Swiss lawmakers to meet Snowden in Russia

A group of Swiss lawmakers are planning to travel to Moscow to ask fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden about his undercover work in Geneva, a media report said. Swiss parliamentarian with the Socialist Party, Carlo Sommaruga, said in an interview with the local RTS television on Saturday that together with a group of colleagues from other parties, they are planning to visit Russia to get first-hand details about what the US intelligence services were doing in the country when Snowden worked under a diplomatic cover in Switzerland in 2007. The lawmaker expressed a concern that the American agency might be still doing intelligence work in the country. Snowden was hired by the CIA in 2006 for a technology job and later worked under the cover of the US State Department in Geneva, the Voice of Russia reported. The former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor told the Guardian newspaper in June that much of what he saw in Geneva “really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world.” Snowden was granted temporary one-year asylum by Russia in August after he arrived in Moscow on a flight from Hong Kong where he fled after disclosing reams of the classified documents to the media. This week, Snowden was back in the news after he met with German lawmaker Hans-Christian Ströbele in Moscow who said the former CIA employee had offered to testify to German lawmakers about information leaked by him about the US spying on Germany.