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agents were to be assigned. All it had discovered was the history of the preparations for a major
espionage revival. It now knew that the SVR had installed plumbing in America that one or more
agents in this network had been activated to handle a possible recruit in the NSA. But without
anyone left in the sleeper network to follow and without an inside source in the SVR, it had no
further avenues to fruitfully pursue. The revelation of the sleeper agents had little, if any, other
intelligence value.

The NSA’s own security investigation turned up no evidence of a leak at Fort Meade in 2010.
The absence of evidence of a penetration in a security investigation is not in itself evidence of the
absence of a penetration. The Russian intelligence service had demonstrated in the past it was
well-schooled in covering its tracks in operations against US communications intelligence. For
example, CIA counterintelligence had learned from a KGB defector in the early 1960s that
Russian intelligence had penetrated the cipher room at the US Embassy in Moscow and, because
of this operation, the KGB was able to decipher crucial communications. Even so, it failed to find
either the perpetrator or any evidence of his existence for more than a half century. The operation
was only definitively revealed by Russian spymaster Sergey Kondrashev in 2007. Tennent
Bagley, who headed the CIA’s Soviet Bloc counterintelligence at the time, late wrote in his book
that the ability of Russian intelligence to conceal this penetration for more than a half century
“broke the record for secret keeping.”

This Russian ability to penetrate US intelligence was not entirely defeated by America’s
implementation of more sophisticated security procedures, such as the polygraph examination and
extensive background checks. In 1995, only 10 years before Snowden joined it, the CIA's
inspector general completed a study of the KGB’s use of false defectors to mislead the US
government from the end of the Cold War in late 1980s through the mid-1990s. It found Russia
had dispatched at least half-dozen double agents who provided misleading information to their
CIA case officers. Because the KGB operation went undetected for nearly a decade, the
disinformation prepared in Moscow had been incorporated into reports, which had a distinctive
blue stripe to signify their importance, had been provided to the three American Presidents,
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Even more shocking, in tracing the path of
this disinformation, the Inspector General found that the "senior CIA officers responsible for these
reports had known that some of their sources for this information were controlled by Russian
intelligence,” yet they did not inform the President and officials receiving the blue-striped reports,
that they had included Russian misinformation. What CIA Director John Deutch called "an
inexcusable lapse" also reflected a form of institutional willful blindness in US intelligence, borne
out of bureaucratic fear of career embarrassment so well described in LeCarre's spy novels.
Detecting intelligence failures has, if anything, become even more difficult in the age of the
anonymous Internet.

The NSA’s vulnerability to intelligence lapses, which became all too apparent with Snowden,
had departed America with a large selection of its most secret documents. The Snowden breach

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