A Russian lawyer for Edward Snowden said on Tuesday the fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor who leaked details of the government’s mass surveillance programs was working with American and German lawyers to return home.
‘I won’t keep it secret … he wants to return back home.’
(Reuters, March 3, 2015)
Well, that didn’t take long. I thought he would hold out for at least a few years.
But here is an excerpt from “I Said Putin Would Hand Snowden Over. I Was Wrong,” October 25, 2013, which explains why I never thought he’d enjoy life as a fugitive in Russia.
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Snowden is enjoying his honeymoon period in Moscow, being fêted, oddly enough, by Westerners his WikiLeaks paymasters are flying in to sing his praises…
Snowden seems destined to emulate British double agent Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 and lived there (in Moscow), free of reprisals, until he died in 1988. It is instructive to note, however, that this fabled ‘Third Man’ lived out almost all of his 25 years in relative obscurity and penury, and not without palpable regret and abiding sorrows [which he drowned in the bottles of alcohol that eventually killed him]…
So don’t be surprised if a disillusioned Snowden ends up drinking himself to death too. After all, Philby’s Russian spymasters had just cause to treat him like a national hero, yet he still felt like little more than a Western mascot almost from day one. By contrast, Snowden’s Russian wards have no reason to treat him like anything but a traitorous rat.
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In any event, consider what Snowden’s plea to return home says about life in Putin’s Russia. After all, here is a man making a perfectly rational decision to live as a prisoner in the United States instead of as a folk hero in Russia.
But how shrewd of him to make this announcement in the media glow of the documentary about his NSA leaks winning an Oscar ten days ago. After all, Snowden is so full of himself, he probably thinks this means he’s such a bona fide national hero now that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will be compelled to grant him a sweetheart plea deal.
You know, similar to the slap on the wrist the DOJ announced yesterday it’s giving former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus for sharing classified information with his mistress, Paula Broadwell, to use in a book she was writing … about his heroic exploits. (The DOJ is recommending Petraeus serve two years probation and pay a $40,000 fine.)
But even this Petraeus comparison might be unfair to Snowden. Not least because this self-righteous SOB has been insisting, from day one, that he should be accorded the right to dictate terms for what he deems would constitute “reliable guarantees of a fair trial … even before he sets foot in court. He couldn’t care any less that, for all its faults, the United States has the fairest criminal justice system in the world; or that no defendant anywhere has ever been accorded the right he feels entitled to.
In any event, I hope Snowden is smart enough to anticipate that Putin will probably prolong his homesickness by seizing this opportunity to use him as a bargaining chip the way ISIS uses its Western hostages….
But here’s to Edward Snowden soon going the way of Bradley/Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. Remember them…?
He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.
(John le Carré, ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’)
Related commentaries:
Putin hand over Snowden…
Assassination of Russian opposition leader…
David Petraeus affair…
Snowden’s NSA leaks…
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