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132 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Angleton, a famously baroque thinker himself, impressed on me the complexity of espionage. He said, “It’s not enough just to steal a secret. It must be done in a way that the theft remains undetected.”
Deception is employed to obscure the nature and the extent of the espionage theft. One of the most famous examples of this principle was the deception used by British intelligence in World War II to conceal its success in breaking the German ciphers generated by the Enigma machines. If German naval intelligence had discovered Britain was able to read the ciphers it used to communicate with its U-boats, it would have stopped using them. So British intelligence hid its coup by supplying false information to known German spies to account for the sinking of U-boats, including the canard that British aerial cameras could detect one ingredient in the paint used to camouflage the U-boats.
That same hoary principle of deception applies to modern-day communications intelligence. If the Russian, Chinese, or any other adversary intelligence service got its hands on the documents stolen by Snowden from the NSA’s repositories in Hawaii in 2013, it would likely employ deception, including well-crafted lies, to create as much ambiguity as possible as to the missing documents. From this counterintelligence perspective, the intelligence issue that spawned the great divide cannot be resolved by accepting the uncorroborated statements made by a source, such as Snowden, who may be in the hands of the Russian security services in Moscow.
By the same token, the calculations made by NSA officials about the extent of the theft are also suspect. After all, the NSA is an intelligence service that often engages in secret machinations. We know that its top officials reported to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as the president’s national security adviser, that Snowden compromised over one million documents. But if this was disinformation, it is difficult to see its purpose. Inflating the extent of the damage of the Snowden breach to the president, Congress, and the secretary of defense obviously reflected poorly on their own management of the NSA, and their own careers. Yet such a possibility cannot be precluded in the arcane world of intelligence.
As in any case involving the loss of state secrets, uncontested facts remain in extremely short supply. The opinion-laden appellatives

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 132 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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