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Did Snowden Act Alone? | 155

shared Snowden's anti-surveillance views. If Snowden then voiced an interest in exposing the NSA's secrets, this person could supply him with the necessary guidance, steering a still-unsuspecting Snowden first to the Booz Allen position and afterward to his associates in Hong Kong. By taking sole credit for the coup in the video that he made with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong, he acted, as he told Greenwald, to divert suspicion from anyone else. This move could also give any collaborator he might have had in Hawaii time to cover his or her tracks.

The astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in regard to searching the universe for signals from other civilizations that the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." That injunction also applies to the spooky universe of espionage. The fact that a mole hunt fails to find a hidden collaborator at the NSA does not necessarily mean such a mole does not exist. Historically, we have many notable cases in which Russian moles eluded long, intensive investigations. Robert Hanssen penetrated the FBI for over twenty years for the KGB without being caught. Similarly, Aldrich Ames acted as a KGB mole in the CIA for more than ten years and passed all the CIA's sophisticated lie detector tests. Both Hanssen and Ames eluded intensive FBI and CIA investigations that lasted over a decade. According to Victor Cherkashin, their KGB case officer, whom I interviewed in Moscow in 2015, the KGB was able to hide their existence from investigators for such a long period partly because of the widespread belief in U.S. intelligence that moles were fictional creatures that sprang from the "paranoid mind" of James Jesus Angleton. When I then cited the signature line from the movie The Usual Suspects, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," Cherkashin thinly smiled and said, "CIA denial [of moles] certainly helped."

In view of such past successes of the Russian intelligence services, it cannot be precluded that there was another person in the NSA working with the enthusiastic Snowden as cover to prevent any light from falling on his own surreptitious spying. While it may seem extremely unlikely that Snowden had such assistance, the alternative scenario, that Snowden broke into the sealed compartments and

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