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33 than six weeks. He had taken the medical leave on May 18, 2013 left the country by plane. By June 7 he had become the NSA’s main suspect. Snowden had been hired to work there as an outside contractor by Booz Allen Hamilton, a private company owned by a hedge fund, which managed much of the information technology at the Center. General Alexander, returning to Washington DC after assigning the sensitive job of investigating the breach to Richard “Rick” Ledgett, the Director of the NSA’s Threat Operations Center at NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. It was a key position since the top- secret unit was responsible for discovering and countering the threats posed by Chinese, Russian and other adversary nations. Ledgett was also the logical choice to head the damage assessment investigation since the Center’s regional branch in Hawaii was from where highly-sensitive documents were stolen and where the main suspect, Snowden, last worked. Ledgett immediately boarded a military jet bound for Hawaii. His first task was to reconstruct the chronology all of Snowden’s moves at the Center, or, as the tactic is called in counterintelligence parlance, “walking the cat back.” The NSA meanwhile notified the FBI of Snowden’s possible involvement in the theft of state secrets. It is in charge of criminal investigations of civilian US intelligence workers, even if they occur on a NSA base, The FBI immediately dispatched a top task force of agents to investigate a potential espionage case in Hawaii. When questioned, Lindsay Mills, who shared Snowden’s rental home with him and had been his girl friend for 8 years, said Snowden was away on a business trip. After determining from airline and hotel data that he was in Hong Kong, the FBI realized Snowden was a possible intelligence defector. It froze his credit and bank cards. It also notified the passport office in the State Department the legal attaches at the Hong Kong consulate. The legal attaches, who were actually FBI field agents posted in Hong Kong, located Snowden at the Mira Hotel on June 8". Such international detective work proved unnecessary since on the evening of June 10 Snowden ended all doubts about the identity of the perpetrator by revealing in a 12-minute video posted on the Guardian website that he was the source of the stolen NSA documents for which the FBI was searching. The problem was that since Hong Kong was in China, US law enforcement did not have the means to recover them. At that point, determining the magnitude of the theft of documents became a critical concern of the investigation. Aside from the few dozen documents published by the Guardian and Washington Post, what else had Snowden stolen? Within the next few days, a small army of forensic investigators from the FBI, the Defense Department and the “Q” counterintelligence division of the NSA swarmed onto the NSA base in Hawaii. The proximate crime scene for their investigation was the National Threat Operations Center. They examined the cubicle where Snowden had last worked at NSA, and then began HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020185