The Moscow lawyer of NSA whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden tells Russia Today that the 30-year-old is planning to spend the foreseeable future in Russia.
“He’s planning to arrange his life here. He plans to get a job," Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer with links to the country's intelligence service (i.e. FSB), told RT. "And, I think, that all his further decisions will be made considering the situation he found himself in.”
The situation he found himself in was being stuck in Russia after the U.S. voided his passport while he was in Hong Kong and Snowden flew to Moscow on a travel document from Ecuador's consul in London.
Kucherena, who sits on the public council of the FSB, has been speaking for Snowden since July 12 — the day Snowden accepted all offers of support and asylum.
“We must understand that security is the number one issue in his case,"Kucherena told RT."I think the process of adaptation will take some time. It’s an understandable process as he doesn’t know the Russian language, our customs, and our laws.”
The development seems like very bad news for the U.S.
Snowden is an elite hacker, trained by the NSA, who gained access and"carefully read" 10,000 classified NSA files.
Furthermore, Snowden knows his way around NSA interviews and the vetting process of the world's largest spy agency.
When Snowden arrived in Moscow on June 23, a radio host in Moscow "saw about 20 Russian officials, supposedly FSB agents, in suits, crowding around somebody in a restricted area of the airport,"according to Anna Nemtsova of Foreign Policy.
"Snowden will fly out of Russia when the Kremlin decides he can go," Moscow political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin told Foreign Policy after Snowden arrived. "He might not even be in the airport. The safest place would be a GRU [Russian military intelligence] apartment."
John Schindler, Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, subsequently tweeted that during the Cold War, the KGB's covert term for the NSA was "OMEGA," the highest Soviet intelligence priority — "in case you wondered how glad FSB is to see Snowden."
On July 12 former senior U.S. intelligence analyst Joshua Foust wrote that the"involvement of known FSB operatives at [Snowden's] asylum acceptance ... suggests this was a textbook [Russian] intelligence operation, and not a brave plea for asylum from political persecution."
Amid the initial reports that Snowden moved out of the transit zone at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, Foust tweeted this:
If this is confirmed, the Edward Snowden has officially defected to Russia and gone into exile. http://t.co/pIEDem2Ehj
— joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) July 23, 2013
Snowden's disclosures to newspapers around the world have resulted in the exposure of concrete evidence detailing a domestic spying apparatus of questionable effectiveness that for years has benefitted from weakoversight and misdirection to harvest data.
Furthermore, the classified documents — one of the largest leaks of intelligence in U.S. history — informed the rest of the world that the NSA, often in cooperation with governments, is collecting their communications too.
The U.S. government's biggest concern right now is what could leak out of Snowden's head over the course of his indefinite time in Mother Russia.
SEE ALSO: The Intel In Snowden's Head Could Be More Damaging Than The Material He Leaked