Speculative timeline of Edward Snowden’s alleged recruitment by Russian intelligence and CIA/NSA internal decisions

(27 confuse the CIA. Others are rejected as political liabilities, as happened to Wang Lijun, a well- connected police chief in China. In February 2012, Wang, walked into at the US consulate in Chengdu asking from asylum. The State Department decided against it. After Wang left US protection, he was arrested for corruption and received a 15 year prison sentence. Such decisions about walk-ins are not made with due consideration, often at the highest level of a government, since exfiltrating a defector can result in diplomatic ruptures and political embarrassments. Conversely, it raises espionage concerns when an adversary government authorizes the exfiltration of a rogue employee of an intelligence service. At minimum, it means that a rival government placed value on what the defector could provide it. The Snowden case is no exception. Whatever Snowden’s prior relations may have been with Russia, it could prudently assumed that after he fled to Moscow, in light of the intelligence value of the stolen documents, he would wind up in the hands of the Russian security services. That assumption was reinforced by subsequent countermeasures that were implemented by Russia to block secret sources of NSA surveillance. “Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks, communications sources dried up, tactics were changed,” Michael Morell who was at that time the Deputy Director of the CIA, revealed. It indicated that at least part of the US communications intelligence that Snowden had stole was in enemy hands. The CIA and NSA’s monitoring of these countermeasures was itself extremely delicate since revealing what they learned about Russian and Chinese countermeasures risked compromising even more U.S communications sources than had Snowden. General Keith B. Alexander headed both the NSA and Cyber Command at the time these countermeasures were first detected in 2013. He said in his interview with the Australian Business Review: “We absolutely need to know what Russia’s involvement is with Snowden.” He further said, “I think Snowden is now being manipulated by Russian intelligence. I just don't know when that exactly started.". Much turned on the answer to this “when” question. The counterintelligence issue was not if this U.S. intelligence defector in Moscow was under Russian control, but when he came under it. There were three possible time periods when Snowden might have been brought under control by the Russian intelligence service: while he was still working for the NSA; after he arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013; or after he arrived in Russia on June 23, 2013. The NSA Scenario The first scenario could stretch as far back as when Snowden was forced out of the CIA in 2009. It will be recalled that the CIA then had planned to launch a security investigation of Snowden but it was aborted when he resigned. He also had incurred large losses speculating in the financial markets in Geneva, which is an activity which had in the past attracted in interest of foreign intelligence services. So it had to be considered in this scenario that Snowden had been recruited by the Russians after he left the CIA and directed to take jobs at civilian contractors servicing the NSA. Such “career management,” as it is called by the CIA, could explain why Snowden had switched jobs in March 2013 to Booz Allen Hamilton, which, unlike his previous employer Dell, allowed him to gain proximity the super-secrets list of the telecommunication systems that the NSA had penetrated in Russia and China. Even though Snowden himself did not HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020279