| ® | The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing | 185 The mystery of the post-Hong Kong documents also intrigued members of the U.S. intelligence community with whom I discussed it. When I asked a former intelligence executive about the ultimate source for the Merkel story, he responded, “If Snowden didn’t give journalists this document in Hong Kong, we can assume an inter- mediary fed it to Appelbaum to publish in Der Spiegel.” According to him, the NSA investigation had determined that Snowden indeed had copied an NSA list of the cell phone numbers of foreign leaders, including the number of Merkel. This list became the basis of the Der Spiegel story. It was also clear that Snowden gave credence to the release in Mos- cow. He made a major point about the hacking of Merkel’s phone in an interview with Wired in 2014. Just about two weeks before the leak, Kucherena said Snowden still had access to the documents. Clearly, someone had access. But whoever was behind it, the release of information about the alleged bugging of Merkel’s phone resulted in badly fraying U.S. relations with Germany in the midst of devel- oping troubles in Ukraine. As it later turned out, according to the © investigation of the German federal prosecutor, which concluded in re) 2015, there was no evidence found in this document, or elsewhere, that Merkel’s calls were ever actually intercepted. Although they revealed little if anything that the intelligence services of Germany, France, and Israel were not already aware of, they raised a public outcry in allies against NSA surveillance, and the outcry became the event itself. While these post-Hong Kong documents had little if any intel- ligence value, they provided further evidence that at least part of the stolen NSA documents was in the hands of a party hostile to the United States. If so, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that this party also had access to the far more valuable Level 3 documents revealing the NSA’s sources and methods, such as