A Single Point of Failure | 245

A Single Point of Failure | 245 during his next fifteen days in Hong Kong would not likely escape China’s scrutiny. The United States had the ability to also follow Snowden’s move- ments via the cell phones of his lawyers and other confederates after he surfaced. All tracking could be done by the NSA. What the United States lacked was any practical means to capture a high- profile intelligence defector in a city that was part of China. By this time, U.S. intelligence had established that Chinese and Hong Kong security services were monitoring Snowden’s every move. This left few options in the game for the United States. “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a twenty-nine-year-old hacker,” President Obama said on June 27. The real prize, in any case, was not Snowden but the NSA’s secret documents that he had with him. When Snowden was observed entering the Russian consulate, the game was all but over. U.S. dip- lomats could protest over back channels to Moscow, as they did, but with a trove of NSA secrets at stake there was little expectation that would stop the Russians. Two days later, the “single point of failure,” © as Snowden described himself, was on his way to Russia, where his © hosts would be calling the shots. When a victory is obtained in a major sports event, it is cause for public celebrations. The opposite is true in espionage. An intelligence victory involving secret documents, even if it cannot be entirely hidden, is kept veiled, as far as is possible, to increase the value of the coup. “The final move in any sophisticated intelligence game,” Angleton told me in relation to espionage intelligence, is “obscuring a success.” Following Angleton’s precept, the Russian or Chinese intelli- gence services, if they had a role in acquiring the product of the self- described “single point of failure,” would work to cover their tracks in the affair even before the Aeroflot plane carrying Snowden touched down at Sheremetyevo International Airport on June 23. If any false flag operations had been used to trick, mislead, or otherwise induce Snowden to come to Hong Kong, they would be disbanded. If any safe house had been used to quarter Snowden in his first eleven days in Hong Kong, it would be shut down. If any operatives had been | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 245 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019733