Was Snowden Spying for Russia Seven Years ago? CIA Fears Fugitive Handed Over 'Treasure Trove' of Secrets to Moscow
- Snowden said he was acting for the good of the country
- The 30-year-old doesn't believe he should be given a lengthy prison term
- Former NSA worker denied having links to Russia
- He says State Department is responsible for his exile in Moscow
- Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, claims Russians were in touch with Snowden in 2007 when he was stationed in Geneva
- Described Snowden as a 'Walter Mitty' character for claiming he was a spy but also said his leaks would cause damage to intelligence gathering
AP, 23 October 2014
The CIA believes Edward Snowden may have been recruited by the Russians as long as seven years ago and could have passed on a ‘treasure trove’ of secrets.
The US intelligence agency is investigating whether the fugitive, now living in Moscow, betrayed his country by working for the Putin regime as a double agent as early as 2007.
Robert Baer, a former senior CIA official, told the Mail that the fact Snowden had ended up in Russia was a likely sign that Moscow had signed him up when he was working for the spy agency in Geneva.
Edward Snowden says he acted on behalf of the American people when he revealed secret NSA files
Revelations: NBC's Brian Williams traveled to Moscow to interview Snowden about his case
He said that if secrets had been passed to the Russians it may have helped them in their recent annexation of Crimea, as they could have changed the codes and frequencies of their communications to stop the US listening in. Security chiefs in the UK are furious at the Snowden leaks and say incalculable damage has been done by them.
However, they do not share the belief that Snowden was recruited by the Russians while working for the CIA in Geneva.
And in an interview in May 2014, Snowden denied he had any relationship with the Russian government, claiming he had the best interests of the American public at heart when he leaked secret files to the media.
The fugitive caused outrage last year by releasing thousands of National Security Agency documents to the Guardian and the Washington Post.
They detailed the NSA’s practice of harvesting data on millions of telephone calls made in the US and around the world, and revealed the agency had snooped on foreign leaders.
He fled the US last May and has been living under temporary asylum in Russia ever since.
Mr Baer said he had been told by contacts at the CIA that they were carrying out a ‘damage assessment’ into whether Snowden handed sensitive information to the Russians.
‘They are looking at the possibility that information was passed on,’ he said. ‘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.’
Disillusioned: Snowden claims he was motivated to act after managers failed to listen when he raised concerns about the NSA's surveillance
Homesick: Snowden says he would like to return to the U.S. and doesn't believe he deserves to be jailed
From 2007 to 2009, Snowden was posted to Geneva, where he worked as a ‘communicator’, looking through intelligence reports and passing them on to headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
He was so trusted during this time that he was chosen to provide President Obama with support at the 2008 Nato summit in Romania.
But Mr Baer said he could have ‘betrayed’ his country by passing information to Moscow.
‘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.’
Robert Baer says Edward Snowden's actions have hugely damaged U.S. and UK intelligence gathering
Snowden fled to Russia after a brief spell in Hong Kong during which he was expected to seek asylum in a South American state.
But Mr Baer said he suspected the stopover in the Far East had been part of a deliberate ploy to muddy the waters. ‘Why did he not get a plane to South America in the first place? None of it stands up. It looks like a recruitment operation.’
Speaking earlier on BBC Radio 4, Mr Baer said he believed Snowden should go to jail for a long time, because letting such a high-profile whistleblower go free would set a dangerous precedent.
‘If you take that attitude with any whistleblower you’d have a really bad problem,’ he said. ‘Could it lead to another catastrophe? I’d say yes.
‘That’s a treasure trove that the Russians could use for years and years. They’re going to know all the parameters about our intercepts and GCHQ’s as well.’
Denial: The Moscow-based NSA whistlebower said he was not working with the Russian government
Mr Baer also derided Snowden’s claims in an NBC interview that he was a bona fide spy as ‘silly’.
‘I think we all know by now he was a systems administrator,’ he said. ‘When he worked in Geneva, he was a communicator – that means he sits in an office and relays messages back to Langley. That’s not a spy.
‘And secondly the NSA doesn’t have spies overseas. It’s got technicians who sit in American embassies and sort of listen to scanners. So I worry about his common sense here. He has a Walter Mitty complex it seems to me.’
Mr Baer said Snowden’s actions would cost Western intelligence agencies billions of dollars as they are forced to rebuild their communications systems.
Exclusive: The hour long interview was filmed in a Moscow hotel
Secret service: Snowden told NBC's Brian Williams he had been trained as a spy and had worked undercover for the CIA and the National Security Agency
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