U.S. Intelligence Failure: How Vanishing Trust Is Crippling National Security

When trust is the only currency, one defector’s fear meets the calm of a CIA agent who knows what’s at stake.

Trust is a funny thing. You don’t notice it until it’s gone — and when it breaks, it breaks hard.

Case in point: Oleg Smolenkov. You might’ve heard his name in passing, maybe in whispers tied to the CIA. Well, it turns out the Kremlin recently admitted he did work inside Russia’s presidential administration. That’s no small thing.

Now, they’re quick to say he wasn’t close to Putin — just another bureaucrat. But here’s what we know: Smolenkov was no paper-pusher. He was the CIA’s man on the inside. For years, he fed Washington top-shelf secrets — stuff he pulled straight off Putin’s desk. We’re talking classified memos, photos, high-level chatter.

He was the CIA’s eyes and ears in the heart of enemy territory. And in 2017, when things got too hot — thanks in part to concerns that President Trump might leak something he shouldn’t — Smolenkov vanished. Extracted. Gone. Just like that.

He was the kind of spy you don’t get twice. And when he disappeared, a big part of America’s window into the Kremlin disappeared with him.

Oleg Smolenkov’s real-life escape reads like something pulled straight out of Mission of Vengeance, my latest spy thriller. In it, a former KGB officer named Yury Bocharov defects to the U.S. and…