Snowden May Wish He Went To Jail In America If He Accepts Putin’s Offer Of Russian Exile

[Tx4obama]

Snowden May Wish He Went To Jail In America If He Accepts Putin’s Offer Of Russian Exile

Six months after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the American defector Victor Norris Hamilton surfaced in a Russian mental hospital. He had been missing for more than 20 years. The 75-year-old former cryptologist for the National Security Agency had defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. His family was shocked to learn of his whereabouts, noting that they had last had contact with him in 1973. They were equally surprised to learn that Hamilton was committed to hospital in a Moscow suburb in 1971 where he disappeared for 20 years.

Hamilton’s unfortunate ordeal is once again relevant. It provides context for the news that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been effectively offered sanctuary by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the condition that he renounce his especially unhelpful habit of revealing American intelligence gathering secrets to the press (and instead reveal them only to the Federal Security Service). Putin said that, provided he provide Washington with some perfunctory assurances that he will no longer regularly embarrass the American intelligence community, Snowden can leave the international limbo of Sheremetyevo airport and work peacefully in the Russian Federation. If Snowden takes Putin up on his generous offer, history suggests he will wish he had not.

Foreign Policy magazine has a compiled a list of cases of American defectors who provided the Soviets with troves of secrets about American intelligence gathering techniques and methods. Their stories are less than heartening for would-be defectors.

FP details the stories of agents like William Martin and Bernon Mitchell; NSA cryptologists who defected to Moscow in the 1960s where they married and worked for a time, but had trouble adjusting. “According to the NSA’s in-house report on the incident, both men asked to leave Russia within a year of their defection, ‘but no country would accept them,’” writes FP’s J. Dana Stuster. “Mitchell died in Moscow, but in time Martin made it as far as Tijuana, where he died in 1987.”

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Full article here: http://www.mediaite.com/online/snowden-may-wish-he-went-to-jail-in-america-if-he-accepts-putins-offer-of-russian-exile/

A Good Read.

[treestar]

1. One variable - there don't seem to be any stories after the USSR

It may be easier to live in today's Russia than the Soviet Union. The difficulty of adjusting might not be so extreme.

[saidsimplesimon]

2. treestar, "Pussy Riot" to Siberian prison for a silly teenage

like protest stunt? Tsar Putin is former KGB, "Russian Rules".

[saidsimplesimon]

3. Thank you, Tx4obama- off topic, Free Mr. Alan Gross, held in Cuba