A decade ago this week, Edward Snowden became the most famous American defector and Vladimir Putin ’s pet when he landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. He had arrived on an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong, China .
With that trip, Snowden’s future in Russia was determined. Ten years later, he is a Russian citizen. Like all defectors to Moscow, Snowden’s life is ultimately controlled by the Kremlin’s powerful intelligence agencies, his hosts.
SWEETHEART HUNTER PLEA IS A GIFT TO BIDEN AND TRUMP
Overnight, the 30-year-old Snowden became the darling of radical activists worldwide by stealing more than a million government documents, many of them highly classified, while he worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency in Hawaii. Snowden then gifted many of the documents to sympathetic journalists. With that theft, Snowden became the NSA’s walking nightmare.
More than a decade before his defection, NSA counterintelligence officials (I was one of them) worried about someone just like Snowden appearing. The famously secretive NSA — for decades, it was joked to stand for No Such Agency — kept a low profile since its birth in 1952, and agency leaders liked it that way.
NSA officials were happy to let CIA get the media attention, and the political critiques that often followed.
NSA dodged a bullet in the 1990s with the so-called ECHELON propaganda campaign that was scripted by Russian intelligence to undermine the agency as the linchpin of the Western intelligence alliance, the core of which is the Anglosphere Five Eyes signals intelligence partnership dating to World War Two. ECHELON caused Washington political problems, especially in Europe, but that was washed away by the 9/11 attacks.
Later, Snowden changed the spy game to Moscow’s advantage because he stole the family jewels, NSA’s most closely guarded secrets, and exposed them to the world.
But how much has really changed?
A decade after Snowden made the NSA world famous in a very negative way, making the secret sky seem to fall, the agency is very much in business and still remains the cornerstone of the Western intelligence alliance. That secret partnership, alongside a lot of NATO weapons and munitions, is keeping Ukraine alive with real-time intelligence that is helping to kill lots of Russians.
If Snowden was supposed to put NSA out of business, he failed.
There have been changes, of course.
The USA Freedom Act of 2015 prohibited the bulk collection of metadata on Americans, which Snowden exposed. Many highly classified NSA and Allied intelligence programs were compromised by Snowden’s revelations, although exactly how much damage that wrought on the Intelligence Community is itself classified. Snowden’s theft and defection triggered the biggest counterintelligence investigation in NSA history.
The agency deserves blame for its slipshod security that allowed Snowden access to its secrets, which he stole on an industrial scale.
However, the Snowden myth has eroded over the past decade. His posturing as a freedom-loving whistleblower was blown apart by the bipartisan assessment of the House Intelligence Committee, which depicted Snowden as a conman and disgruntled employee who became a turncoat for Moscow. His move to Russia under Putin’s roof exposed the essential fraudulence of the Snowden show. Who in his right mind masquerades as a freedom-lover from Moscow while the Putin regime murders its enemies and is trying to annihilate Ukraine?
Neither is he going anywhere. Snowden professes a desire to return home, but he will be prosecuted by the Justice Department for his crimes if he attempts to do so. Neither is it safe for Snowden to travel to many places beyond Russia. His life today, with his wife and two Russian-born sons, is limited to wherever Putin wants him to be. Snowden just turned 40. His middle age will be spent in Russia, barring major geopolitical changes.
Not that the Russian strongman shows affection for his guest. Putin once referred to Snowden as "a strange guy," and cautioned that "he doomed himself to a pretty difficult life." Professional intelligence officers like Putin despise defectors as weaklings and traitors, even when they help their side.
The lives of Western defectors to Russia are seldom happy or pleasant. NSA’s William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, who defected to Moscow in 1960, making them the Snowdens before Snowden, became miserable alcoholics, who died in exile in Mexico and Russia, respectively. CIA’s Edward Lee Howard, who fled to Moscow in 1985, also wanted to come home but instead died in a mysterious fall at his Russian dacha.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
The odds of Snowden finding a happy ending, therefore, seem long. In the meantime, NSA remains on the job, secretly, serving in silence.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
