Britain pulls MI6 agents after Russia, China crack Snowden's NSA cache, London Times reports

China and Russia have decoded more than a million classified files pilfered from the U.S. National Security Agency by Edward Snowden, according to a report in London's Sunday Times that cites unidentified senior officials in British Prime Minister David Cameron's office, western intelligence agencies, and Britain's Home Office. The cracking of the NSA cache has forced Britain "to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries," the Sunday Times said.

An official at Cameron's office also told Sky News that MI6 covert "agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information," adding there was "no evidence of anyone being harmed." Another official elaborated to the Sunday Times: "Snowden has done incalculable damage. In some cases the agencies have been forced to intervene and lift their agents from operations to prevent them from being identified and killed."

Snowden supporters, notably those who have worked with him to disseminate information about mass surveillance of civilians, were skeptical of the reports and the timing, as Britain debates new intelligence laws. Ewen MacAskill at The Guardian has five questions for Britain's government, and Glenn Greenwald told Sky News that it was impossible for China and Russia to have cracked the files because "Edward Snowden said, when he left Hong Kong, he had no documents with him — that he gave them all to journalists and purposely destroyed them so they wouldn't be vulnerable to hacking." (He also lectured the unflappable Sky News reporter on "how journalism works.")

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The Wall Street Journal, a sister publication to the Sunday Times, decried "Snowden's gift to Russia and China."

Sky News did get Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond to talk on the record, though he didn't say much. "As to the specific allegations this morning, we never comment on operational intelligence matters so I'm not going to talk about what we have or haven't done in order to mitigate the effect of the Snowden revelations," he said, "but nobody should be in any doubt that Edward Snowden has caused immense damage" to "the West's ability to protect our citizens." Reuters, in its report on the allegations, noted dryly: "The Russian and Chinese governments were not immediately available for comment."