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126 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

ies. The holders of this darker view of Snowden base it on classified reports of the full extent of the theft of classified data. Those officials believe that only a handful of the tens of thousands of documents he stole involved domestic surveillance and that those few documents served as a cover for a much larger theft.
Admiral Michael Rogers, who replaced General Alexander as head of the NSA in March 2014, said at a public forum at Princeton University, “Edward Snowden is not the ‘whistleblower’ some have labeled him to be.” He further explained to Congress, “Snowden stole from the United States government a large amount of classified information, a small portion of which is germane to his apparent central argument regarding NSA and privacy issues.”
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went even further. In testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014, after estimating that the Snowden breach could cost the military “billions” to repair, he added, “The vast majority of the electronic documents that Snowden exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities.” Dempsey based this assessment on a then still-secret Defense Intelligence Agency report on the breach. The classified DIA report showed that Snowden took “over 900,000” military files from the Department of Defense in addition to the NSA files he had taken. The Defense Department loss in terms of the number of files stolen actually exceeded the loss—in sheer numbers—of NSA documents. Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, the DIA director who directed the study, testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the breach “has caused grave damage to our national security.”
To be sure, this was not the first time that the cryptological branches of the military had been compromised. The spy ring of John Walker had provided thousands of the navy’s reports on breaking Russian ciphers to the KGB during the Cold War. But the Snowden breach exposing military sources was an order of magnitude greater than any past breach.
The CIA’s assessment was no less grim. Morell, the deputy director of the CIA in 2013, wrote that Snowden’s action went beyond taking the handful of documents, such as the FISA order, “that addressed

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