Spies from Russia, China, Cuba, and other nations have targeted the essential secrets of U.S. intelligence capabilities in order to be able to defeat them. Now Snowdens and the WikiLeakers of the world are helping
A recent Wall Street Journal column carries the appropriate headline, "A Press Corps Full of Snowdenistas," and describes the acolytes of National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden in the Western press as "utterly paranoid about their own governments, strangely trusting about the aims of the Kremlin." It is written by Edward Lucas, a journalist who understands and exposes Russian intelligence and espionage operations. He wrote Deception. The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today. His new book, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster, is must reading.
Lacking definitive proof, Lucas does not charge that the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, was directly behind Snowden from the get-go. Instead, he convincingly argues that Russian intelligence manipulated Snowden through third parties such as WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald. This does not mean, he emphasizes, that Snowden's collaborators were "conscious agents" of Moscow. Instead, they operate in a certain "propaganda environment" in which "political movements in the West can serve the Kremlin's purpose without hands-on control."