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The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing | 175 rov, had spent almost six months negotiating with Hillary Clinton’s State Department a one-on-one summit between President Obama and President Putin. Not only would this summit be a diplomatic coup for Russia, but also it would add to Putin’s personal credibil- ity in advance of the Olympic Games in Russia. In mid-June, after USS. intelligence reported to Obama’s national security adviser that Snowden was in contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong, the State Department explicitly told Lavrov that allowing Snowden to defect to Russia would be viewed by President Obama as a bla- tantly unfriendly act. As such, it could (and did) lead to the cancella- tion of the planned summit. Putin knew the downside of admitting Snowden. But if Snowden had a large archive of files containing the sources of the NSA’s electronic interceptions, as Snowden claimed he had in Hong Kong, there was an enormous potential intelligence upside. Putin had to choose between the loss of an Obama summit and an intelligence coup. Would Putin have made the choice he did if Snowden had destroyed, or refused to share, the stolen data? ) “No country, not even the United States, would grant sanctuary © to an intelligence defector who refused to be cooperative,” answered a former CIA officer who had spent a decade dealing with Russian intelligence defectors. “That’s not how it works.” If so, it seems plau- sible to believe that, as Kucherena said, the documents Snowden brought to Russia explain why Russia exfiltrated him from Hong Kong and provided him with a safe haven. The Quickly Changing Narrative Three weeks after Kucherena’s appearance on Shevardnadze’s show, on October 17, Snowden had his first interview exchange with a journalist since his arrival in Russia. It was over the Internet with James Risen of The New York Times, as noted earlier. Snowden now asserted a very different narrative. The subsequent front-page story, which carried the headline “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” reported that Snowden claimed he gave all his documents to journalists in Hong Kong and brought none of them to Russia. He | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 175 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019663