Edward Jay Epstein is my favorite investigative journalist and the author of several of my favorite books including, most recently, How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. Ed has forwarded his thoughts on Snowden’s becoming a Russian citizen. Ed writes:
… This raises the question of what the American defector has been doing in Moscow for the past eight-and-one-half years. When I met in 2015 with Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s Moscow lawyer, Kucherena said that Snowden had been employed by a Moscow cyber security enterprise. I asked the name of the firm but Kucherena said he could not reveal it because of lawyer-client privilege. Nor has Snowden ever publicly revealed the occupation through which he earns his living and supports his wife and child in Russia.
He does, however, have skills and knowledge, which he freely discusses with journalists. For example, he told the editor of the Guardian in Moscow in 2014, “If I were providing information that I know, that’s in my head, to some foreign government, the US intelligence community would . . . see sources go dark that were previously productive.” That sort of knowledge, as well as the skill set by which he acquired it, could be of considerable value in Russia. Although Snowden’s activities in Moscow since 2013 have never been fully disclosed, Putin evidently appreciated them enough them enough to award Snowden citizenship during his disastrous war in Ukraine.
What is less of a mystery is Snowden’s choices. He chose to betray the American intelligence service for whom he worked by taking its secrets. He chose to accept the protection of the Putin regime to avoid prosecution in the U.S. He chose to accept Putin’s gift of Russian citizenship. In short, in his moral vacuity, he chose sides by throwing in not with the critics of liberal democracy but with its sworn enemies.
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