NSA leaker Edward Snowden was a double agent before he released thousands of pages of top secret documents, former CIA officer Fred Rustmann, author of
"The Case Officer," said on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"I think he was talking to the Russians before," Rustmann said of Snowden, who in 2013 disclosed thousands of classified documents to journalists.
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"When he was in Hong Kong he was thoroughly, thoroughly debriefed by the Chinese service. This guy was working for the other side before he defected and once they wring him dry then he'll go out and live in a dock out on the Black Sea somewhere and spend the rest of his life. He's not coming back to the United States. We don't even want him."
Rustmann said that if Snowden wanted to be a whistleblower, he didn’t have to compromise national security.
"Whistleblowers have a way to blow their whistles," he said. "They go through the chain of command or they jump around the chain of command, but they go and they report the stuff to their own people to the United States government. They don't go and whistle blow to the Russians so that the Russians can come back at us and glean all that information."
Rustmann also commented on recent news of a second
German spy working for the United States.
"It's called espionage," Rustmann said. "That's that great big building on Langley [Virginia] that we fund for billions of dollars a year, that's what they do. We do espionage. It's the second oldest profession...I don’t understand why people get so upset when this stuff comes out."
Every country spies on its allies, he said, to ensure that what the country is saying is true.
"The German government, they're allies of ours," Rustmann said. "They're very good allies, but we don't agree on everything and so we would like to know what is behind their statements to the State Department. That's why we have an intelligence service we want to know the truth about their plans and intentions."
Revelations this week by The Intercept website that the U.S government
has been spying on five prominent Muslim-Americans should not come as a surprise to anyone, Rustmann said.
"It doesn't bother me at all," he said. "We should be all over them like white on rice. Every mosque should have surveillance, all of these people we should have this penetrated...The Twin Towers were blown up by Islamists, radicals. That is the enemy, we need to keep an eye on them."
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