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246 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

used in Hawaii to guide or assist Snowden, they would be put back into sleeper mode. If any telltale traces had been left in chat rooms or social media, they would be systematically deleted. Even more important to the ultimate success of such a communications intelligence coup, measures would be taken to conceal the extent of the damage done by the “single point of failure” by not precipitously closing down compromised sources. Snowden might believe that the power of the information he held was so great that if disclosed by him, all the NSA’s sources would immediately go dark in Russia and China, but Russia might not wish to provide such clarity to its adversaries. An intelligence service need not close down channels it discovers are compromised by an adversary. Instead, it can elect to continue to use them and furnish through them bits of sensitive or misleading information to advance its own national interest. The real danger here was not that the NSA’s “lights” would dramatically be extinguished but that all the future messages illuminated by those lights would be less reliable sources of intelligence. The game of nations is, after all, merely a competition among adversaries to gain advantages by the surreptitious exchange of both twisted and straight information.
To review: When the NSA asserted in the summer of 2013 that over one million documents had been compromised, it was recognizing the most massive failure in its sixty-year history. Not only were NSA secrets taken, but secret files from the CIA, the British GCHQ, and America’s cyber military commands had been compromised. It was, as Sir David Omand, the former head of the British GCHQ, described it, a “huge strategic setback” for the West. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. There is not a reset button in this game. The best that the NSA could do now was damage control while its adversaries took full advantage of the setback. Several hundred U.S. and British intelligence officers worked around the clock in Washington, D.C., Fort Meade, Maryland, and Cheltenham, England, for months on end to determine which parts of the most powerful communications intelligence system in the world could be salvaged from what had been the Snowden breach.
Adding insult to injury, Snowden, speaking from his new perch in Moscow, told applauding audiences that the entire purpose of

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