America’s Spies
Want Edward Snowden Dead
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world.
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world.
By Benny Johnson
January 17, 2014 "Information Clearing House - "Buzzfeed" - Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.
January 17, 2014 "Information Clearing House - "Buzzfeed" - Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.
“In a
world where I would not be restricted from killing an
American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a
current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share
this sentiment.”
“I
would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon
official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I
do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life,
having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the
greatest traitor in American history.”
That
violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the
domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some
members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistle-blower,
the New York Times has called for clemency, and
pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows.
In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a
nothing short of a traitor in wartime.
“His
name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor
told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence
collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to
be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”
One
Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly
detailed fantasy.
“I
think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,”
he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow,
coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his
flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks
nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and
thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home
very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the
shower.”
There
is no indication that the United States has sought to take
vengeance on Snowden, who is living in an undisclosed
location in Russia without visible security measures,
according to
a recent Washington Post interview. And the
intelligence operators who spoke to BuzzFeed on the
condition of anonymity did not say they expected anyone to
act on their desire for revenge. But their mood is
widespread, people who regularly work with the intelligence
community said.
“These
guys are emoting how pissed they are,” Peter Singer, a
cyber-security expert at the Brookings Institute. “Do you
think people at the NSA would put a statue of him out
front?”
The
degree to which Snowden’s revelations have damaged
intelligence operations are also being debated. Shawn
Turner, a spokesman for the director of national
intelligence,
recently called the leaks “unnecessarily and extremely
damaging to the United States and the intelligence
community’s national security efforts,” and the ranking
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee,
Dutch Ruppersberger said terrorists have been “changing
their methods because of the leaks.” Snowden’s defenders
dismiss those concerns as overblown, and the government has
not pointed to specific incidents to bear out the claims.
On the
ground, intelligence workers certainly say the damage has
been done. The NSA officer complained that his sources had
become “useless.” The Army intelligence officer said the
revelations had increased his “blindness.”
“I do
my work in a combat zone so now I have to see the effects of
a Snowden in a combat zone. It will not be pretty,” he said.
And
while government officials have a long record of overstating
the damage from leaks, some specific consequences seem
logical.
“By
[Snowden] showing who our collections partners were, the
terrorists have dropped those carriers and email addresses,”
the DOD official said. “We can’t find them because he
released that data. Their electronic signature is gone.”
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