| ® | 180 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS out his knowledge, just as he had copied them without the NSA’s knowledge. As former U.S. intelligence officers pointed out to me, adversary services could not be expected to shirk from employing their full capabilities once they learned that an American “agent of special services,” as Putin called him, had brought stolen NSA docu- ments to Hong Kong. The Times reported from Hong Kong that two sources, both of whom worked for major government intelligence agencies, “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents” of the laptop that Snowden brought to Hong Kong. That China had the capability to obtain Snowden’s data was also the view of the former CIA deputy director Morell. He said, “Both the Chinese and the Russians would have used everything in their tool kit—from human approaches to technical attacks—to get at Snowden’s stolen data.” Snowden would not have been a particularly difficult target for them, especially after he started disclosing secrets to journalists at the Mira hotel. Not only could the Chinese service approach the © security staff at the Mira, but they could track him after he left the re) hotel and moved, along with his computers, in and out of several residences arranged by his carer. Snowden, after all, had put himself in the hands of people whom he had never met before, including three Hong Kong lawyers, a carer, and three Guardian journalists. It is likely that the efforts of these adversary intelligence services to find him, and the NSA data, would further intensify after Snowden revealed to the South China Morning Post on June 12 that he had access to NSA lists of computers in China and elsewhere that the NSA had penetrated. It wouldn’t be only the Chinese service on his trail. The Rus- sian intelligence service would also likely be tasked to acquire these NSA documents after Snowden’s meeting with Russian officials in Hong Kong. And while he could get awa