139 according to a former National Security Council staffer, the Russian cyber service in 2013 had the means, the time and the incentive to break the encryption. It is unlikely they would have gone to the trouble since they had Snowden in the palm of their hand in Moscow. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that, by one way or another, willingly or under duress, Snowden shared his access to his treasure trove of documents with the agencies that were literally in control of his life in Russia. Kucherena’s answer to the question of access also may help to explain Putin’s decision to allow Snowden to come to Moscow. As has been discussed earlier, it was not a minor sacrifice for Putin. His foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had spent almost six months negotiating with Hillary Clinton’s State Department a one-on-one summit between President Obama and President Putin. Not only would this summit be a diplomatic coup for Russia but it would add to Putin’s personal credibility in advance of the Olympic Games in Russia. In mid-June, after US intelligence reported to Obama’s National Security adviser that Snowden was in contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong, the State Department explicitly told Lavrov that allowing Snowden to defect to Russia would be viewed by President Obama as a blatantly unfriendly act. As such, it could (and did) lead to the cancellation of the planned summit. So Putin knew the downside of admitting Snowden. But there was also an upside if Snowden had access to the NSA documents. A large archive of files containing the sources of the NSA’s electronic interceptions, as Snowden claimed he had in Hong Kong, had enormous potential intelligence value Putin therefore had to choose between the loss of an Obama summit and the gain of an intelligence coup. That Putin chose the latter suggests that he had calculated that the utility of the intelligence that the NSA archive outweighed the public relations advantages of the Obama su