before he left Hong Kong in June 2013. Why would Appelbaum keep

182 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS before he left Hong Kong in June 2013. Why would Appelbaum keep it secret for more than four months? The same pressure to publish would also apply to the journalists Snowden had dealt with in Hong Kong. If Snowden had given Poitras, Greenwald, Lam, or MacAskill the Merkel document, or even told them about it in their interviews with him in Hong Kong, The Guardian would have certainly rushed out such a scoop. According to a source with knowledge of the Snowden investiga- tion, there was no document referencing any spying on Merkel’s phone among the fifty-eight thousand documents on the thumb drive that Snowden had given to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. That absence would explain why Poitras had to send a text to Snowden in Moscow to ask for an explanation after the story broke. Further confirmation of the absence of this document in the material Snowden provided journalists in Hong Kong comes from James Bamford, a well-respected expert on the NSA. In the course of researching his 2014 article on Snowden for Wired, he was given access to all the documents Snowden gave to Poitras, Greenwald, and © Gellman. Bamford used a sophisticated indexing program to search © through the database specifically for the Merkel material. He did not find any. He reported that no document given to journalists in Hong Kong even mentioned Merkel. It therefore appeared that the Merkel document was provided to Der Spiegel after Snowden went to Mos- cow. If so, some party had access to NSA documents after Snowden arrived in Russia and provided the Der Spiegel authors with the scoop. In that context, it might not have been a pure coincidence that Kucherena disclosed that Snowden had access to documents that he had not given to journalists in Hong Kong shortly before just such a document was published in Germany. Bamford explored the possibility that there might be another per- son in the NSA who was stealing documents. He wrote to Poitras and asked her whether the Merkel document could have come from another person in the NSA. She declined, via a letter from her lawyer, to answer that question. But because she had not been the author of the Der Spiegel article, and had not been given the document, there is no reason to believe that she would know its provenance. Documents continued to emerge years after Snowden arrived in | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 182 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019670