CIA calls report of $100K payment to Russian “fictional”

The CIA has denied a New York Times report saying American spies paid $100,000 to a shadowy Russian who vowed to give up stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons and compromising information on President Trump. The Times, citing U.S. and European intelligence officials, reported the alleged payment was meant to be the first of a total $1 million payout. The cash was allegedly delivered in a Berlin hotel room inside a suitcase in September, the newspaper reported.

Reacting to the story on Saturday, the CIA called it “fictional,” saying the reporters who worked on it — The Intercept’s James Risen and The New York Times’ Matt Rosenberg — were the ones who were “swindled.” 

“The people swindled here were James Risen and Matt Rosenberg,” the CIA said in a statement provided to CBS News. “The fictional story that CIA was bilked out of $100,000 is patently false.”

Matthew Rosenberg, who wrote The New York Times story, said in a tweet later on Saturday, “@CIA is denying something we did not write – the @nytimes story does not specify CIA as source of funds, which we write came ‘through an indirect channel.'” 

President Trump also responded to the story but he had a different response, seeming to give credence to Times’ report on Twitter. 

“I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here,” he tweeted Saturday, despite his past references to The New York Times as “fake news.”

“DRAIN THE SWAMP!” the president tweeted. 

The Times reported that the Russian, early in the negotiations, dropped the asking price from $10 million to $1 million for the cyber tools and the Trump-related information. 

U.S. officials had said the payment was intended to recover the alleged NSA materials and was abandoned after the Russian produced “possibly fabricated” information on Mr. Trump related to the 2016 presidential election and alleged ties between his associates and Russia, the Times reports. The U.S. agents reportedly considered the information “tabloid gossip pages” rather than intelligence gathering and ultimately terminated the deal. Several American officials said they did not want the alleged information about Mr. Trump. 

The Times reports that the coveted cyberweapons were built to break into the computer networks of Russia and China, but wound up in the hands of a mysterious group called the “Shadow Brokers.” The weapons have helped hackers breach millions of computers around the world, including hospitals, businesses and factories, the Times reports.

The Times claimed it obtained four of the documents the Russian tried to give to American intelligence, noting that the newspaper did not pay for the documents. The documents, according to the newspaper, discuss former Trump campaign aide Carter Page and billionaire GOP donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer. But the reports, according to the Times, draw almost entirely from publicly available news reports. 

The U.S. intelligence community reportedly paid thousands of dollars in an attempt to recover stolen NSA documents from Russian operatives. The U.S. “secretly negotiated” with Russians to purchase the documents, and the Russians then offered to sell them material regarding President Trump, The Intercept reported Friday. The New York Times later ran a related story. The Intercept’s James Risen joined CBSN to discuss the story, which the CIA has denied.

CBS News’ Arden Farhi and Kathryn Watson contributed to this report.