Actually, I’d make the plan to take him in Iceland rather easy. Five million dollars in any international account....if you just get him a US vessel that we will keep parked twenty miles off the coast of Iceland. I’ll advertise it on the internet and even in papers. Just grab him....get to a fishing boat, and haul out to the US vessel.
I can guarantee at least fifty Icelandic guys would readily take the deal and not think twice about it. Plus it’d attract another thousand British and French guys.
If they want to make it Venezulea....fine...I’d make the same offer and have a US naval vessel parked and ready to accept him. Being a traitor....doesn’t get any extra favors on being nice.
The whole point is that we can’t appear to use KGB tactics to get back this whistleblower/hero/traitor, or the USA looks as thuggish as the old USSR, which proves what Snowden is saying.
You can snatch or “disappear” Snowden in Venzuela or Ecuador and make it look like a coincidental car wreck/sequestro/mugging etc. Not in Iceland, not without it being evident that the USA did it.
Snowden’s safety factor is that the USA does not want to look as thuggish and “Soviet” as he has been saying we are, after his NSA domestic spying revelations.
Sure, could somebody snipe him from a helicopter like a James Bond movie? Of course. Then he dies a martyr, and makes the USA look as thuggishly evil as he said it was.