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At the heart of Mr. Snowden’s narrative was his claim that while he may have
incidentally “touched” other data in his search of NSA files, he took only documents that
exposed the malfeasance of the NSA and gave all of them to journalists.
Yet even as Mr. Snowden’s narrative was taking hold in the public realm, a secret
damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very different story. According
to a unanimous report declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had “removed” (not merely
touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based on, among other evidence,
electronic logs that recorded the selection, copying and moving of documents.
The number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were willing to say
in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the House committee had the benefit
of the Pentagon’s more-extensive investigation. But even just taking into account the
material that Mr. Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report
concluded that he compromised “secrets that protect American troops overseas and
secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states.” These were, the
report said, “merely the tip of the iceberg.”
The Pentagon’s investigation during 2013 and 2014 employed hundreds of military-
intelligence officers, working around the clock, to review all 1.5 million documents. Most
had nothing to do with domestic surveillance or whistle blowing. They were mainly
military secrets, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified
before the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014.
It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr.
Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a
reference to documents containing the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since
the agency was created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to
penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.
Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an interview
in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he said he sought to work
on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to
secret lists of computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.
He evidently succeeded. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Richard Ledgett,the NSA
executive who headed the damage-assessment team, described one lengthy document
taken by Mr. Snowden that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would provide a “road map” to
what targets abroad the NSA was, and was not, covering. It contained the requests made
by the 17 U.S. services in the so-called Intelligence Community for NSA interceptions
abroad.
On June 23, less than two weeks after Mr. Snowden released the video that helped
present his narrative, he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow, where he received
protection by the Russian government. In much of the media coverage that followed, the
ultimate destination of these stolen secrets was fogged over—if not totally obscured from
the public—by the unverified claims that Mr. Snowden was spoon feeding to handpicked
journalists.
In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he was a conscientious “whistleblower”
who turned over all the stolen NSA material to journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted
he had no intention of defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America when he
was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to demonize him.

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