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Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong in May 2013 made the Chinese intelligence service, willy-nilly, a potential player in game. Hong Kong is a part of China, even if independently administrated, and, as such, China has full responsibility for its national security and foreign affairs. This mandate includes monitoring foreign intelligence operatives. The Chinese intelligence service accordingly runs much of the local intelligence apparatus in Hong Kong. For this purpose, it maintains its largest intelligence base outside of mainland China in Hong Kong. Its officers are stationed officially in the Prince of Wales skyscraper in central Hong Kong and unofficially maintain informers in Hong Kong’s police, governing authority, airport administration and at other levers of power in Hong Kong. It checks the computerized visitors entering Hong Kong, and has the capability to ferret names that match those in the immense date base its global cyber espionage has amassed. When it detects the entry of any person of possible intelligence interest, it has the opportunity of using its sophisticated array of cyber tools to remotely steal data from those individuals. Such remote surveillance was so effective in 2013 that the US State Department had instructed all its personnel in Hong Kong to avoid using their Iphones, Androids, Blackberries and smart phones when travelling to Hong Kong or China. Instead, it has supplied them with specially-altered phones that disable location tracking and have a remotely-activated switch to completely cut off power to it circuitry. No one in the intelligence community doubts the prudence of taking such precautions in the realm of China.

Once Hong Kong had served as a window into China for Western intelligence, but in the first decade of the 21st century, the Chinese intelligence service had achieved such a pervasive presence in Hong Kong, and such ubiquitous electronic coverage of diplomats and other foreigners even suspected of involvement in foreign intelligence work, that the CIA and British intelligence found it almost as difficult to operate in Hong Kong as in mainland China. The CIA as well as the DIA kept a few officers there, but, as a former CIA station chief told me in September 2013, that for the purposes of intelligence operations, the CIA “regards Hong Kong as hostile territory.”

Snowden apparently knew the limits of CIA operations in Hong Kong. It indeed provided him with an envelope of protection. He told Greenwald, as will be recalled, that he was counting on the Chinese presence in Hong Kong to deter the CIA from intruding on their meetings.

Snowden also must have realized that he was entering the Chinese sphere of influence when he flew to Hong Kong in May 2013. Yet, he took with him level 3 NSA secrets which he could assume would be of great interest to China. In fact, he advertised this fact in his interview with the South China Post, a newspaper controlled in 2013 by mainland China. Whatever he may have assumed about the inability of the CIA to stop him in Hong Kong, he had no reason to assume that Chinese intelligence service would relegate itself to purely passive role, especially when secret NSA’s documents were in a hotel room in Hong Kong. Snowden may have esteemed himself to be an independent actor playing Prometheus on a global stage provided by YouTube, but the Chinese may have viewed him as nothing more as another pawn in the Game of Nations.

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