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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 at the US consulate in
Chengdu asking from asylum. The State Department decided against it. After Wang left US
protection, he was arrested for corruption and received a 15 year prison sentence. Such
decisions about walk-ins are not made with due consideration, often at the highest level of a
government, since 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 means that a rival government placed value on
what the defector could provide it. The Snowden case is no exception. Whatever Snowden’s prior
relations may have been with Russia, it could prudently 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
Russia to block secret sources of NSA surveillance. “Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks,
communications sources dried up, tactics were changed,” Michael Morell who was at that time the Deputy
Director of the CIA, revealed. It indicated that at least part of the US communications intelligence that
Snowden had stole was in enemy hands. The CIA and NSA’s monitoring of these countermeasures was
itself extremely delicate since revealing what they learned about Russian and Chinese countermeasures
risked compromising even more U.S communications sources than had Snowden. General Keith B.
Alexander headed both the NSA and Cyber Command at the time these countermeasures were first detected
in 2013. He said in his interview with the Australian Business Review: “We absolutely need to
know what Russia’s involvement is with Snowden.” He further said, “I think Snowden is now being
manipulated by Russian intelligence. I just don't know when that exactly started." Much turned on the
answer to this “when” question. The counterintelligence issue was not if this U.S. intelligence defector in
Moscow was under Russian control, but when he came under it.

There were three possible time periods when Snowden might have been brought under control
by the Russian intelligence service: while he was still working for the NSA; after he arrived in
Hong Kong on May 20, 2013; or after he arrived in Russia on June 23, 2013.

The NSA Scenario

The first scenario could stretch as far back as when Snowden was forced out of the CIA in
2009. It will be recalled that the CIA then had planned to launch a security investigation of
Snowden but it was aborted when he resigned. He also had incurred large losses speculating in
the financial markets in Geneva, which is an activity which had in the past attracted in interest of
foreign intelligence services. So it had to be considered in this scenario that Snowden had been
recruited by the Russians after he left the CIA and directed to take jobs at civilian contractors
servicing the NSA. Such “career management,” as it is called by the CIA, could explain why
Snowden had switched jobs in March 2013 to Booz Allen Hamilton, which, unlike his previous
employer Dell, allowed him to gain proximity the super-secrets list of the telecommunication
systems that the NSA had penetrated in Russia and China. Even though Snowden himself did not

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