How America Lost Its Secrets Page 12

  Snowden, though, had no intention of allowing himself to be arrested. Despite what he had told Lana Lam only one week earlier, at least for publication, about his determination to seek justice in the Hong Kong courts, he had not planned to use Hong Kong as anything more than a temporary stopover on his escape route. Two months later and safely in Moscow, he made this point clear in a lengthy interview with Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. He told him that it had never been part of his plan to use Hong Kong to escape the legal consequences of his act. “The purpose of my mission [to Hong Kong] was to get the information to journalists.” If so, he had merely been using Tibbo, Man, and Ho to provide him with temporary cover while, following the instructions of Assange, Harrison laid down the smoke screen for his escape to Moscow.

  CHAPTER 12

  Fugitive

  If I end up in chains in Guantánamo, I can live with that.

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Hong Kong, 2013

  DURING HIS INTERVIEWS with Poitras and Greenwald in June, Snowden said stoically, “If I am arrested, I am arrested.” His fatalistic words notwithstanding, Snowden had made plans to seek a haven from American justice well before his meeting them. As early as May 24, 2013, he had suggested to Barton Gellman that he was making arrangements with a foreign government. To that end, he asked Gellman to insert an encrypted key in the Internet version of the NSA exposé that Snowden proposed he write for The Washington Post. He told him the purpose of the encrypted key was to assist him with a foreign government. Snowden did not identify any foreign government to Gellman, but Gellman said he knew that Snowden wanted to “seek asylum” overseas. He decided against assisting him. “I can’t help him evade U.S. jurisdiction—I don’t want to, and I can’t,” he later explained. “It’s not my job. It’s not the relationship. I am a journalist.”

  Although Gellman suspected that Iceland might be the foreign government in question, Snowden, as it turned out, had never contacted the consulate of Iceland while he was in Hong Kong. “We had heard nothing from Snowden,” an Iceland government official told Vanity Fair.

  Snowden also did not contact the government of Ecuador while in Hong Kong. In mid-June, while Harrison was laying down false tracks for Snowden in Hong Kong, Assange in London asked Fidel Narváez, who was a friend of his and the legal attaché in the London embassy of Ecuador, to issue a document that Snowden could use. But this document was not delivered to Snowden in Hong Kong (and it was later invalidated by Ecuador). There are no direct flights to Ecuador from Hong Kong. If Snowden had really planned to go to Ecuador without stopping in a country allied with the United States, he would have had to fly to Cuba. He would need a Cuban travel document to do that, which he could have obtained from the Cuban consulate anytime during his month in Hong Kong. But he did not obtain it. Nor did he acquire a visa to go to any other country in Latin America or elsewhere while in Hong Kong. So where was he headed?

  Whatever foreign government with which Snowden was dealing earlier presumably did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Almost all other countries that did not have active extradition treaties with the United States could not be directly reached by air. With three notable exceptions, the flights to most of these countries had stopovers in a country that was an ally of the United States, where officials could seize Snowden. The three exceptions were China, North Korea (via China), and Russia.

  The only one of these three countries that Snowden is known to have had contact with directly during his thirty-three-day stay in Hong Kong was Russia. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, revealed these contacts in a televised press briefing in September 2013. Putin did not provide the date of these contacts, but he provided an intriguing clue. Snowden was identified to him, according to Putin, not by name but merely as an “agent of special services.” If his name was not given to Putin, it might have been because Snowden’s first meeting with the Russians had taken place before Snowden became a household name on June 9, 2013.

  For his part, Snowden was evasive when discussing his contacts with Russia while still in Hong Kong. When Lana Lam asked Snowden on June 12, 2013, whether he had already requested asylum from the Russian government, he deferred, saying, “My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power.” The Russian government was clearly not intimidated by the threats of reprisals by the United States, as the Obama administration would learn after Snowden’s arrival in Russia on June 23. Snowden could only have known that with certainty on June 12 if he had been in contact with Russian officials prior to his interview with Lam.

  If Putin’s own description of Snowden’s interactions with the Russians in Hong Kong is to be believed, the decision to facilitate Snowden’s escape to Russia had been kicked all the way up the Russian chain of command to Putin. Presumably, this decision-making process began earlier than June 21, when Snowden was said to have gone to the consulate. But how much earlier? Because Snowden had arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, his contacts with Russian officials could have occurred in May. Such a contact with the Russians would fit with Snowden’s telling Gellman on May 24 that he needed his help in dealing with the diplomatic mission of a country that Snowden did not identify.

  In any case, Putin said an American “agent of the special services” had contacted Russian diplomats because he wanted assistance. The agent, Snowden, of course, needed assistance to escape from Hong Kong. The decision to accept him in Russia, given the international ramifications, would have to be made at a much higher level than the Russian mission in Hong Kong.

  Nine days before Snowden boarded Aeroflot Flight SU213 to Moscow on June 23, the United States had filed a criminal complaint against him. It had also officially alerted Interpol when it unsealed the complaint on June 21. It had invalidated his U.S. passport except to return to America (although he still had it in his possession at the Hong Kong airport). Because by this time he was the most famous visitor in Hong Kong, his passage through passport control on June 23 might have reflected the acquiescence of the Hong Kong authorities to the reported request of China to be rid of Snowden by that date.

  According to one Aeroflot official, ordinarily all international passengers are required to have a valid passport as well as a visa to the country of final destination. Snowden had neither a valid passport nor a visa. Still Snowden was able to board the flight to Moscow. Aeroflot, a state-controlled airline, presumably responds to the Russian government on matters where Putin has given his approval.

  Snowden first met Harrison in person on June 23. She was waiting for him in the car that Jonathan Man had arranged to take him to the airport that morning. Snowden was dressed in a gray shirt and khaki slacks. Harrison was dressed in jeans and flip-flops. She said she had chosen this dress style so that they would blend in at the airport with vacationing tourists. She had financed the trip, and she was apparently now calling the shots. Harrison’s concern was that they might be arrested at the airport, so Man accompanied them through passport control. He was able to do this because he bought a ticket on the cheapest available international flight. Harrison had given Man a phone number to call if they got arrested. When she and Snowden boarded the flight at 12:45 p.m., Harrison effectively became Snowden’s second “carer”—a job that would require her presence in Moscow for the next four months.

  Snowden had pretty much remained silent until the plane took off. The first full proper sentence she heard from him as they headed for Moscow, as she recalled, was “I didn’t expect that WikiLeaks was going to send a ninja to get me out.”

  Meanwhile, Assange continued creating “distractions,” as he put it. On June 24, a booking was made for Snowden on an Aeroflot flight to Cuba, and this information was relayed to the foreign press organization in Moscow, resulting in over a dozen reporters flying to Havana on the flight. Snowden, of course, never showed up for it. “In some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that [flight] on open lines to lawyers in the United States,” Assange sai
d. One subsequent piece of his misinformation was that Snowden was flying to Bolivia on the private plane of the Bolivian president, Evo Morales (who was then in Moscow for a meeting). That misinformation had the desired effect. U.S. allies in Europe, including France, Spain, and Portugal, refused to allow that plane to fly through its airspace, forcing the plane to land in Austria. This misinformation resulted in an international incident but did not change the fact that Snowden was still in the custody of Russian authorities.

  Snowden came to realize that those assisting him, including Assange and Harrison, were taking serious risks. “Anyone in a three-mile radius [of me] is going to get hammered,” he later said in 2015 to a reporter from Vogue. (After finally leaving Snowden in Moscow on November 3, 2013, Harrison moved to Berlin, where she set up an organization to provide, as she termed it, “an underground railroad” for other fugitives who had made available documents exposing government secrets.)

  Snowden was sequestered in the transit zone of the Moscow airport for thirty-seven days. A Russian intermediary provided him with a Russian classic to read while awaiting asylum. It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, whose protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is a dissenter who believes breaking the law is morally justified by the unfair abuses of the political system.

  Snowden received official sanctuary in Russia on August 1, 2013. His public statements in Hong Kong that he was willing to go to prison so that others could live freely in a democratic society were, as it turned out, mere rhetoric. Instead of risking prison, he had successfully escaped to a country in which he would be treated as a hero for defying the U.S. government. He had not sacrificed himself; he had transformed himself. He had risen from being a lowly technician in Hawaii whose talents went largely unrecognized to the status of an international media star in Moscow. In his new role, he could make Internet appearances via Skype to prestigious gatherings, such as the TED conference, where he would be roundly applauded as an Internet hero, as well as be paid a $20,000 fee for just his electronic participation. He would be beamed into dozens of ACLU meetings where he was celebrated as a defender of American liberty. He would describe to sympathetic audiences in Germany, Norway, and France the unfairness of the American legal system, asserting that it was denying him a “fair trial.” He would now make front-page news by granting interviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and other publications. He would join Poitras and Greenwald on the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He would be the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, the hero of the 2016 Hollywood movie Snowden (directed by Oliver Stone), and a consultant to the 2015 season of the television series Homeland. He would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. He would attract over one million followers to his tweets in 2015. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won,” he informed the Post in his first live interview in Moscow in December 2013. It was a mission that involved a very high-stakes enterprise: taking not only domestic surveillance documents but America’s military and foreign intelligence secrets abroad.

  Whistle-blowers do not ordinarily steal military secrets. Nor do they flee to the territory of America’s principal adversaries. A fugitive, especially one lacking a Russian visa, does not wind up in Moscow by pure accident. It’s hard to imagine that a Russian president with the KGB background of Putin would give his personal sanction for a high-profile exfiltration from Hong Kong without weighing the gain that might proceed from it. Whatever else may be said of Putin, his actions show him to be a calculating opportunist. Part of his calculus would be that the defector from American intelligence had taken possession of a great number of potentially valuable documents from the inner sanctum of the NSA and, aside from these documents, claimed to hold secrets of great importance in his head. To be sure, the practical value of this stolen archive would require a lengthy evaluation by Russia’s other intelligence services. But it is hard to believe that a defector who put himself in the hands of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and other Russian intelligence services wouldn’t be expected to cooperate with them. Even if such a defector did not carry these files with him to Moscow, intelligence services have the means to recover digital files, even after they are erased from a computer or if they are sent to the cloud. Moreover, once secret documents are taken, they are compromised. Yet for much of the American public, Snowden remained a hero.

  PART TWO

  THE INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

  What you’ve seen so far [in the Snowden theft of documents] is just the tip of the iceberg.

  —RETIRED ADMIRAL MICHAEL MCCONNELL, vice-chairman, Booz Allen Hamilton, 2013

  CHAPTER 13

  The Great Divide

  That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013

  IN THE TWELVE-MINUTE VIDEO on The Guardian’s website, Snowden correctly identified himself as an infrastructure analyst at a regional base of the National Security Agency in Oahu, Hawaii. He also revealed in a calm, unemotional voice that he had been the source for the stories in both The Guardian and The Washington Post. He said that he had supplied the secret, classified documents that the two newspapers had used in their scoops about domestic surveillance being conducted by the NSA, America’s enormous electronic surveillance agency. These sensational revelations had been, literally, the talk of the world, and now, in another major news event, the boyish-looking Snowden took responsibility for what would turn out to be the largest theft of top secret documents in the history of U.S. intelligence.

  In the video, it will be recalled, Glenn Greenwald, who had broken the NSA story in The Guardian, questioned Snowden. What was his motive? Greenwald asked. Why did he do it? Snowden replied that he had become horrified by the NSA’s secret operations, which, to him, represented a kind of distillation of the excesses of the American national security state, and he had therefore made it his mission to blow the whistle. He believed that the public needed to be informed of the existence of a vast, secret surveillance operation directed against tens of millions of Americans that flagrantly violated U.S. laws and was a grave threat to their privacy and their freedoms. Within hours of the release of that video on the Guardian website, Snowden was known throughout the world as a courageous whistle-blower.

  In Laura Poitras’s remarks in accepting her Academy Award for Citizenfour on February 22, 2015, she said that Snowden acted as a whistle-blower not only to “expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself.” She received a standing ovation.

  A large part of the public who viewed this powerful film, including many of my colleagues in journalism whose writing I greatly respect, came to accept Snowden’s whistle-blowing narrative. The film so convincingly depicted Snowden as an altruistic young man willing to risk his own personal freedom and face years of imprisonment for the sake of others that editorial writers asked that he be given clemency from prosecution.

  “Sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white headboard, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice,” George Packer wrote about the film in a widely read article in The New Yorker.

  This powerful narrative, as lucidly articulated by Poitras, Greenwald, and other Snowden supporters, described the NSA activities exposed by Snowden as part of a vast criminal conspiracy involving, among others, President Obama, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and both Democratic and Republican members of the congressional oversight committees. It further derided any claims that there was evidence that Snowden’s theft of NSA secrets went beyond simply exposing government misdeeds. For example, this narrative asserted, as if it were established fact, that U.S. government officials had deliberately “trapped” Snowden in Russia. According to Snowden, the purpose of this government ploy was to “demonize” him. “There was
no question that I was going to be subject to a demonization campaign,” Snowden said in an interview from Moscow, “They [Greenwald and Poitras] actually recorded me on camera saying this before I revealed my identity.” The purpose of this demonization was to divert attention from the government’s own crimes.

  To be sure, it is not unprecedented for the government to release defamatory information about individuals who have embarrassed U.S. intelligence by defecting. When two NSA analysts, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, defected to Russia in the 1960s and accused the NSA of violating international law after arriving in Moscow, U.S. government officials responded by putting out the story that they were homosexual lovers, which was both untrue and irrelevant to the intelligence secrets that they had compromised. It is certainly possible that the government put out information to intentionally defame Snowden. Secretary of State John Kerry characterized him as a coward who should “man up” by returning to the United States.

  While one can discount such characterizations against Snowden by government officials as demonization, as I do, one cannot as easily dismiss the independent evidence that undermines Snowden’s assertion that his sole motive was blowing the whistle on illicit surveillance in the United States. For example, in 2014, the Lawfare Institute, a nonprofit organization that publishes a blog on national security concerns, in cooperation with the Brookings Institution, did an independent analysis of all the published documents that Snowden provided to the media. It concluded that with some notable exceptions, such as the two documents initially published by The Guardian and the Post, the now-famous FISA Verizon warrant and the PRISM slides, few of the other documents that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald for publication had anything to do with either domestic surveillance or infringements on the privacy of Americans. By the Lawfare Institute’s count, 32 of Snowden’s leaks to these journalists concerned the NSA’s overseas sources and methods, 9 identified overseas locations of the NSA’s intelligence bases, 25 revealed the identities of foreign officials of interest to U.S. intelligence agencies, 14 disclosed information about Internet companies legally cooperating with the NSA, and 19 concerned technology products that the NSA had been using or researching.