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222 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS the activities of Russia and China. It was charged with monitoring nuclear proliferation in Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, poten- tial jihadist threats everywhere in the world, and much else. The Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, could put its limited resources to work on redressing the gap with its main enemy: the United States. Nevertheless, Putin had to reckon with the reality in 2013 that Russia could not compete with the NSA in the business of inter- cepting communications. And if the NSA could listen in on all the internal activities of its spy agencies and security regime, the ability of Putin to use covert means to achieve his other global ambitions would be impaired. In the cold peace that replaced the Cold War, Russia had little hope of realizing these ambitions unless it could weaken the NSA’‘s iron-tight grip on global communications intel- ligence. One way to remedy the imbalance between Russian intel- ligence and the NSA was via espionage. Here the SVR would be the instrument, and the immediate objective would be to acquire the NSA’s lists of its sources in Russia. If successful, it would be a game ) changer. ® Such an ambitious penetration of the NSA, to be sure, was a tall order for Russian intelligence. Most of its moles recruited in the NSA by the KGB had been code clerks, guards, translators, and low- level analysts. They provided documents about the NSA‘s cipher breaking, but they lacked access to the lists of the NSA’s sources and methods. These meager results did not inhibit Russian efforts. For six decades, ever since the inception of the NSA in 1952, the Russian intelligence service had engaged in a covert war with the NSA. The Russian intelligence service is, as far as is known, the only intelligence service in the world that ever succeeded in penetrating the NSA. A number of NSA employees also defected to Moscow. The history of this venerable enterprise is instructive. The first two defectors in the NSA’s history were William Mar- tin and Bernon Mitchell. They were mathematicians working on the NSA’s decryption machines who went to Moscow via Cuba in 1960. The Russian intelligence service, then called the KGB, went to great lengths to get propaganda value from their defections. It even orga- nized a ninety-minute press conference for them on September 6, | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 222 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019710