Screenshot from WikiLeaks video of Snowden receiving Sam Adams award.
It's funny, just when I was saying that there's been no actual face-to-face meetings with Edward Snowden since June 24th, when he met in a carefully stage-managed meeting at the Sheremetyevo Airport with coopted human rights activists and lawyers, suddenly comes the news that four ex-US officials from the CIA, NSA and FBI (oh my!) have met with Snowden in Moscow.
I cast around to try to think of what this reminded me of, and the closest I came was the time H.G. Wells went to meet Maxim Gorky in Petrograd in 1920 with the lovely Moura Zakrevskaya (Countess Benckendorf/Baroness Budberg) (where else but the Guardian would you get the picture), and some of those other fellow-traveller meetings. The exotic Moura was the lover of both Gorky and Wells and the British ambassador -- you can read about this in Nina Berberova's wonderful book Moura: the Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg -- the best thing I've ever read that capture's Lenin's (as distinct from Stalin's) terror and the fellow travellers of those years. Sarah Harrison is quite the stand-in for Moura in this scene...
The carefully-stage managed meetings of these four American "whistleblowers" with Edward Snowden, the defector, is really a modern bizarre occasion all of its own, however, even as it harkens back to the manipulated visits of the past. This time no Russian is being visited -- indeed, the only Russians present evidently (beside the unknown photographer) is Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's lawyer, and his translator, who looks like the same one who was at Sheremetyevo. So it's Americans visiting an American.
The video clips from this meeting obtained by (vouchsafed to) WikiLeaks are just plain strange (why not a video of his whole speech?), complete with one segment where all the characters are moving animatedly and reaching for things unseen but no sound is coming out.
Not only does the "award" that Snowden gets appeared to be improvised from a candle from the table, in another picture he is holding a greenish marble-looking object with a candle, as if another holder beside the brass one was found (compare the video with the picture, which is owned by Sunshine, the entity that is used by WikiLeaks to collect money.)
The location of this meeting was kept secret "for security reasons" but it looks like either the Kolonny Zal (Hall of Columns) or I'm going to guess a fancy place like the Hotel Savoy. It might be in the Kremin; but nowadays everything is decorated like the Kremlin palaces so it could be a restaurant.
The most important "news" to come out of this crafted occasion is that Snowden's laptops were fake -- according to him.
RT. com (what else) has a brief report:
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden brought four laptop computers with him to Hong Kong and then Moscow as a “diversion” and they did not contain any classified information, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Reuters Friday. Snowden stored the material he downloaded from the NSA on small, portable hard drives and has not provided them to Chinese or Russian intelligence operatives. McGovern, along with other former American officials who have become critical of US policy, met with Snowden for six hours in Moscow.
Note that Russian spy word diversiya, which is literally "diversion" but also "sabotage". Here the meaning is "decoy".
I've noted in the past that the laptops didn't likely actually have stolen NSA files on them, but were just used for encrypted comms. I noted that they seem to be missing after all the attention was on them. Noah Schachtman noted in Wired at the time that he thought they likely didn't contain anything and could be distractions.
Remember those elaborate stories when Snowden was in Hong Kong, where he was described as putting a hood over his head in order to tap into his laptops? Implying that the Chinese could have a bug in his room to pick up his password being tapped in, if they didn't have a key-logger -- and implying that he kept an "air gap" computer or two for encrypting files. But it was possibly all a maneuver. I wouldn't believe McGovern on this.
Further the story says:
Current US authorities have said they are investigating with the assumption that Snowden did, in fact, provide intelligence to the two nations but have admitted the theory is not based on any evidence. McGovern told reporters Snowden repeatedly stated he had “nothing on” his computers.
But they haven't admitted any such things. WikiLeaks and RT.com specialize in constantly claiming that the US admits there is no damage done by WikiLeaks and that they can't prove Snowden defected in the sense of turned over files to the Russian.
Of course, this is a literalist and self-serving way to view the entire story -- WikiLeaks and Greenwald are hardly judges of what happened in Russia given how they have manipulated this story from the get-go, claiming that Snowden "had no choice" but to go to Russia and that he was "driven into Russia" by the US which pulled his passport. That always overlooks two glaring factors: 1) Snowden could have started his leaking career in Venezuela or Ecuador or even Brazil, instead of fleeing to Hong Kong 2) Putin invited him to apply for asylum on June 11th, weeks before the US issued an extradition request and pulled his passport.
I wonder if these four will be questioned by the Department of Homeland Security or FBI when they return to the US.
Streetwise Professor doesn't mention the laptops issue, but he describes the four in detail as bad actors. I haven't followed them as closely, but I do recall reading up on Jesselyn Raddack when I saw she was the one deployed to read Snowden's ostensible statement to the European Parliament when they gave him a whistleblower's award. She is famous for battling the civil rights issues around the caes of John Lindh, the "American Taliban," a story which the left always portrays strictly in terms of Lindh not getting his Miranda rights read to him on the battlefield. But as with Awlaki, the left never asks why it's okay for Americans to go and fight their own country and subject their fellow American soldiers to terrorist attacks. When Lindh and his Taliban comrades were shot in battle and hid out, the Red Cross came to treat their wounds, but the Taliban shot at them and injured them. That's the kind of people we're dealing with here. People who don't follow any of the "rules of war" but expect them to be followed rigorously for themselves.
I'd have to wonder who gathered and briefed and paid for these four to lurch off to Moscow, and if I took a wild guess, I'd say the Foundation for Freedom of the Press, but we don't know that.
Some other odd things about this visit, besides the fact that the award given to Snowden looks like his Rubic cube turned green marble and sprouted a Confirmation candle (is this some weird ritual?):
o His father came at exactly the same time. But when he arrived, he expressed concern about whether he'd even get to see his son. This seemed odd, given that the party of four were able to see him without a problem. Finally he did see him then that night, and this was covered on Russian TV. But he wasn't at the dinner party where the award was given, despite being a proud father supporting his son. He seemed to be an utter captive of Kucherena, telling the press meeting him at the airport that he would follow Kucherena's schedule for him while in Moscow, and follow his lead on what to do and say.
o The four claimed Snowden is running out of funds. But of course, we know that the FPF is raising money directly for Snowden, and could have easily given any of the four funds to take with them. You can take $10,000 out of the US without declaring it, and you can take it into Russia and declare it and they don't care if you leave it behind if you have receipts (and they don't always check unless they want to make trouble for you, they want that hard currency).
Streetwise -- and Joshua Foust -- both say that the presence of Kucherena "proves" that the FSB is handling Snowden, because Kucherena sits on the community board of the FSB, one of those contrived "civil society" fakeries for which Putin is famous.
But while I wish it did prove this, and I don't doubt for a moment that Snowden is controlled by the Russians, we don't have proof of it. (And note -- that's not the same thing -- as it is for Greenwald -- as saying that we've exonerated Snowden from defecting to the Russians -- we haven't.)
So why am I being scrupulous? Because we do need some evidence eventually. For one, we can't be sure it's actually the FSB that is assigned to Snowden - it could be the SVR (foreign intelligence) or the GRU (military intelligence) or both or all three, as the issues around him overlap, since he is a defector from what is signals intelligence. I'd like to hear some more expert opinion on that. In that case, as Kucherena isn't related to them exactly, then we'd have to figure out who is (the translator? the unknown person taking the picture?)
I think it has been Putin's strategy all along to feign distance from Snowden, and make it look like "civil society" is taking care of him, the way civic groups would take care of refugees in other countries.
Even so, there's no need to obsess only on the laptops. The Russians could be getting intelligence from Snowden of another kind -- the HUMINT around things like command structures, personalities, personal conflicts, etc. etc. that would also be valuable and which they might not be able to get from their existing moles. They could get that willingly, or they could bug him and get everything he says and whom he talks to, and draw clues from that. Obviously, he's in a fishbowl.
On the other hand, my guess as a total amateur here is that Snowden is probably pretty well played out. He was not a full-time staff person, but only a contract worker, working remotely in firms that had contracts with the NSA. His hacks show all kinds of access, but it still is an open question as to whether he alone gained access to all those files, or whether he had help.
There's something more we know about Sarah Harrison now in addition to this meeting in Moscow. She was very much involved (she's in the film in the London scenes with Assange and the Central Asian journalists, and listed in the credits) in the Mediastan film. That film had to have been made in late 2011, judging from the scene where they film the hunger-striking oil workers in Zhanaozen, who began demonstrating in October of 2011 before they were shot and some of them were killed in December 2011.The film crew goes through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan with a group of Russian helpers and the notorious Johanness Wahlstrom, son of Israel Shamir. You don't get to just drive through these countries casually, buying a visa at the border. You need to process the visa applications as press in advance, normally you need a sponsor to invite you into the country. Sarah Harrison appears to have had connections in Russia and Central Asia -- likely through Shamir who publishes in the pro-government media -- to get this entire trip organized. Wahlstrom, who is a Swedish citizen, must have retained Russian citizenship to do all that driving, I'm not sure but even if all the people on the tour had Russian passports, they would still be watched in Central Asia. Even though the group was expelled from Turkmenistan, they still drove in as far as Ashgabat and also got not only a meeting with Gubanov, but also cameras into the building of the state-run Neutral'ny Turkmenistan to film him and the city -- you don't do this casually without permits or without police stopping you.
My point is that WikiLeaks' and Sarah's hooks into the Russian special services may be deeper and go farther back than we realized -- Mediastan demonstrates it. And as I say every time the subject of Sarah comes up: what kind of visa is she on now in Russia? Who got it for her? What is her sponsoring institution? How long is it good for? Is it single or multiple entry?
Recent Comments