During his interview with Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden said stoically “If I am arrested, I am arrested.”   His fatalistic words notwithstanding, Snowden had made plans to seek a haven from American justice well before his meeting with journalists in Hong Kong.   As early as May 24, 2013, Snowden had suggested to Gellman that he was making arrangements with a foreign government.  To that end, he asked Gellman to insert an encrypted key in Internet version of the NSA expose that Snowden proposed he write for the Washington Post.  He told him the purpose of the encrypted key was to assist him with a foreign government. Snowden did not identify that foreign government to Gellman so Gellman knew that Snowden wanted to “seek asylum” overseas. He decided against assisting him.   “I can’t help him evade U.S. jurisdiction—I don’t want to, and I can’t,” he later explained. “It’s not my job. It’s not the relationship. I am a journalist.”  
Although Gellman suspected that Iceland might be the foreign government in question, Snowden, as it turned, had not ever contacted the consulate of Iceland while he was in Hong Kong.   “We had heard nothing from Snowden,” an Iceland government official told Vanity Fair.     

     Snowden also did not contact the government of Ecuador in Hong Kong. In late June, while Harrison was laying down false tracks for Snowden in Hong Kong,  Assange in London asked Fidel Narváez, who was a friend of his and the legal attaché in the London embassy of Ecuador, to issue a document that Snowden could use.  But this document was not delivered to Snowden in Hong Kong (and later it was invalidated by Ecuador.)  If Snowden had really planned to go to Ecuador from Moscow, it would require him first going to Cuba.  Cuba did not even require a U.S. passport (as, in 2013, U.S, citizens were not supposed to travel to Cuba.)  He did require a Cuban travel document, which he could have obtained from the Cuban consulate any time during his month in Hong Kong.  Yet he did not ever obtain it.  Nor did he acquire a visa to go to any other country in Latin America or elsewhere.  So where was he headed?

Whatever foreign government with which Snowden was dealing earlier in May presumably did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Yet few other foreign governments, which did not have active extradition treaties with the United States, could be directly reached by air.  With three notable exceptions, the flights to them had stopovers in a country that was an ally of the US, and which could seize Snowden.  The three exceptions were China, North Korea (via China) and Russia.

    The only one of these three countries, or any other country, that Snowden is known to have dealt with directly during his 33 day stay in Hong Kong, was Russia.  As previously discussed, he had dealings with Russian “diplomatic representatives “, as Putin called them.  Putin did not provide the date of these contacts but he provided an intriguing clue.  Snowden was identified to him, according to Putin, not by name but merely as an “agent of special services.” Putin’s description suggests the meeting had taken place before Snowden became a household name on June 9, 2013. 

 For his part, Snowden was evasive when discussing his contacts with Russia while still in Hong Kong.  When Lana Lam asked Snowden on June 12, 2013 whether he had already requested asylum from the Russia government, he deferred, saying: “My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power.”  As it turned out, Snowden was correct.  The Russian government was not intimidated by the threats of reprisals by the United States, as the Obama Administration would learn after his arrival in Russia on June 23, 2013.  But the only way that Snowden could not have known that fact on June 12th was by being in contact with Russian officials prior to his interview with Lam.  Of course, he may have had multiple contacts on different dates with these officials.  The Russian pro-government newspaper Kommersant reported that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate on more than one occasion and had been given a birthday celebration there on June 21, 2013.

   What we do know about Snowden’s interactions with the Russians in Hong Kong comes partly from Putin’s own description of them.  Putin said, it will be recalled, that his decision to facilitate Snowden’s escape to Russia had been kicked all the way up the Russian chain of command for him to personally decide Snowden’s fate.  Presumably, this decision-making process began earlier than June 21, 2013, when he reportedly came to the consulate.  The question is: how much earlier?  Since Snowden had arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th, 2013, his contacts with Russian officials could have occurred as long as a month earlier.  That would fit in with Snowden telling Gellman on May 24th that he needed his help in dealing with the diplomatic mission of an unnamed country.      In any case, Putin tells us he learned an American “agent of the special services” had contacted Russian diplomats because he wanted assistance.  And Snowden did need assistance to escape from Hong Kong. As he had no visas, he would require the sort of assistance that could only be provided by a government willing to defy the United States. The assistance came from Russia.

Nine days before Snowden boarded Aeroflot flight SU213 to Moscow on June 23rd, the US had filed a criminal complaint against him.  It had also alerted Hong Kong authorities and Interpol when it unsealed the complaint on June 21, 2013. And on June 21st it had invalidated his U.S. passport (although he still had it in his possession at the Hong Kong Airport.)  Since by this time he was the most famous visitor in Hong Kong, his passage through passport control may have reflected the acquiescence of the Hong Kong authorities to the reported request of China to be rid of Snowden by June 23rd.  All we know for certain is that Hong Kong airport police did not stop Snowden. 

  He was allowed on the Aeroflot flight at Hong Kong International Airport.  Aeroflot, a state-owned airline, presumably responds to the Russian government when matters of state security are concerned.  According to one Aeroflot official, ordinarily all international passengers are required to have a valid passport as well as a visa to the country of final destination.  Snowden had neither a valid passport nor a visa.  These boarding requirements were waived so that Snowden was able to board the flight to Moscow.   

    Snowden only met Harrison in person on June 23rd, the day he was to depart Hong Kong.  She was waiting for him in the private car that Jonathan Mann had arranged to take him to the airport that morning.  Snowden was dressed in a grey shirt and khaki slacks. Harrison was also casually dressed in jeans and flip-flops.  She said she chosen this dress style so that they would blend in at the airport with vacationing tourists.  As she had financed the trip, she was apparently now calling the shots.  Harrison’s concern was that they might be arrested at the airport, so Mann accompanied them through passport control.  He was able to do this because he bought a ticker on a cheap international flight. Harrison also gave Mann a phone number to call if they got arrested. When they finally boarded the flight at 12:45 pm, Harrison effectively became Snowden’s second “carer”—a job that would require her presence in Moscow for the next four months.

Once the plane took off, Snowden, who had only said a few words in the car, said to her, as she recalled, the first full sentence she had heard from him.  It was “I didn’t expect that WikiLeaks was going to send a ninja to get me out.”



    Meanwhile, Assange continued creating “distractions,” as he put it.  On June 24th, a booking was made for Snowden on the Aeroflot flight to Cuba, and this information was relayed to the foreign press organization in Moscow, resulting on over a dozen reporters buying tickets on the flight.  But Snowden never showed up for the flight.  This ruse resulted in these foreign correspondents flying to Havana.   “In some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that [flight] on open lines to lawyers in the United States,” Assange said. One subsequent piece of his misinformation was that Snowden was flying to Bolivia on the private plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales (who was then in Moscow for a meeting.)  That misinformation had the desired effect. US allies in Europe, including France, Spain and Portugal refused to allow that plane to fly through its airspace, forcing the plane to land in Austria. This Assange-inspired distraction caused an international incident but did not change the fact that Snowden was in the custody of Russia. 
     Snowden himself came to realize that those assisting him, including Assange and Harrison, were taking serious risks. “Anyone in a three-mile radius [of me] is going to get hammered,” he later explained to a reported from Vogue.  (After finally leaving Snowden in Moscow on November 3, 2013, Harrison moved to Berlin, where she set up an organization to provide, as she termed it, “an underground railroad” for other fugitives who have provided documents exposing government secrets.)

Snowden meanwhile received sanctuary in Russia.  His public statements in Hong Kong that he was willing to go prison so that others could live freely in a democratic society were, as it turned out, mere rhetoric.  Instead of risking prison, he had successfully escaped to a country in which he would be treated as a hero for defying the US government. He had not sacrificed himself, he had transformed himself.  He had risen from being a lowly technician in Hawaii whose talents went largely unrecognized, to the status of an international media star in Moscow. In his new messianic role, he could make Internet appearances via Skype to prestigious gathering such as the TED conference where he would be roundly applauded as an Internet hero.  He could be beamed into dozens of ACLU meetings where he would be celebrated as a defender of American liberty. He could describe to sympathetic audiences in Germany, Norway and France the unfairness of the American legal system, asserting that it was denting him a “far trial.”  He could now make front page news by granting interview to the New York Times, Washington Post, Nation and other elite newspapers.  He could join Poitras and Greenwald on the Board of Directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.   He could be the subject of both an Oscar-winning documentary, the hero of the 2016 Hollywood movie “Snowden.” directed by Oliver Stone and a consultant to the 2015 season of the television series “Homeland.” He could also be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.  His could also attract over one-half million followers to his tweets on Twitter in 2015. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won,” he informed the Washington Post in his first live interview in Moscow.  It was a mission that involved a very high stakes enterprise:  taking America’s state secrets abroad. 

 How he managed to succeed in this extraordinary undertaking is another story and one which may not lend itself to an innocent explanation.   Whistle-blowers do not ordinarily steal military secrets.  Nor do they flee to the territory of America’s principle adversaries. A fugitive, especially one lacking a Russian visa, does not wind up in Moscow by pure accident.   A Russian President, especially one with the KGB background of Putin, does not lightly give his personal sanction to a high-profile exfiltration from Hong Kong without weighing the gain that might proceed from it. Part of that calculus would be that the defector had taken possession of a great number of classified documents from the inner sanctum of the NSA. To be sure, the practical value of this stolen archive would require a lengthily evaluation by its intelligence services.  Finally, a defector who put himself in the palm of the hand of the FSB in Moscow would be expected to cooperate with it.  Even if such a defector did not carry these files with him to Moscow, intelligence services have the means to recover digital files, even if after they are erased from a computer or if they are sent to the cloud. Once secret documents are taken, they are compromised.  How Snowden succeeded in this coup cannot simply be pieced together from his statements and interviews. The story also requires a visit to the wilderness of mirrors called counterintelligence. 

                      ***






PART THREE
THE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CONUNDRUM




“Scenarios deal with two worlds: the world of facts and the world of perceptions. They explore for facts but they aim at perceptions inside the heads of decision makers. Their purpose is to gather and transform information of strategic significance into fresh perceptions”
     —Pierre Wack, Harvard Business Review, 1985







CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Did Snowden Act Alone?

“When you look at the totality of Snowden's actions certainly one hypothesis that jumps out at you, that seems to explain his ability to do all these things, is that he had help and had help from somebody who was very competent in these matters.”

                              --General Michael Hayden, Former Director of the NSA and CIA



  Snowden describes himself a whistle-blower, and, according to the polls, the vast majority of the American public, accept this definition of him.  But the operational distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy is not always clear.  A whistle-blower enters the enterprise of stealing state secrets for reasons of conscience, but so do many spies. Such conscience-driven spies are called, in CIA parlance, “ideological agents.”  For instance, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, who was one of the most important Russian spies in the Cold War, was an ideological recruit.  Maclean stole immensely valuable US nuclear secrets for the Russian intelligence service without receiving any monetary compensation and later defected to Moscow to avoid arrest. 
   As it turns out, the acceptance of money is also necessarily a meaningful distinction when it comes to espionage.  To be sure, many spies get paid, but some whistle-blowers also receive paid a rich bounty for their work.  Indeed, under federal laws, whistle-blowers can qualify for multi-million dollars bounties for exposing financial malfeasance.  The whistle blower Bradley Birkenfeld, for example, after he himself was paroled from prison in 2012, received an award of $104 million for providing data that exposed illicit tax sheltering at the Swiss UBS bank.  Assange also offered political whistle-blower six-figure cash bounties from money he raises on the Internet. In 2015, for instance Wikileaks offered S100, 000 bounties to any whistle-blowers who provided the site with secret documents exposing details of the Pacific Trade Agreement.  

     Nor is acting alone necessarily a line that divides whistle blowers from spies. In many cases, whistle-blowers have accomplices that help them carry out their mission.   For example, in 1969, the celebrated whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst at the RAND Corporation, had an accomplice, Anthony Russo, who also had worked at RAND. (Both were indicted by the government.)  Acting in concert, they copied secret documents that became famously known as the Pentagon Papers. 

Whistle-blowers also can, like conventional spies, enter into elaborate conspiracies to carry out a penetration operation, For example, on the night of March 8, 1971, eight whistle-blowers working together with burglary tools, broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole almost all the FBI files there.  The conspirators escaped and kept their identities secret for over 42 years. 

  Self-definitions also do necessarily produce a distinction between whistle-blowers and conventional spies.   Consider, for example Philip Agee.  Agee left the CIA in 1969 for what he described “reasons of conscience.” Specifically, he said he objected to the CIA’s covert support of Latin America dictators.  After contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, he defected to Cuba, where he leaked information that exposed CIA operations.  Although Agee insisted he was a whistle-blower, and he adamantly denied offering any secrets to the Soviet Union, the KGB viewed him as a conventional spy. According to Oleg Kalugin, the top Soviet counterintelligence officer in the KGB in Moscow, who defected to the U.S.,  Agee offered CIA secrets first to the KGB residency in Mexico City in 1973 and then to Cuban intelligence service. Agee provided the KGB with a “treasure trove” of US secrets, Kalugin revealed. “I then sat in my office in Moscow reading the growing list of revelations coming from Agee.”  Despite this disparity, Agee still defined himself to the public as a whistle-blower because he also had exposed CIA operations to the public.

    The Snowden case blurs the demarcation line even further.   Unlike other whistle-blowers who uncovered what they considered government malfeasance by virtue of their job, Snowden, by his own admission, took a new job in 2013 specifically to get access to the SCI files concerning NSA sources that he stole from the Threat Operations Center.  Switching jobs in order to widen one’s access to state secrets us an activity usually associated with penetration agents, not whistle-blowers.  While the technical distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy may still serve the media in the case of Snowden, it does not help in solving the counterintelligence conundrum. 

Untangling the strands of the Snowden conundrum is no easy matter. A complex burglary of state secrets had been successfully carried in a supposedly-secure site.  The only known witness, Snowden, had escaped to Russia, where he could be of help in reconstructing the crime.  The stolen data was kept in the equivalent of sealed “vaults”—which were actually computer drives that were not connected to the NSA Network ever there was a locked room mystery, this was it.

  The perpetrator Snowden pierced these barriers by using passwords that belonged to other people and using credentials that allowed him to masquerade as a system administrator. However it was carried out, it was feat required meticulous planning.   As in the earlier example of a hypothetical diamond theft from locked vaults, what is needed is to explain how a perpetrator, who did not himself have the combinations to open them or the means to remove their content, succeeded in the theft. 


To address such a mystery, a counterintelligence investigation starts with a tabula rasa, stripping away all the previous assumptions, including that Snowden was the lone perpetrator. Once back at square one, it builds alternative scenarios to test against the known facts. To be sure, scenario-building differs from that of a conventional forensic investigation aimed at finding pieces of evidence that can be used to persuade a jury in a courtroom.  Unlike a judicial investigation concerned with guilt and innocence, scenario-building looks building looks to develop a story that is, concurrently: intrinsically consistent, humanly plausible and symbolically memorable; and in the process, it also identifies and explores the possible holes  in the case. Such scenarios must aim at constituting a limited set of alternatives that are mutually exclusive  The point is to assure that any alternative that fits the relevant facts, no matter how implausible it initially may seem to be, is not neglected.  


One of the most vexing problems that had to be explained by these scenarios is how Snowden got the passwords to up to 24 of these vaults.  He could not have obtained these passwords during his previous employment at Dell because Dell technicians did not have access to the Level 3 documents stored in these compartments.  Nor, as was discussed earlier, was he given access to them when he transferred to Booz Allen because he had not completed the requisite training.
    Snowden had also, it will be recalled, relinquished his privileges as a system administrator when he transferred to Booz Allen, so he did not have the privilege to override password protection.  In short, his new position as an infrastructure analyst did not give him the ability to enter compartments which he had not yet been read into.

There are two possible ways he could have gotten these passwords: Either he had assistance from a party who had access to them or he found flaws in the NSA’s security procedures that left the supposedly-closed vaults effectively unlocked.

The Unwitting Accomplice Possibility

As for the first alternative, it is possible whatever assistance that Snowden received was entirely unwitting.  For example, he could have simply asked other analysts at the Center who had been “read into” compartments for their passwords. But such an approach would be extremely risky for him.   If an analyst gave him his password, and it was discovered, that analyst could lose his job. Moreover, any analyst was supposed to report any request for a password to a security officer. Nor was Snowden, who had been working at the Threat Operations Center for just a few weeks as a trainee, well known to other analysts.  So asking them to break the rules was fairly risky for Snowden.    “It is inconceivable to me that his co-workers would divulge their passwords to him,” a former Booz Allen executive, who had also worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told me.  “If he was a system administrator he might trick a threat analyst into entering his password into his computer under the pretext that he needed it to deal with an urgent hardware issue.”   But Snowden was not a system administrator at the Center.  Snowden therefore “had no plausible reason for requesting passwords to compartment he had not been read into,” the former executive said.    I asked him what the chance was of him obtaining some 24 passwords in 5 weeks. “In my opinion, near zero,” he said.  I next asked him whether it was possible that Snowden could have used a device for intercepting another computer’s electronic signals, called by hackers a “key logger.”  Such a device, which was obtainable over the Internet, could be used to steal passwords of the analysts who had been “read into” the compartments. My source said that while it was possible that Snowden smuggled in a key logger in his backpack, it could not be operated wirelessly inside the Center because, like all other NSA facilities, the computers had been insulated to lock-out wireless transmission.  This precaution was taken to guard against an EMP, or Electro-Magnetic Pulse, attack by an enemy.  If so, the only way Snowden could intercept key strokes was to attach a cable from his key logger to each of his fellow workers’ computers.  In this scenario, he would have to surreptitiously build his own wired network connecting his hidden key logger to 24 separated computers. Moreover, he would have to do this wiring in an open-plan office where he could not count on these additional wires, even if rigged one by one, not being noticed by either other analysts on the room or the geek squad of system administrators who regularly checked connections. Making the task even more risky, according to my Booz Allen source, there were closed-circuit cameras.   The only way he could mitigate the risk of detection was by having someone help him build this network.

There was a further security barrier he had to get by. Even after he managed to obtain all the necessary passwords from colleagues, he had to transfer the files to an external storage device.  This was not a matter of simply using a thumb drive because, unlike in caper movies such as Mission Impossible, the ports on the computers at the NSA were ordinarily sealed shut. This measure was done specifically to prevent any unauthorized downloading by NSA workers.    The only people at the Center who had the authorization, and the means, to open these ports and transfer data were system administrators, according to the former Booz Allen executive.  System administrators needed to have this privilege to deal with glitches in the computers.  So they were allowed to open up the sealed ports.   But Snowden was no longer a system administrator and did not have these privileges.  So again, he needed some help. He either would need to borrow another system administrator’s credential or forge his own.  The credential he would need is called a public key infrastructure card with its authentication code embedded in a magnetic stripe. When I asked the former Booz Allen executive if Snowden possessed the skill set to forge such a card, he said that he strongly doubted any NSA employee would be capable of such a forgery without special equipment.   He could have, however, borrowed this credential from a system administrator who was willing to help him. But just asking such a favor could “set off alarms.”

The unwitting accomplice scenario had another stumbling block: time.  We know from Poitras that Snowden told her in early April 2013 that he planned to deliver documents to her in six to eight weeks (which he in fact did.) But he had not yet started working for Booz Allen at the Center until that same month. It does not seem plausible (to me) that in making such a commitment he was merely counting on the kindness of strangers to fulfill it The only way he could have known for certain that he would be able to borrow a public key infrastructure card and obtain the passwords, whether by trickery or by a key router, before he had begun working at the Center was that he already knew someone at the Center who would help him.  But such a contact leads to a witting accomplice scenario.   

The Witting Accomplice Possibility

    The witting-accomplice scenario better fits with the principle in logic called Occam’s razor that suggests that in choosing between alternative explanations, the one that requires the fewest assumptions should be given priority.  It would be a relatively easy to gain access to passwords if Snowden had the cooperation of an insider at the center that had been read into the compartments or, even better, if he had the cooperation with a system administrator with the necessary PKI cards and shell keys to bypass the password protection. Such an accomplice could also help explain how Snowden was able to get the job at the Center in the first place; how he knew in advance that he could find there the “lists” of the NSA sources in foreign countries, and how he knew that there were no security traps at the center.  Such a witting accomplice might even have prepared in advance the “spiders” that Snowden used to index the files.

     The witting-accomplice scenario of course requires a somewhat unsettling expansion of the plot.  It means Snowden collaborated with one or more insiders at the Center to steal secret documents.  It is not difficult to imagine, in light of the lax background checks at outside contractors servicing the NSA, that there were others in the “geek squad” that shared Snowden’s antipathy to NSA surveillance.   Certainly, we know that Snowden found other NSA workers who were willing to attend his anti-surveillance Crypto party in December 2012. Anyone of these other potential dissidents could have shared Snowden’s objective of exposing NSA abuses. It would only be a small next step to offer Snowden help if he was willing to go public.  Indeed, if the geek culture produced one Snowden, why wouldn’t it produce others? If such an accomplice lacked Snowden’s willingness to flee to another country, he may have limited his participation to supplying technical assistance.  For his part, Snowden may have agreed to divert suspicion from his accomplice by taking sole responsibility for the crime when he went public.

The problem with this scenario, however, is that no witting accomplices were ever found.  The FBI, which was in charge of the domestic part of investigation of the Snowden case, questioned all of Snowden’s co-workers at the Center over the course of six months but it failed to find anyone who knowingly helped Snowden.  If the accomplice was an idealistic amateur, it is likely the FBI would have found him.  Three co-workers did admit to the FBI that they might have inadvertently given Snowden their passwords but these three slips would not account for Snowden’s breach of all the other compartments. Of course, there may have also been less forthcoming co-workers hid their slips in divulging their passwords to Snowden.      

This raises the more sinister possibility that the accomplice was not an amateur co-worker but a deep-cover spy who was already in place when Snowden arrived on the scene.  Such a penetration agent could have been recruited by an adversary intelligence service before Snowden came on the scene.  After Snowden expressed a desire to expose the NSA’s domestic surveillance, it could then have used Snowden as an “umbrella” to hide its own activities. Finding such a means to protect a source while exploiting his or her information is not uncommon in espionage operations, and since Snowden was willing to flee America and go public, he could serve as a near perfect umbrella.  “Snowden may have carried out of the NSA many more documents than he knew about,” a former CIA station chief speculated. It could also account for the disparity between the claims of Snowden and the NSA damage assessment as to the number of the documents that were compromised. 

  As farfetched as this mole scenario may seem to the outside world, less than three years before the Snowden breach, the NSA had received a warning from a CIA mole, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 21, that the Russian Intelligence service might have recruited a KGB mole at the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA. No mole was found in 2010, and, if one existed, it could not have been Snowden, who at that time in 2010 was working for the NSA in Japan.  Such a putative mole conceivably could have acquired enough information to later facilitate Snowden’s operation.

  In this scenario, Snowden would not be difficult to spot as a potential collaborator and possible umbrella.  As Snowden acknowledges, he was not a happy worker at the NSA.  He complained between 2010 and 2013 about what he considered NSA abuses to coworkers, superiors and in his posts over the Internet.  If someone assumed the guise of a reluctant whistle-blower, he would have little difficulty in approaching Snowden.  Snowden might not even know his true affiliation beyond that he shared Snowden’s anti-surveillance views. If Snowden then voiced an interest in exposing the NSA’s secrets, this person could supply him with the necessary guidance, steering a still unsuspecting Snowden first to the Booz Allen position and afterwards to his associates in Hong Kong.  By taking sole credit for the coup in the video that he made with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong, he acted, as he told Greenwald, to divert suspicion from anyone else. This move could also any collaborator he may have had in Hawaii time to cover his tracks. 

 The astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in regard to searching the universe for signals from other civilizations that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  That injunction also applies to the spooky universe of espionage. The fact that a mole hunt fails to find a hidden collaborator at the NSA does not necessarily mean such a mole does not exist.  Historically, we have many notable cases in which Russian moles eluded intensive investigations for many decades. Robert Hanssen served as a KGB penetration in the FBI for over 20 years without being caught. Similarly, Aldrich Ames, acted as a KGB mole in the CIA for more than ten years, and passed all the CIA’s sophisticated lie detector tests. Both Hanssen and Ames eluded intensive FBI and CIA investigations that lasted over a decade.   According to Victor Cherkashin, their KGB case officer, who I interviewed in Moscow in 2015, the KGB was able to hide their existence from investigators for such a long period partly because of the widespread belief in U.S. intelligence that moles were fictional creatures that sprung from the “paranoid mind” of James Jesus Angleton.  When I then cited the signature line from the movie The Usual Suspects   “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Cherkashin thinly smiled and said “CIA denial [of moles] certainly helped.” 

   In view of such past successes of the Russian intelligence services, it cannot be precluded that there was another person in the NSA working with Snowden who used an enthusiastic as cover to prevent any light from falling on his own surreptitious spying.  While it may seem extremely unlikely that Snowden had such assistance, the alternative scenario, that Snowden broke into the sealed compartments and made off with the documents without any assistance, seems equally unlikely.

Even if Snowden had been, as he claims, a pure idealist seeking to right a perceived wrong, it does exclude the possibility of his becoming entangled in the plots of others. Intelligence services make it their business to bring about such witting or unwitting entanglements. 








CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Question of When?

“The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security”

—Snowden in Moscow

In his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John LeCarre helped establish the concept in the public imagination of a mole burrowing unto a rival intelligence service.   LeCarre’s now classic mole, code-named by the KGB “Gerald,” managed in the novel to gain access to the inner sanctum of the British intelligence service MI-6.  Aided and guided by his controllers in Moscow, he systematically stole British intelligence secrets. As LeCarre wove the plot, the brilliantly-orchestrated operation involved spotting, compromising, and recruiting others to gradually advance Gerald the mole to a position of power.  Such well-organized penetrations are not limited to fiction.   The career of KGB mole Heinz Felfe, who was advanced through the ranks of German intelligence by an elaborate series of sacrifices by his controllers in Moscow until he actually headed German counterintelligence in 1961, could have served as the non-fiction inspiration for Le Carre’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came out of the Cold.  As US intelligence only found out after the Cold War ended, the KGB also had the ability to sustain moles for decades.


   The CIA also had its share of long term successes, such as Alexander Poteyev, who fed the CIA secrets for over ten years while burrowing into Russian intelligence.   In the choreography of these operations, as in Le Carre’s fiction, rival intelligence services ensnared and sacrificed recruits , as if playing a chess game, to advance their moles.  Despite notable successes such as Felfe, and Poteyev, a great number of these elaborate conspiracies fail insinuate moles in their adversaries’ confidence.  Intelligence services therefore also take advantage of a more prosaic source:  the self-generated spy, or, as they are called in the trade, walk-in. 
Although they are largely unsung in novels, these walk-ins are an important part of espionage.  A counterespionage review done for the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIEB) in 1990 found that most US spies in the Cold War had taken documents on their own volition and only afterwards offered them to an adversary service. Self-generated spies have diverse motives. Some intelligence workers steal secrets for financial gains.  Others take them to further an ideological interest.  As opportunistic enterprises, intelligence services do not turn walk-ins away if they have valuable intelligence.  Indeed, some of the most successful moles were not recruited, or even controlled, by spy agencies.  They were self-generated penetrations, or “sources” as the KGB preferred to call them, who first stole secrets and later voluntarily deliver them to an adversary.  Consider the case of Robert Hanssen, who successfully penetrated the FBI for the Russian intelligence services from 1979 to 2001.  He was a “walk-in,” who never entered the Soviet embassy or met with KGB or SVR case officers. Instead, he set his espionage in motion by passing an anonymous letter to Victor Cherkashin, the KGB spy handler working undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C.  From the start of his work for the KGB, Hanssen laid down his own rules.  The KGB would deliver cash from which all the fingerprints were removed to locations, or “dead drops,” he specified.  He would deliver documents exposing FBI, CIA and NSA sources and methods in another dead drop. The KGB would precisely follow his instructions. Cherkashin told me that Hanssen’s “astounding self-recruitment” was executed in such a way that the KGB never actually controlled him. “He was our most important mole and we didn’t ever know his identity, where he worked or how he had access to FBI, CIA and NSA files.” Even so, the KGB (and later SVR) paid him $600,000 in cash. In return, the anonymous spy delivered 27 computer discs containing hundreds of secret documents revealing the sources and methods of American intelligence.  According to Cherkashin, it was the largest haul of top secrets documents ever obtained by the KGB (although it was only a small fraction of the number of top secret NSA, Department of Defense and CIA documents taken by Snowden in 2013.)   Cherkashin told me the price paid by Moscow was a great bargain since it helped compromise “the NSA’s most advanced electronic interception technology,” including a tunnel under the Soviet Embassy. Yet, it was only after newspapers reported that Hanssen had been arrested by the FBI in February 2001 that Cherkashin learned the name and position of the spy that he had recruited.  Cherkashin told me that what matters to the KGB was not “control” of an agent but the value of the secrets he or she delivered.  “Control is not necessary in espionage as long as we manage to obtain the documents.”  So in the eyes of the KGB, anyone who elects to provide it with US secrets is a spy.      
  It is also possible to exploit a walk-in even after he has left his service. For example, KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn was an ideological self-generated spy who walked into the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland on Christmas Day 1962. He asked to see the CIA officer on duty announce to him he had collected a trove of KGB secrets, including information that could identify its key spies in the West. He offered to defect to the U.S. The CIA accepted his offer, and through this archive of secrets he had previously compiled, he became one of the CIA’s most productive sources in the Cold War.


     The job of an intelligence service is to take advantage of whatever opportunities comes its way in the form of self-generated spies.  If a Russian walk-in had not yet burned his bridges to his own service, US intelligence officers were under instructions to attempt to persuade the walk-in to return to his post in Russia and serve as a “defector-in-place,” or mole.  “While defectors can and do provide critical information, a CIA memorandum on walk-ins during the Cold War noted, “There are very few cases in which the same individual may not have been of greater value if he had returned to his post.”  Of course if a walk-in believed he was already compromises, as Golitsyn did, a decision would have to be made whether the value of his intelligence merited exfiltrating him to the United States.  
 This required evaluating the bona fides of the walk-in.  Not all walk-ins are accepted as defectors. Some walk-ins are deemed “dangles,” or agents dispatched by the KGB to test and confuse the CIA. Others are rejected as political liabilities, as happened to Wang Lijun, a well-connected police chief in China.  In February 2012, Wang, walked into at the US consulate in Chengdu asking from asylum.  The State Department decided against it. After Wang left US protection, he was arrested for corruption and received a 15 year prison sentence.   Such decisions about walk-ins are not made with due consideration, often at the highest level of a government, since exfiltrating a defector can result in diplomatic ruptures and political embarrassments. 

Conversely, it raises espionage concerns when an adversary government authorizes the exfiltration of a rogue employee of an intelligence service.  At minimum, it means that a rival government placed value on what the defector could provide it.  The Snowden case is no exception.   Whatever Snowden’s prior relations may have been with Russia, it could prudently assumed that after he fled to Moscow, in light of the intelligence value of the stolen documents, he would wind up in the hands of the Russian security services.  That assumption was reinforced by subsequent countermeasures that were implemented by Russia to block secret sources of NSA surveillance.   “Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks, communications sources dried up, tactics were changed,” Michael Morell who was at that time the Deputy Director of the CIA, revealed.  It indicated that at least part of the US communications intelligence that Snowden had stole was in enemy hands. The CIA and NSA’s monitoring of these countermeasures  was itself extremely delicate since revealing what they learned about Russian and Chinese countermeasures  risked compromising even more U.S communications sources than had Snowden.  General Keith B. Alexander headed both the NSA and Cyber Command at the time these countermeasures were first detected in 2013. He said in his interview with the Australian Business Review: “We absolutely need to know what Russia’s involvement is with Snowden.” He further said, “I think Snowden is now being manipulated by Russian intelligence.  I just don't know when that exactly started."     Much turned on the answer to this “when” question.  The counterintelligence issue was not if this U.S. intelligence defector in Moscow was under Russian control, but when he came under it.

    There were three possible time periods when Snowden might have been brought under control by the Russian intelligence service: while he was still working for the NSA; after he arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013; or after he arrived in Russia on June 23, 2013.

The NSA Scenario

   The first scenario could stretch as far back as when Snowden was forced out of the CIA in 2009.  It will be recalled that the CIA then had planned to launch a security investigation of Snowden but it was aborted when he resigned.  He also had incurred large losses speculating in the financial markets in Geneva, which is an activity which had in the past attracted in interest of foreign intelligence services.  So it had to be considered in this scenario that Snowden had been recruited by the Russians after he left the CIA and directed to take jobs at civilian contractors servicing the NSA. Such “career management,” as it is called by the CIA, could explain why Snowden had switched jobs in March 2013 to Booz Allen Hamilton, which, unlike his previous employer Dell, allowed him to gain proximity the super-secrets list of the telecommunication systems that the NSA had penetrated in Russia and China.  Even though Snowden himself did not have password access to these files, since he was still as a trainee, he managed to acquire the necessary passwords from others working there.  It could also account for why the documents he copied that pertained to NSA operations in Russia were not among those he gave to Poitras, Greenwald and other journalists.  Since Russia has an active intelligence sharing treaty with China since 1996, it could further explain why his first stop was Hong Kong, a part of China.  It was a safe venue for debriefing Snowden, as well as establishing his credentials among journalists as a whistle-blower, before a decision was made to allow him to proceed to Russia.

The nearly fatal problem with this early-recruitment scenario is Snowden contacts with journalists.  Snowden, it will be recalled, had contacted Greenwald in December 2012.  Greenwald was a high-profile blogger in Brazil who did not use encryption or any security safeguards. Next, he contacted Poitras in January 2013 in Berlin who was a magnet for NSA dissidents.    Both of these contacts put Snowden’s clandestine downloading at grave risk. As known opponents of US intelligence agencies, these journalists might be, as they themselves suspected they were, under surveillance by American, British, Brazilian or German intelligence services. Greenwald and Poitras might also tell others who were either under surveillance or informers. So no matter what precaution Snowden took, his secret enterprise, or just the fact he was in contact with anti-government activists might be detected. At minimum, he could lose his access to secrets and be of no further use as a source at the NSA. He could also be interrogated and reveal the way he was brought under control.    If Snowden actually had been under the control of the Russian intelligence service, the last thing it would allow was for him to take such a risk—or even to contact a single journalist.  After all, the purpose of an espionage operation is to steal secrets without alerting anyone, including journalists, to the theft.     A former CIA officer told me that while anything could “go haywire: in an intelligence operation, it would be “unthinkable” that the Russian intelligence service would permit a source it controlled in the NSA to expose himself by contacting journalists.  It was, as he put it, a “lose-lose move.”  Assuming that the operation did not “go haywire,” Snowden’s continued interactions with Poitras and Greenwald made it implausible to me that Snowden was under Russian control before he went to Hong Kong.     

The Hong Kong Scenario

      The second possibility is that Snowden was brought under Russian control while he was in Hong Kong.  The most compelling support for this scenario comes from Putin himself,  His disclosure about the case leaves little doubt that Russian officials engaged Snowden in Hong Kong, that Putin authorized his trip to Moscow while he was in Hong Kong and the Russian government allowed him to fly to Moscow without a Russian visa. We also know that Snowden indicated to Gellman he was in touch with a foreign embassy and that he met with Russian diplomats in Hong Kong.  We know from US surveillance of his activities in Hong Kong that he contacted the Russian consulate.  And we know that the Russians went to some lengths to facilitate his trip to Moscow. All these pieces in the Hong Kong scenario support the possibility that the Russian intelligence service managed to bring him under its sway during his 33 days in Hong Kong.  

      The Russian intelligence service even might have been aware of Snowden, and his anti-NSA activities, before his arrival on May 20, 2013. Snowden, as discussed earlier, was anything but discrete in his contacts with strangers in the anti-surveillance movement, including such well known activists as Runa Sandvik (who he supplied his true name and address via email), Micah Lee, Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins, and Laura Poitras. “It is not statistically improbable that members of this circle were being watched by a hostile service,”   a former NSA counterintelligence officer told me in 2015. When I told him that Poitras and others in her circle had used PGP encryption, aliases and TOR software in their exchanges with Snowden, he said, arching his eyebrows, “That might work against amateurs, but it wouldn’t stop the Russians if they thought they might have a defector in the NSA.”  He explained that both the NSA and hostile services have the “means” to bypass such safeguards. 

     I next asked him what the Russian intelligence service would have done if they had indeed spotted Snowden in late 2012 or early 2013.  “Maybe just research him,” he replied.  As we know now, he pointed out. Russia and China probably had access the 127-page standard form in his personnel file that he updated in 2011.   They also had the capability to track his air travel to Hong Kong.  “Could someone have steered him to Hong Kong?” I asked.  He answered. With a shrug, “That depends on whether  Snowden had a confidante who could have influenced him.”

Whenever adversaries became aware of Snowden in this scenario, it was not until after Snowden copied the NSA secrets and took them with him to Hong Kong that Russian intelligence officers offered him a deal.   So from the Russian point of view, Snowden had already burnt his bridges. Since he had used other people’s passwords to get into computers that he was not authorized to use,  illegally moved documents and gave a false reason for his medical leave, it was only a matter of time before NSA investigators would identify him as a possible spy.  He could be of no further use to an adversary at the NSA.  His intelligence value now lay in the documents he had taken with him or stored in the cloud as well as his ability to help clarify them in debriefing sessions.  In addition, he could have a further use to an adversary, especially if he agreed to cooperate.  By virtue of his position as a former insider, he could inflict damage on the morale and public standing of the NSA by denouncing its spying in the media.  So once in Hong Kong, the Russians would have no reason to restrain him from holding a press event or releasing a video,  In fact, in the past the KGB had organized press conferences for all the previous NSA defectors to Moscow.  Hong Kong also might be seen as a perfect venue for a well-staged media event since all the major newspapers in the world had bureaus there.  And his disclosures about the NSA spying coming under the mantle of whistle-blowing could serve to weaken the NSA’s relations with its allies.  The event would also serve to deflect suspicion from any other potential spies in the NSA, if any existed.  Snowden’s going public on June 9th 2013 provided that opportunity.

It is also possible in this Hong Kong scenario that Russian or Chinese intelligence did not become aware of Snowden until after he went public on June 9th 2013 by having the Guardian release his video. At that point, if the Russians or Chinese had any doubts how dissatisfied he was with the NSA, they would be dispelled by the video. Since dissatisfaction is one of the classic means of recruitment in the intelligence business, he certainly would become a prime target for recruitment after he went public.    The CIA also considered the possibility that Snowden also may have been reeled in unwittingly. Its Deputy Director, Michael Morell suggested in his book that Snowden may not himself have fully realized “when and how he would be used.”       



  What can be safely assumed is that the decision made by Putin’s intelligence service to allow Snowden to proceed to Russia proceeded from something other than soft-hearted sentiment about his welfare.  In addition, this decision was not made on the spur of the moment.  After Putin learned that there was an American in Hong Kong from the “special services” seeking to come to Russia, he also learned from Snowden’s own disclosure on the video that he had taken to Hong Kong a large number of NSA documents. After that self-outing by Snowden, Putin had at least 14 days to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of allowing him to come to Moscow.   To be sure, we don’t know the precise date of Snowden’s first contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong.   Putin reframed from specifying when Snowden first met them. But whenever it was, we know that he was deemed important enough by the Russian intelligence service for it to bring him to the personal attention of Putin.
       Putin could offer him not only his freedom from arrest but a platform to express his views.  The exploitation of an intelligence defector, even after he yields his secrets documents, can also be part of an intelligence operation.  General Alexander, who ran the NSA during this period, concluded that Putin was playing a deep game with Snowden by “looking to capitalize on the fact that his [Snowden’s] actions are enormously disruptive and damaging to US interests.”  This game, if Alexander’s assessment in correct, might provide Putin with ample reason to have his representatives in Hong Kong offer Snowden an exfiltration deal.

 Snowden hardly was not in any position to refuse such a deal. After the release of the video release, there was no going back to America without his facing a determined criminal prosecution.  If he had researched the issue, he would  have known that in every prior case, intelligence workers who had released even a single classified document  had gone to prison.  As his Internet postings show, he had closely followed the ordeal of Bradley Manning, whose trial was coming to its conclusion while Snowden was in Hong Kong.  So he likely knew that even though the documents Manning had sent to Wikileaks were far less damaging than those Snowden had taken. Manning had been kept in solitary confinement under horrific conditions for over a year while awaiting his trial and was facing a long prison sentence. (Manning was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison.)   There was no reason for Snowden to expect a better outcome for himself if he returned to the US or was arrested in Hong Kong or any other place that had an extradition treaty with the US.  As the Russian officials in Hong Kong might well have informed him, Russia had no extradition treaty with the US,  It was also one of the few places in the world that he could reach from Hong Kong without flying through airspace in which he might be intercepted by a US ally. Moreover, Putin himself had approved his exfiltration, which meant that, even without a valid passport or visa, Snowden could take the direct Aeroflot flight to Moscow.  Snowden’s choice was going to Russia or going to prison. 

The Russians could have used this leverage in the Hong Kong scenario to extract a quid pro quo. The price of admission in that quid pro quo was proving all his documents and putting himself in the hands of Russian intelligence.  To be sure, Snowden might have refused this leverage in Hong Kong, and Putin may have decided the terms of the deal could better be negotiated in Moscow.    

The Moscow Scenario


    The final possibility is that Snowden did not come under Russian control until after he arrived in Moscow.   Certainly, the Russian intelligence service could afford to wait in Hong Kong before tightening the vice on Snowden.  It knew that Interpol and the US would be pursuing him throughout the world and that Snowden had no valid travel documents to go anywhere else.  It could also have determined that his credit cards had been frozen. So it could afford to wait until his plane landed in Russia.


  After the Russians took him in a “special operation” from the plane at the airport, he was informed by Russian authorities that he would not be allowed to go to Cuba, Venezuela, Iceland, Ecuador, or any other country without the permission of Russian officials, which would not be immediately forthcoming. So he never even showed up for the flight to Cuba (which Assange had  “leaked” to the media he would be aboard.) He was now at the mercy of the Russian authorities.  There was good reason for keeping him in a virtual prison in Russia.   "He can compromise thousands of intelligence and military officials,” Sergei Alexandrovich Markov, the co-Chairman of the National Strategic Council of Russia and an adviser to Putin, pointed out, “We can't send him back just because America demands it."  



So Snowden was consigned to the transit zone of the airport, which is a twilight zone neither inside nor outside of Russia, a netherworld that extends beyond the confines of the airport to include safe houses and other facilities maintained by the FSB for the purposes of interrogation and security.  Stranded at the Moscow airport, Snowden had no place to go except into the waiting arms of the FSB. No matter what he had believed earlier in Hong Kong, he would quickly realize that he had only one viable option: seeking sanctuary in Russia.


     Even though the FSB is known by US intelligence to run a strict regime over present and former members of foreign intelligence services, Snowden may not have realized the full extent of the FSB’s interest in him.  He naively told the Washington Post in December 2013 in Moscow, “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”  While he might have sincerely persuaded himself  that he was somehow helping US communications intelligence  in a self-appointed role, those familiar with the activities of the Russian security services find it inconceivable that he could escape their control in Russia. At the very minimum,   a former US intelligence worker who stole American state secrets, such as Snowden, would be under the FSB’s scrutiny.  Andrei Soldatov, the co-author of the 2010 book The New Nobility: the Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, and who was personal knowledgeable about FSB procedures, explained the FSB would monitor “every facet of Snowden's communications, and his life.”    General Oleg Kalugin, who, as previously mentioned, defected from the KGB to the United States in 1995, added that the FSB following the standard operating procedures of the KGB, would be “his hosts and they are taking care of him.” Kalugin further said in 2014 that “Whatever he had access to in his former days at NSA, I believe he shared all of it with the Russians, and they are very grateful” 



     American intelligence officers knowledgeable about the operations of the FSB, agreed with Kalugin’s assessment.   General Hayden, for example, who served both as director of the NSA, CIA, and Air Force counterintelligence, told me in an interview that he saw no other possibility than Snowden would be induced to cooperate in this situation, saying “I would lose all respect for the Russian and Chinese security services if they haven’t fully exploited everything Snowden had to give.”   They certainly had that opportunity at Sheremetyevo International Airport: He had already, at least in the eyes of the Department of Justice, betrayed US secrets by stealing them and taking them abroad.  Snowden was held in limbo in the transit zone.  The FSB controlled his access to food, lodgings, the Internet, and whatever else he needed to survive there.  It could also return him to the US if he did not cooperate.  What recourse did Snowden have?  The only party from whom he could seek redress was Putin’s regime.  Russia’s leverage now would be even greater than in Hong Kong. If Putin chose to fully apply it, would be all but irresistible over a fugitive who had literally no place else to go.  In a word, the FSB held all the cards but one—Snowden’s help with the stolen documents. Even if Snowden disliked the tactics of the Russian security services, his situation left him a powerful inducement now not to decline the requests of the Russian authorities.  

Two weeks after his arrival, the Russian authorities provided him with a convenient path to full cooperation with Russia.  He was put in contact with Anatoly Grigorievich Kucherena, a silver-haired 53-year old lawyer, who was known as a personal friend of Putin.  Kucherena also did task for Putin’s party in the Russian parliament or Duma.  Most important for Snowden, Kucherena had excellent connections in the Russian security apparatus since he served on the oversight committee of the FSB.  He also offered to serve as the lawyer for Snowden pro bono.   On July 10, 2013, Snowden officially retained him as his legal representative in Moscow. From that point on, he would act as Snowden’s go-between with the FSB and other Russian agencies.  


At the outset, Kucherena made it clear to Snowden that he would have to play by Moscow’s rules before the Kremlin would grant him permission to stay in Russia.  To begin with, Snowden had to withdraw any and application he had made elsewhere for asylum.  He had to put his fate entirely in the hands of Putin’s Russia.  He would also have to be fully candid with the Russian authorities about what was of great value to Putin: the secret documents he had acquired.


 Two days later, Snowden made his first public appearance in Russia.  It had been, like previous press conferences with US defectors to Russia, carefully managed,  First, Snowden arrived by limousine at the international transit lounge of Sheremetyevo airport.  He was seated at a table with Harrison.  As Snowden spoke no Russian, a Russian translator was provided.  The small audience included hand-picked Russian officials, including some Putin’s close associates.  They were ushered through passport control by security men to the otherwise cordoned-off lounge.  The cameras for RT television and other Russian channels were already in place.    When everyone had taken their seats, Snowden announced in a quiet voice that was seeking asylum in Russia.  Ten minutes later, Snowden and Harrison were escorted back to the limousine which drove off to an unannounced destination.

      Snowden received Russian identification papers on August 1, 2013 that allowed him to resettle in Moscow.  Not only was he provided with a residence but he was allowed to set up in it a broadcasting studio that could be used for Internet appearance at well-attended events around the world, such as South by Southwest, TED, and other Internet conferences. Snowden was, according to Kucherena, was also furnished with bodyguards. To help earn his keep, he was employed at an unidentified Moscow cyber-security firm.  To complete his resettlement, Lindsay Mills, whom he had left behind in Hawaii, was given a 3-month visa and was allowed to temporarily live with him in Moscow.  This afforded him a life style which Snowden described in an interview as “great.”



Kucherena, although he was acting without compensation from Snowden, later received the stunning sum of one million dollars from Open Road Films, the distributor for Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” movie,  for the  rights to his not completed novel called “Time of the Octopus,”  a story based on his story of Snowden’s stay at the airport.
It would strain credibility that such privileges would be awarded to an intelligence defector who had refused to cooperate with Russian authorities. In Snowden’s case, he was even allowed to participate in a Putin’s telethon on state-controlled television.  On it, he was called on to ask Putin if the Russian government violated the privacy of Russian citizens in the same way that the American government violated rights of its citizens. Putin, smiling at Snowden’s presumably vetted question, answered in a single word: “No.”  

    In the Moscow scenario, Snowden received sanctuary, support, perks and high-level treatment by Putin himself because he agreed to cooperate.  If Snowden had not paid the price of admission, either in Russia or before his arrival, he would not have been accorded this privileged status.    





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”

                                                   --Edward Snowden in Moscow 

The critical missing piece in Snowden enigma is the whereabouts of the NSA documents.  Greenwald told the Associated Press that the documents that Snowden had taken from the NSA constituted " the instruction manual for how the NSA is built" and they "would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it." Snowden indeed said on camera in June 2013 that NSA investigators would have “a heart attack” when they discovered the extent the breach.   Ledgett, the NSA official who it will be recalled had conducted the damage assessment, while not having a heart attack, confirmed that the files Snowden had taken a massive number of files, which he pout at over one million documents, and, among them, what he deemed the NSA’s “keys to the kingdom.”  These so-called “keys to the kingdom” presumably could open up the mechanism through the United States learns about the secret activities of other nations, and, by doing so, bring down the American signals intelligence system that had for 60 years monitored government communications.  It had also kept track of adversaries’ missile telemetry, submarine movements, and nuclear proliferation.

  The Snowden breach was not without precedent at the NSA.  There had been two Russian spies at the NSA during the Cold War, Jack Dunlap and David Boone who took a limited number of documents, but no one since the end of the Cold War had taken a single NSA classified document.  Now an insider removed, by any count, tens of thousands of NSA’s documents.  Moreover, many of these documents were classified “TS/SCI”—Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information—which, as NSA secrets went, were the gold standard of espionage. Whatever the assessment of Snowden’s motivation, the single question that needed to be answered was:  What happened to these stolen files? 

To begin with, there is a huge disparity between the number of documents that the NSA calculated that Snowden compromised and the number of documents he is known to have handed over to journalists in Hong Kong on a thumb drive.  After the Snowden breach, the House and Senate intelligence committees asked the NSA how many documents were taken by Snowden.  Even though the NSA had employed a world class team of computer scientists, cryptanalysts and forensic experts to reconstruct the crime from the logs, it could not come up with a definitive number.  What it could say was how many documents had been highlighted or selected, coped and moved to another computer.  As the NSA briefed these committees in closed-door sessions, 1.7 million had been selected in two dozen NSA computers during Snowden’s brief tenure at Booz Allen in 2013. This total included documents from the Department of Defense, NSA and CIA.  Of these “touched” documents, some 1.3 million of them had been copied and moved to another computer.  The selection of these documents by Snowden could hardly be considered an accident since Snowden had used pre-programmed spiders to find and index these documents. In addition he had stated that he took the job at Booz Allen to get access to data that had been copied. So, as far as the NSA was concerned the 1.3 million documents he copied and moved were considered compromised.   On top of this haul, Snowden had copied files while working at Dell in 2012.  The total number he stole there is unknown, however, because, as a system administrator there, he could download data without leaving a digital trail.  At best, the NSA investigation could only count the documents that were published or referred to in the press and those found on the thumb drive intercepted in London that traced back to his 2012 work at Dell.  As previously mentioned, more than half the published documents had been taken during Snowden’s time at Dell.  

 Snowden supporters, to be sure, do not accept that Snowden stole such a large number of documents.  According to Greenwald, the NSA vastly exaggerated the magnitude of the theft in order to “demonize” Snowden.  Snowden also disputed the 1.7 million number.  He told James Bamford of Wired in early 2014, that he took far less than the 1.7 million documents that the NSA reported was compromised.  He further claimed in that same interview that he purposely left behind at the NSA base in Hawaii “a trail of digital bread crumbs” so that the NSA could determine which documents he “touched” but did not download. If so, these “bread crumbs” were missed by the NSA according to its statement.

    It is within the realm of possibility that the NSA Damage Assessment team under Ledgett falsified its finding to inflate the number of documents that Snowden stole.   NSA executives also might have lied to Congress to the same end.  But why would these officials engage in an orchestrated deception that made them look bad?  Ledgett, after all, had been in charge of the National Threat Operations Center from which most of the Level 3 documents were stolen. By exaggerating the magnitude of the theft it would also magnify Ledgett and other NSA’s failure in its mission to protect US secrets.  Certainly they had no reason to demonize him for legal reasons.   Greenwald and Poitras had already effectively demonized him in this regard. They revealed that Snowden had given them a vast number of NSA classified documents on a thumb drive that revealed, as Greenwald put it, the “blueprints” of the NSA. This drive contained, it will be recalled, no few than 58,000 documents.  As was discussed in Chapter I, just revealing the partial content of a single document to a journalist, as in the case of CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, could result in two years in prison.  So in the eyes of the law disclosing the full contents of 58,000 highly-classified documents constituted an unprecedented breach of the laws passed to protect communications intelligence.    In any case, safely ensconced in Russia, Snowden was not in any legal jeopardy no matter how many documents it was claimed by the government that he stole.   It is also makes little sense that the numbers were falsified by the Department to tarnish Snowden’s image. The 35-page Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment, for example, that said that 900,000 Pentagon documents were compromised by Snowden, was not made public. It was only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015.   

What is known is the number of documents that Snowden gave to journalists in Hong Kong.  As will be recalled, Poitras and Greenwald were “writing partners.”  When Greenwald discovered that his copy of the documents were corrupted,  Poitras made a copy of the thumb drive that Snowden gave her in Hong Kong and sent it to her Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro by a courier. That courier was intercepted by British authorities at Heathrow Airport.  When examined,  the Poitras-Greenwald thumb drive contained some 58,000 documents.  This meant that the lion’s share of the 1.3 million documents that the NSA claimed were compromised had not been given to journalists and is unaccounted for.

The numbers game is not only misleading nut unenlightening on the issue of the value of the compromised documents.  Many of the putative 1.3 million documents that the NSA says were copied and moved were duplicate copies. Others were outdated or otherwise useless routing data.  So the quantity does not tell the story. Of far more importance than the quantity of the total haul is  the quality of some of the data that Snowden had copied.  Just a single one of these documents could cripple not just the NSA but America’s entire multi-billion dollar apparatus for intercepting foreign intelligence. The previously-cited summary of requests by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and other agencies for communications intelligence, for example, which was 31,000 pages long,  listed all the gaps in U.S. coverage of adversaries, including those cited by President Obama’s national security team. As Ledgett warned, this single document, if it fell into enemy hands, would provide out adversaries with “a roadmap of what we know what we don’t know and imp/licitly a way to protect themselves.”  The “roadmap” was not found among the files on the thumb drive.  Nor were most of the missing level 3 lists concerning NSA activities in Russia and China found on the thumb drive, even though Snowden said he took taken his final job at Booz Allen to get access to these lists.  If Snowden had not given these documents to Poitras, Greenwald or other journalists, where were they?

The compartment logs showed that Snowden copied and transferred these level 3 documents in his final week at the NSA.  He presumably had them in his possession in Hong Kong after he arrived on May 20, 2013.  On June 3rd, according to Greenwald, he was still sorting through the material to determine which ones were appropriate to give to journalists.  On June 12th 2013, he told reporter Lana Lam in Hong Kong that he was going through the documents, country by country, to determine which additional ones he should pass on to journalists. Eleven days later, he departed Hong Kong for Moscow carrying at least one laptop computer.  Even after arriving in Moscow, he suggested he still had NSA secrets in his possession. "No intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect, “ he wrote to former Senator Gordon Humphrey, “I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture."  Much of the material he copied while working at Booz Allen remained, as far as the NSA could determine, missing.  Had he brought these files under his “protection” to Russia?

An answer came three months later from his Moscow lawyer, Anatoly  Kucherena.  On September 23, 2013, Kucherena had an extensive interviewed on the state owned RT channel.   The interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze, who had a show on RT Television, called “Sophie & Co,” was well-admired journalist in her own right.  She is also the grand-daughter of Edward Shevardnadze, a former foreign minister and Politburo member of the Soviet Union and, after the Soviet Union broke up, the first president of Georgia. Even though she had interviewed many top political figures in Russia, obtaining an hour-long interview with Kucherena was a coup since, up until then, he had not discussed the subject in Snowden in a television interview.    About half-way through the interview, she brought up a highly-sensitive subject of the disposition of the NSA documents. She directly asked Kucherena if Snowden given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong. 

If anyone was in a position to know about these documents, it was Kucherena. He had acted as an intermediary for Snowden in his negotiations with Russian authorities, including the FSB.   As such, he would be privy to the status of the secret material that was of immense concern to the Russian intelligence services.   When I interviewed Kucherena in Moscow in 2015, he told me that “all the reports” concerning Snowden had been turned over to him by “Russian authorities” in July 2013. “I had all of Snowden’s statements,” he said. If so, he presumably knew what Snowden had told the Russian security services prior

Had Snowden come to Russia with empty hands or bearing gifts?   Kucherena answered her question without any evasion. He said that Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong.  He had kept the remaining documents in his possession.  That confirmed what Snowden had told Greenwald. Poitras and Lam in Hong Kong.  Snowden told them that he had divided the stolen NSA documents into two separate sets of documents. One set he gave to Poitras and Greenwald on thumb drives.  The other set, which he told them that he considered too sensitive for these journalists, he retained for himself.  As late as July 14, 2013, Greenwald told the Associated Press that Snowden held back documents and  “ "is in possession of literally thousands of documents ... that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."  One issue for U.S. investigators at the NSA, CIA and Department of Defense was what Snowden did with the second set after his meetings with the journalists in Hong Kong.  Did he take these documents with him to Russia?  

Shevardnadze, who makes it a point to drill her interviewees, pressed Kucherena as to whether Snowden still had these NSA files, or “material” in Russia.  The dialogue went as follows (from the transcript supplied to me by Shevardnadze.)  

          Shevardnadze:  So he [Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been     made public yet?


          Kucherena: Certainly.

    After establishing some part of Snowden’s “material” was still in his possession, Shevardnadze asked the next logical question:  “Why did Russia get involved in this whole thing if it got nothing out of?”
In response, Kucherena elliptically hinted that the unreleased material contained CIA secret files.   “Snowden spent quite a few years working for the CIA.” He said. "We haven’t fully realized yet the importance of his revelations.”  (He was correct that Snowden had stolen a larger number of CIA documents that he had not turned over to journalists, as CIA deputy director Morell confirmed.)   

Whatever this material might reveal, the FSB was presumably aware of its existence. After all, Kucherena was on the FSB’s public oversight board. If he had kept Snowden’s possessions of these documents secret from the FSB, he would not have divulged it in an interview on television.

Kucherena’s answer left little ambiguity to the critical question about the fate of the NSA’s missing documents: Snowden had not destroyed the electronic files of NSA documents that he had not distributed to journalists.  He still had them, when Kucherena had reviewed his files in Russia.  Kucherena’s disclosure that Snowden retained these crucial documents did not contradict Snowden’s own story at the time of the Shevardnadze interview.  Indeed, it was completely consistent with the statement Snowden made three weeks after arriving in Russia in his previously-mentioned email to Senator Humphrey. 

Snowden subsequently changed his story.  In mid-October, Snowden electronically-informed journalists that he had destroyed all the NSA documents in his possession before flying to Moscow.  So his new story radically contradicted what his own lawyer had said the previous month on television.

To be sure, Kucherena who later confirmed the accuracy of the Shevardnadze interview to me in Moscow in 2015 may have meant to say that Snowden only had access to the NSA documents rather than having the physical files in his possession. It is certainly possible that Snowden transferred the NSA files from his own computers and thumb drives to storage on a remote server in the so-called “cloud” before coming to Russia.     The “cloud” is actually not in the sky but a term used for remote storage servers, such as those provided by Drop Box, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other Internet companies.  Anyone who is connected to the Internet can store and retrieved files by entering a user name and a password.  For Kucherena to be certain Snowden had access to this data, Snowden must have demonstrated his access either to him or the authorities.  The Russians therefore also knew Snowden had the means to retrieve this data. Since the data concerned electronic espionage against Russia, the FSB had every reason to ask him to share his user name and password. If Snowden had encrypted these files, it would also ask for his encryption key.  And the FSB is not known to take a no for an answer in issues involving espionage.

   Even if Snowden refused to furnish his key, it would not present an insurmountable barrier for the FSB.  Snowden may have had confidence in the power of his encryption protocols but, according to a former National Security Council staffer, the Russian cyber service in 2013 had the means, the time and the incentive to break the encryption.   It is unlikely they would have gone to the trouble since they had Snowden in the palm of their hand in Moscow. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that, by one way or another, willingly or under duress, Snowden shared his access to his treasure trove of documents with the agencies that were literally in control of his life in Russia. 

Kucherena’s answer to the question of access also may help to explain Putin’s decision to allow Snowden to come to Moscow.  As has been discussed earlier, it was not a minor sacrifice for Putin. His foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had spent almost six months negotiating with Hillary Clinton’s State Department a one-on-one summit between President Obama and President Putin. Not only would this summit be a diplomatic coup for Russia but it would add to Putin’s personal credibility in advance of the Olympic Games in Russia.    In mid-June, after US intelligence reported to Obama’s National Security adviser that Snowden was in contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong, the State Department explicitly told Lavrov that allowing Snowden to defect to Russia would be viewed by President Obama as a blatantly unfriendly act. As such, it could (and did) lead to the cancellation of the planned summit.  So Putin knew the downside of admitting Snowden.

But there was also an upside if Snowden had access to the NSA documents. A large archive of files containing the sources of the NSA’s electronic interceptions, as Snowden claimed he had in Hong Kong, had enormous potential intelligence value   Putin therefore had to choose between the loss of an Obama summit and the gain of an intelligence coup.  That Putin chose the latter suggests that he had calculated that the utility of the intelligence that the NSA archive outweighed the public relations advantages of the Obama summit (which, after Snowden arrived in Moscow, was cancelled by Obama.)   Would Putin have made such a sacrifice if Snowden had destroyed or refused to share the stolen data?  “No country, not even the United States, would grant sanctuary to an intelligence defector who refused to be cooperative,” answered a former CIA officer who had spent a decade dealing with Russian intelligence defectors. “That’s not how it works.” If so, it seems plausible to me that, as Kucherena said, that Snowden’s documents were accessible to him either on a computer or via storage in the cloud after he arrived in Moscow.  It explains why Russia exfiltrated him from Hong Kong and provided him with a safe haven,

 The Quickly Changing Narrative

Just three weeks after Kucherena’s stunning disclosure, Snowden changed the narrative. His first exchange with an American journalist after his arrival in Russia was not until October 1`7, 2013.   It was conducted over the Internet with James Risen, a Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter.  Essentially Snowden supplied answers to a set of questions.  In then, Snowden now asserted he took no documents to Russia. The subsequent front-page story, which carried the headline, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” reported that Snowden claimed that he gave all his documents to journalists in Hong Kong and he brought none of them to Russia. He also said that he was “100 percent” certain that no foreign intelligence service had had access to them at any point during his journey from Honolulu to Moscow.   
When I later asked Kucherena in Moscow why Snowden changed his story in direct contradiction of what Kucherena had stated, he said “Wizner.”   He was referring to Ben Wizner, a top-drawer ACLU lawyer based in Washington D.C.   Wizner had joined the ACLU in August 2001 after graduating NYU law school and clerking for a Federal judge.  At the ACLU, he became an effective foe of NSA surveillance.  “I had spent ten years before this [Snowden leak] trying to bring lawsuits against the intelligence community,” he explained in an interview with Forbes in 2014.  Prior to the Snowden leak, he had been consulted frequently by Poitras on government surveillance issues (and appeared in Poitras’ 2010 documentary “The Oath.”)   He had also been engaged in a law suit aimed at exposing the NSA’s subpoenas for Verizon records.

    He had first learned about Snowden in early 2013, while Snowden was still working for the NSA, from Poitras.  At that time, Poitras did not know Snowden’s real name, but she revealed to Wizner that she had found an anonymous source with access to U.S. government surveillance secrets. So he was not completely surprised when Glenn Greenwald, Poitras’ writing partner, asked him in July 2013 to contact Snowden in Russia.

Snowden offered an opportunity  for Wizner since the ACLU already had been pursuing a suit in Federal court against the government’s seizure of Verizon’s billing records. If he could induce Snowden to retain him and the ACLU, he could claim standing in Federal court to represent Snowden in the case. He also fully believed in the salutary benefit of Snowden’s revelations.  They communicated over Skype, according to Kucherena.  When they discussed Snowden’s legal situation in America, Snowden expressed an interest in obtaining some form of amnesty from prosecution in America.  Wizner was willing to attempt to explore making a possible deal with the Department of Justice, but it would not be an easy task, especially if Snowden had turned over NSA documents to a foreign power. 

    Even to argue that Snowden was merely a NSA whistle-blower presented a serious challenge for Wizner.  The ACLU had been involved with three previous NSA whistle-blowers, William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and Russell D. Tice, but Snowden’s case differed from those cases in an important ways. Binney, Drake, and Tice had not intentionally taken any NSA documents.  Snowden, on the other hand, had not only taken a large NSA documents but released tens of thousands of these top secret files to journalists based in Germany and Brazil as well as other unauthorized recipients.  In addition, the Whistle Blower Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1989, does not exempt an insider who signs a secrecy oath, such as Snowden, from the legal consequences of disclosing classified documents to journalists or other unauthorized persons.  Consequently, getting some form of amnesty for Snowden required changing Snowden’s public image from that of a person who had damaged America to an image of a person who had helped America.  But if Snowden had taken even a single top secret document to Russia, the case could be made that he had stolen communications intelligence secrets with intent to damage the United States, which under the law could be considered espionage.  In this regard, Kucherena’s disclosure was extremely damaging to Snowden’s position. 
    One way to mitigate the damage from it was for Snowden to substitute a new narrative.  In it, he would say to say to hand-picked journalists that he had given all his documents to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong and took none of them to Russia,  Wizner could then  argue that documents such as the FISA warrant were improperly classified secret and that disclosing them served the public good. The government might not be able to contest his claim without further revealing NSA sources.  Under these circumstances, it might be induced to agree to a plea bargain for Snowden.  Changing the narrative would also help enhance his public image as a whistle-blower,
    Whatever the reasoning that led to it, Snowden’s new narrative was that he had destroyed all the documents he had in his possession before coming to Moscow and had no access to any NSA documents, not even those that he had distributed to journalists.  
Snowden reinforced this narrative in almost in a series f interviews arranged by Wizner. In December 2013, he met with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.  It was his first face-to-face meeting with a journalist since he had arrived in Russia in June. To advance his narrative , Snowden turned on his laptop to Gellman and, as if proving his point, said to him “there’s nothing on it… my hard drive is completely blank.”   That his computer had no files stored on it actually meant very little. The files could have been transferred to another device, or, as was discussed earlier, to a server in the cloud.    Gellman probed further by asking the precise whereabouts of the files, but, as he reported, Snowden declined to answer that question.  All that he would say was that he was “confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong.”   Since that answer did not nail down the issue, Wizner arranged for Vanity Fair, which was preparing an article on Snowden, to submit questions.  In his reply to them, Snowden wrote s that he destroyed all his files in Hong Kong because he didn’t want to risk bringing them to Russia.   He expanded on this claim in three more interviews arranged by Wizner.  These interviews were with three  journalists who themselves had opposed NSA surveillance: James Bamford writing for Wired magazine, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. He also gave a televised interview to Brian Williams of NBC News in which he explained that since he had no access to the NSA documents in Russia, he could not provide access to the Russians even if they “break my fingers.”   
Snowden did he specify where, when or how the putative destruction of the files occurred, and offered no witnesses or evidence, other than a blank laptop screen to corroborate it.  Even though his new narrative was widely accepted by the media,  a self-serving claim by a perpetrator  that files have been destroyed  cannot be accepted at face value in a digital age in which files can be copied to another computer or moved to the “cloud” with the click of a key,.  After all Snowden went to considerable risk to select, copy, and steal these Level 3 documents in mid-May before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong.  They were the last medium of value he held in Hong Kong. These secrets were his potential bargaining chips. Why would he simply erase them in June in Hong Kong?    It is also difficult for me to accept that he would destroy these documents because he feared the Russians might get them. If he was so concerned about the ability of Russian intelligence, he could have stayed in Hong Kong and fought extradition instead of flying to Russia.  Once he made his arrangements to go to Russia, he must have realized that even without the files on his computer, the Russian intelligence service could still obtain the NSA secrets he held in his head.  Indeed, as he told the New York Times, the secrets he held in his head would have devastating consequences for NSA operations.
    In light of Kucherena statement that Snowden had access to NSA documents in Russia, it would require some form of a suspension of disbelief to accept Snowden’s new narrative.  But even if one was willing to accept his erasure claim, it still would not mean that the NSA documents had not fallen into the hands of adversaries.   
  If he had destroyed all of the electronic copies of the NSA’s data before boarding his flight to Moscow, he could he be “100 percent” certain, as he claimed that the data had not been accessed by others prior to his departure from Hong Kong. His files could have been copied without his knowledge, just as he had copied them without the NSA’s knowledge.  As former U.S. intelligence officers pointed out to me, adversary services could not be expected to shirk from employing their full capabilities once they learned that an American “agent of special services,” as Putin called him, had brought stolen NSA documents to Hong Kong.  The New York Times reported from Hong Kong that two sources, both of whom worked for major government intelligence agencies, “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.”  That China had the capability to obtain Snowden’s data was also the view of former CIA Deputy Director Morell.  He said:  “Both the Chinese and the Russians would have used everything in their tool kit—from human approaches to technical attacks—to get at Snowden’s stolen data.”
Snowden would not have been a particularly difficult target for them, especially after he started disclosing secrets to journalists at the Mira hotel in Hong Kong.  Not only could the Chinese service approach the security staff at the Mira Hotel but they could track him after he left the hotel and moved, along with his computers, in and out of several residences arranged by his “carer.”  Snowden, after all, had put himself in the hands of people whom he had never met before including three Hong Kong lawyers, a “carer” and three Guardian journalists.  Presumably, the efforts of these adversary intelligence services to find him, and the NSA data, would further intensify after Snowden revealed to the South China Morning Post on June 14, 2013 that he had access to NSA lists of computers in China and elsewhere that the NSA had penetrated.

   It wouldn’t be only the Chinese service on his trail.  The Russian intelligence service would also likely be tasked to acquire these NSA documents after Snowden’s meeting with Russian officials in Hong Kong.  And while he could get away with giving coy and elusive answers to journalists who asked him about the whereabouts of the NSA data, the Russian and Chinese officials in Hong Kong, who could offer him an escape route from prison, likely would demand more specific answers about the whereabouts of data they had no already obtained by technical means. 

The Post- Hong Kong Documents

The NSA concern about who had access to its missing files deepened further when NSA documents continued to surface in the press after Snowden went to Moscow.  If US intelligence needed any further evidence that someone had access to the documents, these additional revelations provided it. The most sensational of them was a purported document attributed to Snowden concerning the NSA hacking the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  The story was published on October 23, 2013 on the Der Spiegel website.  The co-author of the story was Jacob Appelbaum.  Even though Snowden had by now been in Russia for four months, he was cited, along with unnamed “others” as the source for the NSA document.  Nor did Snowden deny it. Indeed. He took a measure of credit for the revelation, saying on German TV “What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency.” If Snowden’s  had  released this document, it would be consistent with Kucherena’s assertion that Snowden had access to the archive.

 Adding to the intrigue, Poitras was apparently caught by surprise when the Merkel story broke in Der Spiegel.  She urgently texted Snowden on what she called “background” (which ordinarily means that a journalist will not attribute information to a source.)   She asked him in the text to explain the NSA’s actions. Snowden explained to her that Merkel was listed by her true name (and not by a codename) in the NSA document because the German chancellor was a NSA “target not an asset.” Presumably, Poitras would have already known that distinction if she had the document referred to in Der Spiegel.  If the Merkel document was not among the data given to Poitras in Hong Kong , how did it get to the authors of the Der Spiegel article?

One of the authors, Appelbaum, as discussed earlier, had been in contact with Snowden before he went public.  He had served as Poitras’ co-interrogator of Snowden while he was still working at the NSA in May 2013. Appelbaum also, was one of the leading supporters of Wikileaks.  Since he was famously an advocate of revealing government secrets,  it seems unlikely that he would have delayed releasing such a bombshell about Merkel’s phone if Snowden had given him this document before he had left Hong Kong in June 2013. Why would Appelbaum kept it secret for more than four months? The same pressure to publish would also apply to the journalists Snowden had dealt with in Hong Kong. If Snowden had given Poitras, Greenwald, Lam or MacAskill the Merkel document, or even told them about it in their interviews with him in Hong Kong, the Guardian would have certainly rushed  out such a scoop.  

According to source with knowledge of the Snowden investigation, there was no document referencing any spying on Merkel’s phone among the 58,000 documents on the thumb drive that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong.  That absence would explain why Poitras had to send a text to Snowden in Moscow to ask for an explanation after the story broke.    Further confirmation of the absence of this document in the material Snowden provided journalists in Hong Kong comes from James Bamford, a well-respected expert on the NSA. In the course of researching his 2014 article on Snowden for Wired magazine, he was given access to all the documents Snowden gave to Poitras, Greenwald and Gellman.  Bamford used a sophisticated indexing program to search through the database specifically for The Merkel material. , Even so, he did not find any. He reported that no document that even mentioned Merkel given to journalists in Hong Kong mentioned Merkel.  It therefore appeared that the Merkel document was provided to Der Spiegel after Snowden went to Moscow in June. If so, some party had access to NSA documents after Snowden arrived in Russia and provided the authors of the Der Spiegel story with the scoop.  In that context, it may have not been a pure coincide that Kucherena’s disclosed that Snowden had access to documents which he had not given  to journalists in Hong Kong shortly before just such a document was [published in Germany. 

For his part, Bamford explored the possibility that there might be another mole in the NSA.  Was it possible another person in the NSA was stealing documents?  He wrote Poitras and asked her whether the Merkel document could have come from another person in the NSA.  He notes that she declined, via a letter from her lawyer, to answer that question.  But since she had not been the author of the Der Spiegel article,  and it had not been given the document, there is no reason to she would know its provenance. 

The post-Hong Kong documents did not stop with the Merkel one. Documents continued  to emerge years after Snowden arrived in Moscow.  In June 2015, for example, the Wikileaks website released another putative Snowden document two years after he had supposedly wiped his computer clean in Hong Kong.    It revealed that the NSA had targeted the telephones of the three consecutive presidents of France-- Jacque Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, all of whom were allies of the United States.    Moreover, according to a former NSA official, this 2015 document, like the 2013 Merkel material, not among the data on the thumb drive given to journalists in Hong Kong. The released on the Wikileaks site came at an embarrassing time since in the midst of NATO war games held near the Russian border, which Putin had vehemently denounced,  The accompanying article was co-authored by Julian Assange, who now claimed to have access to Snowden’s NSA material.  Since Assange, it will be recalled, had been in telephonic contact with Snowden in Hong Kong and his deputy, Sarah Harrison, had spent five months in Moscow with Snowden in 2013,