Richard Pendele at the Daily Mail offers a look at traitor and
leaker Edward Snowden in Russia five years after his leaking NSA secrets and compared his life there with George Blake, a British spy who defected to Russia.
Last year, on the eve of his 95th birthday, Blake paid
tribute to the SVR, the foreign intelligence service successor to the
Communist-era KGB. ‘I believe that you will serve our common cause selflessly
and courageously,’ he declared in a statement delivered via the state-approved
media.
Compare and contrast Blake with former American National
Security Agency contractor and CIA operative Edward Snowden, who betrayed
American and British intelligence on an industrial scale.
Snowden, of course, would never describe himself as a
Russian spy. Nor would his many millions of adoring liberal supporters. Rather
than the ‘traitor’ the U.S. authorities have declared him to be, Snowden is a
‘hero’ or a ‘whistleblower’.
He claims his actions were not a betrayal of his country but
a public service; a light shone on the massive surveillance capabilities and
abuses of the American and British secret states.
This month saw the fifth anniversary of Snowden’s escape
from his Hawaii home to Moscow via Hong Kong, having committed the largest leak
of top-secret intelligence data in history. The scale and impact was
astounding, and the reverberations continue to this day.
In co-operation with The Guardian and Washington Post
newspapers, Snowden revealed that almost every telephone company in America had
been providing the National Security Agency (NSA) with their customers’ phone
records.
Documents leaked by Snowden also uncovered the existence of
a surveillance programme under which the NSA used clandestine court orders to
access personal data via tech giants such as Google and Facebook.
There have been no TV interviews, not even with Russia’s
English language propaganda organ RT to mark the latest landmark
… Their fury was only sharpened by Snowden finding sanctuary
with one of those hostile powers; a resurgent old foe which happened to be
among the most dictatorial and surveillance-heavy states on the planet.
So what has happened to Mr Snowden? One thing’s for sure:
the TV cameras focusing on the World Cup are unlikely to spot him. Since he
first came to Russia, Snowden’s profile has become even more secretive, to the
extent he is almost invisible.
Young Russians are as eager as their Western counterparts to
post pictures of celebrities they have spotted in the street on social media.
It never happens to Snowden.
His appearances over the internet using the Skype video
system — so often beamed to foreign-held conferences on subjects close to his
heart — have dried up. He is tweeting less frequently.
… When he gave a fifth anniversary interview this month to
his old collaborators at The Guardian — in which he claimed to have ‘no
regrets’ — it was conducted by telephone, rather than face to face. (His first
anniversary interview with the same paper took place in person in a Moscow
hotel room.)
There have been no TV interviews, not even with Russia’s
English language propaganda organ RT to mark the latest landmark.
Indeed, all the signs are that his relationship with his
hosts has begun to sour.
… So does Putin’s pet spy, who will celebrate his 35th
birthday today, feel like the walls are closing in on him?
Shortly after Snowden fled America, a former CIA chief
predicted that he would also end his days there ‘isolated, bored, lonely,
depressed...and alcoholic’.
Snowden does not drink and seems devoted to girlfriend
Lindsay. She has joined him in Russia having been unaware at the time, he says,
of his intention to cause a haemorrhage of Western intelligence. But isolated
he certainly is.
… Moscow was only supposed to be a temporary refuge, or so
the Snowden camp say. He was holed up in one of the city’s airports for weeks
while he sought asylum elsewhere in the world.
But with America desperate to get their hands on him, no one
wanted such a diplomatic nightmare. And so he remains trapped. In 2016, Snowden
asked to be granted a pardon by the outgoing President Barack Obama. His appeal
was rejected.
For all President Donald Trump’s unfathomably close ties to
Mr Putin — he has just called for Russia to be readmitted to the G8 group of
leading nations — the runaway spy seems just as unlikely to receive clemency
from his administration.
Snowden has ridiculed Trump’s intellect, while the President
has called him a traitor. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, has gone
further in the past and called for Snowden to receive the death penalty.
Last year, when still head of the CIA, Mr Pompeo spoke
contemptuously of ‘the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American
secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandisement or money or for whatever their
motivation’.
You can read the rest of the piece and view videos and
photos via the below link:
You can also read my Washington Times piece on Edward
Snowden: Traitor, Thief, Scoundrel, Spy, via the below link:
