

National Committee was the work

of the Russian government.

For the Obama administration,

the inside source’s testimony was

critical; it gave them what they

were missing, an understanding

of the role of the Russian leader-

ship in this new, innovative attack

on the American democratic

process. It was the spy’s testi-

mony that described a coordi-

nated campaign that Mr. Putin

himself ordered, as a public intelli-

gence report, released in January,

2019, detailed.

Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s depu-

ty foreign minister, on Wednesday

lashed out at reports of Mr.

Smolenkov providing inside infor-

mation to the C.I.A. on Russian

election meddling, saying this was

impossible “because there was no

meddling.” He condemned what

he described as “the piling up of

one lie on top of another and the

multiplication of slander about

us.”

Mr. Ryabkov’s boss, foreign

minister Sergey Lavrov, also

weighed in, mostly to distance

himself from Mr. Smolenkov. “I

never saw him, never met him and

didn’t follow either his career or

his movements. And I don’t want

to comment on rumors,” the for-

eign minister said.

Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of

the information policy committee

in the Russian Parliament’s upper

house, accused the United States

of leaking information about its

Russian informant as part of an ef-

fort to revive “its old story about

‘Russian interference in the elec-

tion.’ ”

He did not name Mr. Smolenkov

but mocked him as someone who

“supposedly knew everything

about everyone.” He concluded:

“The story is muddy, the goal is

clear.”

Frants Klintsevich, a member

of the defense and security com-

mittee of the upper house, said on

his Facebook page that American

news media reports of the ex-

tracted spy were “a routine at-

tempt to discredit American Pres-

ident Donald Trump,” and said

there was “no question of any

American informant having

worked ‘inside the Russian lead-

ership.’ ”

Born in Ivanovo, a depressed

former textile manufacturing cen-

ter northeast of Moscow, Mr.

Smolenkov seems to have joined

the Russian Foreign Ministry

straight out of college in the early

1990s. But his duties, according to

Russian accounts, involved less

high diplomacy than lowly admin-

istrative tasks like money trans-

fers.

He worked for a time at the min-

istry’s Second European Depart-

ment, which handles relations

with Britain, Baltic states and

parts of Scandinavia.

Sent to Washington around 15

years ago to work in the Russian

embassy there, he appeared in

diplomatic lists as a “second sec-

retary” and was listed as being ac-

companied by his then wife, Regi-

na. (He subsequently remarried a

woman 16 years his junior, Anton-

ina, who also worked in the Rus-

sian bureaucracy.)

While in Washington, the family

rented a house in Norfolk, Va., but

it is not clear whether the diplo-

mat lived at this address, which is

several hours’ drive from the capi-

tal. Mr. Smolenkov worked under

the Russian ambassador at the

time, Yuri Ushakov, a seasoned

diplomat who later became Mr.

Putin’s diplomatic adviser in the

Kremlin.

It is not clear where or when the

C.I.A. recruited its informant,

though it was decades ago, ac-

cording to people familiar with the

matter. If Mr. Smolenkov was the

spy, his tour of duty in Washington

would have given the agency am-

ple opportunity to cultivate him

further.

Mr. Ushakov is precisely the

kind of official close to Mr. Putin

the agency was interested in.

Since 2012, Mr. Ushakov, now 72,

has served as Mr. Putin’s foreign

policy aide in the Kremlin. And

Mr. Ushakov has been involved in

every major confrontation be-

tween Russia and the West in re-

cent years — from the incursions

into Ukraine to the annexation of

Crimea to the confrontations over

arms control with the U.S.

RIA-Novosti, a state-controlled

Russian news agency, quoted an

unnamed former colleague as

saying Mr. Smolenkov’s duties at

the embassy revolved around me-

nial tasks like buying automobiles

for the embassy car pool and

goods for its shop. The colleague

also said Mr. Smolenkov “often”

drank and a “bit more than usual,”

which is saying something in the

context of Russia’s diplomatic

corps. Another former associate

said Mr. Smolenkov complained

about his foreign ministry salary

being too low.

After returning to Russia, Mr.

Smolenkov appeared in a 2010 civ-

il service ranking as a “third

class” official serving as an advis-

er to the government. He left the

government bureaucracy around

2012 and joined the presidential

administration, a separate sys-

tem, as an aide and then “chief ad-

viser” to Mr. Ushakov, the former

ambassador to Washington. He

had an office in Old Square, a

tightly guarded complex of build-

ings used by many of Mr. Putin’s

officials down the road from the

Kremlin.

Mr. Galeotti, the Russian securi-

ty expert, said that Mr.

Smolenkov’s position, though

fairly lowly, would probably have

granted him “considerable ac-

cess.” That said, he added, the

“Russians operate ‘compartmen-

talized intelligence’ based on

need-to-know, and I’d be skeptical

he’d have any sight of operational

materials.”

As in many governments, Rus-

sia’s foreign policy professionals

have wary relations with their

country’s intelligence services,

particularly the military intelli-

gence agency, the G.R.U., which

has been accused of spearheading

Moscow’s election meddling. This

makes it highly unlikely, experts

say, that Mr. Smolenkov or even

Mr. Ushakov would have had de-

tailed knowledge of a secret pro-

gram to disrupt American democ-

racy hatched by Russia’s spies.

Mr. Smolenkov’s known curric-

ulum vitae is so thin that it has

prompted speculation on Russian

social media that rather than pro-

viding the C.I.A. with secret inside

information he merely acted as a

“courier” to the Americans for in-

formation obtained by a more

highly placed agent who has yet to

be exposed.

But such speculation could it-

self be disinformation, as there is

no easier way to thwart the opera-

tions of a country’s intelligence

apparatus than planting seeds of

suspicion of hidden traitors. In the

1960s and 1970s, the C.I.A. became

paralyzed by an endless hunt for

turncoats driven by James Jesus

Angleton, the agency’s deeply

paranoid counterintelligence

chief.

The Russian and American ac-

counts of Mr. Smolenkov’s activi-

ties diverge so sharply that even

the manner of his escape from

Russia is clouded by contradic-

tion. United States officials de-

scribe a secret operation in 2017 to

“exfiltrate” — spy talk for extract

— him to safety. Russia, though,

has detailed a far more mundane

exit, saying Mr. Smolenkov took

his second wife and their three

children on holiday to Montene-

gro, a popular tourist destination

for Russians on the Adriatic coast,

and then traveled on to the United

States, where he bought a house

under his own name in Virginia for

$925,000 in 2018.

The only certainty is that he and

his family disappeared. Russian

opened a murder case after they

vanished but closed it when no

bodies could be found. In the fall of

2017, friends of his son, Ivan, ex-

changed anxious messages on

VKontakte, a Russian social net-

working site. “Is he dead or

what?” asked one of Ivan’s

friends. When this drew flippant

responses, the friend tried again:

“Seriously, what has happened to

him?”

“God only knows,” replied an-

other friend.

Moscow Mocks Russian Aide Recruited by the C.I.A. as a Boozy Nobody

By ANDREW HIGGINS

Above, President Vladimir V.

Putin of Russia, at a meeting

with military and law enforce-

ment officials at the Kremlin in

April. Left, a house in Stafford,

Va., owned by Oleg B.

Smolenkov, who was named by

Russian news media as an al-

leged spy for the United States.

POOL PHOTO BY ALEXEI DRUZHININ

ERIC BARADAT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Reporting was contributed by Oleg
Matsnev from Moscow, and Julian
Barnes and David E. Sanger from
Washington.