Potential Compromise of U.S. Intelligence Documents After Snowden’s Flight to Russia

186 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Russian troop movements in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials even went so far as to suggest, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, that “Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping.” Britain also discovered that some of its secret operations had been compromised after Snowden went to Moscow. According to a 2015 story in the Sunday Times of London, British intelligence had deter- mined that Britain’s intelligence-gathering sources had been exposed to adversary services by documents that Snowden had stolen from the NSA in 2013. These documents had been provided to the NSA by the GCHQ. Unless such intelligence disasters were freak aberra- tions, it appeared to confirm General Alexander’s warning in 2014 that the NSA was “losing some of its capabilities, because they’re being disclosed to our adversaries.” Snowden’s supporters disputed this view. If only as an act of faith in Snowden’s personal integrity, they continued to believe his avowal to Senator Humphrey that he had acted to protect U.S. secrets by shielding them from adversary intelligence services after he took ® them abroad. They also continued to take him at his word when he © said he had destroyed all the NSA documents before going to Rus- sia. Despite such protestations of patriotic loyalty, U.S. intelligence officials could not so easily dismiss the possibility that the missing documents still existed. After all, a U.S. intelligence worker who is dedicated to protecting America’s secrets from its adversaries does not ordinarily steal them. The NSA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense therefore had little choice but to assume the worst had happened: Russia and China had obtained access to the “keys to the kingdom.” Whatever the extent of the actual damage, it was up to Alexander’s replace- ment, Admiral Michael Rogers, both to restore morale and to rebuild the capabilities of America’s electronic intelligence in the wake of the massive breach. According to a national security staff member in the Obama White House, that job would take more than a decade. The NSA had failed to protect vital assets. This intelligence failure did not happen out of the blue. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 186 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019674