‘US traded info with Sweden for spying on Russia’
Press TV has conducted an interview with Philip Giraldi, former CIA analyst, about leaked documents from the US National Security Agency showing Washington has spied on Russia’s leadership with the help of Sweden’s intelligence service.
- Philip Giraldi, does this surprise you? And of course the question comes what are going to be the consequences of this ultimately? Also how many countries are involved? How did the US get these countries to do this?
- Well, I think it should not surprise anyone to learn that intelligence agencies cooperate with each other even when they are not particularly friendly.
The United States will work with the Russians for example when there is some common objective that they want to work on. So this is not a surprise to me in anyway.
The United States clearly wanted to know more about the Russian leadership. The Swedish had access to the communications cables and systems, they run through Sweden and the United States probably traded information with Sweden to get what it wanted.
- And if we want to take a look at who is going to be held accountable here, if there is going to be any backlash for example coming from Russia, how is this going to move forward?
- Well...intelligence agencies exist because they try to collect information that is not in the public sectors.
So we all know that this is going on. The Russians have an embassy in Washington that has numerous antennas on the roof and the antennas are not there just for communications purposes.
So countries do this to each other and I think the backlash will be relatively limited.