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Putin then decided that this agent would be “welcome, provided, however, that he stops any kind of activity that could damage Russian-US relations.” Putin’s disclosure came as no surprise to the NSA investigation since the Russian pro-government newspaper Kommersant had reported that Snowden visited the Russian consulate in Hong Kong.
Putin’s authorization could certainly account for Aeroflot waiving its usual passport and visa check to allow Snowden to board its plane. It also might explain the dispatch with which Russian officials whisked Snowden off the plane after it landed and into a waiting car at the Moscow airport. It could even account for Snowden’s vanishing from public view for the next three weeks and the promulgation of the cover story that Snowden was unwillingly trapped at the airport by the U.S. government. The reasons behind Putin’s move were less clear.
By September 2013, the investigation was looking into a veritable abyss. Snowden’s culpability was no longer an issue. What was lacking from the video, or the 2-hour film made from it by Laura Poitras, was any specific information on how many documents he had copied, how he had obtained the passwords to the computers on which they were stored, the period of time involved in the theft, or how he had breached all the security measures of the NSA in Hawaii. Nor would that data be forthcoming from Snowden, who may be the only witness to the crime, By June 23, 2013, he was in a safe haven in Moscow. Even though the Grand Jury case against Snowden was cut and dry, it was also irrelevant because the US does not have an extradition treaty with Russia.
The purpose of the intelligence investigation went far beyond determining Snowden’s guilt or innocence, however. Its job was to find out how such a massive theft of documents could occur how the perpetrator escaped, and, perhaps most urgent, who had obtained the stolen documents from Snowden.
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When Snowden first met Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong on June 3™ 2013, he displayed in his hand, as a recognition signal. It was an unsolved Rubik’s Cube. It may also be an appropriate metaphor for the unsolved elements in the Snowden enigma. Even in his later interviews with journalists in Moscow, Snowden studiously avoided describing the means by which he breached the entire security regime of America’s most secret intelligence service. He only told the journalists who came to Moscow to interview him, with a bit of pseudo-modesty, that he was not “an angel” who descended from heaven to carry out the theft.
But the question of how Snowden stole these documents may be the most important part of the story. The NSA, after all, furnishes communications intelligence to the President, his National Security advisers, and the Department of Defense that is supposedly derived from secret sources in adversary nations. If these adversary nations learn about the NSA’s sources, the information, if not worthless, cannot be fully trusted. The most basic mission of the NSA is to protect its sources. Yet, despite all its efforts, Snowden walked away with long lists of its sources. In doing so, he amply demonstrated that a single civilian employee working for an outside contractor, even
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