| ® | 288 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS state secrets. It still needs to fog over the extent of its coup, as said earlier, to prolong the value of the espionage. Hence it is likely that the story that Snowden had thoroughly destroyed all the stolen data in the month prior to departing for Russia, as well as the story that he had turned down all requests to be questioned by the FSB and other Russian intelligence officials, was part of the legend con- structed for him. The repetitions of these uncorroborated claims in his press interviews might also have enhanced his public image for the ACLU effort to get clemency for him. Even so, in view of the importance of such communications intelligence to Russia, it would be the height of naiveté for U.S. or British intelligence to accept such claims as anything more than camouflage. As for Snowden’s motive, I see no reason to doubt his explana- tion that he stole NSA documents to expose its surveillance because he believed that it was an illicit intrusion into the privacy of indi- viduals. Such disaffection is not a unique situation in the intelligence business. Many of Russia’s worldwide espionage sources before Snowden were also dissatisfied employees who had access to classi- © fied secrets. Like some of them, Snowden used his privileged access re) to reveal what he considered the improper activities of the organiza- tion for which he worked. In that sense, I fully accept that he began as a whistle-blower, not as a spy. It was also as a whistle-blower that he contacted Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman, who published the scoops he provided in Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. Snowden’s penetration went beyond whistle-blowing, however. In the vast number of files he copied were documents that contained the NSA‘s most sensitive sources and methods that had little if any- thing to do with domestic surveillance or whistle-blowing. Snowden could not have acted entirely alone. It will be recal