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him from releasing U.S. intelligence data. The alternative is that this material was released at the behest of the Russian intelligence service.

The mystery of the post Hong Kong documents also intrigued members in the US intelligence community with whom I discussed it. When I asked a former intelligence executive about the ultimate source for the Merkel story, he responded: “If Snowden didn’t give journalists this document in Hong Kong, we can assume an intermediary fed it to Appelbaum to publish in Der Spiegel?” According to him, the NSA investigation had determined that Snowden indeed had copied a NSA list of cell phone numbers of foreign leaders, including the number of Merkel. This list became the basis of the Der Spiegel story. It was also clear that Snowden in Moscow gave credence to the release. He made a major point about the hacking of Merkel’s phone in an interview with Wired magazine in 2014. Just about two weeks before the leak, Kucherena said Snowden still had access to the documents. Clearly, someone had access. But whoever was behind it, the release of information about the alleged bugging Merkel’s phone resulted in badly fraying US relations with Germany in the midst of developing troubles in Ukraine. As it later turned, according to the investigation of the German federal prosecutor concluded in 2015, there was no evidence found in this document, or elsewhere, that Merkel’s calls were ever actually intercepted. Although they revealed little, if anything, the intelligence services of Germany, France and Israel were not already aware of, they raised a public outcry in allies against NSA surveillance, and the outcry became the event itself.

While these post-Hong Kong documents had little, if anything, intelligence value, they provided further evidence that at least part of the stolen NSA documents was in the hands of a party hostile to the United States. If so, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that this party also had access to the far more valuable Level 3 documents revealing the NSA’s sources and methods, such as the one that Ledgett had described as a “road map” to U.S. electronic espionage against Russia and China.

Within the intelligence community, this concern was heightened by new counter measure to this espionage employed by Russia and China after Snowden reached Moscow. For example, there were indications that the NSA had lost part of its capabilities to follow Russian troop movements in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials even went so far as to suggest, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that “ Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping.”
. Britain also discovered that some of its secret operations had been compromised after Snowden went to Moscow. According to a 2015 story in the Sunday Times of London, British intelligence had determined that Britain’s intelligence- gathering sources had been exposed to adversary services by documents that Snowden had stolen from the NSA in 2013. These documents had been provided to the NSA by the GCHQ, the British cipher service. Unless such intelligence disasters were freak aberrations, it appeared to confirm General Alexander warning in 2014 that the NSA was “losing some of its capabilities, because they’re being disclosed to our adversaries.”

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