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The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing | 185

The mystery of the post–Hong Kong documents also intrigued
members of the U.S. intelligence community with whom I discussed
it. When I asked a former intelligence executive about the ultimate
source for the Merkel story, he responded, “If Snowden didn’t give
journalists this document in Hong Kong, we can assume an inter-
mediary fed it to Appelbaum to publish in Der Spiegel.” According
to him, the NSA investigation had determined that Snowden indeed
had copied an NSA list of the cell phone numbers of foreign leaders,
including the number of Merkel. This list became the basis of the
Der Spiegel story.

It was also clear that Snowden gave credence to the release in Mos-
cow. He made a major point about the hacking of Merkel’s phone
in an interview with Wired in 2014. Just about two weeks before
the leak, Kucherena said Snowden still had access to the documents.
Clearly, someone had access. But whoever was behind it, the release
of information about the alleged bugging of Merkel’s phone resulted
in badly fraying U.S. relations with Germany in the midst of devel-
oping troubles in Ukraine. As it later turned out, according to the
investigation of the German federal prosecutor, which concluded in
2015, there was no evidence found in this document, or elsewhere,
that Merkel’s calls were ever actually intercepted. Although they
revealed little if anything that the intelligence services of Germany,
France, and Israel were not already aware of, they raised a public
outcry in allies against NSA surveillance, and the outcry became the
event itself.

While these post–Hong Kong documents had little if any intel-
ligence value, they provided further evidence that at least part of
the stolen NSA documents was in the hands of a party hostile to the
United States. If so, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that this party
also had access to the far more valuable Level 3 documents revealing
the NSA’s sources and methods, such as the one that Ledgett had
described as a “roadmap” to U.S. electronic espionage against Russia
and China.

Within the intelligence community, this concern was heightened
by new countermeasures to this espionage employed by Russia and
China after Snowden reached Moscow. For example, there were
indications that the NSA had lost part of its capabilities to follow

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