In a stunning video in Hong Kong on June 9, 2013, Edward Snowden admitted he stole NSA documents published earlier that week by The Guardian and The Washington Post. Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old employee of an outside contractor for the NSA, said that he took the documents to expose the NSA’s surveillance of U.S. citizens. Credit 1

Twenty-two days before Snowden’s video confession, the largest theft of American secrets in history had taken place at the pastoral-looking NSA base on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. When I viewed it from the outside (above left, behind parking lot), it looked like little more than a grassy hillock, but it contained some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, including a road map to all its intelligence targets. Snowden copied hundreds of thousands of documents, including this road map, before he fled to Hong Kong. Credit 2

Snowden, using an alias, sent Barton Gellman secret NSA documents from Hong Kong fifteen days before he went public. He asked Gellman to write a story for the Post and put in it a cipher key to help prove his bona fides to an unnamed foreign mission. Gellman refused the request and did not go to Hong Kong but published the story. Credit 3

Snowden, using another alias, also sent the filmmaker Laura Poitras, right, and the blogger Glenn Greenwald NSA documents after Snowden arrived in Hong Kong on May 20. Poitras and Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to meet their anonymous source, who they discovered was Snowden. Credit 4

Snowden moved into the Mira hotel on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong on June 1 after spending eleven days in an undisclosed location arranged by a “carer.” He would later falsely tell Poitras and Gellman that he had been at the Mira since he arrived on May 20. It was not the only untruth he would tell them. Credit 5

Snowden took Poitras and Greenwald to room 1014 at the Mira on June 3. The glass partition separates the bedroom from the bath. Even though Snowden said he didn’t want “to be the story,” he allowed Poitras to film him for twenty hours during the next six days. In this cramped space, he let her film him revealing the contents of stolen NSA documents to her colleague Greenwald. This footage became the centerpiece of Poitras’s full-length documentary Citizenfour. Credit 6

General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, flew to the crime scene in Hawaii soon after the story by Poitras and Greenwald appeared. The damage assessment would take over a year to complete because more than one million documents from the NSA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense had been compromised by Snowden. Alexander resigned seven months later, concluding Snowden’s theft had done “irreversible and significant damage” to the United States and that “the [NSA] system did not work as it should have.” Credit 7

Vladimir Putin personally authorized Snowden’s flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, bragging about ordering Snowden’s exfiltration. Putin not only gave Snowden a safe haven in Russia but invited him to participate in one of his press conferences on Russian television. Credit 8

Snowden called Julian Assange of WikiLeaks for assistance from Hong Kong. Assange booked false flights for Snowden to divert Western intelligence. Credit 9

The Russian airline Aeroflot allowed Snowden to board its flight on June 23 without the necessary visa. When the flight landed in Moscow, he was taken off the plane by security officials in what was termed a “special operation.” From that moment on, he was in Russian hands. Credit 10

General Michael Hayden was CIA director when Snowden, then twenty-three, began his intelligence career. In 2007, Snowden was sent to Geneva as a junior CIA communications officer. His CIA career ended less than two years later, when he was caught tampering with a CIA computer system. After the general was briefed on the extent of Snowden’s theft, Hayden said, “I would lose all respect for the Russian and Chinese security services if they haven’t fully exploited everything Snowden had to give.” Credit 11

After leaving the CIA, Snowden was hired by Dell, an outside contractor for the NSA, and sent to work on computer issues at the Yokota base in Japan. While working as a system administrator there in 2010, he spotted a hole in the security system that would allow a disgruntled employee or spy to steal classified information. It was the same flaw he would use three years later to steal documents. Credit 12

Still working for Dell, Snowden moved to Hawaii, where he rented this house. It was no more than a ten-minute drive to the NSA base where he worked in a windowless structure eight hours a day with eighteen-year-old military employees of the NSA. It was here that he maneuvered to get greater access to secret documents. Credit 13

Snowden lived in Hawaii with twenty-seven-year-old Lindsay Mills, his girlfriend for six years. She described her life with him as an “emotional roller coaster.” Soon after arriving, she began pole dancing at a local bar. Credit 14

NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, had a position that Snowden sought in 2012. After three years in dead-end jobs at Dell in Japan and Hawaii, Snowden sought to advance himself by getting an executive position at the NSA itself. In the summer of 2012, he stole the answers to the NSA entrance exam and, with the answers, easily aced it. Even so, he didn’t get the NSA executive position. He continued working at Dell in Hawaii but grew progressively more disgruntled about the NSA. Credit 15

Jacob Appelbaum, called by Rolling Stone the “most dangerous man in cyberspace,” shared an interest with Snowden in promoting Tor software, which allowed hacktivists and others to hide their identities on the Internet. Aside from working at the NSA, Snowden was “moonlighting” by operating the largest server in Hawaii for this software. Snowden allowed Appelbaum to question him about NSA activities, along with Poitras, in mid-May 2013 while he was still at the NSA. Credit 16

Runa Sandvik was Appelbaum’s associate in promoting Tor software. She went to Hawaii in December 2012 to co-host with Snowden an anti-surveillance hackers’ gathering, an event called by hacktivists a CryptoParty. Although Snowden revealed to her his true identity, Sandvik did not disclose that she knew Snowden prior to his going public until nine months after he went to Russia. Credit 17

Snowden held his CryptoParty in BoxJelly in downtown Honolulu in December 2012. Here, he advocated measures designed to defeat NSA surveillance while working for the agency. He even invited selected NSA co-workers to attend, and some did. Whether or not any helped him, he couldn’t have committed his thefts in May 2013 without help, witting or unwitting. The owner of BoxJelly told me he had not been questioned by the FBI or anyone else about the CryptoParty. Credit 18

Anatoly Kucherena was appointed Snowden’s “legal representative” in Russia at Sheremetyevo International Airport outside Moscow on July 12, 2013. A man with connections in high places, Kucherena effectively blocked access to Snowden to all but a few foreigners. Because he served as the liaison between Snowden and Russian security services, he was in a unique position to answer a key outstanding question of the case: Did Snowden bring American secrets to Russia? The answer, as he confirmed to me, is yes. Credit 19

Snowden’s first appearance in Russia was in a cordoned-off lounge at the Moscow airport on July 12, 2013. Seated to his right is Sarah Harrison, the “ninja” Assange had sent to Hong Kong to help him get to Russia; a government-supplied translator is on his left. No press was allowed into this Russian-style “press conference.” Snowden officially requested asylum. Credit 20

Anna Chapman, one of the “sleeper agents” planted by Russian intelligence in America after the Cold War ended, jokingly offered to marry Snowden. One objective of her sleeper network in America was to service a possible recruit in the NSA. The FBI arrested her in 2010 and sent her back to Russia. Credit 21

Left to right, the director Laura Poitras, the journalist-author Glenn Greenwald, and Snowden’s longtime girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, accept the best documentary feature Oscar for Citizenfour during the eighty-seventh Academy Awards. Capturing on film a true crime in progress, the transfer of state secrets, as Poitras did, is truly an extraordinary achievement. But the documentary, based on Snowden’s self-serving narrative, reinforced the myth that Snowden stole only documents that revealed the crimes of the U.S. government so as to give them to journalists. It neglects the reality that the vast majority of the documents he took, including military secrets, had nothing to do with the misdeeds of the government and were not given to journalists. Credit 22