219 such communication intelligence to Russia, it would be the height of naiveté for U.S. or British intelligence to accept such claims as anything more than part of the cover story. As for the Snowden’s motive, I see no reason to doubt Snowden’s explanation that he stole NSA documents to expose NSA surveillance that he believed was an illicit intrusion into the privacy of individuals. Such disaffection is not a unique situation in the intelligence business. Many of Russia’s espionage sources before Snowden were also dissatisfied employees who had access to classified secrets. Like some of them, Snowden used his privileged access to blow the whistle on what he considered to be the improper activities of the organization for which he worked. In that sense, I fully accept that he began as a whistle-blower, not as a spy. It was also as a whistle-blower that he contacted Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman, who published the scoops he provided in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Washington Post, Snowden’s penetration went beyond whistle-blowing, however. He copied a vast number of electronic files, including the level 3 files that contained the NSA’s most sensitive sources and methods. While these files had little, if anything, to do with domestic surveillance or whistle- blowing, they gave him the sense of power he demonstrated in asserting that he could make all of U.S. communication intelligence “go dark” all over the world. We know from Kucherena that he did not share part of data with journalists. Instead, he took it to Russia. As far as carrying out the most damaging part of the operation, he could not have acted entirely alone. It will be recalled that the deepest part of his penetration was during the five weeks he worked at the National Threat Operations Center in Hawaii as a contract employee of Booz Allen Hamilton. It was there that he copied level 3 files, including the so-called road map to the gaps in American intelligence. During this period