MOSCOW, September 23. /TASS/. The wife and children of a former employee of the Russian presidential staff, Oleg Smolenkov, whom some mass media suspect of being a CIA agent, are officially listed as missing persons and a search is underway for them. The Interior Ministry’s data base contains the names of Antonina Smolenkova, born in 1984, and her children.
Earlier on Monday it was announced that Oleg Smolenkov, born in 1969, was listed as missing and for that reason a search for him was in progress.
A law enforcement source told TASS that at a certain point a criminal case had been opened over Smolenkov’s disappearance on suspicion of murder. The investigation has been paused. State media said that in the summer of 2017 Smolenkov, his wife Antonina and three children (two daughters aged two and seven and a son aged 13) had gone on vacation to Montenegro where they disappeared.
On September 9, CNN claimed that US intelligence had evacuated a key agent from Russia in 2017, because there was a high risk that the individual in question could have been exposed. CNN did not reveal the name of the purported agent, whom it described as a fairly senior official in the Russian administration. According to The New York Times, the alleged agent held a senior post and had high-level access to the Kremlin. The CIA and the White House castigated CNN for airing information that they said was inaccurate. Also, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham blasted CNN’s report as "inaccurate" and had "the potential to put lives in danger," without elaborating, though. Some media outlets eventually quoted anonymous sources as saying the individual in focus was someone named Oleg Smolenkov. Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed last week that Smolenkov had been an employee of the presidential staff but at a certain point was dismissed under an internal order.