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The Great Divide | 131

acted to "trap" him in Moscow by revoking his passport while he
was already on a plane to Moscow on the afternoon of June 23.
None of these journalists asked Snowden what the basis for his oft-
repeated allegation was. If they had, they would have discovered that
he had no independent basis for his assertion. When asked about it
during the Q&A following his July 12 press conference in Moscow,
he indeed said that the only knowledge he had about the suspen-
sion of his passport was what he had "read" in the news reports. But
all the news stories prior to his statement reported that his pass-
port had been revoked on June 22, while he was still in Hong Kong.
ABC News, for example, reported that the U.S. "Consul General–
Hong Kong confirmed Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr.
Snowden's passport was revoked June 22." By advancing that date
to when his plane was in "midair" on June 23, Snowden provided to
unsuspecting journalists an untrue alibi for his presence in Russia.

The credibility problem with Snowden assumed a more sinister
dimension once he put himself and his fate in the hands of the Rus-
sian authorities in Moscow. Even though the Obama administration
decided against revealing the extent of the Russian intelligence ser-
vice's participation in Snowden's move from Hong Kong to Mos-
cow, or what intelligence services call an "exfiltration," I was told
by a presidential national security staff adviser that the government
acted to protect the intelligence sources used by the CIA, the NSA,
and the FBI to track Snowden's movements in the latter part of June
in Hong Kong. The CIA's deputy director, Morell, would go no fur-
ther than to state that during that period he had no doubt that the
intelligence services of Russia and China "had an enormous interest
in him and the information he [Snowden] had stolen." Presumably,
the last thing these adversary services would want would be to make
this "interest" transparent to the United States.

The role of concealment must be taken into account when assess-
ing information bearing on the work of espionage services. When
I was interviewing James Jesus Angleton—the CIA's legendary ex-
counterintelligence chief, active in the 1970s—for a book on decep-
tion, I learned that intelligence services play by a different set of
rules from historians when it comes to their espionage successes.

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