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166 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS mercy of the Russian authorities. There was good reason for keeping him in a virtual prison in Russia. “He can compromise thousands of intelligence and military officials,” Sergei Alexandrovich Markov, the co-chairman of the National Strategic Council of Russia and an adviser to Putin, pointed out. “We can’t send him back just because America demands it.” So Snowden was consigned to the transit zone of the airport, which is a twilight zone neither inside nor outside Russia, a nether- world that extends beyond the confines of the airport to include safe houses and other facilities maintained by the FSB for the purposes of interrogation and security. Stranded at the Moscow airport, no matter what he had believed earlier in Hong Kong, Snowden would quickly realize that he had only one viable option: seeking protec- tion in Russia. Even though the FSB is known by U.S. intelligence to strictly control the movements and contacts of former members of foreign intelligence services in Russia, Snowden might not have realized the full extent of the FSB’s interest in him. He naively told The Wash- ® ington Post in December 2013, in Moscow, “I am still working for © the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.” Whatever he might have been thinking, a former U.S. communica- tions intelligence worker who stole American state secrets, such as Snowden, would be under the FSB’s scrutiny. Andrei Soldatov, the co-author of the 2010 book The New Nobil- ity: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Endur- ing Legacy of the KGB, who was personally knowledgeable about FSB procedures, explained the FSB would monitor “every facet of Snowden’s communications, and his life.” General Oleg Kalugin, who, as previously mentioned, defected from the KGB to the United States in 1995, added that the FSB (following the standard operating procedures of the KGB) would be “his hosts and they are taking care of him.” Kalugin further said in 2014, “Whatever he had access to in his former days at NSA, I believe he shared all of it with the Russians, and they are very grateful.” This assessment was backed by Frants Klintsevich. As the first deputy chairman of the Kremlin’s defense and security committee at the time of Snowden’s defection, he was | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 166 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019654