Epstein Secrets

cure debriefing room, he said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but he wanted money in return. What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton, even though he was no longer working at the NSA and no longer had access to @ the NSA. In addi

urse grab them.” The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979. Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the

_OVERSIGHT_019768 Snowden’s Choices | 281 need for him to expose himself in this way. If he merely wanted to be a whistle-blower, he could have, as Bradley Manning did, anony- mously sent the documents to journalists as “Citizen Four.” In fact, in late May 2013, that was exactly what he did. He anonymously sent

urse grab them.” The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979. Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the

return. What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton even though he was no longer working at the NSA, and Pelton no longer had access to the NSA. In addition, since the FBI had 24 hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed en

e, he co-founded Wikileaks, a website in which secret documents could anonymously be sent and posted. The site received little public attention until Bradley Manning sent it several hundred thousand lowly-classified U.S. military and State Department documents in April 2010. With these stolen documents, Wikileaks

ously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected a to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB. “Did the information in his head proved valuable?” I asked. “As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was comp

he residence of the Soviet ambassador to Austria. A KGB’s electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for 15 days, were from 8 AM to 6 PM. In them, Pelton managed to recall Project A, a joint NSA-CIA

ice intriguing is that there was no evident need for him to expose himself in this way. If he merely wanted to be a whistle-blower, he could have, as Bradley Manning did, anonymously sent the documents to journalists as “Citizen 4.” In fact, in late May 2013, that was exactly what he did. He sent Barton Gellman th