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119 almost all the FBI files there. The conspirators escaped and kept their identities secret for over 42 years. Self-definitions also do necessarily produce a distinction between whistle-blowers and conventional spies. Consider, for example Philip Agee. Agee left the CIA in 1969 for what he described “reasons of conscience.” Specifically, he said he objected to the CIA’s covert support of Latin America dictators. After contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, he defected to Cuba, where he leaked information that exposed CIA operations. Although Agee insisted he was a whistle-blower, and he adamantly denied offering any secrets to the Soviet Union, the KGB viewed him as a conventional spy. According to Oleg Kalugin, the top Soviet counterintelligence officer in the KGB in Moscow, who defected to the U.S., Agee offered CIA secrets first to the KGB residency in Mexico City in 1973 and then to Cuban intelligence service. Agee provided the KGB with a “treasure trove” of US secrets, Kalugin revealed. “I then sat in my office in Moscow reading the growing list of revelations coming from Agee.” Despite this disparity, Agee still defined himself to the public as a whistle-blower because he also had exposed CIA operations to the public. The Snowden case blurs the demarcation line even further. Unlike other whistle-blowers who uncovered what they considered government malfeasance by virtue of their job, Snowden, by his own admission, took a new job in 2013 specifically to get access to the SCI files concerning NSA sources that he stole from the Threat Operations Center. Switching jobs in order to widen one’s access to state secrets us an activity usually associated with penetration agents, not whistle- blowers. While the technical distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy may still serve the media in the case of Snowden, it does not help in solving the counterintelligence conundrum. Untangling the strands of the Snowden conundrum is no easy matter. A complex burglary of state secrets had been successfully carried in a supposedly-secure site. The only known witness, Snowden, had escaped to Russia, where he could be of help in reconstructing the crime. The stolen data was kept in the equivalent of sealed “vaults” drives that were not connected to the NSA Network ever there was a locked room mystery, this was it. which were actually computer The perpetrator Snowden pierced these barriers by using passwords that belonged to other people and using credentials that allowed him to masquerade as a system administrator. However it was carried out, it was feat required meticulous planning. As in the earlier example ofa hypothetical diamond theft from locked vaults, what is needed is to explain how a perpetrator, who did not himself have the combinations to open them or the means to remove their content, succeeded in the theft. To address such a mystery, a counterintelligence investigation starts with a tabula rasa, stripping away all the previous assumptions, including that Snowden was the lone perpetrator. Once back at square one, it builds alternative scenarios to test against the known facts. To be HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020271