Russia might be "handling" Snowden as they have other agents in the past. [View all]

[pnwmom]

A former KGB agent who has been living in the UK in exile for decades believes Snowden might be getting the same treatment he did when the Soviets wanted information from him.

http://world.time.com/2013/07/10/snowden-in-moscow-what-are-russian-authorities-doing-with-the-nsa-whistleblower/

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So Gordievsky believes Snowden would have gotten roughly the same treatment that the KGB spy got back in 1985. “They would have fed him something to loosen his tongue,” Gordievsky says by phone from the U.K., where he has been living in exile for nearly three decades. “Many different kinds of drugs are available, as I experienced for myself.” Having been called back to Moscow, Gordievsky says his KGB comrades drugged him with a substance that “turned out his lights” and made him “start talking in a very animated way.” Although the drug wiped out most of his memory of the incident, the parts he did recollect horrified him the following morning, when he woke up feeling ill. “I realized that I had completely compromised myself,” he says.

One of the substances the KGB used for such purposes at the time was called SP-117, which is odorless, tasteless and colorless, according Alexander Kouzminov, a former Russian intelligence operative who describes the drug’s effectiveness in his book, Biological Espionage. Now living in New Zealand, Kouzminov worked in the 1980s and early 1990s for the Foreign Intelligence Service, the spy agency known as the SVR, which handles undercover agents, or “illegals,” stationed in foreign countries. In his book, Kouzminov writes that various drugs were used periodically to test these operatives for signs of disloyalty or diversion. Once the drug had worn off, the agents would have no recollection of what they had said and, if their test results were satisfactory, they could be sent back into the field as though nothing had happened.

Although it is impossible to determine which of Russia’s secret services could be handling Snowden’s case, Gordievsky believes it would be either the SVR or the Federal Agency for Government Communication and Information, known as FAPSI, which answers directly to the Kremlin. FAPSI is the Russian analogue to the U.S. National Security Agency, where Snowden worked as a contractor before fleeing to Hong Kong in May with a cache of the agency’s files.


Most of the secrets Snowden has exposed are related to the NSA’s vast surveillance programs, which he revealed to be collecting data on tens of millions of phone calls and Internet communications around the world. FAPSI, which operates its own data gathering stations in various countries, mostly in the former Soviet Union, would be keen to learn as much as possible about the work of its American counterpart. “[Snowden] could have information about the internal parameters of these systems, their lists of targets and priorities,” says Vladimir Rubanov, who headed the KGB’s analytical directorate in 1991-1992, after which he served three years as deputy head of the Russian Security Council. “Yes, all of this is pretty interesting,” he says. “And it is a fool who has the chance to get information and misses it.”



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