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communications intelligence. It provided a valuable window on the activities of adversary nations in the Pacific region and was able to monitor the ballistic missile tests and submarine activities of China, North Korea, and Russia. By 2013, the Kunia base had a vast array of state-of-the-art technology, including ninety Cray supercomputers arranged in a horseshoe configuration, used to decipher and make sense of the intercepted signals from China, Russia, and North Korea. At the heart of the Hawaiian complex was a unit with both military and civilian employees. A large share of the civilians who ran the computers worked under two-year contracts with the NSA’s leading civilian contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton.

General Alexander, who, as I said, headed the NSA in 2013, first learned about an impending story in The Guardian on June 4, while he was in Germany meeting with its top intelligence officials, from Janine Gibson, The Guardian’s American website editor. She had notified the NSA it intended to break a story focusing on the organization. It took NSA counterintelligence less than forty-eight hours to determine that a civilian employee at the base from which documents were stolen had not reported back to work on May 22. His civilian supervisor had delayed reporting the absence to the NSA until May 28. It also determined that the missing civilian employee, Snowden, had lied on his application for a medical leave and had flown to Hong Kong. Personal records showed he was being trained as an analyst at the Threat Operations Center and had worked there for less than six weeks. He had taken the medical leave on May 18 and left the country by plane. By June 6, he had become the NSA’s main suspect.

Alexander flew to Washington, D.C., after assigning the sensitive job of investigating the breach to a team headed by Richard “Rick” Ledgett, who was then director of the NSA’s Threat Operations Center at the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Ledgett was the logical choice to head the damage assessment investigation because the center’s regional branch in Hawaii was under his command. Ledgett flew to Hawaii, where his first task was to reconstruct the chronology of Snowden’s moves, or, as the tactic is called in counterintelligence parlance, “walking the cat back.”

The NSA had also notified the FBI of Snowden’s possible involve-

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