He drank too much, abandoned his sick, aged mother and — most important of all for Russia in its 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, who 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.