Veteran Journalist Walter Pincus Questions if Wikileaks Has Always Been Running Snowden
Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist Walter Pincus has a new piece questioning if Snowden was really in the pilot seat for his now infamous snatch and grab before going on the run.
Did Edward Snowden decide on his own to seek out journalists and then a job at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hawaii facility as an IT systems administrator to gather classified documents about the National Security Agency’s worldwide surveillance activities?
Julian Assange has told the media that he was late to the Snowden party, but Pincus seems to have his doubts. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but one can argue inference in the subtext. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time that Snowden or Assange (or Glenn Greenwald) has been caught in a lie.
Pincus has been covering national security since before Snowden was even born, so he knows his stuff.
[Snowden] worked less than three months at Booz Allen, but by the time he reached Hong Kong in mid-May, Snowden had four computers with NSA documents.
Was he encouraged or directed by WikiLeaks personnel or others to take the job as part of a broader plan to expose NSA operations to selected journalists?
If this is true, then Wikileaks could be running operatives like an intelligence-gathering agency. That begs the question if they’re already grooming other Edward Snowdens currently in situ at Booz Allen and elsewhere.
It also suggests a future where non-state actors are running terrorist ops while other non-state actors are running intelligence ops.