SNOWDEN MAY HAVE SOME CLARIFYING TO DO AFTER BOMBSHELL REPORTS THAT RUSSIA AND CHINA ACCESSED NSA FILES

15.06.2015

SNOWDEN MAY HAVE SOME CLARIFYING TO DO AFTER BOMBSHELL REPORTS THAT RUSSIA AND CHINA ACCESSED NSA FILES

MICHAEL B KELLEY

The Sunday Times reports that Russia and China decrypted files stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, forcing the UK intelligence service, MI6, to pull officers out of live operations in hostile countries.

"Western intelligence agencies say they have been forced into the rescue operations after Moscow gained access to more than [1 million] classified files," the London paper, citing senior UK officials, reports.

A senior UK government source told the BBC that China and Russia "have information" that led to agents being moved, adding there was "no evidence" any officers had been harmed. The source added that the information included "knowledge of how we operate" and had obstructed the UK from getting "vital information."

If the reports are true, then Snowden has some explaining to do — especially given that he has repeatedly said that Russia and China could not have possibly received documents.

Snowden told former US Sen. Gordon Humphrey in July 2013 that "no intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. ... I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture."

The 31-year-old told James Risen of The New York Times in October 2013 that there was “a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”

Risen also reported, citing an encrypted chat with Snowden, that the former CIA technician "gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong." (ACLU lawyer and Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner subsequently told me that the report was inaccurate.)

Snowden would later tell NBC that he "destroyed" all documents in his possession before he spoke with the Russians in Hong Kong.

"The best way to make sure that for example the Russians can't break my fingers and — and compromise information or — or hit me with a bag of money until I give them something was not to have it at all," he told Brian Williams of NBC in Moscow in May 2014. "And the way to do that was by destroying the material that I was holding before I transited through Russia."