Fake Snowden Is Russia's Newest TV Star
'Where the Motherland Begins' weirdly shows Snowden character as a mole in the U.S. since childhood.
The planned Oliver Stone film about National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden—played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt—and his quest for asylum in Russia, is still being shopped around to Hollywood studios and won’t start shooting for another three months. In the meantime, however, a thinly fictionalized version of the Snowden story just premiered on Russian television as part of an eight-episode spy drama, Where the Motherland Begins. And it has a peculiar twist, which implies that since he was a child, the former NSA contractor was, in a sense, groomed by a Russian intelligence agent.
Most of the miniseries—which aired from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3 on Channel One, Russia’s leading state-controlled channel—actually takes place in the mid-1980s and is a dramatization of that era’s U.S.-Soviet spy wars. But the story of “James Snow,” a fugitive former CIA/NSA contractor who disclosed classified information about U.S. surveillance of telephone and Internet communications worldwide, is the framing device that opens and concludes the main plot.
The miniseries begins in “Hong Kong, July 2013,” with a giant screen showing a news report on the whereabouts of Snow, rumored to be seeking asylum in Russia. Cut to Snow himself, watching the segment on a MacBook aboard a charter jet and looking like a somewhat hotter version of Snowden, right down to the trademark eyeglasses. At this point, there is a detour into a subtle-as-a-brick reference to current events: an expert on the news, introduced as “Oxbridge University” political scientist Jonathan Chadwick (and speaking what is meant to pass for British English), opines that the United States is likely to engineer some drastic distraction by way of damage control after Snow’s revelations. Such as, say… a war in Europe, most likely in a former Soviet republic bordering with the European Union? “I won’t be surprised if Washington attempts to play a tried-and-true card of the ‘Red Threat,’” intones Professor Chadwick while a worried Snow stares at the screen. “The Americans could pull their longtime geopolitical rival, Russia, into a major scandal such as a local military conflict, and then organize and lead a new crusade against Russia.” You don’t say.
This stunning analysis is interrupted by the arrival of a dumpy, unshaven older man in a gray suit—Snow’s curator from Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, who wants to chat. “Your mom’s name was Vera—Vera Finley, yes?” he says. Snow, played by Lithuanian-born Arnas Fedaravičius and actually sounding plausibly American, looks more startled than he should be. “I see you did your homework,” he replies. Mr. FSB also knows that Vera died in a car accident twenty years ago, when Snow was seven, and that Snow was raised by an uncle, Nick Storm, who turned up about a year later. Hasn’t he ever wondered where Uncle Nick had been until then? “I asked him about it once,” says Snow. “He said it wasn’t the time to talk about it.” Well, now’s the time, says his curator.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/12/fake-snowden-is-russia-s-newest-tv-star.html
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