Snowden's Moscow Lawyer: NSA Leaker Is Planning To Live In Russia And Get A Job
“He’s planning to arrange his life here. He plans to get a job," Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer with links to the country's intelligence service (i.e. FSB), told RT. "And, I think, that all his further decisions will be made considering the situation he found himself in.”
The situation he found himself in is being stuck in Russia.
And the newest development seems like very bad news for the U.S.
Snowden is an elite hacker, trained by the NSA, who gained access and "carefully read" 10,000 classified NSA files.
Furthermore, Snowden knows his way around NSA interviews and the vetting process of the world's largest spy agency.
When Snowden arrived in Moscow on June 23, a radio host in Moscow "saw about 20 Russian officials, supposedly FSB agents in suits, crowding around somebody in a restricted area of the airport," according to Anna Nemtsova of Foreign Policy.
On June 25 John Schindler, Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, tweeted that during the Cold War, the KGB's covert term for the NSA was "OMEGA," the highest Soviet intelligence priority — "in case you wondered how glad FSB is to see Snowden."
Kucherena, who sits on public council of the FSB, has been controlling Snowden's messaging since July 12, the day Snowden accepted all offers for support and asylum.
“We must understand that security is the number one issue in his case," Kucherena told RT. "I think the process of adaptation will take some time. It’s an understandable process as he doesn’t know the Russian language, our customs, and our laws.”
On July 12 former senior U.S. intelligence analyst Joshua Foust wrote that the "involvement of known FSB operatives at his [Snowden's] asylum acceptance ... suggests this was a textbook [Russian] intelligence operation, and not a brave plea for asylum from political persecution."
Amid the initial reports that Snowden moved out of the transit zone of the transit zone at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, Foust tweeted this:
Snowden's disclosures to newspapers around the world have resulted in the exposure of concrete evidence detailing a domestic spying apparatus of questionable effectiveness that for years has benefitted from weak oversight and misdirection to harvest data.
Furthermore, the classified documents — one of largest leaks of intelligence in U.S. history — informed the rest of the world that the NSA, often in cooperation with governments, is collecting their communications too.
The biggest concern right now for the U.S. government is what can leak out of Snowden's head over the course of a lifetime.