If fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden were to request and receive asylum from Russia, he would find himself in dubious company.
Refuge in Russia would put Snowden on a shameful list that includes notorious assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who aimed a rifle out of a Dallas book depository building and assassinated President Kennedy as his motorcade passed by in 1963.
Oswald had defected in 1959 to the Soviet Union, where he renounced his US citizenship. Less than three years later, in 1962, Oswald returned to the US.
Four British double agents who worked both sides during the Cold War also sought and received political asylum from Moscow.
Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and George Blake were members of the so-called “Cambridge Five” spy ring, which sold British secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II.
The group infiltrated some of the highest levels of British government and sold secrets that included NATO military strategy.
From 1944 to 1946, Philby served as director of anti-Soviet counterintelligence for British Intelligence. The position guaranteed his access to top-level British military, intelligence and government secrets, including World War II battle plans and Cold War agreements between Britain and the United States to thwart the spread of communism is Europe.
Burgess and Maclean fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 and Philby followed in 1963.
Educated at Cambridge University in the late ’20s and ’30s, they succumbed to the revolutionary illusions of Marxism, secretly casting their lot with the Soviet Union and betraying their country.
Blake, who escaped from a London jail to his KGB handlers in the Soviet Union in 1966, was proud of his tradecraft skills.
“I would take the same path again,’’ he said after his escape. He had been sentenced to 42 years in jail.
Blake was awarded a medal by Vladimir Putin in 2007 and lives quietly outside Moscow to this day on a KGB pension. He denied being a traitor, insisting that he had never felt British
“To betray, you first have to belong,” Blake said. “I never belonged.”