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documents than he knew about,” a former CIA station chief speculated. It could also account for
the disparity between the claims of Snowden and the NSA damage assessment as to the number
of the documents that were compromised.

As farfetched as this mole scenario may seem to the outside world, less than three years before
the Snowden breach, the NSA had received a warning from a CIA mole, which will be discussed
in greater detail in Chapter 21, that the Russian Intelligence service might have recruited a KGB
mole at the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA. No mole was found in 2010, and, if one
existed, it could not have been Snowden, who at that time in 2010 was working for the NSA in
Japan. Such a putative mole conceivably could have acquired enough information to later
facilitate Snowden’s operation.

In this scenario, Snowden would not be difficult to spot as a potential collaborator and
possible umbrella. As Snowden acknowledges, he was not a happy worker at the NSA. He
complained between 2010 and 2013 about what he considered NSA abuses to coworkers,
superiors and in his posts over the Internet. If someone assumed the guise of a reluctant whistle-
blower, he would have little difficulty in approaching Snowden. Snowden might not even know
his true affiliation beyond that he shared Snowden’s anti-surveillance views. If Snowden then
voiced an interest in exposing the NSA’s secrets, this person could supply him with the necessary
guidance, steering a still unsuspecting Snowden first to the Booz Allen position and afterwards to
his associates in Hong Kong. By taking sole credit for the coup in the video that he made with
Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong, he acted, as he told Greenwald, to divert suspicion from
anyone else. This move could also also any collaborator he may have had in Hawaii time to cover his
tracks.

The astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in regard to searching the universe for signals from
other civilizations that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” That injunction also
applies to the spooky universe of espionage. The fact that a mole hunt fails to find a hidden
collaborator at the NSA does not necessarily mean such a mole does not exist. Historically, we
have many notable cases in which Russian moles eluded intensive investigations for many
decades. Robert Hanssen served as a KGB penetration in the FBI for over 20 years without being
caught. Similarly, Aldrich Ames, acted as a KGB mole in the CIA for more than ten years, and
passed all the CIA’s sophisticated lie detector tests. Both Hanssen and Ames eluded intensive FBI
and CIA investigations that lasted over a decade. According to Victor Cherkashin, their KGB
case officer, who I interviewed in Moscow in 2015, the KGB was able to hide their existence
from investigators for such a long period partly because of the widespread belief in U.S.
intelligence that moles were fictional creatures that sprung from the “paranoid mind” of James
Jesus Angleton. When I then cited the signature line from the movie The Usual Suspects “The
greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Cherkashin thinly
smiled and said “CIA denial [of moles] certainly helped.”

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