CHAPTER 15 Did Snowden Act Alone?
When you look at the totality of Snowden’s actions certainly one hypothesis that jamps out at you, that seems to explain his abil- ity to do all these things, is that he had help and had help from somebody who was very competent in these matters.
—GENERAL MICHAEL HAYDEN, former director, NSA and CIA
WHISTLE-BLOWER enters the enterprise of stealing state
secrets for reasons of conscience, but so do many spies. Such conscience-driven spies are called, in CIA parlance, “ideological agents.” For instance, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, one of the most important Russian spies in the Cold War, was an ide- ological recruit. He stole immensely valuable U.S. nuclear secrets for the Russian intelligence service without receiving any monetary compensation.
The acceptance of money is not necessarily a meaningful dis- tinction when it comes to espionage. To be sure, many spies get paid, but some whistle-blowers also receive a rich bounty for their work. Indeed, under federal laws, whistle-blowers can qualify for multimillion-dollar bounties for exposing financial malfeasance. The whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld, for example, after he himself was paroled from prison in 2012, received an award of $104 million for providing data that exposed illicit tax sheltering at the Swiss UBS bank. Assange also offered political whistle-blowers six-figure cash
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