If You Didn’t Get That Wikileaks Was Russia’s Handmaiden Before, You Should Now
Sarah Harrison has left Snowden’s side in Russia, and joined the Berlin cabal (Poitras, Appelbaum, Holger Stark, et al.) I won’t bore you with her tedious announcement: Google it in case you need a sick laugh.
The fact that she stayed so long in defiance of typical Russian visa regulations already suggested that she was essentially acting as an agent of the Russians all along, shepherding Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Russians bent and broke the rules to permit her to stay. Presumably because she was working with them, or for them. This would be consistent with Assange’s pro-Russian tilt.
The fact that they let her go only reinforces that conclusion. She knows a great deal. About where Snowden is. About his experiences in Russia. And most notably, about the relationship between Snowden and the security services.
If the Russians, and notably FSB/GRU/SVR, believed that she was at all unreliable, they would not have let her go and risk having this information come out. The fact that they did let her leave makes it beyond plain that she is a reliable tool of the Russian security services, and that by extension Assange and Wikileaks are too.
Her current location also strongly suggests that the rest of the Berlin cabal is also considered highly reliable by the Russians. And why wouldn’t they? The entire agenda, the entire body of “reporting” is damaging to the US and highly beneficial to the Russians and Putin.
Not that those who pass for journalists in the US and Europe will connect these huge dots.
+++Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.+++
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/net-us-usa-security-snowden-idUSBRE9A703020131108
Somehow this sounds very beleivable: a typical office environment. No one seemed to realize that the house rules for an NSA outfit must differ a bit form those at Re/Max…
Comment by LL — November 8, 2013 @ 4:53 am
“Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity” (c)
Comment by LL — November 8, 2013 @ 4:54 am
LL: Tanks for posting the link. Two things in the article stunned me. One is that local management didn’t realise Snowden was collecting logins and passwords. That would light a bright red light in any start-up I have ever worked at. The second is that intelligence agencies want funding to install software that tracks access to materials. I find it amazing that they have not had that ever since they had computers. From what I have read, back in the days when intelligence was stored on paper, every document had a readers’ slip that recorded everyone who had ever drawn the document out of the library, and each intelligence employee had a rating that entitled him or her to a specific set of documents.
I’m no fan of Snowden, but he may end up doing us a bit of a favour unintentionally by starting some house cleaning.
Comment by jon livesey — November 8, 2013 @ 3:26 pm
It’s not related to this particular post, but why while talking about Snowden nobody remembered the case of Martin & Mitchell, who defected from the NSA in 1960 taking the very similar route to the one Snowden took?
Of course, the publicity then was different. I personally became aware of their case after reading Andrew’s & Gordievsky’s “KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations”
Here is the relevant WP page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection
Comment by Misha — December 30, 2013 @ 7:57 pm
@Thanks, Misha. I had heard of them. Will read more.
Welcome 🙂
I’m from Georgia (not the US 🙂 and by comparing how Putin operates here (i.e. 2008 war preparations and all) to the history of Soviet KGB or GRU I am more and more sure that methods today are the same that worked before (as far as even back in 30-60s). This case might be one of the proofs.
Comment by Misha — December 30, 2013 @ 8:10 pm
@Misha-I’d be interested in your take on the posts I wrote about the Russo-Georgia War back in August-September 2008.
There are clearly parallels between Chekist methods today, and Chekist methods going back to the days of Dzerzhinski and every day in between.
I’ll read the through. Is there a tag I can search by?
As for 2008 War itself, IMHO it was a well planned, and amazingly enough, well executed Kremlin’s special operation, which started in 2006 (or maybe even earlier), when Putin understood that Misha isn’t going to bend under. The goal was to at least slow down Georgia’s movement towards NATO and, if possible, remove Saakashvili. Besides pure military component the operation included both:
— active measures like spreading rumors about Saakashvili, that he’s crazy, unstable, etc., that he’s building up military to take those breakaway regions by force, and so on. And then, after the war, pushing “both are to blame” version in the West, especially the EU.
— special measures like blowing up things in Georgia core, sending Russian GRU Spetsnaz into South Ossetia to shoot to both Georgian and Ossetian villages to provoke sporadic local shootouts;
I once expressed my amazement to Andrey Illarionov on how well coordinated and well executed overall the operation was, to which he replied that the myth that Kremlin is weak and doesn’t control Russia is the result of one of the best disinformation campaigns by Kremlin for at least last 20 years.
Comment by Misha — December 31, 2013 @ 3:02 am
@Misha-To the right -> there is a sidebar where posts are archived by months. Pretty much most of what I was writing about during August and September of ’08 related to the war.
My main theme was that it was obviously a planned operation-and provocation-and not, as the Kremlin insisted, an extemporaneous response to an unprovoked Georgian attack on Russian “peacekeepers.”
Illarionov actually thinks that Russian peacekeepers were killed by the Army Spetsnaz (Brigade 10). And I can believe that.
Comment by Misha — December 31, 2013 @ 9:25 am