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CHAPTER 17 The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013 A CRITICAL MISSING PIECE in the Snowden enigma is the where- abouts of the NSA documents. Greenwald told the Associated Press that the documents that Snowden had taken from the NSA constituted “the instruction manual for how the NSA is built” and that they “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.” Snowden, for his part, said on camera in his Hong Kong interview in June 2013 that NSA investi- gators would have “a heart attack” when they discovered the extent of the breach. Ledgett, the NSA official who had conducted the damage assess- ment, while not having a heart attack, confirmed that Snowden had taken a massive number of documents and among them was what he deemed the NSA’s “keys to the kingdom.” These keys could pre- sumably open up the mechanism through which the United States learns about the secret activities of other nations and, by doing so, bring down the American signals intelligence system that had for | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 169 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019657