“This interesting fish has swum into our nets of its own accord, and it would be unthinkable of our special services to miss this rare chance to talk to a U.S. defector associated with the CIA,” Kondaurov said in an interview with The Times. “I am sure he is worried as hell that the Americans could force a plane carrying him to land and that will be the end of the road for him.”

Snowden is actually associated with the NSA, not CIA, and is not, strictly speaking, a defector at this point. He is wanted by the U.S. Justice Department for leaking top-secret documents to two newspapers, Britain’s Guardian and the Washington Post.

“Right now Moscow is the safest place for him to hide, even if he has to pay the price of being debriefed by our special services,” Kondaurov added…

“It would be totally unprofessional of Russian special services not to use this chance and not to compel him to share with us some CIA secrets,” Korotchenko said in an interview. “But we will never learn what he had to say, as by our laws state secrets are kept undisclosed for at least 50 years, some even longer than that.”