dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

How a brutal assault led a woman to one of the CIA's most valuable Russian spies

On a warm day in late September nearly 10 years ago, Lisa Sales was in the basement of her Virginia home, going through files belonging to her former tenant, a man who had just been arrested and would later plead guilty to assaulting her.

Sales, then in her early 40s, picked up a flash drive in a small glass dish where she kept odds and ends by the printer. She assumed, she later recounted, that it was hers and inserted it into her computer. Instead, she realized the flash drive belonged to her former tenant, and it contained an investment report listing total assets of more than $16 million, a seemingly inexplicable sum for someone who had been paying $2,000 a month to rent a basement room in her house.

Her interest piqued, she started digging for more among the belongings left behind after he was arrested. She came across a handwritten letter in Cyrillic and other financial documents in the recycling bin.

It had been a little over a week since Dmitry Mikhaylov had attacked her. Mikhaylov, a Russian immigrant attending graduate school, had not immediately struck Sales as a multimillionaire. Now she began to wonder about his real background. Could he have ties to the Russian mafia?

Even before the attack, there were some unusual things about her housemate. He could be sociable but was also prone to moodiness, particularly when he drank, sometimes bragging about a father in Russia who was in some sort of serious trouble, she recalled. He owned a black Mercedes, a flashy car for a young man still in school, particularly since Sales said he couldn’t legally drive it without restrictions because of a recent DWI conviction.

There were other hints of wealth. He was buying an expensive condo in Falls Church, Va., and she’d seen him buy drinks for a big crowd at the bar on more than one occasion. And now there was the matter of the $16 million.

Sales was suspicious enough to call a neighbor in the FBI, later following it up with a call and email to the bureau’s Washington field office concerning her former housemate’s “suspicious activity” — essentially, his access to a massive trove of money. The field office never responded.

Unperturbed, Sales began her own investigation. Over the next several years, she pieced together documents Mikhaylov had left behind, conducted her own interviews and scoured the internet for information. Sales eventually came to believe the CIA had helped her former tenant move to the United States, and is protecting him as part of a legal maneuver roughly similar to the Justice Department’s witness protection program. The reason, she argues, is that he’s the son of one of the agency’s most valuable assets of the past two decades.

Most people who believe they’ve become entangled in a web of international espionage might be dismissed as having watched too many episodes of “The Americans.” But Sales, who works for a large national security company, began to connect the pieces of her attacker’s life and family. If she’s correct about the CIA’s involvement, it puts the agency in a difficult position; if it confirms her suspicions, it would potentially endanger someone, a so-called asset who spied on behalf of the United States, making it harder to recruit others in the future.

Those who work, or have worked, in and around the intelligence community say the agency’s responsibilities to its foreign assets don’t end when they reach the relative safety of the United States. “We’re responsible for them for life,” said Joseph Augustyn, former head of the CIA program that resettles those who risk their lives to spy for the United States.

“Unlike witness protection, if you stray from that or break the rules, they’ll kick you out; the CIA will never do that,” said Augustyn, who emphasized he was not familiar with the details surrounding Mikhaylov. “The cases never really are closed.”

Sales, however, wants the answer to a different question: If the CIA is responsible for those spies and their families for life, is the agency also responsible for their crimes?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-a-brutal-assault-led-a-woman-to-one-of-the-ci-as-most-valuable-russian-spies-090022725.html