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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,

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