PanThe New York Times Book ReviewYou can see the outlines of a coherent hypothesis in How America Lost Its Secrets ... Epstein proves none of this. How America Lost Its Secrets is an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly soufflé of speculation, full of anonymous sourcing and suppositional language ... 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, 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 ... his concern seems to be half with the celebratory closed loop between Snowden and the journalists who covered him, and half with the causes and consequences of a major security breach at the N.S.A. The heart of the matter is the second of these concerns, not the first.
