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The Great Divide | 129

million classified documents at the Signals Intelligence Center in
Hawaii, and flying to Russia.
Additional information does not necessarily change the minds of
people who already have a firm view. In the field of social psychol-
ogy, the testing of “confirmation theory” consistently shows that
people tend to more readily reject new information that contradicts
their pre-existing beliefs. For example, when Lee Harvey Oswald
was arrested in the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, he said
famously, “I haven’t shot anybody.” Ten months later, the Warren
Commission presented evidence, including ballistic tests, that it
claimed showed that Oswald had shot three people, including Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy, less than an hour before making his statement.
Yet many of those who believed Oswald’s public proclamation of
his innocence chose to believe that the government had falsified
all the incriminating evidence to tarnish Oswald (who had been
killed on November 24, 1963) rather than accept that they had
been wrong in believing Oswald.
The charges, countercharges, and defamatory name-calling in the
Snowden case therefore only deepened the great divide. Those who
saw Snowden as a democratic hero exposing the abuses of power of
an out-of-control national security state tended to dismiss anything
that depicted Snowden in a negative light as a fabrication, while
those who saw Snowden as a “traitor” tended to dismiss anything
that depicted him in a more positive light.
When it comes to the murky universe of spy agencies, the prob-
lem in deciding where the truth lies is further heightened by the
possibility of deliberate deception. Spy masters are, after all, in the
business of concealing their most sensitive operations. It is often
considered essential that important secrets be protected by what
Winston Churchill famously termed “a bodyguard of lies.” Top
intelligence officials are not exempt from this practice. Consider, for
example, the response to a question concerning the NSA’s opera-
tions made by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to
the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013. The Demo-
cratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who was on the committee,
asked the spymaster if the NSA collected data on Americans. Clap-

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