The FBI has a yet another defense contractor in custody on espionage charges—what did he really do?
Six weeks ago in this column I explained that the National Security Agency, our nation’s most secretive spy service, almost certainly remains penetrated by one or more Russian moles. Not only is Edward Snowden hardly the super-spy he’s claimed to be, in truth he’s no more than a patsy whose purpose has been to distract attention from the real Russian intelligence penetrations of NSA.
The idea that the Kremlin has more moles lurking inside NSA made front-page news in August with the public appearance of Top Secret hacking tools apparently stolen from the Agency. Embarrassingly, those were posted online by the mysterious “Shadow Brokers,” which gave every appearance of being yet another front for Moscow and its spy services. How had it obtained such closely guarded secrets?
Today we learned from the Justice Department that, just four days after my column appeared, the FBI executed a search warrant on the residence of Harold Thomas Martin III of Glen Burnie, Maryland, which is an NSA bedroom community. The 51-year-old Martin was employed with Booz Allen Hamilton, the very same big-league defense contractor which employed Edward Snowden at the time of his fleeing Hawaii and subsequent defection to Moscow.
Inside Martin’s residence and his car, the FBI found evidence of criminal activity including possible espionage. The arrest affidavit (which on security grounds never mentions NSA, though that was Martin’s place of employment) spells out what Bureau agents found: information that was classified at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level—including six documents of recent vintage from an unnamed government agency which is certainly NSA.
Read the rest at The Observer….
The XX Committee 