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172 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

whole story. Of far more importance is the quality of some of the
data that Snowden had copied. Just a single one of these documents
could cripple not just the NSA but America's entire multibillion-
dollar apparatus for intercepting foreign intelligence. The previously
cited road map, which was thirty-one thousand pages long, listed
critical gaps in U.S. coverage of China, Russia, and other adversaries,
including those cited by President Obama's national security team.
It was not found among the files on the thumb drive given to Poitras
and Greenwald. Nor were most of the missing Level 3 lists concern-
ing NSA activities in Russia and China found on the thumb drive,
even though Snowden said he had taken his final job at Booz Allen
to get access to these lists. If Snowden had not given these docu-
ments to Poitras, Greenwald, or other journalists, where were they?

The compartment logs showed that Snowden copied and trans-
ferred these Level 3 documents in his final week at the NSA. He
presumably had them in his possession in Hong Kong when he
arrived on May 20. On June 3, according to Greenwald, Snowden
was still sorting through the documents to determine which ones
were appropriate to give to journalists. On June 12, he told the
reporter Lana Lam in Hong Kong that he was going through the
documents, country by country, to determine which additional ones
he should pass on to journalists. Eleven days later, he departed Hong
Kong for Moscow carrying at least one laptop computer. After arriv-
ing in Moscow, he suggested he still had NSA secrets in his posses-
sion. "No intelligence service—not even our own—has the capacity
to compromise the secrets I continue to protect," he wrote to the
former senator Gordon Humphrey. "I cannot be coerced into reveal-
ing that information, even under torture." Much of the material he
copied while working at Booz Allen remained, as far as the NSA
could determine, missing. Had he brought these files under his "pro-
tection" to Russia?

An answer soon came from Snowden's Moscow lawyer. On Sep-
tember 23, Anatoly Kucherena was extensively interviewed on the
RT channel in Russia. The interviewer, Sophie Shevardnadze, who
had a show called SophieCo, was a well-admired journalist. She is
the granddaughter of Eduard Shevardnadze, a former foreign minis-

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