SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The New York Times is reporting:
Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a "low-level analyst" writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
Mr. Snowden's claims were made in a television interview to be broadcast Wednesday evening by NBC News. They added a new twist to the yearlong public relations battle between the administration and Mr. Snowden, who is living under asylum in Moscow to escape prosecution for leaking thousands of classified files detailing extensive American surveillance programs at home and abroad.
"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas--pretending to work in a job that I'm not--and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams of NBC News, in an excerpt released in advance of the full interview.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 02 2014, @03:20AM
I never worked for either the NSA or CIA, but I interviewed extensively with the CIA after I returned from graduate study in China. They held the final round at a hotel in downtown Chicago whose conference room had been fitted with special, heavy drapes. The position I was interviewing for was to be a CIA agent working out of embassies and consulates around the world as a "diplomat;" the primary duty was to try to recruit foreign diplomats and employees, etc. at diplomatic functions to spy for the US.
The atmosphere hovered somewhere between a stalker's convention and a junior high school pep rally--mostly sad and cheesy with an undercurrent of creepy. My interviewer was a wan woman in her late 30's who obviously suffered from a compulsive eating disorder and who claimed to be the station chief for Europe. The interview consisted of a nearly endless round of role-playing exercises that ran along the lines of, "You're driving in a car with your informant and accidentally run over the Chief of Police's son's dog. WHAT. DO. YOU. DO?!!!" (You could almost hear the "duhn duhn DUHN!") The scenarios were obviously designed to test your ability to think on your feet. Somewhere near the end, after I had passed the tests with flying colors, the "station chief" asked me if I had any questions for her.
Now, this woman oozed sleeze. Equal parts bluster and butchy aggression. And frankly she wasn't all that bright. Going into the whole affair, I had spoken to a couple friends who were professors and had written dossiers for the CIA on Iran and such, who told me the reality of life as an agent was endless bureaucracy and paperwork. Makes sense, right? Also, I had the obvious question about how effective such a clandestine role could possibly be when the first thing I would do as a foreign counter-intelligence officer would be to watch absolutely everyone connected with an American embassy or consulate like a hawk. So with that context and after two hours of the ridiculous woman posing ludicrous scenarios to get me to choke, and bragging about her role as a station chief for all of Europe, I decided to turn the tables hit her with the unexpected because I have never suffered fools gladly, because it would be important to know who would have my back before putting my life on the line, and because I'm just a punk like that. So I smilingly hit her with all I knew about working for the CIA, all my obvious doubts about the role itself, and whether a candidate like myself who wanted to make an effective difference for king and country shouldn't apply to the NSA instead, and sat back to watch her reaction. It took about 5 milliseconds for her to lose her composure and drop cover.
I stood up, shook her hand, thanked her for her time, and took my leave.
It wasn't two weeks later that I read an expose in Foreign Affairs by a former CIA covert officer doing that very role in North Africa who utterly panned the Agency's methods and 100% confirmed my own doubts about the place. About a month after that, there was a picture of the woman I had interviewed with on the cover of the New York Times, arrested by the Russian FSB for espionage. It was a profound feeling of having dodged a bullet.
I also much later went through to the end of the process with the State Department, and they were just as ridiculous but with an alarmingly anachronistic and atavistic amount of White Man's Burden larded on top.
Between the two, there was a uniform amount of rank absurdity and base pettiness.
So to my eyes what the NSA's been doing with Snowden this past year is right in step with that. It is sheer absurdity and pettiness. Neither they nor anyone else in DC at this point deserves our respect or awe or fear. They deserve our contempt and our ire. They deserve the justice that we will serve upon them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3) by evilviper on Monday June 02 2014, @05:20AM
While the CIA no doubt has its problems, I find it hard to believe they are that far on the "drooling moron" scale, as to have field agents show themselves, and blow their cover, to every potential recruit who walks in.
Care to point us to the NY Times cover-story in question?
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 03 2014, @05:51PM
This is a link [hautetfort.com] to a LeMonde article that has her picture.
This is a NY Times article [nytimes.com] talking about the incident, and is what I referred to in my original post.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday June 02 2014, @05:57AM
I seem to recall watching this documentary [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford