Edward Snowden was in Moscow's Sights
-Six Years Before Leaking U.S. Secrets Claims Former KGB Agent
- Moscow identified Edward Snowden as a possible defector in 2007
- Former KGB chief Boris Karpichkov said Moscow 'tricked' Snowden
- Russians began monitoring Snowde
- Edward Snowden admits he was Trained as a Spy
- n, 30, in Geneva while at the CIA
- US officials trying to establish whether Snowden as a double agent
By Daily Mail UK, 8 June 2014
Russian spies 'tricked' US whistleblower Edward Snowden into asking Moscow for asylum by posing as diplomats after spending six years targeting him, a former major in the KGB has claimed.
Boris Karpichkov, who fled Russia after 15 years serving with the KGB said Snowden had been identified as a potential defector as far back as 2007.
Snowden, 30, arrived in Moscow after he was revealed as responsible for leaking more than 1.7 million highly classified US documents.
Former KGB spy Boris Karpichkov, top, said Russian security services first identified Edward Snowden,
as a possible defector back in 2007 while he working with the CIA in Geneva as a communications specialist
Karpichkov told reporters that Russian security agents leaked information concerning Snowden's arrival in Moscow to provoke the US into action.
The US cancelled Snowden's passport before he could get a connecting flight out of Moscow, forcing him to seek asylum.
According to Karpichkov: 'It was a trick and he fell for it. Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses.'
Karpichkov said: 'He lives in a block of flats in Moscow’s *suburbs controlled by the FSB. His flat is heavily alarmed to stop anything happening to him. He meets the FSB twice a week over plenty of food and drink.'
Former CIA official Robert Baer has said the US has began investigating whether Snowden had been turned by the Russians in 2007.
Bauer believes the Russians will want to know the extent of the West's electronic interception capability.
Edward Snowden, right, told Brian Williams, left, that he had been trained as a spy
by the CIA had had lived undercover using as assumed name and working in a cover job
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Mr Baer said his former colleagues at the CIA were conducting a 'damage assessment' to determine what top secret information Snowden handed over to the Russians.
According to Baer, the Russians first became aware of Snowden while he was working for the CIA in Geneva.
He said: 'They are looking at the possibility that information was passed on. It’s a damage assessment – clearly what he saw in Geneva has to be looked at and it has to be assumed that he passed it on to Russia.’
He said: 'You’d be seeing the intelligence briefings that Geneva would get. You’d also be getting NSA reports. That’s the sort of regular stuff he’d be getting across his desk.
'He was a disaster there. As a communicator he will have seen everything.’
Snowden could also have seen information sent by British intelligence, Mr Baer said.
‘There’s a daily intelligence briefing which gives you a summary of chatter and intercepts and diplomatic communication. He could have easily given it to Russia. I think it is just horrendous.'
Meanwhile, Snowden last week admitted that he was trained in espionage. He made the claim during an interview with Brian Williams.
Quote:
Snowden said: 'I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine.'
'But I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert. I don’t work with people. I don’t recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I’ve done that at all levels from — from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.'
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MORE: Edward Snowden's Interview with Brian Williams— saying "I Was Trained as a Spy”
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