MOSCOW — He drank too much, abandoned his sick, aged mother and — in Russia’s own account of the man portrayed in the United States as a highly valued spy burrowed deep into the Kremlin — he had no contact whatsoever with President Vladimir V. Putin.

Just hours after The New York Times and other American news outlets this week detailed how an unnamed Russian informant helped the C.I.A. conclude that Mr. Putin ordered and orchestrated a campaign of interference in the 2016 United States election, Russia fired up its propaganda machine to provide an entirely different picture of the same man, whom the state-controlled news media identified as Oleg B. Smolenkov.

Instead of a superspy who saw Mr. Putin regularly and became “one of the C.I.A.’s most valuable assets,” he is now being presented by Russian officials, state-controlled news outlets and pro-Kremlin newspapers as a boozy nobody with no access to Kremlin secrets.

No American official has ever claimed the C.I.A.’s source was part of Mr. Putin’s inner circle. But nevertheless, if Mr. Smolenkov, now aged 50, was the informant, he had a position of interest to the C.I.A.: an aide to a senior official close to Mr. Putin. Anyone in that position could have provided a vital flow of information to the United States government.