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184 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS 2008. It revealed that a group of Israeli commandos killed General Muhammad Suleiman, a top aide to President Bashar al-Assad who had been working with North Korea to build a nuclear facil- ity in Syria. Israel had destroyed that facility in Operation Orchard nearly a year earlier. Whatever the purpose of this new release of an NSA document (which had little if anything to do with any of the NSA’s own operations), it was not among the data that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong in 2013, according to a source with access to the investigation. Next, on January 28, 2016, The Intercept published data taken from a GHCQ (the British cipher service) file furnished by Snowden revealing military intelligence activities abroad. Specifically, it disclosed that the United States and Britain were intercepting data from Israel’s military drones in 2008. British intelligence had determined in 2013 that the material sent to Greenwald via a courier did not contain such GCHO documents. If that is the case, then Poitras and Greenwald, like Appelbaum and Assange, were still receiving NSA documents that Snowden had allegedly stolen a long time after he went to Russia and claimed he ® had destroyed all his files. © The NSA reportedly determined that these belated documents, most of which concerned American allies in Germany, France, and Israel, had been among the material copied during the Snowden breach. They provided further reason to believe that someone still had access to the documents that were not distributed to journal- ists in Hong Kong. Kucherena’s disclosure, just before the first post— Hong Kong release, that Snowden still had access to the NSA files made it appear plausible that Snowden sent these documents to Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks, and The Intercept. A former high-ranking KGB officer I interviewed had a very dif- ferent view. He told me that in his experience an intelligence defec- tor to Russia would not be allowed to distribute secret material to journalists without explicit approval by the security service tend- ing him. He added that this injunction would be especially true in the case of Snowden because Putin had publicly enjoined him from releasing U.S. intelligence data. The more plausible alternative was that this material was released at the behest of the Russian intel- ligence service. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 184 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019672