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The Espionage Source | 289

allow him to copy, transfer, and steal the electronic files. He there-
fore must have obtained that assistance from someone who had the
passwords and privileges. Other workers there might have shared
his sensibilities and antipathy toward NSA surveillance. It there-
fore seems entirely plausible that he found a co-worker willing to
cooperate or, vice versa, a co-worker found him. Snowden might
not have been aware of his new accomplice’s true motives or affili-
ations, but without some co-worker’s providing him with entry to
the sealed-off computers, he could not have carried out the penetra-
tion. To our knowledge, whoever helped him evidently did not want
to expose himself to prosecution or defect from the NSA. That was
Snowden’s role. By accepting the sole blame in the video that Poitras
made about him in Hong Kong, Snowden shielded anyone else from
suspicion, which was, as he told Poitras, his purpose. Whoever helped
him may still be working at the NSA.

To be sure, there remains that other glaring gap in the chain of
events that led Snowden to Moscow: his whereabouts and activi-
ties during his first eleven days in Hong Kong. Mike Rogers, the
chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, even sug-
gested, without any evidence, that Snowden might have been taken
to mainland China during this period. What drove his speculation
was the admission of U.S. intelligence that despite its vast global
resources for searching credit card charges, banking transactions,
hotel registrations, e-mails, police records, and even CCTV cameras,
neither it nor its allies were able to find a trace of Snowden during
that time. It was, in a phrase made famous by the former secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “a known unknown.” Just as likely he
could have been staying in a well-prepared safe house anywhere in
Hong Kong or even at the home of an unknown associate. All that is
really known is that soon after he emerged from this venue, moved
to the Mira hotel, and gave his celebrated interview to journalists, he
was safely settled in Russia.

Snowden’s actions appear squarely at odds with his assertions of
serving his country’s interests. Even accepting that he began with a
sincere desire to be a world-class whistle-blower, his mission evolved,
deliberately or not, into one that led him to disclose key communica-

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