NSA leaker Edward Snowden has applied to the Russian government for the extension of his temporary asylum, which expires July 31. There is public debate among the Western (but not the Russian) commentariat about whether his application will be granted.

It will be.

That the otherwise odd question is even raised is because recently, in the wake of his continuing troubles of imperial overstretch in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made in his Fourth of July message some conciliatory noises toward Washington. U.S. President Barack Obama had cancelled a meeting with Putin after Snowden was given asylum a year ago.

But according to British newspaper interviews by Boris Karpichkov, a Soviet-Latvian intelligence major who worked for Moscow and defected to the United Kingdom in 1990s yet still retains contacts back home, the FSB (ex-KGB) targeted Snowden as many as six years ago.

At the time, Snowden was working in Switzerland as a maintenance specialist the CIA’s computer security network there. (Recall that Snowden has always maintained that he is not the low-level contract employee that the great splash of media coverage has portrayed.)

According to Karpichkov, Russian intelligence opened a file on him then, but refrained from contacting him directly until, posing as genuine diplomats, they visited him last year in Hong Kong, where they tricked him into flying to Moscow.

Recall that Snowden’s passport was valid when he boarded in Hong Kong, but cancelled by the State Department before he landed in Moscow. Karpichkov says the FSB publicized Snowden’s flight while he was en route, in the hope of provoking the U.S. to revoke his passport, stranding him upon arrival. And that is what happened.

If Snowden is correct that he was “trained as a spy” rather than being a low-level third-party contract employee, then Karpichkov’s story makes sense. But it also means that he has a lot more to tell the Russian intelligence services, including about U.S. encryption secrets, the sanctum sanctorum of the espionage business.

So it is unlikely that the Russians will let him go so soon. And, anyway, where would he go; and how would he get there without being physically intercepted and repatriated?

The British spy Kim Philby is reputed to have been privately unhappy after his own flight to Moscow. He was reportedly given little work and started drinking more heavily than was good for him, pining for everyday English niceties.

Philby’s erstwhile colleague Donald Maclean, on the other hand, made a decent career (under a Russian pseudonym of course) at one of the research institutes of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences on international politics and economics, specializing in post-imperial British foreign policy and European integration.

The tales about Snowden living in a secluded FSB dacha village outside Moscow are plausible. According to these stories, he is visited twice a week by his FSB handlers, who wine and dine and get drunk with him.

There would seem to be a lot to tell. At the present juncture, it seems that his career path is set more in the Philby than in the Maclean template.

After all, it is instructive to recall that it is the NSA’s job to spy on Russian and Chinese intelligence services. So one would suppose that the millions of documents that Snowden released to WikiLeaks would include materials on those subjects.

Yet all of the misdeeds that have reached the international press, through WikiLeaks and elsewhere even before Snowden reached Moscow, have concerned solely American transgressions. There would seem to be more here than meets the eye.

But then, this is, after all, a hush-hush “spy-vs.-spy” story. It is in Moscow’s interests to keep it that way. Snowden will stay there for the foreseeable future.

[Originally published in Montreal Gazette, 14 July 2014, p. 7.]

Also published on Medium.