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34 retracing all his activities at the NSA over the past four years. To begin with, they needed to find out how many documents from the Center had been copied and taken by Snowden. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s own intelligence service, meanwhile was kept partially in the dark. It did not learn from the NSA that Snowden had stolen military documents, concerning the joint Cyber Command until July 10, 2013. In terms of sheer quantity, the number of stolen military documents was staggering. The DIA found that Snowden had copied “over 900,000” military files. Many of these files came from this joint command, which had been set up in 2011 by the NSA and Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force cryptological services to combat the threat of warfare in cyberspace. The loss was considered of such importance that between 200 and 2500 military intelligence officers worked day and night for the next four months, according to the DIA’s classified report, to "triage, analyze, and assess Department of Defense impacts related to the Snowden compromise." The job of this unit, called the Joint Staff Mitigation Oversight Task Force, was to attempt to contain the damage caused by the Snowden breach. In many cases, containment meant shutting down NSA operations in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran so they could not be used to confuse and distract the U.S. military. The NSA and Defense Department were not the only government agencies concerned with determining the extent of the breach. There was also the CIA. The NSA acted as a service organization for it, handling most, if not all, of tts requests for communication intelligence to support its international espionage operations. Although the CIA and NSA were both part of the so-called “Intelligence Community,” the NSA did not immediately share with the CIA details of the Snowden breach. Despite the immense potential damage of the theft, it was not until a week later that CIA Director John Owen Brennan and Deputy Director Michael Morell were briefed by the NSA. When Morell realize how much data had been taken by Snowden, he was astounded “You might have thought of all the government entities on the planet, the one least vulnerable to such grand theft would have been the NSA,” he wrote “but it turned out that the NSA had left itself vulnerable.” According to Morell, he bluntly told the NSA briefer that it was urgent for the CIA to be brought in on the case. After all, only four years earlier Snowden had been employed by the CIA. Specifically, Morell said the CIA needed to find out three things. Has CIA documents had been part of Snowden’s haul? How long had Snowden been stealing documents? Had Snowden been working “with any foreign intelligence service, either wittingly or not?” According to Morell, the effort to get a direct answer from NSA officials to these three key questions “proved maddeningly difficult.” He found that in mid June NSA officials with whom he dealt were so “distraught at the massive security breach” that initially they even refused to allow CIA officers to participate in the on-going security review. A former NSA executive told me there was “near panic” at the NSA. Finally, Morell called Chris Inglis, a former professor of computer science who had risen to be the NSA’s Deputy Director at the time of the breach. Inglis, who headed operations for the NSA, told him “the news was not good.” Among the data copied by Snowden were a large number of CIA secrets. By the time, the CIA learned that its secrets had been compromised, Snowden was headed to Russia. The investigation of a crime involving potential espionage is no easy task. In this case, it required attempting to solve a jigsaw puzzle in which not only were key pieces missing but, since it involved adversary intelligence services, some of the found pieces might have been twisted to deliberately to mislead the US investigators. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020186