People who reveal secrets are either heroes or betrayers, depending on what the secrets are and on the inclinations of the audience for them. In the case of Edward Snowden, who took and then released a great deal of internal data from the National Security Agency in 2013, his admirers have campaigned for a last-minute pardon by President Obama, but Donald Trump has mused that execution might be more appropriate. Journalism based on Snowden's revelations won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2014, and the Oscar for best documentary in 2015；on the other hand, many American government officials think Snowden, who lives in Russia, should be brought home and prosecuted for revealing classified information.
In 2014, Edward Jay Epstein, the veteran writer on espionage, published a provocative article in The Wall Street Journal proposing another way of looking at Snowden：as a spy. Epstein wrote that an unnamed “former member of President Obama's cabinet” had told him “that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist：1) It was a Russian espionage operation； 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation； 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.
Now Epstein has produced a long, detailed book elaborating on his theory. Snowden is known for having revealed that the N.S.A. was illegally spying on American citizens, but Epstein says that he actually took almost a million documents that had nothing to do with that, which he didn't give to journalists. What happened to them? How did a relatively lowly nonemployee at the agency, without much official access, manage to get all that material in the first place? Why did he choose to announce himself to the world from Hong Kong, and why has he remained in Moscow since he left Hong Kong?
You can see the outlines of a coherent hypothesis in “How America Lost Its Secrets.” Perhaps Snowden was planted at the N.S.A. by either Russia or China, or by both. Perhaps while he was there he worked with other, as yet undetected, insiders who were also serving foreign powers. Perhaps in Hong Kong he put himself into the care of Chinese handlers who debriefed him extensively during the nearly two weeks between his arrival and his self-outing. Perhaps the same thing happened in Moscow during the first 37 days after he landed there, when he seems to have been hiding somewhere inside the airport security perimeter. Perhaps his reward for, in effect, defecting has been the odd protected life in Russia that celebrated spies like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess previously enjoyed. Perhaps his media-abetted role as a whistle-blower was merely a counterintuitive (because it was so public) new form of cover.
Epstein proves none of this. “How America Lost Its Secrets” is an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly souffle of speculation, full of anonymous sourcing and suppositional language like “it seems plausible to believe” or “it doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude.” Epstein's first book, “Inquest,” published more than 50 years ago, featured another mysterious young man who spent time in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. This book has a greatest-hits feeling, because it touches on several of Epstein's long-running preoccupations：Russia；the movie and media businesses；the gullibility of liberals；and, especially, the world of counterintelligence. The spirit of James Jesus Angleton, the C.I.A.'s mole-obsessed counterintelligence chief during the peak years of the Cold War and evidently a mentor to Epstein (he's mentioned several times), hovers over these pages.
Sometimes it seems as if Epstein so much enjoys exploring the twists and turns in Snowden's story - his encounter with Snowden's mysterious lawyer in Moscow, Anatoly Kucherena, is especially memorable - that he doesn't have an overwhelming need to settle the questions he raises. The sentence from The Wall Street Journal quoted above appears almost verbatim in the book, but it's immediately followed by this：“These severe accusations generated much heat but little light. They were not accompanied by any evidence showing that Snowden had acted in concert with any foreign power in stealing the files or, for that matter, that he was not acting out of his own personal convictions, no matter how misguided they might have been.” But then Epstein spends many more pages considering, and not dismissing, the very same severe accusations, and ends by saying that “Snowden's theft of state secrets... had evolved, deliberately or not, necessarily, into a mission of di
sclosing key national secrets to a foreign power.”
