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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Pawn in the Game

“The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.”
--Edward Snowden in Moscow, 2014

When Snowden arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013 he became a person on interest to any parties who knew, or later learned, about his coup. How could they not be interested this intelligence defector? He had brought with him enough US government secrets to, as he put it, make NSA “sources go dark that were previously productive”. Snowden also fully realized the lethal situation that his possession of NSA documents put him. He was after his arrival in Hong Kong, as he put it, the NSA’s “single point” of a potential catastrophic intelligence failure. He also stated the consequences if caught, telling Poitras: “The US Intel community will certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure.”

The reason that Snowden considered himself of such importance to be the “single point of failure” was the pay load of secrets he was carrying. He possessed thumb drives full of files so critical to the NSA that in the wrong hands they could cause, in his view, many of the key sources of the entire US communication intelligence service to “go dark.” Not only was he carrying these files, but he had willingly bought them inside the territory of China; a place in which America’s main adversaries, China and Russia, could operate freely. Whoever he sought to deal with in Hong Kong, or whatever idealistic axe he intended to grind there, he could not expect his position as a “single point of failure”—a position he advertised in his email correspondence—would not attract the attention of other players in the game of nations.

The enormous power of the NSA rested on a frail thread: its ability to keep secret from its foes its sources and methods. General Alexander could call the NSA’s communication intelligence “the queen on the chessboard,” but, like the queen in a chess game, it could be captured by a well-placed pawn. In this case, the pawn, which had it in his power to expose the NSA’s critical sources and methods, would also be considered fair game for capture by an adversary. And both the Chinese and Russian cyber services, whether working alone or together, had the technological means in China to tap into Snowden’s computer. They also had an interest in learning how the NSA was listening in on their secret communications. If any further incentive was needed, an intelligence service could barter them to other countries whose signals were also intercepted by the NSA. Michael Morell, the CIA’s Deputy Director at the time, said in his book “The Great War of Our Times” that just a few selected parts of Snowden’s cache could be traded to the intelligence services of Iran and North Korea.

Snowden, realizing that he now represented that weak link in the architecture of America’s intelligence system, made a move from the U.S. that greatly increased the stakes. He entered what he knew to be hostile intelligence territory with his stash of stolen secrets. He did so, as he explained to Greenwald in Hong Kong, to reduce the possibility of an American countermove against him or his associates in the media. But while succeeding in limiting the reach of the CIA, FBI, NSA and their allies, he willy-nilly put himself under the protection of America’s adversary, the Chinese security services. In light of the counterintelligence training he had received at the CIA, he could not be unaware his move into Chinese-controlled territory would not prevent

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