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almost all the FBI files there. The conspirators escaped and kept their identities secret for over 42
years.

Self-definitions also do necessarily produce a distinction between whistle-blowers and
conventional spies. Consider, for example Philip Agee. Agee left the CIA in 1969 for what he
described “reasons of conscience.” Specifically, he said he objected to the CIA’s covert support
of Latin America dictators. After contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, he defected to
Cuba, where he leaked information that exposed CIA operations. Although Agee insisted he was
a whistle-blower, and he adamantly denied offering any secrets to the Soviet Union, the KGB
viewed him as a conventional spy. According to Oleg Kalugin, the top Soviet counterintelligence
officer in the KGB in Moscow, who defected to the U.S., Agee offered CIA secrets first to the
KGB residency in Mexico City in 1973 and then to Cuban intelligence service. Agee provided the
KGB with a “treasure trove” of US secrets, Kalugin revealed. “I then sat in my office in Moscow
reading the growing list of revelations coming from Agee.” Despite this disparity, Agee still
defined himself to the public as a whistle-blower because he also had exposed CIA operations to
the public.

The Snowden case blurs the demarcation line even further. Unlike other whistle-blowers who
uncovered what they considered government malfeasance by virtue of their job, Snowden, by his
own admission, took a new job in 2013 specifically to get access to the SCI files concerning NSA
sources that he stole from the Threat Operations Center. Switching jobs in order to widen one’s
access to state secrets us an activity usually associated with penetration agents, not whistle-
blowers. While the technical distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy may still serve the
media in the case of Snowden, it does not help in solving the counterintelligence conundrum.

Untangling the strands of the Snowden conundrum is no easy matter. A complex burglary
of state secrets had been successfully carried in a supposedly-secure site. The only known
witness, Snowden, had escaped to Russia, where he could be of help in reconstructing the crime.
The stolen data was kept in the equivalent of sealed “vaults”—which were actually computer
drives that were not connected to the NSA Network ever there was a locked room mystery, this
was it.

The perpetrator Snowden pierced these barriers by using passwords that belonged to other
people and using credentials that allowed him to masquerade as a system administrator. However
it was carried out, it was feat required meticulous planning. As in the earlier example of a
hypothetical diamond theft from locked vaults, what is needed is to explain how a perpetrator,
who did not himself have the combinations to open them or the means to remove their content,
succeeded in the theft.

To address such a mystery, a counterintelligence investigation starts with a tabula rasa,
stripping away all the previous assumptions, including that Snowden was the lone perpetrator.
Once back at square one, it builds alternative scenarios to test against the known facts. To be

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