SHEVARDNADZE: SO he [Snowden] does have some materials that

174 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS SHEVARDNADZE: SO he [Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been made public yet? KucHERENA: Certainly. Shevardnadze asked the next logical question: “Why did Russia get involved in this whole thing if it got nothing out of it?” “Snowden spent quite a few years working for the CIA. We haven’t fully realized yet the importance of his revelations.” Kucherena was on the FSB’s public oversight board. He was clearly in the picture. Kucherena’s answer was completely consistent with the statement Snowden made three weeks after arriving in Russia in his previ- ously mentioned e-mail to Senator Humphrey. It is certainly possible that Snowden transferred the NSA files from his own computers and thumb drives to storage on a remote server in the cloud before coming to Russia. The “cloud” is actually not in the sky but a term used for remote storage servers, such as those provided by Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other Internet companies. Anyone who is connected to the Internet can © store and retrieve files by entering a user name and a password. © For Kucherena to be certain Snowden had access to the so-far- unrevealed data, Snowden must have demonstrated his access either to him or to the authorities. The Russians obviously knew Snowden had the means to retrieve this data one way or the other. Because the data concerned electronic espionage against Russia, the FSB would have been keen to obtain the documents, and the FSB is not known to take no for an answer in issues involving espionage. Even if Snowden refused to furnish his key encryption, accord- ing to a former National Security Council staffer, the Russian cyber service in 2013 had the means, the time, and the incentive to break the encryption. It is unlikely it would have had to go through the trouble. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that, willingly or under duress, Snowden shared his access to his treasure trove of documents with the agencies that were literally in control of his life in Russia. Kucherena’s answer on the television program may also help to explain Putin’s decision to allow Snowden to come to Moscow. It was not a minor sacrifice for Putin. His foreign minister, Sergei Lav- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 174 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019662