Former CIA officer warns against trusting Russia's account of mysterious death in Siberia

Glenn Corn, a former CIA officer, told Fox News Digital that Russia’s decades-long history of deception makes it difficult to trust the Kremlin’s account of a possible disease outbreak following the death of a 28-year-old researcher at a facility containing dangerous pathogens.

Darya Shipilova, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, got sick near the end of September.

After unconfirmed reports that Shipilova died from pneumonic plague were shared far and wide on social media, Russian authorities pushed back, saying she died on Oct.

2 from "pneumonia of unknown etiology" and that testing found no evidence she had been infected with a pathogen from her lab.

Yet the Russian government’s past messaging around major crises has left Corn and others wary of its official account.

RUSSIAN RESEARCHER'S MYSTERY DEATH COULD BE ‘FAR WORSE’ THAN THE PLAGUE, FORMER SENIOR TRUMP OFFICIAL WARNS "This is what the challenge is, because they have the history of the 'boy who cried wolf syndrome.' They have this history of being deceitful.

It's very hard to believe what they're saying," said Corn, a professor at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, D.C.

Corn, who is fluent in Russian and spent more than 20 years overseas during his intelligence career, gave several examples of elaborate Russian coverups, including the 1979 anthrax outbreak that killed at least 64 people in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, now called Yekaterinburg.

For years, the Soviet Union claimed that the deaths were caused by intestinal anthrax from tainted meat, according to PBS' "Frontline." It wasn't until 1992 that President Boris Yeltsin finally admitted the illnesses were the result of military activity at a nearby biological weapons facility.

This dedication to deception, Corn said, remains a feature of the current government under President Vladimir Putin .

AMB.

GORDON SONDLAND: THE GODFATHER TEST -- HOW PUTIN TURNS EVERY ATTACK INTO A MYSTERY—AND GETS AWAY WITH IT Corn pointed to the Kremlin’s past denials of ties to the Wagner mercenary group, whose murky relationship with the state allowed its fighters to advance Moscow’s interests overseas while Russian officials maintained plausible deniability.

Putin later acknowledged that the group had been fully financed by the Russian state.

"This goes to the strategic culture of leadership in Russia... and their fear of the rest of the world, and their belief that they have to deceive everybody because everybody is deceiving them," Corn said.