Reports circulate in Moscow that detained cyber spies are being charged with passing on information to the CIA, strengthening suspicions that Moscow arrests are connected to the Clinton leaks scandal.

Suspicions that the arrests of alleged cyber spies that have been taking place in Moscow since the middle of December are in some way connected to the US intelligence community's allegations of Russian hacking of the DNC and Podesta have received more support from a report by the Russian news agency Interfax that Sergey Mikhailov - a former FSB officer - and Dmitry Dokuchaev - now also revealed to be an FSB officer and apparently Mikhailov's deputy - are being charged with passing on information to the CIA.

Interfax is a highly reliable news agency, and information it provides can usually be considered trustworthy. Probably the information about the charges against Mikhailov and Dokuchaev were intentionally provided to Interfax for publication by the FSB.

To add spice to the story, Russian media reports are apparently claiming that the FSB has found up to $12 million in cash stashed away in various hiding places in Mikhailov's home and dacha. If so then that would suggest that he was a longstanding CIA agent working for pay.

It should be stressed that as of now there is no official confirmation of these claims, or that Mikhailov and Dokuchaev provided the CIA with information about the Russian hacking claims. Even if they did, and even if the information they provided was the source of some of the claims of a Russian role in the leaking of the DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks, it doesn't mean that what they told the CIA about Russian intelligence's supposed role in passing on the DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks is true.

To add to the mystery, the Russian media has been full of reports that the arrests are in some way connected to a group of hackers called Shaltai-Boltai, who have supposedly been busy hacking the Russian government.

There is far too little information currently available to comment about this. It could be that the claims about the alleged connection to the Shaltai-Boltai group are a smokescreen put up by the FSB to conceal the direction of its investigation. Alternatively Shaltai-Boltai might have been a CIA front to conceal a US cyber operation in Russia. If I had to guess, I would say the second is more likely to be true.

As I said in previous report, clearly something is going on, but given the lack of detail, and given the strong possibility of disinformation, it is essential not to assume too hastily that anything which appears in the media is true.

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In light of what Peskov has said, any further speculation that the individuals who have been arrested were involved in hacking Podesta and the DNC is obviously wrong, and should be ignored.

It is now confirmed that - as I have been saying all along - the individuals have been arrested for passing on information to a foreign power, which - as I also speculated - is confirmed to be the US. The official Russian news agency TASS quotes a lawyer familiar with the case as follows

No CIA is mentioned in the case. It is only the country that is mentioned. Yes, the talk is about America, not about the CIA (bold italics added)

This is not a denial that the CIA was the US agency with which the arrested individuals are supposed to have been in contact. All that the lawyer is saying is that the CIA is not referred to in the charges. However he explicitly confirms that the country with which the arrested individuals were in contact was the US.

Lastly the lawyer has poured cold water over the claims that the individuals arrested had some connection to the Shaltai Boltai group

The lawyer rejected media reports that leader of the Shaltay Boltay hacker group Vladimir Anikeyev was among the suspects in the criminal case. "It does not follow from official documents that Anikeyev and the Shaltay Boltay group are mentioned in this criminal case," the lawyer said, declining to disclose other details of the case.

It seems as if the Russian media talk about the Shalta-Boltai group was all wrong. Conceivably it was disinformation deliberately spread by the FSB to conceal the actual direction of the inquiry. More likely it was simply someone's mistaken guess.

Whilst this information has finally resolved some of the mysteries about the case - we now know definitely that at least two FSB officers and a cyber specialist have been arrested in Moscow charged with passing on secrets to the US - the theory that these individuals were a source for the US intelligence community's claims about Russian interference in the US election remains for the moment speculation.

We will no doubt find out more shortly even though what is clearly shaping up to be a major spy trial will be held in private, as such trials usually are in most countries, not just in Russia.

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