How America Lost Its Secrets Read online

  ALSO BY EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN

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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by E. J. E. Publications Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Epstein, Edward Jay, author.

  Title: How America lost its secrets : Edward Snowden, the man and the theft / by Edward Jay Epstein.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017] | “A Borzoi book.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016026940 | ISBN 9780451494566 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451494573 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Snowden, Edward J., 1983– | United States. National Security Agency/Central Security Service. | Leaks (Disclosure of information)—United States. | Electronic surveillance—United States. | Whistle-blowing—United States.

  Classification: LCC JF1525.W45 E67 2017 | DDC 327.12730092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016026940

  Ebook ISBN 9780451494573

  Cover image by John Chan/123RF

  Cover design by Darren Haggar

  v4.1

  ep

  This book is dedicated to the memory of a wise teacher,

  James Q. Wilson (1931–2012)

  There are certain persons who…have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and…the law is not for them.

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Crime and Punishment

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Edward Jay Epstein

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Snowden’s Trail: Hong Kong, 2014

  Part One: Snowden’s Arc

  Chapter 1: Tinker

  Chapter 2: Secret Agent

  Chapter 3: Contractor

  Chapter 4: Thief

  Chapter 5: Crossing the Rubicon

  Chapter 6: Hacktivist

  Chapter 7: String Puller

  Chapter 8: Raider of the Inner Sanctum

  Chapter 9: Escape Artist

  Chapter 10: Whistle-blower

  Chapter 11: Enter Assange

  Chapter 12: Fugitive

  Part Two: The Intelligence Crisis

  Chapter 13: The Great Divide

  Chapter 14: The Crime Scene Investigation

  Chapter 15: Did Snowden Act Alone?

  Chapter 16: The Question of When

  Chapter 17: The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing

  Chapter 18: The Unheeded Warning

  Part Three: The Game of Nations

  Chapter 19: The Rise of the NSA

  Chapter 20: The NSA’s Back Door

  Chapter 21: The Russians Are Coming

  Chapter 22: The Chinese Puzzle

  Chapter 23: A Single Point of Failure

  Part Four: Moscow Calling

  Chapter 24: Off to Moscow

  Chapter 25: Through the Looking Glass

  Chapter 26: The Handler

  Part Five: Conclusions: Walking the Cat Back

  Chapter 27: Snowden’s Choices

  Chapter 28: The Espionage Source

  Chapter 29: The “War on Terror” After Snowden

  Epilogue: The Snowden Effect

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Illustrations

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Prologue

  Snowden’s Trail: Hong Kong, 2014

  THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, or, as it is now commonly called, the NSA, was created on October 24, 1952, in such a tight cocoon of secrecy that even the presidential order creating it was classified top secret. When journalists asked questions about this new agency, Washington officials jokingly told them that the initials NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” The reason for this extraordinary stealth is that the NSA is involved in a very sensitive enterprise. Its job is to intercept, decode, and analyze foreign electronic communications transmitted around the globe over copper wires, fiber-optic cable, satellite, microwave relays, cell phone towers, wireless transmissions, and the Internet for specified intelligence purposes. In intelligence jargon, its product is called COMINT, which stands for communications intelligence. Because this form of intelligence gathering is most effective when the NSA’s targets are unaware of the state-of-the-art tools the NSA uses to break into their computers and telecommunications channels to first intercept and then decrypt their secret messages, the NSA goes to extraordinary lengths to keep them secret. Draconian laws protect this secrecy.

  In the first week of June 2013, the NSA learned that there had been a massive breach. Thousands of secret files bearing on communications intelligence had been stolen from a heavily guarded regional base in Oahu, Hawaii.

  The suspect was Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old civilian analyst at that base, who had fled to Hong Kong before the breach was discovered. According to a three-count criminal complaint filed by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, Snowden had stolen government property and violated the Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of national defense information to an unauthorized person. He also likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by entering computer systems illicitly.

  This was not a whodunit mystery. On June 9, 2013, in an extraordinary twelve-minute video made in a cramped hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden identified himself as the person who had taken the NSA documents. Watching the video, the world saw a shy, awkward, and sympathetic-looking man wearing a rumpled shirt, rimless glasses, and a computer-geek haircut, passionately speaking out against what he termed the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a shaky voice, expressing his willingness to suffer the consequences for exposing them.

  Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him, and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA’s alleged illegal collection of data inside the United States. But in fact, Snowden had stolen a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their monitoring of adversaries, which was their job.

  By the time the theft had been discovered, in the first week of June 2013, it was impossible for the FBI, a grand jury, or any other U.S. agency to question him because he had fled the country. His first stop, Hong Kong, the economically autonomous city of 7.2 million, is a special
administrative region of mainland China. Under the terms of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Great Britain, China is responsible for Hong Kong’s defense and foreign policy, including intelligence services. He then proceeded to Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. Russia granted him asylum, making it unlikely that U.S. authorities would ever have the opportunity to question him.

  Snowden’s escape left in its wake an incredibly important unsolved mystery: How had a young analyst in training at the NSA succeeded in penetrating all the layers of NSA security to pull off the largest theft of secret documents in the history of American intelligence? Did he act alone? What happened to the documents? Was his arrival in Russia part of the plan?

  Because I had written several books on the vulnerability of intelligence services, this was a mystery—a “howdunit,” if you like—that immediately intrigued me. Even if Snowden had acted for the most salutary of reasons, the unauthorized transfer of state secrets from the United States to an adversary country is, by almost any definition, a form of espionage.

  I decided to begin my investigation of this case in Hong Kong, because it was the place to which Snowden first fled after leaving Hawaii. Snowden had planned the trip for at least four weeks, according to the mandatory travel plan he had filed at the NSA. When I spoke to my sources in the intelligence community, they could not explain Snowden’s choice. It would not necessarily protect him from the reach of U.S. law, because Hong Kong had an active extradition treaty with the United States. Just a few months earlier, Hong Kong had made headlines by honoring America’s request to extradite Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted for insider trading.

  Nor was Hong Kong particularly convenient to Hawaii. There were no nonstop flights there from Honolulu in May 2013. Snowden flew eight hours to Narita International Airport in Japan, where he waited almost three hours. He then flew five hours to Hong Kong. Snowden could have flown to countries that do not have extradition treaties with America in far less time.

  Adding to this mystery, at the time he departed Honolulu, Snowden had not yet arranged for any journalists to meet him in Hong Kong, and as far as U.S. intelligence could determine, he had no known appointments there. Even so, Snowden carried to Hong Kong digital copies he had made of the top secret NSA documents. As General Michael Hayden, who served as the head of both the NSA and the CIA, told me, “It’s very mysterious why Snowden chose Hong Kong.” We can assume he had a compelling enough reason for him to take the risk that he would be arrested there by Hong Kong police after U.S. authorities invoked the detention provision of its extradition treaty. It was of course possible that Snowden had traveled there to see someone he believed could protect him.

  —

  I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2014—exactly one year after Snowden had arrived there aboard a Japan Airlines flight. I checked in to the Mira hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon, a ten-minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong Island, where most of the foreign consulates are located.

  I chose the Mira because it was the five-star hotel in which Snowden had stayed and where he had made the celebrated video admitting his role in taking the NSA documents. I asked at the front desk for room 1014, the same one that Snowden had occupied in 2013, because I wanted easy access to the hotel’s service and security personnel responsible for the room who might have had contact with Snowden a year earlier. Unfortunately, that room was occupied, but I was given a nearby room that served my purpose.

  Snowden had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the Guardian reporters he met in Hong Kong, that he had hidden out at the Mira hotel since his arrival in Hong Kong because he feared that the CIA might capture him. My first surprise was that Snowden had not arrived at the Mira until eleven days after he arrived in Hong Kong. As I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had registered there under his real name and used his own passport and credit card to secure the room, an odd choice if he was hiding out. He had checked in to the hotel not on May 20, as he had told the reporters, but on June 1, 2013. He checked out on June 10.

  Wherever Snowden stayed from May 20 to June 1, he apparently considered it a safe enough place from which to send Greenwald a “welcome package,” as he called it, of twenty top secret NSA documents on May 25. He had now not only downloaded documents but also violated the oath he had signed when he took his job by providing them to an unauthorized party. During this period, Snowden also contacted Barton Gellman, on behalf of The Washington Post, via e-mail. Indeed, while he was staying someplace other than the place he claimed to be staying, he made almost all the arrangements for his journalistic coming-out. He was in contact with at least one foreign mission during this period, according to what he wrote to Gellman on May 24. In that e-mail, concerning when and how his story was to be published by The Washington Post, Snowden asked Gellman to include some text that would help Snowden with his dealings with this mission. But which country was he approaching? In an effort to establish Snowden’s whereabouts during these “missing” eleven days, which, among other things, could shed light on why he first came to Hong Kong, I called Keith Bradsher, a prizewinning journalist who had been the New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong in 2013. He had written a well-researched report about Snowden’s arrival there. He proposed we meet at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

  Bradsher told me that he had known Albert Ho, who had been retained as Snowden’s lawyer, for more than a decade. He had interviewed him many times, because he was a leader of a political movement in Hong Kong. Bradsher said that a few days after Snowden had revealed himself on June 9, he met with Ho and questioned him about Snowden’s unknown whereabouts.

  Ho told Bradsher that all of Snowden’s logistics had been arranged for him by an intermediary, whom Ho called a “carer.” Ho said that Snowden had been in contact with the “carer” prior to his arrival in Hong Kong on May 20. According to Ho, it was this person who had arranged accommodations for Snowden on his arrival and afterward. If so, it seemed to me that this person might be able to shed light on whom, if anyone, Snowden saw in his first eleven days in Hong Kong. Even if this person might have been unaware of the reasons for Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong when he made the arrangements for him, he was still the best lead I had to learning why Snowden had come to Hong Kong. Bradsher told me that he pressed Ho for details about this mystery person over the course of several meetings but Ho would not identify him beyond saying that he was a “well-connected resident” of Hong Kong.

  I called Ho’s law office in Hong Kong. He politely declined to be interviewed by me, saying he had said all he was going to say about the Snowden case. I was able, though, to make an appointment with Robert Tibbo, a Canadian-born barrister specializing in civil liberties cases. Tibbo had worked closely with Ho on the Snowden case.

  I met Tibbo in the tearoom at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Hong Kong Island. Tibbo, in his early fifties, was tall, with a round face and thinning hair. He talked freely about his remarkable career. After earning a degree in chemical engineering from McGill University and working in Asia as an engineer for a decade, he went to law school in New Zealand and became a barrister in Hong Kong specializing in cases involving the legal status of refugees.

  Over a leisurely tea, Tibbo made it clear that he had played a far more active role than Ho in the Snowden case. He had even personally escorted Snowden from the Mira hotel to a safe house on June 10. He did not dispute what Ho had told Bradsher. When I asked him if he could give me the name of the “carer,” he said that he was bound by a lawyer-client privilege that prevented him from providing me with any details that might reveal the identity of the person who had made arrangements for Snowden. When I asked the date that he was officially retained by Snowden, he said that Snowden had signed an agreement hiring him and Ho’s law firm as his legal adviser on June 10, 2013 (which was a matter of public record).

  “I understand that,” I said, “but I am inquiring about something that had happened before you became his legal advise
r.” He shook his head, as if getting rid of a pesky fly, and said that his oath precluded him from saying anything at all that might do damage to the credibility of his client. “Not even where he was staying in May in Hong Kong?” I persisted. He leaned forward and, after a brief hesitation, said, jokingly I assumed, that he would not divulge that information, “even if you held a gun to my head.” We met two more times, but true to his word Tibbo would not say if he even knew the identity of the “carer.”

  Meanwhile, Joyce Xu, a very resourceful Chinese journalist who was assisting me in Hong Kong, had filed the equivalent of a Freedom of Information request with the Hong Kong Security Bureau asking for information about Snowden’s movements in May. Thomas Ng, the secretary for security, turned down the request, adding that Hong Kong authorities do not keep records of hotel registrations. I had run into a dead end with the Hong Kong authorities on the issue of Snowden’s “carer” and Snowden’s whereabouts for those eleven crucial days.

  At this point, I got some much-needed help from an old friend on the Obama White House staff. Before I had left New York, I asked him if he could find someone at the consulate in Hong Kong who might brief me on the Snowden case. I didn’t hear from him until just a few days before I was due to return to New York. He put me in touch with a former employee of the Hong Kong consulate, who he said was “fully informed” about the efforts of the U.S. mission to locate Snowden in Hong Kong. This person was still living in Hong Kong, and he agreed to meet with me on condition that I did not mention either his name or his specific job in the U.S. mission in Hong Kong. The venue was the terrace lounge of the American Club in Exchange Square in central Hong Kong, a posh club mainly for expatriate Americans. It was on the forty-eighth floor, with a spectacular view of Victoria Harbor. Once there, I had no problem finding my source, identifying him by the description he had given me. He was sitting alone at a discreet table in the corner.