Saturday, July 6, 2013

Is Snowden a Spy or a Hero?


By Alan Caruba

Interesting to see how Edward Snowden, former employee of a National Security Agency contractor, has dropped off the front pages; how quickly he has become “old news”.

The leaders of the European Union are shocked to learn that the U.S. spies on them. Since their own spy agencies routinely share information with the intelligence agencies of our government, it did not come as a big a surprise to them.

The real surprise is how much spying our government does on American citizens.

Even in the days when the Continental Congress sent representatives to France to negotiate deals to acquire arms and secure its support for our Revolution the British spied on them, opening their mail, and such. George Washington won the Revolution in large part to an excellent network of his own spies. Spying is as old as mankind.


Though he embarrassed the President and the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden is not likely to be granted asylum in Russia. The odds are that Snowden has been a witting or unwitting agent of what used to be called the KGB and now goes by the name of the Federal Security Services, FSB. It is responsible for internal security and counter-intelligence.

It should come as no surprise, however, that two Communist nations, Venezuela and Nicaragua, have offered Snowden asylum.

The old KGB was closely involved with another American who went to Russia. He was Lee Harvey Oswald who history records as returning to the U.S. and later assassinating President Kennedy. The highest ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, has written “Disinformation”, revealing the long history of deception perfected under Lenin, Stalin, and others among the parade of KGB agents that served as its prime minister in the wake of Stalin’s death.

In 2007, Pecepa’s book, “Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination” in which he revealed that Oswald had been recruited for ideological reasons when he was a U.S. Marine stationed in Japan. “When he insisted on defecting to the Soviet paradise, the KGB kept him there for three years and then persuaded him to return to the United States temporarily, in order to assassinate President Kennedy, who had badly humiliated Oswald’s idol, Khrushchev. before the whole world.” Khrushchev changed his mind, but Oswald was determined to go ahead.

Everything old is new again!

A Daniel Greenfield commentary posted on New Media Journal.com notes that “Foreign intelligence agencies look for people with security clearances who go through a lot of money in short periods of time, who simmer with grudges and grievances, who are rootless and dissatisfied. These descriptions adequately cover Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, two men who should never have been given any kind of clearance whatsoever on personality alone.”

FSB Logo
It is pure speculation, but there is reason to believe that Snowden was recruited “for ideological reasons” and given the assignment to secure access to the NSA secrets. His escape to Hong Kong and then onto Russia smacks of some real planning. I don’t know who is funding WikiLeaks, but it would not surprise me to learn that it was the FSB. What an easy way to dupe people like Bradley Manning into providing information the FSB might otherwise not be able to secure. If anyone deserves the firing squad, it is Manning.

On July 1st Snowden said “In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised—and it should be.”

Former Soviet KGB officials are now the Russian Federation government, starting with Putin and including every other member of his executive team. The process of disinformation continues; reaching back to the days of the czars.

As Pacepa notes, “In a 2008 Rasmussen poll, only 53% of Americans preferred capitalism to socialism, with another 27% unsure, and 20% strongly opting for socialism.”
 
That was also the year a totally unknown Illinois Senator leaped from virtual anonomy to capture the presidency. Despite strong connections with radical leftists, his charm and the “slobbering love affair” that ensued from the news media put him in the Oval Office and have kept him there. Along with the White House, the FSB agents stationed here routinely leak or spin stories to these dupes.

Pacepa points out that Obama has engineered the extraordinary takeover of “the U.S. banking sector, home mortgages, school loans, automakers, and most of the healthcare industry.” If the President has not long been and continues to be a FSB agent of influence, then he is surely the greatest of what Lenin used to call his “useful idiots.”

Under the Communist premiers from Lenin to Putin, disinformation has had two goals; to undermine faith in the Judeo-Christian religions, especially the spread of anti-Semitism, and to advance communism/socialism worldwide.

Old journalists like myself will tell you that there is no such thing as a coincidence. This is particularly true on the world stage. There are always unseen hands seeking to set events in motion or to control and correct the outcome of unforeseen events. I have always been wary of conspiracy theories, but that does not mean that conspiracies do not exist.

As for Snowden, Douglas J. Hagmann, a private investigator with strong ties inside the U.S. government among people who are deeply concerned of actions taken by the Obama administration, recently wrote: “Edward Snowden made a conscious decision to expose a massive, draconian system of spying on American citizens that he believed is violating the rights of every American. He could not reconcile his responsibilities under the executive order in which he was working with his knowledge as an American citizen himself.”

I recommend you read Pacepa’s book with its astonishing revelations based on decades within the inner circles of the Rumanian and Russian secret services. At the end of his book, he says, “Let us reject the Marxist redistribution of wealth which has transformed so many once-noble countries into lands looking like giant trailer camps hit by a hurricane…” warning against “the disinformation, the glasnost, that has been used so destructively over the years to squash freedom and bankrupt countries.”

Maybe Snowden is a hero? There are such people, you know. Or a dupe? That’s possible, too.  One thing is sure, more and more Americans are coming to fear the current administration..

© Alan Caruba, 2013

10 comments:

Ronbo said...

One thing is for sure - America is no longer a free country.

TexasFred said...

Most Americans have the attention span of a 3 year old..

Longstreet said...

Great piece, Alan.

So far as I am concerned, the jury is still out on Snowden. I expect it will take time and distance to determine what, exactly, he really is -- spy or hero.

JDL

Alan Caruba said...

As you can tell, I have no idea if Snowden is a spy or a hero either. My guess is that he was "encouraged" to provide WikiLeaks with the NSA data and my best guess is that WikiLeaks is a front from the Russian FSB security agency.

Harry Dale Huffman said...

The bottom line is that Snowden acted to protect the basic freedom of Americans to not be continually lied to by their leaders, and to not be subjected to unreasonable search and seizure of even our personal communications. He should be a hero to real Americans, those who seriously value their individual freedoms, so carefully laid down at the very beginning of the United States of America. Insofar as you think the jury is still out on him, you have already given up on your rights. You know Obama, and the Insane Left he represents, lies to the American people every day, in every way. Obama is the traitor, the Insane Left is traitorous of all our individual freedoms, and the Right is clueless and abetting of the treason. Enough of the KGB/FSB crap--you should be worried, and outraged, first last and always by the misinformation fed to us by the Insane Left and its pet media, and by the incompetence of the Right to stand up to it.

What is going on is not just a conspiracy by the Left, or the Communists, or any group of men. I have tried to tell people, including you and your readers, something of the greater tide running against all men today, but I don't have the kind of details needed to convince most--because what is going on is a general ascendance of dogma in the minds of the people of Earth, and the dogmas are specific to the specific groups and individual members of those groups who harbor those specific dogmas. What is going on is a meta-conspiracy, a general testing of mankind. And mankind is too grasping of what it has, or in many cases only thinks it has, to recognize, much less focus upon for long, the overriding threat, among all the lesser ones--revolution must come, even many revolutions all on top of one another, and considering the avoidance behavior of practically everyone, that means wars must come to enable the revolutions. I personally only know much about the scientific revolution, because I have started it with my own unprecedented discoveries, which will demand the fundamental rethinking and redeveloping of many fields of science, especially the earth and life sciences. I know there are other revolutions are coming because it is obvious in everyday affairs, increasingly over the last ten years, in the same time frame that I have been trying to inform others of my scientific discoveries. It is all tied together, and at the bottom it is incompetence on the part of modern man, due to his clinging to his many different false and divisive dogmas, both ancient and modern. For you see, my scientific discovery, put succinctly, has been to uncover the single, objective origin for all the earliest, religiously-held dogmas of mankind, responsible for all the so-called "ancient mysteries". And the world IS NOT ready to handle that uncovering, and is instead grasping at its dogmas, even the most unforgiving and bloody. Never has the world needed gentleness, dispassionate reason, and a unifying love of God--or love of one's fellow man--like it does now; and, you see, it obviously doesn't have any of those prerequisites. Everyone's thinking is in common and sordid ruts, day in and day out.

Unknown said...

He is a liar, thief and a spy. He is no hero. He took that job with the sole purpose to gain access to information, in order to disseminate it. He signed the non-disclosure agreement, knowing that he was not going to follow it. If he thought what he knew was against the law, there are channels you can follow to stop it. But giving information to foreign governments in order to damage ours, now makes him a criminal.

RStabb said...

Let's hope Snowden writes a book while in exile and explains his thoughts.
Spy or hero, who knows. Right or wrong he did expose what the creeps in the White House are up to.

Doug said...

Would it matter if it were Vladimir Putin that told you the U.S. Government was spying on innocent civilians? Why are we even talking about the motives of Snowden and not the fact that our privacy is all but gone. So, you don't do anything illegal and you don't have anything to worry about? Stick a camera above your toilet and let the world watch while you take a crap. Just because you're not doing anything illegal now doesn't mean that laws won't change tomorrow. And I'd be willing to be that there's not a single adult American living right now that isn't doing SOMETHING they could pin on you if they wanted/needed. 20 years ago Obama (and Bush) would've been impeached for what they're doing now. But because we're like frogs in the pot not even noticing the temperature of the water rising we're about to be burned alive. 9-11 did exactly what Bin Laden wanted. It's destroying the foundations of what made us free. The Patriot Act if used for it's intended purposes would've been fine but like all "acts" enacted by congress it gets abused by the next politician to figure out how that power can best keep his party in office. We need to stop worrying about Snowden and his intensions and start looking at ways to stop a locomotive when all we have is a feather. The ability to find this post as easy as a Google search when they're recording EVERYTHING is a bigger undertaking than the Manhattan Project. It should be completed in a couple of years if not sooner. We need to wake up.

Fred Mangels said...

Snowden's revelations were no surprise to me, just as I'm sure they weren't much of surprise to terrorists, the Russians or Chinese. He simply exposed Americans to some things that were in their best interest to know.

RStabb said...

In Snowdens' own words...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video