142 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
Russia by design or by accident. Whenever an intelligence worker steals sensitive compartmented information of interest to a foreign adversary and then defects to that adversary, it raises at least the specter of state-sponsored espionage. It is a commonly accepted pre- sumption in counterintelligence that a spy, fearing arrest, flees to a country that has some reason to offer him protection. When the British spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby fled to Moscow during the Cold War, the presumption was that they had a prior intelligence connection with Russia. Philby confirmed that in his 1968 memoir, My Silent War. So in the case of Snowden, coun- terintelligence had to consider the possibility that his theft of state secrets and his arrival in Moscow might not be totally coincidental.
Snowden blamed high officials in the U.S. government who pur- posely “trapped him” in Russia. He told the editor of The Nation, “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.” He repeated that assertion over a dozen times, but as we’ve seen, it had no basis in fact. Whenever criminal charges are lodged against a U.S. citizen by
© the Department of Justice, the State Department, in accordance with © the U.S. code of justice, marks in the electronic passport validation advisory system that that person’s passport is valid only for return to the United States. After criminal charges were publicly filed against Snowden on June 21, it advised foreign governments that because Snowden was wanted on felony charges, he “should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States.” Rather than “exiling” Snowden, the government acted to facilitate his return home. With his passport, he could have flown home from either Hong Kong or Moscow, where he, like any other person accused of a felony, would face the charges against him. Snowden’s unfounded claims suggested to investigators that he had something to hide about his arrival in Russia.
The counterintelligence investigation had access to State Depart- ment records showing that its representatives in Hong Kong had informed authorities there on June 16 that there were criminal charges against Snowden. Only a typographical error in spelling out Snowden’s middle name—James instead of Joseph—in the criminal
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