I believe the point was that usually every foreign intelligence agency plays exactly as nasty game as diplomacy allows. As we are living the era of U.S. hegemony, we can assume CIA is playing as nasty as humanly possible.

So the news in this case would be that there is some evidence that CIA actually did a thing that was expected of them. They either are not very competent, or they don't care because they get away with it anyhow.

They probably also have a plan to assassinate Snowden. But currently the costs outweigh the benefits.