We now have an inside sense, thanks to Greg Miller of the Washington Post, of just how fervent, frenetic, and full-scale was the attempt to bring in Edward Snowden by hook or crook after his story broke and he ended up trapped in a Moscow airport, including every day meetings in the White House. Heres the money paragraph: The burst of activity during that period — including the White House meetings, a broad diplomatic scramble and the decision to force a foreign leader’s plane to land — was far more extensive than U.S. officials acknowledged at the time. You bet. While the piece offers us a window into the forced grounding of the Bolivian presidents plane in Austria in the belief (based on no evidence) that Snowden might be on it, there is no discussion of rendition plans for Snowden if he made it to a country other than Russia. But you better believe that that was also being considered. Its quite a tale. Tom For weeks, senior officials from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other agencies assembled nearly every day in a desperate search for a way to apprehend the former intelligence contractor who had exposed the inner workings of American espionage then fled to Hong Kong before ending up in Moscow. Convened by White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, the meetings kept ending at the same impasse: Have everyone make yet another round of appeals to their Russian counterparts and hope that Snowden makes a misstep. “The best play for us is him landing in a third country, Monaco said, according to an official who met with her at the White House. The official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article discussed internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity, added, We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’” U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard. washingtonpost/world/national-security/us-officials-scrambling-to-nab-snowden-hoped-he-would-take-a-wrong-step-he-didnt/2014/06/14/057a1ed2-f1ae-11e3-bf76-447a5df6411f_story.html?hpid=z1
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 15:01:53 +0000