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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.

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