In 2012, when Mitt Romney was convinced by his top campaign officials that he would defeat President Obama, Romney warned that Russia posed the greatest threat to the United States. Many, including your solitary reporter, scoffed, but it turns out that Romney was right.
There’s not much going on in Russia that Vladimir Putin doesn’t know about.
But deep inside the Kremlin there was a Russian mole, who was supplying details about Putin’s covert operations to our CIA.
Then, in 2017, Donald Trump openly told Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov top-secret information about ISIS that he had gotten from Israel, and the CIA, then led by former Wichita Tea Party Congressman Mike Pompeo, started to get really worried.
In the cloak and dagger world of spies, such moles are known as “assets,” because they are treated like commodities, and when it’s necessary to get them out of wherever they are in danger, it’s known as an “exfiltration” — a word unknown to us until today. Another applicable word is “extraction” — which we always thought had to do with going to the dentist.
Whoever that Russian national is, she or he is no longer in Russia.
The story broke today on the network that Donald Trump hates the most, CNN (https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/09/politics/russia-us-spy-extracted/index.html).
Associate solitary reporter Foma Kheroshonsky was our Moscow-based associate solitary reporter, but, sad to say, as soon as CNN broke the story about the mole’s exfiltration, Putin ordered his thugs to put him on an Aeroflot flight bound for an undisclosed location.
Our hope here at AP is that somehow, Kheroshonsky will manage to escape and get back into the Kremlin at the earliest opportunity.