The Crime Scene Investigation | 137

The Crime Scene Investigation | 137 The DIA found from its forensic examination that Snowden had copied “over 900,000” military files. Many of these non-NSA files came from the Cyber Command, which had been set up in 2011 by the NSA and the army, navy, marine, and air force cryptologi- cal services to combat the threat of warfare in cyberspace. The loss was considered of such importance that between 200 and 250 mil- itary 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 the Defense Department were not the only gov- ernment agencies concerned with determining the extent of the breach. The NSA acted as a service organization for the CIA through handling most if not all of its requests for communications intel- © ligence to support both its international espionage and its analytic © operations. Although the CIA and the 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 June 10 that the CIA’s director, John Owen Brennan, and his deputy, Michael Morell, were briefed by the NSA. When Morell realized how much data Snowden had taken, 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, the CIA had employed Snowden only four years earlier. Specifically, Morell said, the CIA needed to find out three things: Had CIA docu- ments 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 | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 137 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019625