| ® | Prologue | 5 terms of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Great Britain, China is responsible for Hong Kong’s defense and foreign policy, includ- ing intelligence services. He then proceeded to Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. Russia granted him asy- lum, making it unlikely that U.S. authorities would ever have the opportunity to question him. Snowden’s escape left in its wake an incredibly important unsolved mystery: How hada young analyst in training at the NSA succeeded in penetrating all the layers of NSA security to pull off the largest theft of secret documents in the history of American intelligence? Did he act alone? What happened to the documents? Was his arrival in Russia part of the plan? Because I had written several books on the vulnerability of intelli- gence services, this was a mystery—a “howdunit,” if you like—that immediately intrigued me. Even if Snowden had acted for the most salutary of reasons, the unauthorized transfer of state secrets from the United States to an adversary country is, by almost any defini- tion, a form of espionage. © I decided to begin my investigation of this case in Hong Kong, re) because it was the place to which Snowden first fled after leav- ing Hawaii. Snowden had planned the trip for at least four weeks, according to the mandatory travel plan he had filed at the NSA. When I spoke to my sources in the intelligence community, they could not explain Snowden’s choice. It would not necessarily protect him from the reach of U.S. law, because Hong Kong had an active extradition treaty with the United States. Just a few months earlier, Hong Kong had made headlines by honoring America’s request to extradite Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted for insider trading. Nor was Hong Kong particularly convenient to Hawaii. There were no nonstop flights there from Honolulu in May 2013. Snowden flew eight hours to Narita International Airport in Japan, where he waited almost three hours. He