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“Tt was the information in his head that we wanted.” Cherkashin said that as KGB rarely got access to any NSA officer, it was worth the risk. So he was given $5,000 in cash and a plane ticket to Vienna, where he was domiciled at the residence of the Soviet ambassador to Austria. A KGB’s electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for 15 days, were from 8 AM to 6 PM. In them, Pelton managed to recall Project A, a joint NSA-CIA-Navy operation in which submarines surreptitiously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected a to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB.
“Did the information in his head proved valuable?” I asked.
“As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was compromised by Pelton, we could use the cable to send to the NSA the information we wanted it to intercept.” He said while actual NSA documents would have proved more useful than someone’s memories, “Our job is to take advantage of whatever we can get.”
Two years later, Pelton was again flown to Vienna for a follow-up debriefing to see if he could recall any further details. Finally, in 1985, Pelton was arrested by the FBI and, like Ames and Hanssen, sentenced to life imprisonment.
Looking at his watch, Cherkashin politely excused himself, saying he had work to do. On parting, I signed a copy of my book on Angleton for him and thanked him for his insights.
Through the eyes of the KGB, a penetration of American intelligence was clearly opportunistic. If these practices continued, they put the Snowden case in a new light for me. If Russian intelligence considered it worthwhile to send an ex-civilian worker at the NSA, such as Ronald Pelton, from Washington D.C. 2,000 miles to Austria so that its specialists could debrief him on the secrets he held in his head, it would have an even greater interest in exfiltrating Snowden from Hong Kong to get, aside from his documents, whatever secrets he held in his head. If Russian intelligence was willing to opportunistically accept the delivery of U.S. secrets from an unknown espionage source that it neither recruited nor controlled, such as Hanssen, it would have little hesitancy in acquiring the secrets that Snowden had stolen on his own volition, even if Snowden acted for idealistic reasons. If Russian intelligence focused its search pattern on disgruntled American intelligence workers, such as Ames, it is plausible that it spotted Snowden through his Internet rants against U.S. surveillance. Even if it had missed Snowden in Hawaii, a disgruntled ex-civilian employee at the NSA would have received its full attention after he contacted Russian officials in Hong Kong. While the tactics of the SVR may have changed since Cherkashin retired, its objectives remained the same. And the NSA remained its principal target. Nor is there any reason to doubt that it still measures success in its ability to obtain, by whatever means, the secret sources and methods of its adversaries. Snowden was in a position, both with the documents he had taken and the knowledge he had in his head, to deliver the KGB such a
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