171 telephones (SORM 1), emails and other Internet activity (SORM-2), and computer data storage of billing information (SORM-3). Not only did Russia run a nationwide system of Internet-filtering in 2013, but it requires their telecommunication companies furnish to it worldwide data. The NSA also had to deal with many peripheral issues other than the activities of Russia and China. It was charged with monitoring everything from nuclear proliferation in Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, to potential jihadist threats everywhere in the world. The Russian intelligence service, on the other hand, could put its limited resources to work on redressing the gap with its main enemy: the United States. Nevertheless, Putin had to reckon with the reality in 2013 that Russia could not compete with the NSA in the business of intercepting communications. And if the NSA could listen in on all the internal activities of its spy agencies and security regime, the ability of Putin to use covert means to achieve his other global ambitions would be impaired. In the Cold Peace that replaced the Cold War, Russia had little hope of realizing these ambitions unless it could weaken the NSA’s iron-tight grip on global communications intelligence. One way to remedy the imbalance between Russian intelligence and the NSA was via espionage. Here the SVR would be the instrument and the immediate objective would be to acquire the NSA’s lists of its sources in Russia. If successful, it would be a game changer. Such an ambitious penetration of the NSA, to be sure, was a tall order for Russian intelligence. Most of its moles recruited in the NSA by the KGB, had been code clerks, guards, translators, and low-level analysts. They provided documents about the NSA’s cipher-breaking, but they lacked access to these lists of the NSA’s sources and methods These meager results did not inhibit Russian efforts. Yet, for almost seven decades, ever since the inception of the NSA in 1952, the Russian Intelligence