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The Question of When | 159

He offered to defect to the United States. The CIA accepted his offer, and through this archive of secrets he had previously compiled, he became one of the CIA's most productive sources in the Cold War.
The job of an intelligence service is to take advantage of whatever opportunities come its way in the form of self-generated spies. If a Russian walk-in had not yet burned his bridges to his own service, U.S. intelligence officers were under instructions to attempt to persuade the walk-in to return to his post in Russia and serve as a "defector-in-place," or mole. "While defectors can and do provide critical information," a CIA memorandum on walk-ins during the Cold War noted, "there are very few cases in which the same individual may not have been of greater value if he had returned to his post." Of course, if a walk-in believed he was already compromised, as Golitsyn did, a decision would have to be made whether the value of his intelligence merited exfiltrating him to the United States.
This required evaluating the bona fides of the walk-in. Not all walk-ins are accepted as defectors. Some walk-ins are deemed "dangles," or agents dispatched by the KGB to test and confuse the CIA. Others are rejected as political liabilities, as happened to Wang Lijun, a well-connected police chief in China. In February 2012, Wang walked into the U.S. consulate in Chengdu asking for asylum. The State Department decided against it. After Wang left U.S. protection, he was arrested for corruption and received a fifteen-year prison sentence. Such decisions about walk-ins are not made without due consideration, often at the highest level of a government, because exfiltrating a defector can result in diplomatic ruptures and political embarrassments.
Conversely, it raises espionage concerns when an adversary government authorizes the exfiltration of a rogue employee of an intelligence service. At minimum, it suggests that a rival government placed value on what the defector could provide it. The Snowden case is no exception. Whatever Snowden's prior relations might have been with Russia, it can be assumed that after he fled to Moscow, in light of the intelligence value of the stolen documents, he would wind up in the hands of the Russian security services. That assumption was reinforced by subsequent countermeasures that were implemented by adversaries moved to block secret sources of NSA

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