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110 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

tary, 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 would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. He would attract over one million followers to his tweets in 2015. "For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won," he informed the Post in his first live interview in Moscow in December 2013. It was a mission that involved a very high-stakes enterprise: taking not only domestic surveillance documents but America's military and foreign intelligence secrets abroad.

Whistle-blowers do not ordinarily steal military secrets. Nor do they flee to the territory of America's principal adversaries. A fugitive, especially one lacking a Russian visa, does not wind up in Moscow by pure accident. It's hard to imagine that a Russian president with the KGB background of Putin would give his personal sanction for a high-profile exfiltration from Hong Kong without weighing the gain that might proceed from it. Whatever else may be said of Putin, his actions show him to be a calculating opportunist. Part of his calculus would be that the defector from American intelligence had taken possession of a great number of potentially valuable documents from the inner sanctum of the NSA and, aside from these documents, claimed to hold secrets of great importance in his head. To be sure, the practical value of this stolen archive would require a lengthy evaluation by Russia's other intelligence services. But it is hard to believe that a defector who put himself in the hands of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and other Russian intelligence services wouldn't be expected to cooperate with them. Even if such a defector did not carry these files with him to Moscow, intelligence services have the means to recover digital files, even after they are erased from a computer or if they are sent to the cloud. Moreover, once secret documents are taken, they are compromised. Yet for much of the American public, Snowden remained a hero.

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 110 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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