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264 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS ton, D.C., to Austria so that its specialists could debrief him on the secrets he held in his head, it would have an even greater interest in exfiltrating Snowden from Hong Kong to get, aside from his docu- ments, whatever secrets he held in his head. If Russian intelligence were willing to opportunistically accept the delivery of U.S. secrets from an unknown espionage source that it neither recruited nor controlled, such as Hanssen, it would obviously have little hesitancy in acquiring the secrets that Snowden had stolen of his own volition, even if Snowden had acted for idealistic reasons. If Russian intelligence focused its search pattern on disgruntled American intelligence workers, such as Ames, it is plausible that it spotted Snowden through his Internet rants against U.S. surveil- lance. Even if it had missed Snowden in Hawaii, a disgruntled former civilian employee at the NSA would have received its full attention after he contacted Russian officials in Hong Kong. While the tactics of the SVR might have changed since Cherkashin retired, its objec- tives remained the same. And the NSA remained its principal target. Nor is there any reason to doubt that it still measures success in its ) ability to obtain, by whatever means, the secret sources and methods ® of its adversaries. Snowden was in a position, with both the docu- ments he had taken and the knowledge he had in his head, to deliver the KGB such a coup. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 264 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019752