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30 movements in the latter part of June in Hong Kong. CIA Deputy Director Morell would go no further than to state that during that period he had no doubt the intelligence services of Russia and China “had an enormous interest in him and the information he [Snowden] had stolen.” Presumably, the last thing these adversary services would want would be to make this “interest” transparent to the United States. The role of concealment must be taken into account when assessing information bearing on the work of espionage services. I learned when I was interviewing James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary ex-counterintelligence chief of the CIA in the 1970s for my book on deception that intelligence services play by a different set of rules than historians when it comes to their espionage successes. Angleton, a famously baroque thinker himself, impressed on me the complexity of espionage. He said “It’s not enough just to steal a secret. It must be done in a way that the theft remains undetected.” From his perspective, there were two requisites that had to be fulfilled to assure the success of any intelligence theft. The first task is the obvious one: acquiring by espionage an adversary’s state secrets. The second task is concealment of that success. Deception is employed to obscure the nature and the extent of the espionage theft. This deception is necessary to extend the usefulness of theft. One of the most famous examples of this principle was the deceptions used by British intelligence in the Second World War to conceal its success in breaking the German ciphers generated by the Enigma machines. If German naval intelligence discovered Britain was able to read the ciphers it used to communicate with its U-boats, it would have stopped using them. So British intelligence hid its coup by supplying false information to known German spies to account for the sinking of U-boats, including the canard that British aerial cameras could detect one ingredient in the paint used to camouflage the U-boats. That same hoary principle of deception applies to modern-day communications intelligence. If the Russian, Chinese or any other adversary intelligence service got its hands on the documents stolen by Snowden from the NSA’s repositories in Hawaii in 2013, it would likely employ deception, including well-crafted lies, to create as much ambiguity as possible as to the ultimate disposition of the missing documents. From this counterintelligence perspective, the intelligence issue that spawned the great divide cannot be resolved by accepting the uncorroborated statements made by a source, such as Snowden, who may be in the hands of the Russian security services in Moscow. By the same token, the calculations made by NSA officials about the extent of the theft are also suspect. After all, the NSA is an intelligence service that often engages in secret machinations. We know that its top officials reported to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as the President’s National Security Adviser, that over one million documents were compromised by Snowden. But if this was disinformation, it is difficult to see its purpose. Inflating the extent of the damage of the Snowden breach to the President, Congress and the Secretary of Defense obviously reflected poorly on their own management of the NSA, and their own careers. Yet such a possibility cannot be precluded in the arcane world of intelligence. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020182