It is "smoke and mirrors", but in completely different sense, which is clear now: Russians have been known for a long time (whole Cold War) for being able to s

It is "smoke and mirrors", but in completely different sense, which is clear now: Russians have been known for a long time (whole Cold War) for being able to sacrifice one, less important spy to distract enemy's attention from more valuable one. Now think about Snowden in this context: few years ago NSA must had been sniffing around, looking for a leak. Suddenly, one of their employes takes few laptops with secret data and runs, ending up in Russia. NSA is furious, but on the other hand their alertness goes down. Few years later it turns out that there's still someone leaking their secrets.