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her whether the Merkel document could have come from another person in the NSA. He notes that she declined, via a letter from her lawyer, to answer that question. But since she had not been the author of the Der Spiegel article, and it had not been given the document, there is no reason to she would know its provenance.

The post-Hong Kong documents did not stop with the Merkel one. Documents continued to emerge years after Snowden arrived in Moscow. In June 2015, for example, the Wikileaks website released another putative Snowden document two years after he had supposedly wiped his computer clean in Hong Kong. It revealed that the NSA had targeted the telephones of the three consecutive presidents of France-- Jacque Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, all of whom were allies of the United States. Moreover, according to a former NSA official, this 2015 document, like the 2013 Merkel material, not among the data on the thumb drive given to journalists in Hong Kong. The released on the Wikileaks site came at an embarrassing time since in the midst of NATO war games held near the Russian border, which Putin had vehemently denounced, The accompanying article was co-authored by Julian Assange, who now claimed to have access to Snowden’s NSA material. Since Assange, it will be recalled, had been in telephonic contact with Snowden in Hong Kong and his deputy, Sarah Harrison, had spent five months in Moscow with Snowden in 2013, it is certainly possible Snowden was his source. But it seems difficult to believe that Assange waited two years before publishing since he has made it part of his modus operandi to publish documents immediately. And since Wikileaks receives documents anonymously via its TOR software, any party, with access the Snowden files, could have sent it.

Greenwald and Poitras also released belated documents. On July 15, 2015, for example, their web publication The Intercept released a Snowden document that t cited a NSA intercept of Israeli military communications about an Israeli raid in Syria on August 1, 2008. It revealed that in it a group of Israeli commandos killed General Suleiman, a top aide to President Assad who had been working with North Korea to build a nuclear facility in Syria. Israel had destroyed that facility in Operation Orchard nearly a year earlier. Whatever the purpose of this new release of a NSA document (which had little, if anything, to do with any of the NSA’s own operations); it was not among the data that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong in 2013, according to a source with access to the investigation. If so Poitras and Greenwald, like Appelbaum and Assange, were still receiving NSA documents that Snowden had allegedly stolen a long time after he claimed he had destroyed all his files.

The NSA reportedly determined that these belated documents, all of which concerned American allies in Germany, France and Israel, had been among the material copied during the Snowden breach. They provided further reason to believe that someone still had access to the documents that were not distributed to journalists in Hong Kong. Kucherena’s disclosure just before the first post-Hong Kong release that Snowden still had access to the NSA files made it appear plausible that Snowden sent these documents to Der Spiegel, Wikileaks and The Intercept. A former high-ranking KGB officer I interviewed had a very different view. He told me that in his experience an intelligence defector to Russia would not be allowed to distribute secret material to journalists without explicit approval by the security service tending him. , and that this injunction would be especially true in the case of Snowden after Putin publicly had forbade

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