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184 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

2008. It revealed that a group of Israeli commandos killed General
Muhammad Suleiman, a top aide to President Bashar al-Assad
who had been working with North Korea to build a nuclear facil-
ity in Syria. Israel had destroyed that facility in Operation Orchard
nearly a year earlier. Whatever the purpose of this new release of an
NSA document (which had little if anything to do with any of the
NSA's own operations), it was not among the data that Snowden had
given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong in 2013, according to a
source with access to the investigation. Next, on January 28, 2016,
The Intercept published data taken from a GCHQ (the British cipher
service) file furnished by Snowden revealing military intelligence
activities abroad. Specifically, it disclosed that the United States and
Britain were intercepting data from Israel's military drones in 2008.
British intelligence had determined in 2013 that the material sent
to Greenwald via a courier did not contain such GCHQ documents.
If that is the case, then Poitras and Greenwald, like Appelbaum and
Assange, were still receiving NSA documents that Snowden had
allegedly stolen a long time after he went to Russia and claimed he
had destroyed all his files.

The NSA reportedly determined that these belated documents,
most of which concerned American allies in Germany, France, and
Israel, had been among the material copied during the Snowden
breach. They provided further reason to believe that someone still
had access to the documents that were not distributed to journal-
ists in Hong Kong. Kucherena's disclosure, just before the first post-
Hong Kong release, that Snowden still had access to the NSA files
made it appear plausible that Snowden sent these documents to Der
Spiegel, WikiLeaks, and The Intercept.

A former high-ranking KGB officer I interviewed had a very dif-
ferent view. He told me that in his experience an intelligence defec-
tor to Russia would not be allowed to distribute secret material to
journalists without explicit approval by the security service tend-
ing him. He added that this injunction would be especially true in
the case of Snowden because Putin had publicly enjoined him from
releasing U.S. intelligence data. The more plausible alternative was
that this material was released at the behest of the Russian intel-
ligence service.

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 184 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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