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such communication intelligence to Russia, it would be the height of naiveté for U.S. or British intelligence to accept such claims as anything more than part of the cover story.
As for the Snowden’s motive, I see no reason to doubt Snowden’s explanation that he stole NSA documents to expose NSA surveillance that he believed was an illicit intrusion into the privacy of individuals. Such disaffection is not a unique situation in the intelligence business. Many of Russia’s espionage sources before Snowden were also dissatisfied employees who had access to classified secrets. Like some of them, Snowden used his privileged access to blow the whistle on what he considered to be the improper activities of the organization for which he worked. In that sense, I fully accept that he began as a whistle-blower, not as a spy. It was also as a whistle-blower that he contacted Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman, who published the scoops he provided in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Washington Post,
Snowden’s penetration went beyond whistle-blowing, however. He copied a vast number of electronic files, including the level 3 files that contained the NSA’s most sensitive sources and methods. While these files had little, if anything, to do with domestic surveillance or whistle- blowing, they gave him the sense of power he demonstrated in asserting that he could make all of U.S. communication intelligence “go dark” all over the world. We know from Kucherena that he did not share part of data with journalists. Instead, he took it to Russia.
As far as carrying out the most damaging part of the operation, he could not have acted entirely alone. It will be recalled that the deepest part of his penetration was during the five weeks he worked at the National Threat Operations Center in Hawaii as a contract employee of Booz Allen Hamilton. It was there that he copied level 3 files, including the so-called road map to the gaps in American intelligence. During this period, as discussed in Chapter HII, Snowden had neither the passwords nor system administrator’s privileges that would allow him to copy, transfer and steal the electronic files. He therefore must have obtained that assistance from some who had the passwords and privileges. Even if that reality does not sit well with the NSA administration, there is no reason to assume that Snowden was the only disgruntled employee at that NSA facility in 2013. That a dozen or so NSA co-workers attended his anti-surveillance Crypto party in 2012 shows that others shared his sensibilities and antipathy towards NSA surveillance. It therefore seems plausible to me that he found a co-worker willing to cooperate, or vice versa, a co-worker found him. To be sure, Snowden might not have been aware of his new accomplice’s true motives or affiliations. But without some co-worker providing him with entry to the sealed-off computers, he could not have carried out the penetration. To our knowledge, whoever helped him evidently did not want to expose himself to prosecution or defect from the NSA. That was Snowden’s role. By accepting the sole blame in the video that Poitras made about him in Hong Kong, Snowden shielded anyone else from suspicion, which was, as he told Poitras, his purpose, Whoever helped him may still be working at the NSA.
To be sure, there remains another glaring gap in the chain of events that led Snowden to Moscow: his whereabouts and activities during his first eleven days in Hong Kong. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, even speculated that Snowden might have been taken to mainland China during this period. What drove his speculation was the admission of U.S. intelligence that, despite its vast global resources for searching credit card charges, banking transactions, hotel registrations, emails, police records and even CCTV cameras, neither it, nor its allies, were able to find a trace of Snowden. It was, in a phrase later made famous by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “A known unknown.” Yet there
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