Joshua Foust has a strange post up called "Snowden's…Defection?" on Medium, a new blogging platform in beta still closed to the public which apparently doesn't pay authors.

And a number of previously-critical Twitterati are thinking that suddenly, they agree with Foust and he must have changed.

Not so.

Foust is of course a figure I've long criticized mainly on my Central Asian blog, Different Stans.and opposed for his attacks on the human rights movement, his soft touch on oppressive regimes, his strange anti-Pussy Riot screed, and his chronic bullying on Twitter.

Foust has recently gone into the IR wildnerness after being let go from American Security Project when Sen. John Kerry, who was the head of ASP, went to become Secretary of State. There may or may not be any connection to that event; it may be more about the sound of axes chopping budgets related to Central Asia everywhere in the land, as the region rapidly loses its relevance piggy-backing on Afghanistan, as the troops will be withdrawn in 2014 or sooner.

So some think accordingly that Foust has become less flame-worthy and has toned down and even ceased the pro-regime sort of stuff he was infamous for doing — the kind of cleverly-worded stuff that required careful polemics many didn't want to bother with or feared doing because of his wrath.

I don't think that; I just think when he does a piece that suddenly seems as if he flip-flopped on Nazarbayev, it's because he has cleverly tucked into the piece another point in order to sneak it by — which in this case is the (highly dubious) point that Kazakhstan is an honest broker between Iran and the West. I called this in another context "the politically correct pickle in the sandwich" which appears when people feign criticism of Moscow but tuck in some pro-Kremlin nugget that works by subliminal suggestion.

So in this piece, Foust makes it look as if he has all the goods on the Kremlin and has boldly called the Snowden affair an obvious KGB-style operation by making these points:

o "Officials at Sheremetyevo Airport organized the event and provided
passage to the activists and journalists attending the meeting with
Snowden". Although…This may be the pickle. It would be naive in the extreme to say that officials who checked passports and lists and took foreigners and Russians were mere "airport officials"; they would have to be border guards at the very least, but very much more likely were from Russian foreign intelligence or military intelligence or both. Simon Shuster reports that Snowden was flanked by beefy goons

Even so, Foust concludes:

Despite this, a whole lot of otherwise smart people, ranging from human rights activists to journalists to academics,
still think this is just a whistleblower seeking protection from
political persecution rather than a sophisticated intelligence operation
against the United States.

Well, Foust never misses a chance to take a swipe at the human rights movement, which he, as a Realist, derides as hopelessly unrealistic, but I tend to agree that it has more of a chance of being a sophisticated intelligence operation than an idealistic young man having a meeting with other people who are idealistic.

Next, Foust says:

As a rule, when a cleared intelligence employee seeks refuge in another
country running a hostile intelligence service while carrying gigabytes
of top secret documents, that isn’t the behavior of a whistleblower.
That is the behavior of a defector. The involvement of known FSB
operatives at his asylum acceptance – and the suddenly warm treatment of
HRW and Transparency International after months of government
harassment – suggests this was a textbook intelligence operation, and not a brave plea for asylum from political persecution.

Sure. But whistleblowers of the new format have to have laptops of kompromat, Glenn Greenwald could argue, and Snowden keeps pretending he's not really defecting but fleeing what he views as unfair treatment for his disclosures on the part of the US. That's not naive, but manipulative and whiny, and I don't buy it, but the question here really is whether WikiLeaks, to use the old Soviet terms, is a) a useful idiot; b) objectively serving the Party's interests; c) a fellow traveller; d) an agent of influence; e) a source f) a compromised confident, i.e. blackmailed; g) an actual paid agent. There's a range.

o Foust cites Israel Shamir as an obvious pro-Kremlin figure — check.

o Foust notes that WikiLeaks has never leaked anything revelatory about Russia — check.

o Foust claims Snowden wrote his statement "under the advisement of WikiLeaks" — which seems obvious — check — but Greenwald denies this vigorously;

But….Here comes the top slice of bread on the sandwich:

Chechens, democrats, human rights workers, aid workers, gays and
lesbians, minorities, and political dissidents all have suffered
horrendous abuse in just the last two years.

Absolutely disagree, all true.

Now comes the slice of meat — Foust says exactly what Walter Pincus said, but isn't pressured by Greenwald to retract:

Most of Snowden’s most prominent defenders were in touch with him long
before he chose to leak; Wikileaks, which has developed deeper ties to
the Russian and Belorussian governments, apparently helped Snowden travel to Moscow.

Now comes the first pickle:

Then again, naïveté seems to drive Snowden as much as any principles do. Last month
he said his conscience would not permit him to live in a surveillance
state anymore… from his hotel room in Hong Kong, China, one of the most heavily state-surveilled countries on the planet.

Why the PC pickle? Because we are to believe now that naïveté is the issue, not Snowden's connivance with WikiLeaks or Russian intelligence to pull off this stunt. We now sympathize with the poor lad.

Now comes the slice of cheese:

I’m sure the White House is relieved to know a 30-year old IT worker has
its best interests in mind as he preaches about human rights from one of the world’s worst human rights abusers.

Muscular Realism with withering guy-talk — the next thing you know, Foust will kick sand in the face of this puny nerd.

Now here comes the second pickle:

This looks like the first trickle of information before a bizarre — and
complex — intelligence operation gets blown open in the public. That
doesn’t mean Wikileaks wittingly participated (useful idiots abound) but
I bet money U.S. counterintelligence officials are now wondering just
how deep the Russia connection to Snowden — and, to Wikileaks — really
goes.

In other words, if you read this piece just once quickly, you could come away with thinking "Foust is critical of WikiLeaks and Snowden and thinks he isn't a whistleblower but a defector and that this may all be an intelligence operation."

But he's also said two very important things to exonerate the perpetrators:

o Snowden is naive and doesn't know what he's doing

o WikiLeaks unwittingly got played.

o Therefore neither Snowden or WikiLeaks are to blame, but Russian intelligence.

So that leaves merely the professional Russian intelligence as the bad guy — or, rather, as the real winners of the battle who are now being properly acknowledged.

See how this works?!

Foust is a Realist, and that means an establishmentarian. But don't forgot how he wrote with barely-contained glee about the geeks coming to power through hacking — you could palpably feel that he was hoping to position himself as their envoy just by seeming to understand them best.