A Russian national hired by the Secret Service to work at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was dismissed as a suspected spy last year, a leading British newspaper reported Thursday.
According to the Guardian newspaper account, the woman had worked at the Embassy for more than a decade and had access to the intranet and email systems of the Secret Service, as well as its counterfeit-money tracking operations.
The agency was slow to react to suspicions surrounding the woman before dismissing her and is still downplaying the matter for bureaucratic reasons, the Guardian reported.
That computer access would have given her a potential window into such sensitive material as the schedules of the president and vice president, all their living predecessors, and their wives.
The woman came under suspicion in 2016 when a routine security sweep by the Regional Security Office of the State Department discovered “regular and unauthorized meetings with members of the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency,” the Guardian wrote.
The British newspaper said it had the woman’s name, but did not report it. She did not respond to queries about the circumstances surrounding her dismissal.
The State Department alerted the Secret Service, a branch of the Homeland Security Department, in January 2017 and revoked her security clearance in the summer of that year.
But the Secret Service kept her on for months after getting the initial warnings, dismissing her shortly before a July 2017 spat involving embassy staffing levels and U.S. sanctions against top Russian officials — which, according to the Guardian, “provided cover for her removal.”
“The Secret Service is trying to hide the breach by firing [her],” an intelligence source told the Guardian. “The damage was already done but the senior management of the Secret Service did not conduct any internal investigation to assess the damage and to see if [she] recruited any other employees to provide her with more information.”
“Only an intense investigation by an outside source can determine the damage she has done,” the source concluded.
The Guardian reported that the breach had not been reported to any intelligence or oversight committees in Congress.
According to the Manchester-based newspaper, the Secret Service “did not deny that she had been identified as a potential mole,” but still downplayed the matter’s significance.
“All foreign service nationals [FSN] are managed … to ensure that Secret Service and U.S. government interests are protected at all times. As a result, the duties are limited to translation, interpretation, cultural guidance, liaison and administrative support,” the agency told the paper in a statement.
“At no time, in any US Secret Service office, have FSNs been provided or placed in a position to obtain national security information,” the Secret Service said.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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