(27 confuse the CIA. Others are rejected as political liabilities, as happened to Wang Lijun, a well- connected police chief in China. In February 2012, Wang, walked into at the US consulate in Chengdu asking from asylum. The State Department decided against it. After Wang left US protection, he was arrested for corruption and received a 15 year prison sentence. Such decisions about walk-ins are not made with due consideration, often at the highest level of a government, since exfiltrating a defector can result in diplomatic ruptures and political embarrassments. Conversely, it raises espionage concerns when an adversary government authorizes the exfiltration of a rogue employee of an intelligence service. At minimum, it means that a rival government placed value on what the defector could provide it. The Snowden case is no exception. Whatever Snowden’s prior relations may have been with Russia, it could prudently assumed that after he fled to Moscow, in light of the intelligence value of the stolen documents, he would wind up in the hands of the Russian security services. That assumption was reinforced by subsequent countermeasures that were implemented by Russia to block secret sources of NSA surveillance. “Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks, communications sources dried up, tactics were changed,” Michael Morell who was at that time the Deputy Director of the CIA, revealed. It indicated that at least part of the US communications intelligence that Snowden had stole was in enemy hands. The CIA and NSA’s monitoring of these countermeasures was itself extremely delicate since revealing what they learned about Russian and Chinese countermeasures risked compromising even more U.S communications sources than had Snowden. General Keith B. Alexander headed both the NSA and Cyber Command at the time these countermeasures were first detected in 2013. He said in his interview with the Australian Business Review: “We absolutely need to know what Russia’s involvement is wit