| ® | 154 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Three co-workers did admit to the FBI, as noted earlier, that they might have inadvertently given Snowden their passwords, but these three slips would not account for Snowden’s breach of all the other compartments. Of course, there might have also been less forthcom- ing co-workers who hid their slips in divulging their passwords to Snowden. This raises the more sinister possibility that the accomplice was not an amateur co-worker but a spy who was already in place when Snowden arrived. Such a penetration agent could have been recruited by an adversary intelligence service before Snowden came on the scene. After Snowden expressed a desire to expose the NSA’s domestic surveillance, it could then have used him as an “umbrella” to hide its own activities. Finding such a means to protect a source while exploiting his or her information is not uncommon in espio- nage operations, and because Snowden was willing to flee America and go public, he could serve as a near-perfect umbrella. “Snowden may have carried out of the NSA many more documents than he knew about,” Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA station chief, said. It © could also account for the disparity between the claims of Snowden re) and the NSA damage assessment as to the number of documents that were compromised. As far-fetched as this scenario may seem, less than three years before the Snowden breach the NSA had received a warning from a CIA mole (to be discussed in greater detail later) that the Russian intelligence service might have recruited a KGB mole at the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA. No mole was found in 2010, and if one existed, it could not have been Snowden, who was working for the NSA in Japan in 2010. Such a putative mole could conceiv- ably have acquired enough information to later facilitate Snowden’s Operation. As Snowden acknowledges, he was not a happy worker at the NSA. He complained in his posts over the Internet between 2010 and 2013 about sup