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242 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

any interview that he ever gave in Moscow under Russian protection, but he had similar access to NSA operations against Russia in his job at the NSA’s Threat Operations Center.
The enormous power of the NSA rested in its ability to keep its sources and methods secret from its foes. A queen on the chessboard could be captured by a lowly pawn if it was well-placed. In this case, the person who had it in his power to expose the NSA’s critical sources and methods would no doubt be considered fair game by America’s adversaries, including the Chinese and Russian cyber services. Indeed, how could they resist such a prize?
Snowden might have believed that he was in control, but the CIA believed that confidence was misinformed. “Snowden thinks he is smart,” Morell said, after reviewing the case on a panel appointed by President Obama, “but he was never in a position in his previous jobs to fully understand the immense capabilities of our Russian and Chinese counterparts.” He could adopt a cocky tone in his postmortem conversations with journalists in Moscow, but in truth he had no means to block the efforts of the Chinese or Russian services in Hong Kong. Even before Snowden contacted its diplomats in Hong Kong, the Russian intelligence service would swing into action to determine his intelligence value.
How many days he planned to be in Hong Kong depended on how speedily he could arrange a meeting with journalists. “The purpose of my [Hong Kong] mission was to get the information to journalists,” he told the editor of The Guardian after he was safely ensconced in Moscow. He indicates that he was working under a tight clock. The time pressure resulted in his e-mailing an ultimatum to Gellman on May 24: either Gellman would publish the selected documents in The Washington Post within seventy-two hours, or he would lose the exclusive scoop. Snowden wanted the story to break on May 27, without his true identity (which Gellman did not know) attached to it. His identity would be known to a foreign mission in Hong Kong if Gellman acceded to his demands, because, as previously mentioned, Gellman’s story would enclose an encoded signal he planned to use as proof of his bona fides. So even before the Guardian reporters had agreed to come to Hong Kong, Snowden had plans to deal with a foreign mission. If the Post had accepted his terms, Snowden would

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