38 were not authorized to receive them, the same charge for which Manning was convicted. Even if it went no further, the FBI would satisfy its superiors in the Department of Justice that it had done its law-enforcement job. But if it pursued the latter hypothesis, it would need to engage in a mole hunt for a quarry that might not exist. By doing so, it could open a Pandora’s Box of suspicions that it, or the NSA, might not ever be able to close. When the investigation came to this fork in the road in the summer of 2013, according to a source on the House Intelligence Committee, it chose the former route. Finally, there was the question of whether Snowden had gone to Russia by design or accident. Whenever an intelligence worker steals sensitive compartmentalized information of interest to a foreign adversary and then defect to it, it raises at least the specter of state-sponsored espionage. It is acommonly accepted presumption in counterintelligence that a spy, fearing arrest, flees to a country that has some reason to offer him protection. When the British spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, for example, fled to Moscow in the Cold War the presumption was that they had a prior intelligence connection with Russia. And Philby confirmed it in his 1968 memoir “My Silent War.” So in the case of Snowden, counterintelligence had to consider the possibility that his theft of state secrets and his arrival in Moscow might not be totally coincidental. For his part, Snowden said that he did not leave Hong Kong with the intention of staying in Russia, but that the U.S. government “trapped him” at Moscow’s Airport by revoking his passport. He told editor of The Nation magazine: “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled.” He added that the U.S. government “chose to keep me in Russia.” Although he repeated that assertion over a dozen times, it was untrue. The US government had not invalidated his passport for travel back to th