Jack Devine is a 32-year veteran of the CIA, President of The Arkin Group, and author of Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014.

In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald tells how Edward Snowden once confided to him, “with a hint of embarrassment,” how much he had learned from playing video games. In the black-and-white world of video games, “the protagonist is often an ordinary person, who finds himself faced with grave injustices from powerful forces and has the choice to flee in fear or to fight for his beliefs,” Greenwald writes.

But Edward Snowden’s video-game world is not the real world. As a former director of operations for the CIA, I see Snowden in a very different light. My colleagues and I in the agency spent our careers looking for people like him—on the other side, that is. We worked hard to locate the kind of person who could be persuaded to give up his country’s secrets: narcissistic, often delusional under-achievers whom we could hope to turn into loose-lipped sources in our enemies’ camps and other hostile locations. We understood just how valuable it was to every aspect of our foreign policy to know the plans and intentions of our enemies; the best way to do this was to look for a source and exploit people like Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, ­ to target for this purpose.


The Russians weren’t slouches either in searching for sources of classified information. They were looking for their Snowdens too. You don’t have to go back too far to see their success in recruiting American spies with unique access – John Anthony Walker, Aldreich Ames, and Robert Hanssen – who did immense damage to our national security. Moreover, Ames and Hanssen’s compromises led to the death of many of our top Russian sources. Walker’s compromise, by contrast, allowed the Soviets to know the locations of U.S. submarines around the world. One shudders to think what more could have been done against us if they had had Snowden’s access to sensitive communications and his technical know-how on how to extract it from the system. Some people think of Snowden as a latter-day Daniel Ellsberg, a noble whistle-blower. Clearly I do not.

For those who believe that the United States should step back from its engagement from the world, toning down our robust national security and dramatically shrinking our defense and intelligence community, Greenwald’s rationale and Snowden’s behavior might appear to vaguely honorable. And in this next round of debate, the emphasis will once again be on the domestic side of Snowden’s disclosures, as opposed to the enormous international damage done to our country’s self-defense by his revelations.

The picture looks different for those who believe, as I do, that the world is still a very dangerous place and that America faces grave challenges from a range of threats as it plays its essential role as guarantor of global peace: terrorism and instability across the Middle East; China’s military muscle-flexing in Asia; and Putin’s imperial designs in Ukraine and potentially towards other neighbors. From this perspective, Snowden’s actions are deeply troubling in that they directly caused a serious loss of capability to understand the plans and intentions of current and future adversaries. Snowden single-handedly blinded us to critical targets and eliminated our ability to see what some of the key players on the international stage are up to. From first-hand experience, I can state unequivocally that the capability to do this comes at incredibly great cost in time, money and personal sacrifice.

As James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January, Snowden’s disclosures constituted “the most massive and damaging theft of intelligence in our history.” He added that “we’ve lost critical foreign intelligence collection sources, including some shared with us by valued partners. … Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods and tradecraft, and the insights they are gaining are making our job much, much harder.”

This is a very hard subject for government officials to talk about without compromising additional capabilities (even this article had to be approved by the CIA’s Publications Review Board). However, only a cursory reading of our history reveals just how important gaining access to the dispatches of our enemies has been in every war since the American Revolution. Moreover, this activity has been authorized by all of our presidents since George Washington. Protestations aside, every nation uses its technical collection capabilities to the maximum in the international arena, and will continue to do so as long as international conflicts are with us. No one should doubt that our adversaries and some of our fair-weather friends are cheering the loss caused by Snowden.

Within five months of the leaks by Edward Snowden in June of last year, Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Mass., firm that specializes in web intelligence, says it observed an increased pace of innovation by radical groups, specifically new competing jihadist platforms and three major new encryption tools from three different organizations. | Recorded Future

But, to give the devil his due, let’s look at Snowden’s domestic revelations about U.S. citizens’ privacy, which have drawn most of the attention and concern from the American people. It is eminently clear that the intelligence community, Congress and the White House are struggling with the double-edged sword of privacy and national security, particularly as technology progresses at unprecedented speed. And I am reasonably optimistic that, despite the public hand-wringing, they will quickly come up with the right balance that protects our civil liberties and doesn’t cripple our intelligence collection against our enemies, who do, at times, operate in and cooperate with U.S. citizens. When the news cameras stop rolling, these officials all know just how vital these collection platforms are to our defense while at the same time truly appreciating the value of the law and the importance of protection of our citizens’ rights. Nevertheless, implementation won’t be an easy task, and it certainly won’t take place above the requisite Washington self-serving politics.

Debates about civil rights and national defense aside, it is worth talking about Snowden’s motivations before we determine, finally, if he is a sinner, saint or something in between. We must first appreciate just how critical protecting secrets is to our national security, a point that seems to be lost on many participants of this debate. As someone who spent an entire career in the intelligence community, what flashes through my mind first is old the World War II adage, “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” In those first days of the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, no one had to explain to our people – not to mention our troops — how important secrecy was to operational success. Nor should it be necessary to explain it in the age of terrorism and permanent conflict. But it seems that, today, we do.

It is inconceivable that any country can last long without guarding its sensitive information and capabilities and washing people like Snowden out of the system. Once you accept this principle, it’s becomes imperative that our national security agencies and departments demand all government employees abide by the rules, and expect them to be held accountable when they don’t.

Clearly, Snowden and his supporters see it otherwise. But if Snowden felt the NSA was breaking the law or in violation of accepted human rights principles, he should have stood tall in his job and challenged his superiors verbally and in writing, and if necessary taken his concerns to the Inspector General or General Counsel. If he didn’t get satisfaction there, he should have requested that the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees hear him out. There is, in fact, a mechanism in place already to do this. He almost certainly would have gotten his hearing, and appropriate action would have been taken if his position had merit. He knew it didn’t, since each of those committees had in fact already been briefed on those programs, and there is no indication that he took any action whatsoever in this regard.

In that vein, and moreover, why did Snowden cut and run in the style of past defectors like Kim Philby to Russia in the 60’s and Philip Agee to Cuba in 70’s, not to mention the dozens of other traitors that defected on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War? There is no doubt in anyone’s mind, including Greenwald’s, that Snowden knew just how much destruction he had done with the information he stole about our national security. What’s more, he knew full well what he was doing when he put himself in the hands of the Russians. He is both naive and delusional if he believes they will keep him around once they have gotten what they want from him, both in terms of intelligence and propaganda value. It is then that he will learn, like the others before him that have fallen into this trap, that when he truly becomes a “man without a country, “ he will have to pay for his keep. He has set a course that will inevitably lead him to disillusionment, despair and guilt.

Like the video-game fanatic he appears to have been, Snowden has made black-and-white what is actually a very complex issue. For most of our history, it was relatively easy to draw a line between domestic and foreign intelligence. For years there were rigid policies set in place that rightly prohibited NSA, CIA, and FBI from collecting on American “persons” (including green-card holders), unless there was a court order demonstrating reasonable cause. The Snowden documents actually reveal the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gain permission to collect very specific metadata on American citizens for the purposes of tracking suspected terrorists.

It does appear that, unfortunately, the court was overly friendly to the governments’ requests. Consequently, there are a few sensible reforms being put forward to improve the process, including the formation of an independent panel to oversee the activities of the FISC and the relocation of stored metadata outside the NSA. But again, there were ways for Snowden to achieve these ends without betraying his country.

And we must face the fact that it is never going to be easy again to draw that traditional line between domestic and foreign intelligence. The fact remains that with the truly universal explosion of technology, communications, and data movement, as well as connectivity and storage, the government and private sector will continue to struggle with how best to exploit the information available for the purposes of defense and security, while steering clear of unnecessary intrusions into our private lives.

If Snowden really believes in accountability, as he has espoused so often, he should let it start at home and put himself in the hands of the U.S. judicial system, the most impartial in the world, and certainly in contrast to Snowden’s new homeland. If he has a case, he will be exonerated, and if not, he will serve a very long jail sentence. As long as he stays in Russia, Snowden is telling the world that this is a risk he knows he can’t take.