145 him from releasing U.S. intelligence data. The alternative is that this material was released at the behest of the Russian intelligence service. The mystery of the post Hong Kong documents also intrigued members in the US 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 intermediary fed it to Appelbaum to publish in Der Spiegel?” According to him, the NSA investigation had determined that Snowden indeed had copied a NSA list of cell phone numbers of foreign leaders, including the number of Merkel. This list became the basis of the Der Spiege/ story. It was also clear that Snowden in Moscow gave credence to the release. He made a major point about the hacking of Merkel’s phone in an interview with Wired magazine 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 Merkel’s phone resulted in badly fraying US relations with Germany in the midst of developing troubles in Ukraine. As it later turned, according to the investigation of the German federal prosecutor concluded in 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, 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, intelligence 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 valuabl