187 The U.Ss also had the ability to track Snowden’s movements via the cell phones of his lawyers and other confederates after he surfaced. This tracking could all be done by the NSA. What the U.S. lacked was any practical means to capture a high-profile intelligence defector in a city that was part of China. By this time, US intelligence had established that Chinese and Hong Kong security services were monitoring Snowden’s every move. This left few options in the game for the U.S. “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” President Obama said on June 27, 2013. The real prize, in any case, was not Snowden himself but the NSA’s secrets documents that he had with him in Hong Kong. When Snowden was observed entering the Russian consulate, the game was all but over. US diplomats could protest over back channels to Moscow, as they did, but, with a trove of NSA secrets at stake, there was little expectation that they stop the Russians. Two days later, the ’single point of failure,” as Snowden described himself, was on his way to Russia, where he would be subject to Moscow’s rules. When a victory is obtained in a major sports event, such as the world cup, it is celebrated with victory dances, parties and ticker-tape parades. The opposite is true in the Game of Nation. An intelligence victory involving secret documents, even if it cannot be entirely hidden, is kept veiled, as far as is possible, to increase the value of the coup. “The final move in any sophisticated intelligence game,” Angleton told me in relation to espionage intelligence coup, is “obscuring a success.” Following Angleton’s precept the Russian or Chinese intelligence services, if they had a role in acquiring the product of the self-described “single point of failure,” would work to cover their tracks in the affair even before the Aeroflot plane carrying Snowden touched down at Sheremetyevo International Airport on June 23, 2013. If any false flag operations had been used to tri