Speculative CIA Mole Warning May Have Enabled Snowden Leak

[23 documents than he knew about,” a former CIA station chief speculated. It could also account for the disparity between the claims of Snowden and the NSA damage assessment as to the number of the documents that were compromised. As farfetched as this mole scenario may seem to the outside world, less than three years before the Snowden breach, the NSA had received a warning from a CIA mole, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 21, that the Russian Intelligence service might have recruited a KGB mole at the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA. No mole was found in 2010, and, if one existed, it could not have been Snowden, who at that time in 2010 was working for the NSA in Japan. Such a putative mole conceivably could have acquired enough information to later facilitate Snowden’s operation. In this scenario, Snowden would not be difficult to spot as a potential collaborator and possible umbrella. As Snowden acknowledges, he was not a happy worker at the NSA. He complained between 2010 and 2013 about what he considered NSA abuses to coworkers, superiors and in his posts over the Internet. If someone assumed the guise of a reluctant whistle- blower, he would have little difficulty in approaching Snowden. Snowden might not even know his true affiliation beyond that he shared Snowden’s anti-surveillance views. If Snowden then voiced an interest in exposing the NSA’s secrets, this person could supply him with the necessary guidance, steering a still unsuspecting Snowden first to the Booz Allen position and afterwards to his associates in Hong Kong. By taking sole credit for the coup in the video that he made with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong, he acted, as he told Greenwald, to divert suspicion from anyone else. This move could also any collaborator he may have had in Hawaii time to cover his tracks. The astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in regard to searching the universe for signals from other civilizations that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” That injunction also applies to the spooky universe of espionage. The fact that a mole hunt fails to find a hidden collaborator at the NSA does not necessarily mean such a mole does not exist. Historically, we have many notable cases in which Russian moles eluded intensive investigations for many decades. Robert Hanssen served as a KGB penetration in the FBI for over 20 years without being caught. Similarly, Aldrich Ames, acted as a KGB mole in the CIA for more than ten years, and passed all the CIA’s sophisticated lie detector tests. Both Hanssen and Ames eluded intensive FBI and CIA investigations that lasted over a decade. According to Victor Cherkashin, their KGB case officer, who I interviewed in Moscow in 2015, the KGB was able to hide their existence from investigators for such a long period partly because of the widespread belief in U.S. intelligence that moles were fictional creatures that sprung from the “paranoid mind” of James Jesus Angleton. When I then cited the signature line from the movie Zhe Usual Suspects “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Cherkashin thinly smiled and said “CIA denial [of moles] certainly helped.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020275