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File 020153

The Snowden Affair: A Spy Story in Six Parts by Edward Jay Epstein (File 020153)

Edward Jay Epstein's comprehensive analysis of Edward Snowden's theft of NSA documents, examining the intelligence crisis, counterintelligence implications, and geopolitical consequences of the largest document theft in American intelligence history.
Summary
This draft manuscript presents Epstein's investigative account of Edward Snowden's 2013 theft of classified NSA documents and his subsequent flight to Hong Kong and Russia. The work is structured in six parts examining the intelligence crisis, Snowden's background and motivations, counterintelligence questions about whether he acted alone, the geopolitical game involving nation-states, operational analysis, and conclusions about the whistleblower's choices and the broader effects on American national security. The narrative traces Snowden's 82-day journey from Honolulu to Moscow and explores the vulnerabilities in NSA security that allowed the theft of state secrets revealing the agency's surveillance capabilities and methods.
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[DECEMBER DRAFT--- 287 pages]



THE SNOWDEN AFFAIR


 A Spy Story in Six Parts



By Edward Jay Epstein




                                            CONTENTS



                              PROLOGUE
                       On the Snowden Trail: Hong Kong 2014




                              PART ONE
                       The Intelligence Crisis



Chapter One                  The Great Divide
Chapter Two                  The Crime Scene Investigation

                               PART TWO

                            Snowden’s Arc



Chapter Three             Tinker
Chapter Four               Secret Agent

Chapter Five                Contractor

Chapter Six                  Thief

Chapter Seven              Crossing the Rubicon

Chapter Eight               Hacktavist

Chapter Nine                String-Puller

Chapter Ten                  Raider of the Inner Sanctum

Chapter Eleven             Escape Artist

Chapter Twelve            Whistle Blower

Chapter Thirteen           Enter Assange

Chapter  Fourteen          Fugitive

                                PART THREE

                  The Counterintelligence Conundrum



Chapter Fifteen          Did Snowden Act Alone
Chapter Sixteen         The Question of When

Chapter Seventeen    The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing

Chapter Eighteen        The Unheeded Warning



                            PART FOUR
        The Game of Nation



Chapter Nineteen             The Rise of the NSA
Chapter Twenty                 Back Door In

Chapter Twenty-One        The Russians Are Coming

Chapter Twenty-Two        The Chinese Puzzle

Chapter Twenty-Three      The Pawn in the Game




 PART FIVE
            WALKING THE CAT BACK

Chapter Twenty-Four           Dinner with Oliver Stone

Chapter Twenty-Five            Vanishing Act

Chapter Twenty-Six        through the Looking Glass

Chapter Twenty-Seven         the Handler




                               PART SIX
                               CONCLUSIONS

Chapter Twenty-Eight       Snowden’s Choices

Chapter Twenty-Nine       The Whistle Blower Who Became an Espionage Source

                                    EPILOGUE

                            THE SNOWDEN EFFECT



Chapter Thirty                  The ‘War on Terrorism’ after Snowden
Chapter Thirty-one          America after Snowden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly





Appendix A                             the Spies in this Book [TK]


                                   End Notes
                       Bibiography [TK]





                               Chronology 1: Snowden Thriller:
 From Honolulu to Moscow in 82 Days.



April 8, 2013, Honolulu.   Edward Snowden begins working as an infrastructure-analyst in training at the National Threat Operations Center for outside contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
June 5, 2013, London   The Guardian publishes a classified document revealing that the National Security Agency has secretly been gathering the telephone billing records of millions of American.  The Washington Post then publishing other secret documents revealing that the NSA has been intercepting data from the Internet.

June 9, 2013, Hong Kong.      In a 12-minute long video posted on the website of the Guardian, Edward Snowden reveals himself as the source for the document published by the Guardian and the Washington Post

June 11  Hong Kong.  Sarah Harrison arrives in Hong Kong to work behind-the-scenes to assist Snowden.

June 14, 2013, Washington D.C.        Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, file a three-count criminal complaint against Snowden charging him with theft of government documents,  unauthorized communication of national defense information and the willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.

June 23, 2013, Moscow.    Snowden arrived from Hong Kong at Sheremetyevo International Airport.






                                     PROLOGUE
On The Snowden Trail:  Hong Kong 2014

 The National Security Agency, or, as it 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 from copper wires, fiber optic cable, satellite, microwave relays, cell phone towers, wireless transmissions and the Internet for intelligence purposes. In intelligence jargon, its product is called COMINT. This form of intelligence-gathering is particularly 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 and decipher their enciphered messages.

    In the first week of June in 2013, the NSA learned that a huge number of its most secret files had been stolen.  The suspect was Edward Snowden, a 29 year old civilian analyst at the NSA’s regional base in Oahu, Hawaii, who had fled to Hong Kong. The stolen documents revealed, among other things, the secret tools and capabilities that the NSA employed to do its job.  According to a three-count criminal complaint filed by Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, Snowden had stolen government documents and violated the Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of national defense information to an unauthorized person.
This was not a who-dunn-it mystery.  On June 9th, 2013, in an extraordinary 12-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-style haircut, passionately speaking out against the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a shaky voice, expressing his willingness to expose them.
   Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him, and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA's illegal collection of data inside the United States.  But in fact, he stole a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance.  He had also stolen secret documents from the NSA revealing the sources and methods it employed in its monitoring of foreign adversaries.
 What made this theft even more extraordinary was that he got away with it.  By the time it had been discovered in the first week of June 2013, it was not possible for the FBI, the Grand Jury or any other US agency to question him because he had fled the country.  He went first to Hong Kong.  Although it is economically autonomous, the city of 7.2 million is actually a special administrative zone of China, whose national security apparatus is ultimately controlled by Beijing.  Making the possibility of questioning him even more remote, he next went to Russia, a country which has no extradition treaty with the United States.  And Russia granted him asylum.  His escape left in its wake an incredibly-important unsolved mystery: how did a young analyst 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 documents?  Was his arrival in Russia part of the plan?
As I had written several books on the vulnerability of intelligence services, this was a mystery-- a "how-dunnit" if you like-- that immediately intrigued me.  After all, even if the perpetrator had acted for the most salutary of reasons, the unauthorized transfer of state secrets to another country is, by 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 4 weeks, according to the travel plan he had filed at the NSA, I assumed he had a good reason for going first to Hong Kong. But when I spoke to my sources in the intelligence community, they could not explain Snowden’s choice of this semi-autonomous zone in China as his initial destination.  It would not protect him from the reach of US law since Hong Kong had an active extradition treaty with the United States. Just a few months earlier, Hong Kong had made headlines by extraditing Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted in America for insider-trading, who was arrested in Hong Kong following an American request to detain him.  Martin was then sent back to the United States to stand trial.

Nor was Hong Kong particularly convenient to Hawaii.  There were no non-stop flights to it from Honolulu. Snowden’s flight took 8 hours and ten minutes just to Narita airport, Japan, where he had to change planes. After a three hour wait at the airport, it took him five more hours to fly to Hong Kong.    Moreover, at the time he departed Honolulu, Snowden had not yet arranged for any journalists to meet him in Hong Kong and, as far as US intelligence could determine, he had no known appointments there. Even so, Snowden carried the digital copies he had made of the top-secret NSA documents to Hong Kong.  General Michael Hayden, who served both as the head of the NSA and the CIA, told me.  “It’s very mysterious why Snowden chose Hong Kong.”  Whatever reason he had for flying to Hong Kong, we can assume it was compelling enough for him to take the risk that he would be arrested there after US authorities discovered the theft and invoked the detention provision of its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.  It was possible that Snowden travelled there to see someone other than a journalist. But who?

     Using my frequent travel miles, I bought a ticket on Japan Air Lines to Hong Kong. The route, like that of Snowden’s route the previous year, had a stop-over in Narita Airport in Japan (where, according to an intelligence source, Snowden was caught on the CCTV cameras waiting in the transit lounge for his connection to the four and one half flight to Hong Kong).

    I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th 2014– the same day that Snowden had arrived there the previous year.  I checked into the five-star Mira Hotel. It was in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon, a 10-minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong island, where most of the foreign consulates are located.

 I chose the Mira because it was the hotel in which Snowden stayed and 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.  Snowden had told the journalists from the Guardian that that he had been at Mira Hotel since he first arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th until he left on June 10th.  My motive in taking the room during that period was not journalistic nostalgia; I wanted access to the hotel’s service and security personnel who may have had contact with Snowden a year earlier.  Unfortunately, that room was occupied.  Even so, I was given a nearby room that served my purpose.  The rate was $330 a day with taxes, although I received a journalist’s discount of 30 percent.

My first surprise was that Snowden had not arrived at the Mira until 11 days after he arrived in Hong Kong. He told the Guardian reporters that he hid out at the Mira hotel since his arrival because he feared that he might be captured by the CIA.  But, as I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had actually registered there under his real name and used his own passport and credit card to secure the room.  Even more surprising was the date he checked into the Mira Hotel.  It was not May 20th but June 1, 2013. Since he checked out on June 10, 2013, he was there for only nine days.

    The question that could not be answered by the registry of the Mira Hotel was: where was Snowden staying for the eleven days between from May 20th to June 1?  Wherever he was, he apparently considered himself safe enough to take another irrevocable step in his defection. He sent journalist Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian a “welcome package,” as he called it, of 20 top-secret NSA documents on May 25, 2013.  He had now not only downloaded documents but, in a violation of his oath, he provided them to an unauthorized party.  He also in Hong Kong, for the first time, directly contacted via email Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.  Indeed, it was during these first 11 days during which he was staying someplace other than the place he claimed to be staying that he made almost all the arrangements for his journalistic event.  He was also apparently in contact with at least one foreign mission during this period, according to what he written to Gellman on May 25th. In that email concerning when and how his story was to be published by the Washington Post, Snowden even asked Gellman to include in it some text that would help him with this mission.  But which country was he approaching?  Clearly his whereabouts during these missing 11 days was a gap that needed to be filled in.  It could shed light on why he came to Hong Kong.

     I next called Keith Bradsher, a prize-winning journalist who had been the New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong in 2013, who had written a well-researched report about Snowden’s arrival in Hong Kong in 2013..  He proposed we meet at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club on top of Ice House Street in central Hong Kong, a venue, I recalled, reminiscent of where John LeCarre had set the opening chapter of his spy novel The Honourable Schoolboy.  When we spoke later, Bradsher told me that he knew Albert Ho, who had been retained as Snowden’s lawyer, for more than a decade, and interviewed him many times as he was a leader of a political movement in Hong Kong. Bradsher said that a few days after Snowden had revealed himself on June 9th, 2013, he met with Ho and questioned him on the very question that intrigued me about Snowden’s unknown whereabouts. Ho told Bradsher that all of Snowden’s logistics had been arranged for him by an intermediary, who Ho called a “carer.”  Ho further said that Snowden had been in contact with the “carer” prior to his arrival in Hong Kong on May 20th.  According to Ho, it was this person who had arranged accommodations for Snowden on his arrival—and afterwards.  If so, it seemed plausible to me that this person might be able to shed light on whom, if anyone, Snowden saw in his first ii days in Hong Kong.  Of course, this person may have been unaware of the reasons for Snowden’s escape to Hong Kong when he made the arrangements for him but he was the best lead I had to learning why Snowden had come to Hong Kong. But who was the “carer?”    Bradsher told me that he pressed Ho for details about this mystery person over the course of several meeting but Ho would not identify him beyond saying, that he was a “well-connected “resident” of Hong Kong.

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

    I met Tibbo in the tea room at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Hong Kong Island, where I moved to from the Mira hotel.  The Mandarin was also convenient to Tibbo’s office at the court.

      Tibbo was a tall, round-faced man, with thinning hair, in his early fifties.  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 then became a barrister in Hong Kong specializing in cases involving the legal status of refugees. Over a leisurely tea, Tibbo made it clear to me that he had played a far more active role than Ho in the Snowden case, even personally escorting Snowden from the Mira Hotel on June 10th to a safe house.  He did not dispute what Ho had told Bradsher, but said that he was himself bound by lawyer-client privilege which 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 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 adviser.”  He shook his head, as if getting rid of a pesky fly, and said that his oath precluded him 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.  So I ran into a dead end on the issue of Snowden's “carer” and his whereabouts for those eleven crucial days with the Hong Kong authorities.

 At this point, I had some much-needed help from an old friend on the 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 had managed to put me in touch with a former employee of the consulate, who he said was “fully informed” about the efforts of the US 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 position in the US 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 48th floor with a spectacular view of Victoria Harbor. Once there, I had no problem finding my source.  He was, as he had described himself, a large man with short-cropped brown hair wearing a brightly-striped tie.  He was sitting alone at a discreet table in the corner.  I introduced myself and gave him a copy of my latest book, The Annals of Unsolved Crime.

   After ordering drinks, he told me in a soft voice about the American reaction to Snowden’s revelations in Hong Kong. “All hell broke loose,” he said, describing the atmosphere at the US mission after Snowden’s video was posted on the Guardian’s website on June 9th, 2013.   To break the ice, I went over some of the assertions Snowden had made concerning the US consulate in that extraordinary video.  For example, Snowden had said that he could be seized at any moment by a CIA rendition team based at the US consulate “just down the road” from the Mira Hotel. “Was that true,” I asked?   He rolled his eyes, and said, “Snowden has a pretty wild imagination.  For one thing, the US consulate is not down the road from the Mira in Kowloon, it is here on Hong Kong Island. And there was no CIA rendition team in Hong Kong.”

My next question concerned a second period during which Snowden's whereabouts are unknown—the period between the time he left the Mira Hotel on June 10, 2013 and the day he left Hong Kong for Russia on June 23, 2013.  When I asked my consulate source whether the US mission took any action to track Snowden during these 13 days, he explained that the FBI had a contingent of “legal attaches” based at the consulate to pursue, among other things, video pirates. In addition, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had a handful of “China-watchers” in Hong Kong. This group constituted the intelligence “mission,” as he referred to it.  After Snowden outed himself on the Internet, the mission began tracking Snowden’s movements. Since Snowden, his lawyers and the journalists in his entourage frequently used their cell phones to text one another, it was fairly easy for the mission to follow Snowden’s trail after he left the Mira hotel. Presumably, the Hong Kong Police also knew where he was during this period.  My source further suspected that the massive Chinese intelligence contingent in Hong Kong also knew, since it had close relations with the Hong Kong police.  If so, Snowden’s whereabouts as he moved every few days from apartment to apartment was no secret anyone but the public from June 10th to June 23rd. “Of course we knew,”   he said, adding that there were also photographs of Snowden entering the office building that housed the Russian consulate.  I mentioned that there was a report in a Russian newspaper that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate in late June in connection with the flight he later took to Moscow.  “All we know is he entered the building,” he answered, with a shrug.    That visit did not come as a complete surprise to US intelligence.  After Snowden left the Mira, his interactions with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services in Hong Kong also had been closely monitored by the “secret means,” as was subsequently confirmed to me a former top intelligence executive in Washington DC.  All of Snowden’s stealth in exiting from the Mira hotel, which included wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, was ineffective in hiding him from US intelligence and presumably other intelligence services seeking the treasure trove of documents he had taken from the NSA.  Among other things, the Hong Kong lawyers moving him to a safe house were carrying easily traceable cell phones.

   The mystery that most concerned me was, however, not where Snowden was housed in the interim between when he went public and when he went to Moscow. It was where, and in whose care, Snowden had been before, he had checked into the Mira hotel on June 1st.   When I asked him about this period, he said that as far as he knew neither the FBI nor the Hong Kong police could find a trace of him during the period between May 20th, when he passed through Hong Kong customs, and June 1st, when he used his credit card and passport to check into the Mira hotel.  They could not find any credit card charges, ATM withdrawals, telephone calls, hotel registrations, subway pass purchases or other clues to Snowden’s activities.   As far as a paper trail was concerned, Snowden was a ghost during this period.  Could an American just vanish in Hong Kong for eleven days, I asked”?   “Apparently he did just that,” my source replied.

Snowden’s whereabouts during these 11 days was not a mystery I was going to solve on this first trip to Hong Kong.  I needed to know more about Snowden’s activities before he flew to Hong Kong. After all, Snowden was not, as he himself pointed out from Moscow, an “angel descending from the heavens.”  He had a past working for the US government that extended back seven years. During that period, he had been part of America’s secret intelligence regime, and held a clearance for Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI.  Such SCI material is considered so sensitive that it must be handled within formal access control systems established by the Director of National Intelligence.

Nor did Snowden’s breach begin with him handing over classified documents to the Guardian reporters in Hong Kong in June 2013 or, for that matter, in the eleven days prior to his meeting with journalists in 2013. He had, as the NSA quickly determined begun illicitly copying documents in the late summer of 2012.  Such an enterprise does not emerge from thin air.  Even if he had managed to elude American intelligence from late May to early June 2013, he could not hide all the history that led to his decision to come to Hong Kong.   There had to be an envelope of reality surrounding it, including Snowden’s motivation, associates, movements, finances, and his  activities prior to his fleeing to Hong Kong.  What was missing was not just Snowden’s first 11 days in Hong Kong but the entire context of the alleged crime.    I now needed to fill in that envelope of reality in America. I left Hong Kong for New York on June 2, 2014 two days after my meeting with the former official of the consulate.






PART ONE


THE INTELLIGENCE CRISIS



CHAPTER ONE
The Great Divide



“What you’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.”
                             -- retired Admiral Michael McConnell, vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton



    On June 9, 2013, the Guardian, the British newspaper known for the quality and gravity of its reporting posted Snowden’s 12-minute video on its website.  In it, Snowden identified himself as an infrastructure analyst at a regional base of National Security Agency that was located in Oahu, Hawaii.   He 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 revealed his 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, Snowden was questioned by Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist living in Brazil who had broken the NSA story in the Guardian.  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 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 US 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 one of the most famous people in the world, celebrated by his supporters as a courageous whistle-blower.

    The Snowden interview in the video subsequently was expanded by the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras into the two-hour movie CitizenFour, which won the 2015 academy-award for the best documentary.  Poitras said in accepting her Oscar in the Academy Awards Theater in Hollywood on February 22nd 2015, 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.  The film convincingly depicts Snowden as an altruistic young man who is willing to risk his own personal freedom and face years of imprisonment for the sake of others.  Adding to the drama, almost all the footage of Snowden in the film is from interviews with him in the confines of Snowden’s small room at the Mira hotel from June 3 to June 9th, 2013, as the event was actually unfolding.  Snowden, speaking for the camera, describes himself as a civilian contractor for the National Security Agency.  He took full responsibility for the theft of classified documents, saying that he had acted alone. He said that he had been forced to take these documents to expose a crime that threatened the freedom of Americans: the US government’s illegal surveillance of US citizens.  He said that he had a duty to bring this secret activity to the attention of the American people.      “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.   He said repeatedly he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, by allowing himself to go to prison, so that Americans could live in freedom.  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.

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 Democrat and Republican members of the Congressional oversight committees.  It further derided claims that there was evidence that Snowden’s theft of NSA secrets went beyond exposing government misdeeds as part of an orchestrated effort to demonize Snowden.  The purpose of this demonization was to divert away from the government’s crimes.  For example, this narrative asserted as if it was established fact, that US government officials had deliberately “trapped” Snowden in Russia.  According to Snowden, the purpose of this government ploy was to “demonize” him.

      To be sure, it is not unprecedented for the government to release defamatory information about individuals who have embarrassed US 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 compromised.   So it is certainly possible that the government put out information to intentionally defame Snowden.  Secretary of State John Kerry, after all, characterized him as a coward who should “man up” by returning to the United States.

 While one can discount such characterizations against him by government officials as demonization, as I do, one cannot as easily dismiss the independent evidence that undermines Snowden assertion that his sole motive was blowing the whistle on illicit surveillance in the United States.   For example, by the Lawfare Institute in cooperation with The Brookings Institution in 2014 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 Washington Post, the now famous FISA warrant and the PRISM slides, few of the other documents that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald for publication had little to do with either domestic surveillance or the 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 method, nine identified overseas locations of the NSA’s intelligence bases, 25 of them revealed the identities of foreign officials of interest to US intelligence agencies, 14 of them disclosed information about Internet companies legally cooperating with the NSA, and 19 of them concerned technology products that the NSA had been using or researching.   In addition, a considerable number of the published documents did not even belong to the NSA but were copies of reports sent to the NSA by its allies, including the British, Australian, Canadian, French, Norwegian and Israeli intelligence services.  For example, he provided journalists with secret documents from the British cyber service GCHQ describing its own plans to obtain a legal warrant to penetrate the Russian computer security firm Kaspersky to expand its “computer network exploitation capability." All the GCHQ was revealing in this document was its own capabilities to monitor a Russian target of interest to it.   While the release of these foreign documents may have embarrassed foreign allies of the United States, they exposed no violations of US law by the NSA.  It was a legitimate part of the NSA’s job to share information with its allies.  This raises the question: what constitutes whistle-blowing?

    To the general public no doubt, a whistle-blower is simply a person who exposes government misdeeds from inside that government.     But in the eyes of the law someone who discloses classified information to an unauthorized person, even as an act of personal conscience, is not exempt from punitive consequences of his act.   Indeed, if a person deliberately reveals secret US operations, especially ones that compromise the sources and methods of US intelligence services, he or she may run afoul of American espionage laws.

In the past when government employees have disclosed classified information to journalist to redress perceived government misconduct, they almost always received prison sentences, Just during Obama’s presidency, there were six government employees who, as a matter of personal conscience, shared classified information they obtained from the FBI, CIA, State Department and US Army with journalists.  They were Shamai Leibowitz in 2010, Chelsea Manning in 2013, John Kiriakou in 2013, Donald Sachtleben in 2013, Stephen Kim in 2014 and Jeffrey Sterling in 2014. Like Snowden, they claimed to be whistle-blowers informing the public of abuses of the government.  But since they disclosed classified documents, they were dealt with as law-breakers.  All six men were indicted, tried, convicted and received prison sentences.  Sterling, a CIA officer who allegedly turned over a document to James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times, was sentenced to 42 months, for example.  The most severe sentence was meted out to Private Bradley/Chelsea Manning, who an Army court sentenced to 35 years in a military stockade.

    The prison time that others received did not go unnoticed by Snowden.  He had been following the Manning case since 2012.  In fact, he posted about it shortly before he began stealing far more damaging documents than had Manning. He therefore would have been aware that by revealing state secrets that he had sworn to protect, he would be risking imprisonment unless, unlike Manning, he fled the country.  His motives, no matter how noble they might be, would not spare him, anymore than it spared the other six, from determined federal prosecution.

To be sure, the view of those  on the Snowden side of the divide is not grounded in legal definitions, but in a broader notion of morality.   Snowden‘s supporters do not accept that the law should be applied in this fashion to Snowden. They argue that Snowden had a moral imperative to act, even if it meant breaking the law.  They fully accepted his view that he had a higher duty to protect citizens of all countries in the world from, as he put it, “secret pervasive surveillance.” That higher duty transcended him any narrower legal definitions of law-breaking.  For example, Ben Wizner, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union who represented Snowden since November 2013, argues that Snowden’s taking of classified documents was as “act of conscience” that overrode any legal constraints because it “revitalized democratic oversight in the U.S.”  And, without question, Snowden’s theft caused a much needed debate on govern surveillance.

In this ends- justify-the-means view, any person with access to government secrets can authorize himself or herself to reveal those secrets to the world if it serves the public good and because doing so would be an “act of conscience,” he or she should be immune from legal prosecution.

    So for Snowden’s supporters, his “act of conscience” justifies his claim to being a whistle-blower even though the preponderance of the secrets disclosed by Snowden had to do with the NSA’s authorized activity of using its multi-billion dollar global arrays of sensors to intercept data in foreign countries and share it with some 30 allied intelligence services, as it did in 2013. Snowden, for example, took the NSA to task for its sharing information with Israel. In an interview in Moscow with James Bamford for Wired Magazine in August 2014, Snowden describes supplying intelligence to Israel as “One of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.” He was referring to the NSA providing the Israeli Cyber Service, known as Unit 8200, with data concerning Arab communications in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.  But providing Israel with such data, as well as providing it with lethal weaponry, was not some rogue operation. It was part of a policy that had been approved by every American President—and every Congress—since 1948.    Snowden had every right to disagree with this established US policy of aiding Israel with intelligence, but it is another matter to release secret documents to support his view. If the concept of whistle blowing is expanded to cover intelligence workers who steal secrets because they disagree with their government’s foreign policy of their government, it would also have to include many notorious spies, such as Kim Philby.

Snowden’s concept of whistle-blowing also applied to NSA’s spying on adversary nations.  “We’ve crossed lines.”  Snowden said in regard to China, “We’re hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure.”   The NSA’s operations against China were such “a real concern” for Snowden that he targeted lists of the NSA’s penetrations in China.  This expansion of the whistle-blowing concept to adversaries was echoed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He complimented Snowden for having “uncovered illegal acts by the United States around the globe,” Putin’s view implies a convenient global concept of whistle-blowing that justified breaking US laws.

Even so, this whistle-blower interpretation of Snowden’s act has had immense international resonance in the media. The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists, who assisted Snowden in this enterprise, including Greenwald and Poitras, were awarded the 2014 Polk Award for national-security reporting. Former Congressman Ron Paul organized a clemency petition in February for Snowden, stating: "Thanks to one man's courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them," and his son, Senator Rand Paul, who was a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016, calling for a Presidential pardon for Snowden.

    Senator Paul’s concern fitted with the growing public apprehension over increasing intrusion on its privacy.  Snowden was correct, in my opinion, in describing the threat of a surveillance state and the loss of privacy is certainly a legitimate public concern.  “We actually buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets voluntarily,” he pointed out from Moscow.

Snowden is correct that the technology involved in the electronic equipment we all use in the 21st century has made mass surveillance part of our daily life.  There can be little doubt that our privacy has been largely eroded, if not entirely negated, by the widespread use of cell phones, credit cards, social media and the search engines of the Internet.  When we use smart phones, as most Americans do today, our location is relayed to our telephone service provider every three seconds.  The phone companies collect and archive our phone usage “metadata,” which includes whom we called and how long we spoke.  When we use Google to search for anyone or anything on the Internet, that activity is captured by Google, a company whose profits mainly come from making available to advertisers the results of its surveillance and collection of its users’ searches.  When we use Gmail, the Google’s email service used by nearly one-billion senders and recipients, we agree to allow Google to read the actual contents of our correspondence to find keywords in them of interest to advertisers.    When we use a credit card, the credit card company also retains data about what we buy and where we go.  When we travel in automobiles equipped with GPS, every turn and stop is tracked and recorded.  And when we are in public places with CCTV cameras, our image is recorded and archived.  When we use Facebook, Twitter,  and other so-called social media, as over two billion people do today, we allow these companies to collect, retain and exploit its surveillance of our movements, associations with other people, and stated preferences.   When we use Amazon and other on-line stores, we allow them to track and archive a great deal of our commercial activity.  For Internet companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Google, collecting private data on hundreds of millions of their members provide them with vast searchable data bases that they can sell to advertisers and other search parties.  The exploitation of these data bases is a fundamental aspect of their business plans.  Without such surveillance of their users, social media companies would not be able to turn a profit.  Indeed, they may be more aptly called surveillance media rather than social media.  For those of us who use them to post pictures and communicate, any notion of personal privacy is largely illusionary.

    To be sure, there is a distinction to made between the surveillance of our activities to which we voluntarily agree in exchange for the benefits and conveniences that we gain from social media, search engines, and other Internet companies, and the surveillance done by government to which we do not voluntarily invite-- or want.  We willingly waive our privacy for corporations but not for governments.  What the public might not fully realize, however, is that all the personal information in data bases of private companies can be accessed by the government if it obtains a court order or search warrant.   As Snowden himself pointed out,  “If Facebook is going to hand over all of your messages, all of your wall posts, all of your private photos, all of your private details from their server, the government has no need to intercept all of the communications that constitute those private records." These Internet companies, even if they are only interested in exploiting the data for its own profit, cannot refuse to share this information with the NSA, FBI and other agencies of the government if they have a court-ordered search warrant, Consequently, all the information these private corporations collect about us is legally available to any municipal, state and federal authority that obtains a warrant from a court.  And such search warrants are routinely issued.  That reality became evident to me in my investigation of the rape charges brought (and subsequently dropped) against Dominique Strauss- Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in 2011.  Immediately after his arrest, Cyrus Vance Jr, the district attorney of New York county, obtained  a warrant for Strauss-Kahn’s cell phone records, credit card records, hotel room electronic key records,  emails, room service bills, and the CCTV videos of his activities (some of which I published in my article about the case in the New York Review of Books).     If anyone doubts the pervasiveness of government data collection, consider a little known government agency called the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”  Created in 2010 by Congress, it mines data on a monthly basis from some 600 million personal credit card accounts, targeting about 95 percent of the credit cards users in the United States.    In additions, through 11 other data mining programs, it gathers data on everything from private home mortgages and student loans to credit scores and overdrafts in personal banks accounts.  This ubiquitous surveillance of virtually every non-cash transaction came about because of advances in computer technology which made it economically feasible to mine data.


Nor is the concern raised by Snowden about NSA domestic surveillance misplaced. Ever since the 9-11 attack the NSA has increasingly played a role in this surveillance state not by own choice but because Congress mandated it.  In 2001, it empowered the NSA to obtain and archive data on American citizens. Accordingly, the NSA obtained the billing records of customers from phone and Internet companies and archived these records.  The operation was intended to build a searchable data base for the government that could be used to trace the history of the telephone and Internet activities in the United States of FBI-designated foreign terrorists and spies.   The government also kept secret these anti-terrorist programs from the public because it did not want the foreign suspects to realize their communications in America were being monitored.   The public only learned that the phone company was turning over its billing records on June 5, 2013, when Snowden disclosed it to the Guardian and Washington Post.  The documents he provided the journalists showed that the NSA had been obtaining phone records every three months that had been collected by Verizon.  While this revelation may have shocked the American public, the NSA had not acted on its own.  It had obtained a warrant issued by a secret court established by Congress in 1978 as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for each request for records.  Congress empowered the FISA court to hear cases and authorize search warrants in secret in cases involving national security.  As its name implies, the FISA court was meant to deal with matters bearing on foreign intelligence activities in the United States.  That restriction changed after the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  A month after the attack, Congress expanded the purview of the FISA court by passing the USA Patriot Act (an acronym which stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”).  Part of the Act, Section 215, euphemistically referred to as the "library records" provision, permitted the FISA court to issue warrants authorizing searches of records by the NSA and other federal agencies to investigate international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities  Through these FISA authorizations, the NSA could obtain "tangible things" such as "books, records, papers, documents, and other items."   Under the interpretation of this section of the law by both the Bush and Obama administrations, the FISA court was enabled by Congress to issue warrants to telephone companies demanding that they turn over to the NSA the bulk billing records of all calls made in America.. The FISA court need only deem these records to be “relevant: to the FBI’s investigations of terrorists and spies.  Essentially, this controversial interpretation of the word “relevant” in Section 215 by the FISA court was used by the NSA to create a searchable database of telephone billing records.   Such a “haystack,” as the NSA called the national collection of billing records, could allow the FBI to instantly find missing “needles,” even if the connections were made years earlier.   For example, if the FBI had a lead on a foreign suspect, it could search the data base for any telephone calls made by the foreign suspect to telephone numbers in America, and then who those people called.  The FBI always had this power, if it obtained a warrant, but it did not have the records previously in a single data base.   General Alexander believed such a “Haystack” database made sense.  His approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” according to one former senior U.S. intelligence official quoted by the Washington Post. According to its critics, including the ACLU, the results provided by this vast database did not justify its immense potential for abuse.   In early May 2015, just three weeks before this part of the Patriot Act was set to expire, a three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, agreed with the ACLU position, overturning a lower court decision that it was legal. The panel found that the word “relevant” in the Act was not intended by Congress to justify the acquisition and storing of the bulk records of telephone companies.  It declared that the government’s interpretation of Section 215 of The Patriot Act was incorrect.  Soon afterwards Congress replaced the Patriot Act with the USA Freedom Act, which effectively transferred bulk storage of billing records from the NSA to the phone companies themselves. Despite the change in venue, the records of individuals were still not completely private.   The databases held by phone companies could still be searched under the new law via a FISA warrant by the FBI.

   The core of Snowden’s charge in the media was that the FISA court overreached its authority by issuing sweeping warrants that allowed the NSA to obtain data collected by private phone and Internet companies.    It the initial story published in the Guardian on June 5, 2013, Snowden disclosed one such FISA warrant to support his charge.   It was issued by Judge Roger Vinson of the FISA court on April 25, 2013 and ordered Verizon to turn over to the FBI all its billing records of landline customers for the next 90 days. The FBI presented this FISA authorization to the NSA, which acts as a service organization for the FBI and CIA in collecting communications data. The NSA, with the FISA warrant in hand, then obtained the Verizon billing records.  Snowden also provided the Washington Post and Guardian with another secret document, which was actually a power point presentation on 20 slides by the NSA to other intelligence agencies.  It described a program it was using for monitoring the Internet. Its code name was PRISM.  It was authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was designed to collect messages sent over the Internet from foreigners.  Since most of the Internet pipes that carried these messages ran through the United States, the NSA intercepted a large part of the data from Internet companies based in America.  This program was not entirely secret from the Internet companies.  Such information was in fact obtained with FISA court approval and with the knowledge of the service providers.  It also requires a written directive from both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence, and a review by the Department of Justice every three months of each case.   After obtaining this data, the NSA ran programs to filter out all domestic Internet communications.  In theory at least, PRISM targeted foreign communications, but, as Snowden pointed out, domestic information was also accidently picked up.  Whenever the Justice Department actually opened an investigation against Americans in contact with foreign suspects, as it did in 170 cases in 2013, it could obtain warrants from the FISA court to search these Americans’ Internet activities. So though PRISM supposedly was a tool for foreign surveillance, it could be extended to Americans in contact with foreign suspects.

These two documents raised legitimate questions for many Americans, including members of Congress, about the proper role of the FISA court, including should it conduct its business in secret?   If Snowden had released only these two documents that related to unwarranted domestic surveillance, and other possible violations of the law by the NSA, it would be difficult for any reasonable person not to see his actions as a valuable and even necessary public service.  After all, as the three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would later find, Congress had not intended Section 215 of the Patriot Act to be used to justify the bulk collection of American records.  So if he had limited his illegal downloading to the few documents about bulk collection, it would be more difficult to argue that he was not a whistle-blower in spirit if not in the letter of the law and even a hero of the struggle to preserve our civil liberties.  But, in fact, he took a great many other secret documents that did not bear on civil liberties issues.

    As a result, the Snowden case produced a great divide in the American appreciation of him.  On one hand, he has been almost universally lauded and lionized by what might be seen as the mainstream media, by numerous academics, and even, as we have seen, by members of Congress.  The journalists who assisted him, such as like Greenwald, Poitras and/ Gellman also have been celebrated for the roles they played in bringing Snowden’s revelations to the public.    In other circles, the appreciation had been of him has been very different. American and British intelligence officials, senior members of the Obama Administration, and members of the oversight committees of Congress do not view Snowden as a hero or even an authentic whistle-blower.  Instead they see him as a betrayer of secrets who, acting willfully brought damage to the United States and benefits to its adversaries. The holders of this darker view of Snowden base it on classified reports of the full extent of the theft of classified data.  Those officials reckon that only handful of the tens of thousands of documents he stole involved domestic surveillance, and these few documents served as a cover for a much larger theft.   Admiral Michael Rogers, who replaced General Alexander as head of the NSA in January 2014, said that March at a public forum at Princeton University. “Edward Snowden is not the "whistleblower" some have labeled him to be.” He further explained to Congress: “Snowden stole from the United States government a large amount of classified information, a small portion of which is germane to his apparent central argument regarding NSA and privacy issues.”   Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went even further.  He testified to the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014, after estimating that the Snowden breach could cost the military “billions” to repair, added that "The vast majority of the electronic documents that Snowden exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities."     He based this assessment on then still-secret Defense Intelligence Agency’s report on the breach.  Although he did not reveal the full extent of the damage even in  his classified testimony to Congress in 2013,  the classified DIA report showed that Snowden took "over 900,000" military files from the Department of Defense (DoD) in addition to the NSA files he had taken..  The Defense Department loss in terms of the number of files stolen actually exceeded the loss, in sheer numbers, of NSA documents.   Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, the DIA director, who directed the DIA secret study, testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the breach “has caused grave damage to our national security.”

To be sure, this was not the first time that the cryptological branches of the military had been compromised.  The spy ring of John Walker had provided thousands of the Navy’s reports on breaking Russian ciphers to the KGB during the Cold War era, for example.  But the Snowden breach exposing military sources was an order of magnitude greater than any past breach.

    The CIA’s assessment was no less grim.  Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the CIA in 2013, who, after Snowden’s breach, was appointed by President Obama to the task force to review the NSA’s intelligence breach and its consequences for national security, wrote that Snowden’s action went beyond taking the handful of documents, such as the FISA order, “that addressed the privacy issue.” Instead, as Morell put it, “he backed up a virtual tractor trailer and emptied a warehouse full of documents—the vast majority of which he could not possibly have read and few of which he would likely understand—[and] and he delivered the documents to a variety of news organizations and God knows who else.”     As a result, Morell concluded “Snowden’s disclosures will go down in history as the greatest compromise of classified information ever.”

General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA at the time, came to a very similar assessment, asserting that Snowden did “the greatest damage to our combined nations’ intelligence systems that we have ever suffered.”   To be sure, it is to be expected that military intelligence officers would not be on Snowden’s side of the divide (and the Snowden breach ended the career of many of them, including General Alexander.)
   But political leaders in both parties could also be found on the anti-Snowden side of the divide.   “I don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower.”  Senator Dianne Feinstein (D. - Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after she was briefed on Snowden's theft of documents.  "I think it’s an act of treason."  Rep. Mike Rogers, (R.-Mich.), her counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the NBC program, “Meet the Press,” that Snowden might be working for a foreign intelligence service.  And a former prominent member of President Obama's cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.     These severe accusations generated much heat but little light. They were not accompanied by any evidence from these Congressional leaders showing that Snowden had acted in concert with any foreign power in stealing the files or, for that matter, that he was not acting out of his own personal convictions, not matter how misguided they may have been.
     On this side of the divide, Snowden's critics regard the whistle blowing narrative as at best incomplete, and at worst fodder for the naive.  They point out that the FISA document that gave him credentials as a whistle-blower was only issued in the last week of April 2013, which was three months after he first contacted Greenwald and almost 9 months after he began illegally copying secret documents.   They further believe that the evidence contradicts Snowden’s claims that he stole only documents that exposed NSA transgression into domestic surveillance, that he turned over all the stolen documents to journalists, and that he was forced to remain in Moscow by the actions of the US government.  They believe that all three of these claims, which are at the conceptual basis of the whistle blowing story, are false.  They also find that the unprecedented size and complexity of the penetration of NSA files, compromising hundreds of thousands of secret documents pertaining to US operations against adversary nations, according to the NSA’s and Pentagon estimates, does not afford an innocent explanation for the volume of files he took.
The deep split in how Snowden is perceived brings to mind the famous drawing of a duck

-rabbit cartoon first published in 1900 in the book Fact and Fable in Psychology.  The figure is perceived either as a duck or as a rabbit but it cannot be seen as both simultaneously.  Whether a person sees a rabbit or duck in this test may depend on the information available to that person.  For example, if the person has never seen an image of a rabbit before, he will see almost certainly see a duck; and vice versa.

     Similarly, what may account for the sharp divide between the Snowden and anti-Snowden camps is a disparity in the available information. The pro-Snowden camp's view is largely informed by Snowden himself.  It prefers to believe his words over his actions.

 In the anti-Snowden camp are administration officials and the members of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees who have been at least partially briefed on the continuing investigations of the Snowden affair. The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, were briefed by David Leatherwood, the director of operations of the Defense Intelligence Agency that the military files compromised by Snowden  included documents bearing on military plans and weapons systems; foreign government’s intelligence activities (including special activities), intelligence sources, or methods or cryptology;

Scientific and  technological matters relating to national security;;  vulnerabilities systems, installations, infrastructures, projects, plans, or protection services relations to national security and the development, production, or use of weapons of mass destruction.  The members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but not the public, also have been privy to an NSA investigation that established the chronology of his actions, including changing jobs, copying more than one million classified documents at the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii and flying to Russia.

    Nor does additional information necessarily change the minds of people who already have a firm view.  In the field of social psychology, the testing of “confirmation theory” consistently shows that people tend to more readily reject new information that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs.  For example, when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, he said famously, “I haven’t shot anybody.” Ten months later, the Warren Commission presented evidence, including ballistic tests that it claimed showed that Oswald had shot three people, including President John F. Kennedy, less than an hour before making his statement. Yet, many of those who believed Oswald’s public proclamation his innocence chose to believe that the government had falsified all the incriminating evidence to tarnish Oswald (who had been killed on November 24, 1963) rather than accept that they had been wrong in believing Oswald.
The charges, countercharges and defamatory name-calling in the Snowden case therefore only deepened the great divide.  Those who saw Snowden as a democratic hero exposing the abuses of power of an out-of-control national security state tended to dismiss anything that depicts Snowden in a negative light as a fabrication while those who saw Snowden as a “traitor” tended to dismiss anything that depicted him in a more positive light.

   When it comes to the murky universe of spy agencies, the problem in deciding where the truth lies is further heightened by the possibility of deliberate deception.  Spy masters are, after all, in the business of concealing their most sensitive operations. It is often considered essential that important secrets be protected by what Winston Churchill famously termed “a bodyguard of lies.”  Top intelligence officials are not exempt from this practice.  Consider, for example, the response to a question concerning the NSA’s operations made by James D. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence to the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) of the Committee asked the spy master if the NSA collected data on Americans.  Clapper answered that the NSA did not knowingly “collect any type of data” on millions of Americans.   Clapper’s answer was clearly untrue. However, it did not mislead Senator Wyden or any other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee because Clapper had truthfully testified that the NSA did collect American’s telephone records in a classified session of the Committee earlier that week.  Who was being misled was the American public.  Yet, none of the Senators on the Committee, including Senator Wyden, corrected this obviously false answer.  When Clapper realized he had misspoken, he could not publically correct the record of the public session because, to do so, would be revealing classified information he had swore to protect. No doubt other intelligence officers find themselves in a similar bind in discussing secret matters.  This suggests that there is a risk in accepting statements made by the intelligence chiefs at face value.

    But Snowden also has a credibility problem. He has told numerous untruths including ones calculated to help him insinuate himself into the key position from which he stole secrets and to cover up the nature of his theft.   For example, Snowden got access in the spring of 2013 to the super-secret NSA’s computers storing these electronic files by working at Booz Allen Hamilton, a hedge-fund owned consulting firm, that helped manage computer systems at its Kunia base in Hawaii.     On his application to Booz Allen in March 2013, Snowden claimed to be in the process of completing a master’s degree at the University of Liverpool in computer security sciences, which he expected to get that year.  Although he had registered two years earlier at the online division of  University of Liverpool, he had not completed a single course there and, according to the registrar, he was not in line to receive a master’s (or any) degree.    To be sure, Snowden did not lie gratuitously.  He told untruths to get access to classified documents and to get safely away with them.

He also was not entirely truthful with journalists whose trust he sought when it suited his purpose in protecting himself.  For example, in contacting Laura Poitras under the alias Citizen Four in January 2013, he gave her his word that he was currently a “government employee,” although in fact he was working for a private contractor at the time.

Snowden had little concern about misleading journalists when it suited his purpose.  For example, he told Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian, Brian Williams of NBC News, James Bamford of Wired Magazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation, Barton Gellman of the Washington Post and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that the U.S, government intentionally acted to “trap” him in Moscow by revoking his passport while he was already on a plane to Moscow on the afternoon of June 23, 2013.  Although he had first made this charge on July 1, 2013, none of these journalists asked Snowden what was the basis for his oft-repeated allegation.  He did admit, however, during the Q&A following his July 12, 2013 press conference in Moscow that he had no independent source, sating t he had “read it” in the news reports.  In fact, news stories prior to his statement reported that his passport had been revoked before he had left Hong Kong on June 22nd, 2013.  ABC News, for example reported that the U.S. "Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden's passport was revoked June 22.”  By the date to June 23rd, Snowden effectively provided to unsuspecting journalists an alibi for his presence in Russia.

 The credibility problem with Snowden assumed a more sinister dimension once Snowden put himself and his fate in the hands of the Russian authorities in Moscow.  Even though the Obama Administration decided against revealing the extent of Russian intelligence service's participation in Snowden’s move from Hong Kong to Moscow, or what intelligence services call an “exfiltration,” I was told by a Presidential National Security staff adviser that the government acted to protect the intelligence sources used by the CIA, NSA and FBI to track Snowden’s movements in the latter part of June in Hong Kong.  CIA Deputy Director Morell would go no further than to state that during that period he had no doubt the intelligence services of Russia and China “had an enormous interest in him and the information he [Snowden] had stolen.”  Presumably, the last thing these adversary services would want would be to make this “interest” transparent to the United States.
The role of concealment must be taken into account when assessing information bearing on the work of espionage services.  I learned when I was interviewing James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary ex-counterintelligence chief of the CIA in the 1970s for my book on deception that intelligence services play by a different set of rules than historians when it comes to their espionage successes.  Angleton, a famously baroque thinker himself, impressed on me the complexity of espionage. He said “It’s not enough just to steal a secret. It must be done in a way that the theft remains undetected.”  From his perspective, there were two requisites that had to be fulfilled to assure the success of any intelligence theft. The first task is the obvious one: acquiring by espionage an adversary’s state secrets. The second task is concealment of that success.  Deception is employed to obscure the nature and the extent of the espionage theft. This deception is necessary to extend the usefulness of theft.   One of the most famous examples of this principle was the deceptions used by British intelligence in the Second World War to conceal its success in breaking the German ciphers generated by the Enigma machines. If German naval intelligence discovered Britain was able to read the ciphers it used to communicate with its U-boats, it would have stopped using them.  So British intelligence hid its coup by supplying false information to known German spies to account for the sinking of U-boats, including the canard that British aerial cameras could detect one ingredient in the paint used to camouflage the U-boats.  That same hoary principle of deception applies to modern-day communications intelligence. If the Russian, Chinese or any other adversary intelligence service got its hands on the documents stolen by Snowden from the NSA’s repositories in Hawaii in 2013, it would likely employ deception, including well-crafted lies, to create as much ambiguity as possible as to the ultimate disposition of the missing documents.   From this counterintelligence perspective, the intelligence issue that spawned the great divide cannot be resolved by accepting the uncorroborated statements made by a source, such as Snowden, who may be in the hands of the Russian security services in Moscow.

   By the same token, the calculations made by NSA officials about the extent of the theft are also suspect.  After all, the NSA is an intelligence service that often engages in secret machinations.  We know that its top officials reported to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as the President’s National Security Adviser, that over one million documents were compromised by Snowden.  But if this was disinformation, it is difficult to see its purpose.  Inflating the extent of the damage of the Snowden breach to the President, Congress and the Secretary of Defense obviously reflected poorly on their own management of the NSA, and their own careers.   Yet such a possibility cannot be precluded in the arcane world of intelligence.

     As in any case involving the loss of state secrets, uncontested facts remain in extremely short-supply.  The opinion-laden appellatives such as “patriot” and “traitor” that have tended to fill the gap in the great divide do little to address the important mystery of how many thousands of state secrets were taken from the United States.  How did Snowden breach the supposedly formidable defenses of the NSA?  Did he have any assistance?  How did he escape to Moscow?  And what was the final destination of the stolen documents?   The purpose is to find answers to these questions.  For this endeavor, it is necessary to return to the crime scene: the NSA’s base in Hawaii.






CHAPTER TWO
The Crime Scene Investigation

“Any private contractor, not even an employee of the government, could walk into the NSA building, take whatever they wanted, and walk out with it and they would never know.”

                   Edward Snowden, Moscow 2014

   About 15 miles northwest of Honolulu on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, adjacent to the sprawling Wheeler Air Force Base, is a 250,000 square foot man-made mound of earth and reinforced concrete surrounded by an electrified fence.  Inside the mound is a three story structure originally built by the Air Force in the Second World War as a bomb-proof aircraft repair facility.  In the Cold War, it was modernized to withstand an enemy chemical, biological, radiological or Electrical Magnetic Pulse attacks, and used by the Navy’s operation center for its Pacific fleet.  After the Cold War ended, the huge edifice was turned over to the NSA, which had been created as an intelligence service to intercept the communications and signals of foreign countries after World War II, a mission which included vacuuming into its giant computer arrays telephone messages, missile telemetry, submarine signals and virtually everything on the electro-magnetic spectrum of interest to the US defense department and US intelligence agencies.   Because it provided a valuable window on the activities of adversary nations in the Pacific region, it was able to monitor the ballistic missile tests and submarine activities of China, North Korea and Russia.  As the NSA developed it, this Hawaiian base became one of its primary regional bases for gathering Asian communications intelligence.  By 2013, the Kunia base, also called “the tunnel” by its NSA workers, had a vast array of state-of-the-art technology, including 90 Cray supercomputers arranged in a horseshoe configuration, used to decipher and make sense of the intercepted signals from China, Russia and North Korea.  At the heart of the Hawaiian complex was a unit with both military and civilian employees.  A large share of the civilians who ran the computers worked under two-year contract to the NSA’s leading civilian contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Keith Alexander, the four-star general who headed the NSA from 2005 to 2014, first learned about the impending story in the Guardian on June 4, 2013 while he was in Germany meeting with its top intelligence officials.  Janine Gibson, the Guardian’s American website editor had notified the NSA it intended to break a story based on NSA the next day.  It took NSA counterintelligence less than 48 hours  to determine that a civilian employee at the base from which documents were stolen had not reported back to work on June 3rd, 2013.  It also determined he had lied on his application of a two-week medical leave and had flown to Hong Kong.  The missing man was Edward Joseph Snowden, a 29-year civilian employee of Booz Allen Hamilton.  At the time of the theft in May 2013, he was still being trained as an analyst at the Threat Operations Center.  Personnel records further showed that he had worked there for less than six weeks.  He had taken the medical leave on May 18, 2013 left the country by plane. By June 7th, he had become the NSA’s main suspect. Snowden had been hired to work there as an outside contractor by Booz Allen Hamilton, a private company owned by a hedge fund, which managed much of the information technology at the Center.



General Alexander, returning to Washington DC after assigning the sensitive job of investigating the breach to Richard “Rick” Ledgett, the Director of the NSA’s Threat Operations Center at NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.  It was a key position since the top-secret unit was responsible for discovering and countering the threats posed by Chinese, Russian and other adversary nations.  Ledgett was also the logical choice to head the damage assessment investigation since the Center’s regional branch in Hawaii was from where highly-sensitive documents were stolen and where the main suspect, Snowden, last worked.    Ledgett immediately boarded a military jet bound for Hawaii.  His first task was to reconstruct the chronology all of Snowden’s moves at the Center, or, as the tactic is called in counterintelligence parlance, “walking the cat back.”
   The NSA meanwhile notified the FBI of Snowden’s possible involvement in the theft of state secrets.  It is in charge of  criminal investigations of civilian US intelligence workers, even if they occur on a NSA base,  The FBI immediately dispatched a top task force of agents  to investigate a potential espionage case in Hawaii. When questioned, Lindsay Mills, who shared Snowden’s rental home with him and had been his girl friend for 8 years, said Snowden was away on a business trip.   After determining from airline and hotel data that he was in Hong Kong, the FBI realized Snowden was a possible intelligence defector. It froze his credit and bank cards.  It also notified the passport office in the State Department the legal attaches at the Hong Kong consulate.  The legal attaches, who were actually FBI field agents posted in Hong Kong, located Snowden at the Mira Hotel on June 8th. Such international detective work proved unnecessary since on the evening of June 10th, Snowden ended all doubts about the identity of the perpetrator by revealing in a 12-minute video posted on the Guardian website that he was the source of the stolen NSA documents for which the FBI was searching.  The problem was that since Hong Kong was in China, US law enforcement did not have the means to recover them.

     At that point, determining the magnitude of the theft of documents became a critical concern of the investigation.  Aside from the few dozen documents published by the Guardian and Washington Post, what else had Snowden stolen?

Within the next few days, a small army of forensic investigators from the FBI, the Defense Department and the “Q” counterintelligence division of the NSA swarmed onto the NSA base in Hawaii. The proximate crime scene for their investigation was the National Threat Operations Center. They examined the cubicle where Snowden had last worked at NSA, and then began retracing all his activities at the NSA over the past four years.  To begin with, they needed to find out how many documents from the Center had been copied and taken by Snowden.

    The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s own intelligence service, meanwhile was kept partially in the dark.  It did not learn from the NSA that Snowden had stolen military documents, concerning the joint Cyber Command until July 10, 2013.  In terms of sheer quantity, the number of stolen military documents was staggering.  The DIA found that Snowden had copied “over 900,000” military files. Many of these files came from this joint command, which had been set up in 2011 by the NSA and Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force cryptological services to combat the threat of warfare in cyberspace. The loss was considered of such importance that between 200 and 2500 military intelligence officers worked day and night for the next four months, according to the DIA’s classified report, to "triage, analyze, and assess Department of Defense impacts related to the Snowden compromise."  The job of this unit, called the Joint Staff Mitigation Oversight Task Force, was to attempt to contain the damage caused by the Snowden breach.  In many cases, containment meant shutting down NSA operations in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran so they could not be used to confuse and distract the U.S. military.

The NSA and Defense Department were not the only government agencies concerned with determining the extent of the breach.  There was also the CIA. The NSA acted as a service organization for it, handling most, if not all, of its requests for communication intelligence to support its international espionage operations.  Although the CIA and NSA were both part of the so-called “Intelligence Community,” the NSA did not immediately share with the CIA details of the Snowden breach.  Despite the immense potential damage of the theft, it was not until a week later that CIA Director John Owen Brennan and Deputy Director Michael Morell were briefed by the NSA. When Morell realize how much data had been taken by Snowden, he was astounded “You might have thought of all the government entities on the planet, the one least vulnerable to such grand theft would have been the NSA,” he wrote “but it turned out that the NSA had left itself vulnerable.”  According to Morell, he bluntly told the NSA briefer that it was urgent for the CIA to be brought in on the case. After all, only four years earlier Snowden had been employed by the CIA.  Specifically, Morell said the CIA needed to find out three things. Has CIA documents had been part of Snowden’s haul?  How long had Snowden been stealing documents?  Had Snowden been working “with any foreign intelligence service, either wittingly or not?”  According to Morell, the effort to get a direct answer from NSA officials to these three key questions “proved maddeningly difficult.”  He found that in mid June NSA officials with whom he dealt were so “distraught at the massive security breach” that initially they even refused to allow CIA officers to participate in the on-going security review.  A former NSA executive told me there was “near panic” at the NSA. Finally, Morell called Chris Inglis, a former professor of computer science who had risen to be the NSA’s Deputy Director at the time of the breach. Inglis, who headed operations for the NSA, told him “the news was not good.”  Among the data copied by Snowden were a large number of CIA secrets.  By the time, the CIA learned that its secrets had been compromised, Snowden was headed to Russia.

The investigation of a crime involving potential espionage is no easy task.  In this case, it required attempting to solve a jigsaw puzzle in which not only were key pieces missing but, since it involved adversary intelligence services, some of the found pieces might have been twisted to deliberately to mislead the US investigators.
By late July, NSA investigators made their initial assessment. They determined that most of the material had been taken from sealed-off areas, known in intelligence-speak as “compartments,” which in this case were files stored on computers that were isolated from any network.   Each compartment electronically tracked all the activities that occur in them on their logs, including the password identity of any person who has gained entry to any compartment.  From a forensic examination of these logs, NSA investigators were quickly able to reconstruct the timeline of the theft. The logs showed that an unauthorized party had begun copying files in mid-April, which was just days after Snowden began his job at the Center. The breach illicit activity ended just before Snowden’s last day of work there. So this piece fit in with Snowden’s guilt.

    The size of the theft was another matter. Ledgett was certainly in a position to know.  Not only had he been in charge of the National Threat Center at the time of the Snowden breach, but he personally supervised the NSA’s damage assessment team.  And, in the shake-up that followed that followed, he would replace Inglis as Deputy Director of the NSA.  According to Ledgett, the perpetrator, moving from compartment to compartment, had “touched” 1.7 million documents.  Of these “touched” documents, according to the analysis of the logs, more than one million of them were moved in mid-May by the unauthorized party to an auxiliary computer intended to be used for temporary storage by authorized service personnel.    Finally, the data was transferred from this auxiliary computer to thumb drives.  This download occurred just days before Snowden’ left the NSA on May 17, 2013, having told the agency that he needed a leave of absence to undergo medical treatment in Japan.  The FBI further established from airport records that Snowden flew to Hong Kong the next day presumably with thumb drives containing, by the government’s calculation, over one million documents.

   To be sure, the quantity of stolen documents does not necessarily reveal the damage, and can itself be misleading.  Many documents that do not reveal current or known sources or methods and others may have little value to an enemy. And a large portion of the 1.7 million documents may have been duplications.  But the quality of some of these documents is another matter.  Just one document that exposed a source or method of which enemies are unaware can be of immense value. For example, one of the missing documents taken by Snowden provided what Ledgett called “a roadmap” to the NSA’s current secret operations. That single document would reveal to an adversary such as Russia, China or Iran, according to Ledgett, “what we know, what we don’t know, and, implicitly, a way to protect themselves.”  And there were many documents in the Snowden breach that met these criteria, according to a National Security official at the Obama White House.

    The breach had happened on the watch of General Alexander, who headed both the NSA and the US Cyber Command, in 2013. A short, compact man with military bearing, Alexander closely followed the investigation as it developed over the summer of 2013. By then, of course, the whole world knew that Snowden had stolen a vast trove of NSA documents.  But General Alexander saw major inconsistencies developing between Snowden own account of the theft and what had actually happened.   To him, Snowden’s timeline, as established by the government’s investigators, did not match up to Snowden’s story line.  “Something is not right,” Alexander said in an interview.

   What was wrong with Snowden's account proceeded from unresolved inconsistencies in both the timing and nature of the theft.    For one thing, Snowden had made the claim to journalists, four months after he was in Russia, that he had turned over all the documents he took from the NSA’s compartments to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong.  However, on August 18, 2013, the investigators had the opportunity to examine the files that Snowden had actually given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong.  This discovery came when David Miranda, Greenwald’s romantic partner, was detained at Heathrow Airport by British Authorities under Schedule Seven of Britain’s Terrorism Act.  At the time, as British intelligence presumably knew, Miranda was acting as a courier for Greenwald and Poitras.  According to Greenwald’s account, Snowden had given both him and Poitras identical copies of the NSA documents in Hong Kong.  When Greenwald returned home to Rio de Janeiro, he found his copy was corrupted.  But Poitras still had her digital copy of whatever stolen documents that Snowden had distributed to them. So Greenwald dispatched Miranda from Rio to Berlin to get a copy of Poitras’ thumb dive.  On the return trip, Miranda’s plane stopped at Heathrow and British authorities temporarily detained him and temporarily took the thumb drive from him.  Poitras had written out the password for Greenwald, and Miranda kept it with the thumb drive.   The British quietly copied the contents and shared them with the NSA.  As a result, the NSA discovered that Snowden had only given Poitras and Snowden some 58,000 documents.  By any measure, it was only a tiny fraction of Snowden’s total haul. The damage assessment team under Ledgett determined that some of these documents had been edited out of much larger documents that the NSA logs showed that he had copied.  Snowden had evidently selected for the journalist’s only parts of the lengthy documents.  For example, only scattered fragments of the 36,000 page “road map” file were among the material on the thumb drive.  By the count of both the NSA team and the Defense Department team almost one million documents were unaccounted for. If Snowden had not given these missing files to Poitras and Greenwald, the issue of what had happened to them became a critical missing piece in the puzzle.



     Adding another layer to the mystery of the missing documents, the NSA investigation found that the chronology of the theft of documents did not support Snowden’s claim to journalists that he had only been seeking whistle-blowing documents.   Most of the documents he first took did not concern the domestic activities of the NSA.  It was only towards the end of the theft that he copied documents that would qualify as whistle-blowing.  In fact, the now-famous FISA court order to Verizon that was the basis of the initial Guardian expose was only issued by the FISA court on April 27, 2013.  The other main whistle-blowing document he revealed, the PowerPoint presentation about PRISM, a joint NSA-FBI-CIA Internet surveillance program, that was the basis of the Washington Post expose, was also only issued in April 2013. Yet Snowden had been down-loading documents for some 10 months before he copied these documents.    When I discussed the chronology of the copied documents with a former government official briefed on the investigation, he suggested that Snowden’s purpose may have changed between 2012 and 2013.  When I asked him what might have induced the change, he replied “That is one of the unanswered questions.”  That Snowden only took these two whistle-blowing documents at the tail-end of his 9-month operation, and after he had contacted Poitras and Greenwald, suggests he may have had another motive prior to contacting journalists.  In light of this chronology, the investigation had to consider the possibility that his whistle-blowing was, partly if not wholly, a cover for another enterprise.


    The investigation soon ran into another serious issue: his access.  Snowden had described to  journalists a situation in which he had  access to“ millions of records that [he] could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone,” but, as it turned out,  he was not among the limited number of individuals at the Center who had access to these documents,    The NSA’s and Booz Allen’s employment records showed that Snowden had not yet completed his requisite on-the- job training at the National Threat Operations Center in Hawaii when he carried out the theft.  Consequently, he had not yet been provided with the passwords he needed to get the documents.  A former NSA official bluntly told me that Snowden, at least during the period of the thefts in April and May 2013, had no more legitimate access to the compartments than the cleaning personnel at the Center.  Somehow he converted his proximity to access.
   This lack of access could not be ignored in any law-enforcement investigation.  Consider if a hundred top-quality D-flawless diamonds were stolen from locked vaults at Tiffany’s by a recently-hired trainee who, it turned out, did not have either the combination to open these vaults.  One possibility that the police would be expected to consider was that the trainee might have had help from a current or former insider at the company who knew the combinations.  Snowden had accomplished a similar inexplicable feat as the hypothetical jewel thief.
In Snowden’s case, the FBI had to consider two very different possibilities that could explain how he could have acquired the password.  He said in his video confession that he was solely responsible but there was another possibility.  He had help, unwitting or witting, from others and he was trying to protect away from them.

The FBI faced a dilemma. It could either assume that the NSA’s security regime was so badly flawed that Snowden could trick his fellow workers into providing him with access or that there was another individual at the Center who might have assisted or directed Snowden.  If it pursued the former hypothesis, it could close the case as far as the sitting Grand Jury was concerned.  After all, Snowden had admitted he was the perpetrator and, if further evidence was needed, he could be seen showing stolen documents to Greenwald on the video. And Greenwald later used these documents.  For the Grand Jury, it was, as one former federal prosecutor put it, “a slam dunk.” Not even Snowden denied the charge that he gave secret documents to individuals that were not authorized to receive them, the same charge for which Manning was convicted.  Even if it went no further, the FBI would satisfy its superiors in the Department of Justice that it had done its law-enforcement job. But if it pursued the latter hypothesis, it would need to engage in a mole hunt for a quarry that might not exist.  By doing so, it could open a Pandora’s Box of suspicions that it, or the NSA, might not ever be able to close.  When the investigation came to this fork in the road in the summer of 2013, according to a source on the House Intelligence Committee, it chose the former route.

     Finally, there was the question of whether Snowden had gone to Russia by design or accident.  Whenever an intelligence worker steals sensitive compartmentalized information of interest to a foreign adversary and then defect to it, it raises at least the specter of state-sponsored espionage.  It is a commonly accepted presumption in counterintelligence that a spy, fearing arrest, flees to a country that has some reason to offer him protection.  When the British spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, for example, fled to Moscow in the Cold War the presumption was that they had a prior intelligence connection with Russia.  And Philby confirmed it in his 1968 memoir “My Silent War.”  So in the case of Snowden, counterintelligence had to consider the possibility that his theft of state secrets and his arrival in Moscow might not be totally coincidental.

 For his part, Snowden said that he did not leave Hong Kong with the intention of staying in Russia, but that the U.S. government “trapped him” at Moscow’s Airport by revoking his passport.  He told editor of The Nation magazine:  “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled.” He added that the U.S. government “chose to keep me in Russia.”  Although he repeated that assertion over a dozen times, it was untrue.   The US government had not invalidated his passport for travel back to the United States.  When criminal charges are lodged against a U.S, citizen by the Department of Justice, the State Department, in accordance with the U.S. code of justice, marks in the electronic passport validation advisory system that that person’s passport is electronically marked valid only for return to the U.S. After criminal charges were filed against Snowden, including the theft of classified government documents, it advised foreign governments that Snowden was wanted on felony charges, and “should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States."  It was simply requiring that his passport, which is a State Department document, be used for him to return to the United States.  Rather than preventing Snowden from returning to the United States, or “exiling” him, the government facilitated his return home.  With his passport, he could have flown home from either Hong Kong or Moscow, where he, like any other person accused of a felony, would face the charges against him. Nor was it plausible that President Obama and Secretary Of State Clinton would conspire to trap a perpetrator carrying incredibly valuable national security secrets in Russia.

    The counterintelligence investigation had little difficulty establishing that Snowden’s trapped” version in the media was not consistent with the actual chronology of the events. Snowden claimed that the U.S. State Department had acted while the plane was flying to Moscow on June 23rd but in actuality it had acted on June 22, 2013, which was the day before the plane (or Snowden) departed from Hong Kong.  The Hong Kong authorities had been advised as early as June 19, 2013 that there were criminal charges against Snowden and only a typographical error in spelling out Snowden’s middle name—James instead of John-- in the criminal charges prevented the Hong Kong police from immediately ordering his detention.  His Hong Kong lawyers were advised of the pending charges, which were unsealed on June 21, 2013 and published on front page of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. So presumably Snowden knew that action by the U.S. government was imminent. One of his lawyers, Jonathan Mann, even accompanied Snowden to the airport out of his concern that he would not even be allowed by Hong Kong authorities to go through passport control.  Although Snowden still had a US passport in his possession, the computerized database would show on June 23rd, it was no longer valid for travel to anywhere but the U.S.

This electronic notification advised foreign government that his passport was only approved for his return to the U.S.  Even so, when he arrived in Russia any future international travel decisions for him would be up to Russia, not the U.S.  So the only government with the means to “trap” him in Russia was the Russian government.

The U.S. government also knew that his it was no accident that Snowden wound up in the hands of Russia. He had been in contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong.   Even before Putin admitted this liaison on September 3, 2013, the CIA knew about it. In fact, on June 23rd, t, Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.),  correctly said based on a White House briefing that “Vladimir Putin had personally approved Snowden’s flight” to Moscow.     As mentioned earlier, the NSA still had the capability to monitor Russian communication in June 2013.  The messages, as well as the traffic, it intercepted from its sources reportedly revealed the Russian intelligence activity in Hong Kong.    The NSA also reportedly intercepted contacts between these Russian officials and Russian representatives of Aeroflot, the Russian state-owned airline flying between Hong Kong and Moscow.    Aeroflot, like most other international carriers, ordinarily requires international passengers to have both a valid passport and visa to the country of his destination. That those rules were waived for Snowden implicated Aeroflot in Snowden’s exfiltration from Hong Kong.   All of which meant to investigators that Snowden’s defection to Moscow was not a haphazard result of unexpected circumstances. This raised new questions for the investigation. What led Snowden to defect to Russia?  Was his arrival in Moscow planned by Russia intelligence in advance?  Was any other party, such as China, privy to the plan?   Was there a quid pro quo?


    US intelligence had some clues suggesting that Snowden’s path to Russia had been prepared for him in advance.  On September 3, 2013, Russia’s President Putin gave a lengthy interview on state-owned Channel 1 television in which he divulged that he personally had had advance knowledge of Snowden’s plan. “I will tell you something I have never said before,” Putin said. Snowden "first went to Hong Kong and got in touch with our diplomatic representatives” and that he was told then that an American "agent of special services" was seeking to come to Russia. Putin then decided that this agent would be “welcome, provided, however, that he stops any kind of activity that could damage Russian-US relations.”  Putin’s disclosure came as no surprise to the NSA investigation since the Russian pro-government newspaper Kommersant had reported that Snowden visited the Russian consulate in Hong Kong.


      Putin’s authorization could certainly account for Aeroflot waiving its usual passport and visa check to allow Snowden to board its plane.   It also might explain the dispatch with which Russian officials whisked Snowden off the plane after it landed and into a waiting car at the Moscow airport.  It could even account for Snowden’s vanishing from public view for the next three weeks and the promulgation of the cover story that Snowden was unwillingly trapped at the airport by the U.S. government.  The reasons behind Putin’s move were less clear.


    By September 2013, the investigation was looking into a veritable abyss. Snowden’s culpability was no longer an issue. What was lacking from the video, or the 2-hour film made from it by Laura Poitras, was any specific information on how many documents he had copied, how he had obtained the passwords to the computers on which they were stored, the period of time involved in the theft, or how he had breached all the security measures of the NSA in Hawaii.  Nor would that data be forthcoming from Snowden, who may be the only witness to the crime, By June 23, 2013, he was in a safe haven in Moscow.    Even though the Grand Jury case against Snowden was cut and dry, it was also irrelevant because the US does not have an extradition treaty with Russia.


The purpose of the intelligence investigation went far beyond determining Snowden’s guilt or innocence, however.  Its job was to find out how such a massive theft of documents could occur, how the perpetrator escaped, and, perhaps most urgent, who had obtained the stolen documents from Snowden.


    When Snowden first met Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong on June 3rd 2013, he displayed in his hand, as a recognition signal.  It was an unsolved Rubik’s Cube.  It may also be an appropriate metaphor for the unsolved elements in the Snowden enigma.   Even in his later interviews with journalists in Moscow, Snowden studiously avoided describing the means by which he breached the entire security regime of America’s most secret intelligence service.  He only told the journalists who came to Moscow to interview him, with a bit of pseudo-modesty, that he was not “an angel” who descended from heaven to carry out the theft.


    But the question of how Snowden stole these documents may be the most important part of the story.  The NSA, after all, furnishes communications intelligence to the President, his National Security advisers, and the Department of Defense that is supposedly derived from secret sources in adversary nations. If these adversary nations learn about the NSA’s sources, the information, if not worthless, cannot be fully trusted. The most basic mission of the NSA is to protect its sources. Yet, despite all its efforts, Snowden walked away with long lists of its sources.  In doing so, he amply demonstrated that a single civilian employee working for an outside contractor, even one not having the necessary passwords and other access privileges, could steal documents that betrayed these vital sources.  He also demonstrated that such a theft, which the NSA calculates exceeded one million documents, can go undetected for at least two weeks. If Snowden managed this feat on his own, as he claims in his Hong Kong video, it suggests that any other civilian employee with a perceived grievance against NSA practices or American foreign policy could also walk away with some of the most precious secrets held by US intelligence.  Such vulnerability extends to tens of thousands of civilian contract employees in positions similar to the one held by Snowden.  The lone disgruntled employee explanation is therefore hardly reassuring. If true, calls into question the entire multi-billion dollar enterprise of outsourcing the management of the NSA’s computer networks and other technical work to outside contractors. It also casts doubts on the post-9/11 decision by the intelligence community to strip away much of the NSA’s “stove-piping” that previously insulated the NSA’s most sensitive computers.  Without such “stove-piping,” any rogue civilian employee could bring down entire edifice of shared intelligence.


    Nor would a finding by the investigation that Snowden had acted in concert with others in breaching compartments at the NSA be any more reassuring.  Such collaboration among intelligence workers would reflect gravely on the mindset of the NSA.  Snowden described an atmosphere in which intelligence workers exchanged lewd photographs of foreign suspects. Did this violation of the NSA’s rules also involve abetting the theft of documents?  If so, the NSA would have to evaluate further vulnerabilities that might arise when it entrusts its secrets to technicians who do not share is values. A collaborative breach would signal an immense failure of the present concept of the counterintelligence regime in the NSA.


  From what I gathered from government officials who were familiar with the investigation, there was a concern that answering the “how” question could open up a Pandora Box of other issues concerning the very ability of the NSA to carry out its core mission of protecting the government’s intelligence secrets.  However it was organized, it was that clear that Snowden had played a major role in what amounted to a brilliant intelligence coup.














PART TWO
SNOWDEN’S ARC




“I woke this morning with a new name. I had had a vision. A dream vision.  A vision righteous and true.  Before me I saw Gamers shrouded in the glory of their true names...Step forth, and assume your name in the pantheon. It's always been there, your avatar's true name. It slips through your subconscious, reveals itself under your posts, and flashed visibly in that moment of unrestrained spite; in the indulgent teabag. You've felt it, known it, and recognized it. Now realize it.
I woke this morning with a new name. That name is … Wolfking Awesomefox”
      --Edward Snowden in Geneva, June 12, 2008.




CHAPTER THREE
Tinker



“It’s like the boiling frog. You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty… you can come to justify it.”
                                     —Snowden in Moscow, 2014



      Edward John Snowden was born on June 21, 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.  His parents, Lon Snowden and Elizabeth “Wendy” Barrett, according to their marriage records, wed when they were both 18 in 1979.  The following year they had a daughter, Jessica.
Lon Snowden, like his father before him, served in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was stationed at its main aviation base, where his father-in-law Edward John Barrett, was an officer and rising star of the Coast Guard. While Edward Snowden was still a child, his grandfather would become not only an admiral but the head of the Coast Guard’s entire aviation service.  Admiral Barrett would be the only grandfather, Edward Snowden would ever know.    His paternal grandfather died before he was born in a fatal car crash.  He had had a drinking problem and killed a woman in a prior car crash.)

  When Lon was transferred to a Coast Guard base near Baltimore in 1992, the family moved to Maryland.  Lon bought a two-story house in Croften, Maryland, a residential community very close to the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade. The two children, Edward, who was nine, and Jessica, who was 12, were enrolled in local public schools in Croften.

    Jessica was a top student. She graduated high school, completed both her courses at University of Maryland and went on to law school, where she graduated with honors.  Unlike his sister, Snowden experienced a string of failures in his education.  In 1998, after only one year of classes, he dropped out of Arundel High School.  According to school records, he stopped attending classes at the age of fifteen.  He later attributed his absence from school to a medical problem, mononucleosis, but according to Robert Mosier, a spokesman for Anne Arundel County public schools, there is no record of any medical illness. Brad Gunson, who knew him before he dropped out of high school, recalled in an interview with the Washington Post only that he had a high-pitched voice, liked magic cards, and played fantasy video games.  Nor did Snowden receive home schooling or ever get a high school diploma.

Instead, Snowden became the product of a broken home. His parents were entangled in a messy divorce fight until he was seventeen. By this time Jessica had her own apartment.  When his parents separated, Snowden’s mother, Wendy, bought a two-bedroom condominium in Elliott City, Maryland.  She moved Snowden, along with his two cats, into the condominium.  She remained in the family house while awaiting its sale.  According to his neighbor Joyce Kinsey, Snowden, alone, stayed home almost all the time.  From what she could observe, he spent long hours in front of a computer screen.

     At the age of 18, Snowden was still living by himself, while other teens his age went to college, Snowden now devoted a large part of his time playing fantasy games on the Internet. Posting under the alias “The TrueHooHa” on a web site called Ars Technica, he showed himself to be a passionate gamer.  He was especially drawn to Anime, a graphically violent style of Japanese animation. These Anime games had by 2002 achieved a fanatic following in both Japan and the United States.  He claimed special skills at Takken, a martial arts fighting game.  He even went to Anime conventions in the Washington DC area.  When he became a webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a website running these anime-based games, he described himself somewhat fancifully as a 37-year old father of two children,  The only clearly true part of his description was that he was born on  “the longest day of the year” (June 21).

  He also apparently valued changing his body. He wrote Internet posts under his TrueHooHa alias about how he used weightlifting and intensive training to precision-shape his body.  He bragged to his online followers that he had reduced his “body fat percentage to between 9.5% and 10.5%” (which was less than half of the average for his age.)

    He appeared somewhat restless with his solitary life in a Maryland suburb in his almost daily postings. He expressed a longing to go to Japan.  “I’ve always dreamed of being able to "make it" in Japan. I've taken Japanese for a year and a half,” he posted in 2002.  Despite his claim of learning Japanese, there is no record of him taking any courses in Japanese.  But it perhaps part of his yearning.  He also wrote that he wore “cool” purple sunglasses, practiced martial arts and was a fan of Japanese cuisine.  He described himself at one point, as if advertising his virtues, as having a “head of vibrant, shimmering blond hair (with volume).”   In pursuit of an employment opportunity in Japan, he posted “I’d love a cushy gov job over there.”  Eventually, he gave up on the idea of relocating himself to Japan because, as he explained in a post, he would have to put his cats in quarantine for six months.

    Snowden’s father meanwhile moved to Pennsylvania with his new wife-to-be.  This left Snowden with only one male family member in the area, his maternal grandfather, Admiral Edward J. Barrett.  Unlike Snowden’s virtual career on the Internet, where at one point Snowden invented for himself two fantasy children, Admiral Barrett became a real actor in the top echelon of US intelligence.  After the Coast Guard, he moved to the Pentagon. He was actually in the Pentagon when a plane piloted by terrorists crashed into it on 9-11.  He emerged unscathed and, by 2004, was a top official in the intelligence regime that operated the interrogation center at Guantanamo.

Instead of seeking a job in Japan, Snowden sought to join the Special Forces through the 18X program.  It was an Army Reserve program created in 2003 that allowed individuals who had not served in the military or completed their education, to train to be a Special Forces recruit. He listed his religion on the application as “Buddhist” because, as he explained in a sardonic post on Ars Technica, “Agnostic is strangely absent” from the form.”

  He enlisted in the army reserves on May 7, 2004, according to U.S. Army records. He reported for a 10 week basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.  That was standard course for all enlistees in the infantry.  In August, he began a three-week course in of parachute jumping but did not complete that training. US Army records show he did not complete the training requirements and received no commendations.     As Snowden put it in his Internet postings, he “washed out.”  He was discharged on September 29, 2004, ending his 19 week military career.  Snowden would later claim on the Internet that he returned to civilian life because he had injured himself by breaking both legs. An Army spokesman said, however, that he could not confirm that Snowden injured his legs or that he was in fact dropped from the program for medical reasons.   Under his alias TheTrueHooHa he wrote that “they [the Army] held on to me until the doctors cleared me to be discharged, and then after being cleared they held onto me for another month just for shits and giggles.”  He attributed this treatment in the Army, as he would later attribute his problems in the CIA and NSA, to the inferior intelligence of his superiors, He wrote in his post “Psych problems = dishonorable discharge depending on how much they hate you. Lots of alleged homos were in the hold unit, too, but they only got a general discharge at best.”  It is not entirely clear whether or not Snowden actually injured himself.  If he had broken his legs, it was not evident to Joyce Kinsey, his next door neighbor, who told me that she never saw Snowden on crutches when he returned to his mother’s condominium in September 2004. Whether or not he broke his legs, Army records show that he did not receive a medical discharge.  He received an “administrative discharge.”   Unlike a medical discharge which is given because a soldier has sustained injuries that prevent him from performing his duties, an administrative discharge  is a “morally-neutral” form of separation given to a soldier when her or she is deemed for non-medical reasons inappropriate for military service.  Snowden himself preferred to voice a medical explanation for his severance, just as he had claimed a medical reason for dropping out of high school (and would later claim he needed medical treatment for epilepsy at the NSA.)

     When he returned home from Fort Benning, Georgia on September 28, 2004, he was 21. Having failed in his attempt to join the Special Forces, he returned to his mother’s condominium in Elliott City, where he remained unemployed for several months.  He took a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language. According to his Ars Technica postings, he worked the night shift from six in the evening to six in the morning.   Because intelligence officers took its language courses, Snowden had to take a polygraph exam to get the job. After he passed it, he was hired and given his first security clearance   But he had higher ambitions than being a campus security guard, It was only a temporary stop gap for him.

         He had ambitions of becoming a male model.  He did not seem overly concerned about his privacy, posting pictures of himself “mooning” for the camera.  He also posted provocative modeling pictures of himself on the Ars Technica website.  He commented on his own beefcake-style pictures “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girlish figure that attracts girls.”  He approached a model agency called Model Mania.  He had some concern about the photographer who “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said in a post he was “a little worried he might, you know, try to pull my pants off and choke me to death with them, but he turned out to be legit and is a pretty damn good model photographer.” He posted the photographs on the Internet, commenting: “ I think I look pretty good in the shots, so it's kind of hard to get used to thinking of yourself in terms of being an element in a picture as opposed to just a picture of X." Despite his enthusiasm, the lack of any paid job offers dashed any hopes he had of a modeling career.

He also began dating Lindsay Mills around this time.  She was an extremely attractive 19-year old art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art.   Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father, was an applications developer at the Oracle Corporation.  According to him, she met Snowden on an Internet dating site.  However they met, Snowden and Mills had much in common.  They both had divorced parents who gave them a great deal of latitude in conducting their personal lives. Both of them were keenly interested in perfecting their bodies through exercise and diet regimes, Mills’ only paid employment over the next 8 years would be as a fitness and Yoga instructor in Maryland.  They both also had ambitions to be models and neither of them had inhibitions about posing provocatively for photographers.  They both also had a desire to travel to exotic places, including cities in Asia.  Mills had spent four month in Guilin, China before meeting Snowden.

    As bleak as his prospects as a high school dropout may have seemed, he had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the spring of 2006.   The CIA, out-of-the-blue, offered Snowden a $66,000 a year job as a CIA communications officer. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. In fact, I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Snowden boasted in May 2006 on the website Ars Technica under his alias The TrueHooHa.  He added, with only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.”

   But how did Snowden get the job? The CIA’s minimum requirements in 2006 for a job in its clandestine division included a bachelor's or master's degree and a strong academic record, with a preferred GPA of 3.0 or better.  Snowden had only completed one year of high school.  He had never attended college. He said himself that he had “no degree.”  So he had none of the requisite degrees for the job he got.

CIA deputy director Ledgett said the CIA needed technical workers in 2006.  But even if Snowden only applied in this capacity, which entailed a 5-year contract-term employment agreement, the minimum requirements for an intelligence technology job were a minimum of an Associates’ Degree awarded by a two-year Community college in Electronics and Communications Engineering Technology   Computer Network Systems, or Electronics Engineering Technology.  Candidates further must have a final GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale from a fully accredited technical school or university.  Snowden did not meet these standards.  Lacking these qualifications, the CIA can make an exception only if a candidate had at least two years civilian or military work experience in the telecommunications and/or automated information systems field that are comparable to one of the requisite degree fields.  , Even here, Snowden in no way qualified. He did not have the education qualifications or two-year work experience anywhere.  In fact, his only paid work was as a security guard at a language school at the University of Maryland, and that job lasted less than one year.

    Under extraordinary circumstances, even the minimum requirements might be waived if the applicant had a distinguished military career and an honorable discharge.  Snowden, however, did not complete his military training at Fort Benning, Georgia and received only an administrative discharge.

    The CIA, to be sure, had needed computer savvy recruits to service its expanding array of computer systems since 1990. By 2006, however, there was no shortage of fully-qualified applicants for IT jobs who met the CIA’s minimum standards.  Most of them had university course records, work experience at IT companies, computer science training certificates from technical schools, and other such credentials they could provide the personnel office.  The CIA, like the NSA, also obtained technicians with special skills for IT jobs from outside contractors. So it had no need for employing a 22-year old drop-out who did not meet its requisites.     According to the former CIA station chief, the only plausible way that Snowden, with no qualifications, was allowed to jump the queue was that “he had some pull.”

    In 2006, Snowden was not without family connections.  His grandfather, it will be recalled was Rear Admiral Barrett, who certainly was well-connected in the intelligence world. After 20 years service in the Coast Guard, Admiral Barrett joined an interagency task force in 1998, which included top executives from the CIA, FBI, and DEA.  It had been set up to monitor any gaps in the US embargo on Cuba and, as one of its leaders, Barrett was in constant liaison with the CIA.  Following the attack on the World Trade Center in NY in 2001, he joined the FBI as the section head of its aviation and special operations.  In this capacity, he supervised the joint CIA/FBI interrogation of the prisoners in the Guantanamo base in Cuba which involved him in the rendition program for terrorist.    As a top FBI executive in a liaison role with the CIA, he certainly had could have played a role in furthering his only grandson’s employment. The CIA, however, has not disclosed any information about whom, if anyone, recommended Snowden.  All that is known is that in 2006 the CIA waived its minimum requirements for Snowden.

However Snowden got his job at the CIA, it meant, as he pointed out from Moscow, that in 2006 his entire family was employed by the Federal government.  His father Lon in 2006 was serving in the Coastguard; his mother Wendy was the administrative clerk for the Federal Court in Maryland; his sister Jessica was a research director at the Federal Judicial Center; and his namesake grandfather, Admiral Barrett, was still a top executive at the FBI. In a sense, Snowden had now entered the family business.



Chronology2: The Snowden Thriller
                                 The Intelligence World, 2006-2014




June2006-Feb 2007            CIA
                                            Trainee, Langley, Virginia



March 2007- Feb 2009        CIA
                                             Communications officer. Geneva, Switzerland




 June 2009-Sept 2010            DELL/ NSA
                                               Security instructor, Yokoda. Japan



October 2010- March-2012     DELL/ NSA
                                                 Computer platforms, Maryland–designing computer platforms



April 2012- March 2012           DELL/ NSA
                                                  System administrator, Oahu, Hawaii



M arch 2012– May 2013              BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON/ NSA
                                                      Infrastructure analyst, Oahu, Hawaii

October 2013– Present                   Unidentified Cyber Security Firm

                                                        Unknown position, Moscow, Russia




CHAPTER FOUR
Secret Agent

 “Sure, a whistleblower could use these [computer vulnerabilities], but so could a spy.”

       --Edward Snowden in Moscow



The sudden transformation of Snowden in 2006 from a night watchman on a university campus to secret agent for the CIA provided him with a powerful new identity and one much closer to the avatars he adopted for his fantasy games.   It was burnished so deeply in his self-image that he cited it eight years in Moscow. When Brian Williams, then a NBC anchorman, began an hour-long NBC television interview with Snowden in 2014 by saying, “It seems to me spies probably look a lot more like Ed Snowden and a lot less like James Bond these days," Snowden approvingly smiled and told him, “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word.”  Snowden further confirmed his interviewer’s point, sating “I lived and worked undercover overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not, and even being assigned a name that was not mine."
      In reality, Snowden’s employment at the CIA was more prosaic.  When he joined the CIA in 2006, he did not have the required experience in maintaining secret communication systems.  So the CIA sent him to its information technology school for six months to train as a communications officer, not a spy.   After completing his training, he was dispatched to the CIA station in Geneva, Switzerland. He worked there for the next two years as one of dozens of Information Technologists servicing the CIA’s communication channels in Switzerland. He was stationed there, according to Swiss registry records, under his own name from March 2007 to February 2009.  He was identified as a US State Department employee in Geneva because Switzerland does not allow any intelligence officers to operate in that country.  So officially he was attached to the permanent U.S. mission to the United Nations which employed hundreds of US government functionaries in Switzerland.  It was a thin cover, since the Swiss government was aware that the CIA maintained its base in Geneva and posted it employees at the US mission,

      Although he would later claim in the video he made in Hong Kong that he had served as a “senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he was merely a telecommunications support officer, or TSO in CIA parlance, which was a junior level job at the CIA.  He worked as part of a 12 man team of information technologists under the supervision of senior CIA officers, according to a former CIA officer in Geneva.  The job of these TSOs was to protect the security of the CIA’s computer systems through which the CIA station in Geneva sent and received its secret communications.    As far as is known, Snowden made very few friends at the 800-person mission.  The only person there to have publicly reported knowing him in Geneva during this period is Mavanee Anderson, a young and attractive summer intern at the US Mission from May to August 2007.  She described befriending Snowden, who, according to her, said that he was in the CIA and also demonstrated to her his martial arts skills.  She later recalled in interviews that he was “a bit” prone to brooding and voiced growing dissatisfaction with the CIA.

   During his time in Geneva, he received no promotions or commendations for his work.  In December 2008, he received an unfavorable evaluation from his superior and a “derog,” the CIA’s shorthand for a derogatory comment. He was also threatened with a punitive investigation unless he agreed to quietly resign from the CIA. “It was not a stellar career,” Tyler Drumheller, former CIA station chief told me in 2014.

    The job in Geneva did have its benefits, however.  It provided him a generous housing and travel allowance.  In many ways, it was the “cushy government job” he had said he was seeking in his Internet posts.  He rented a four room apartment and had his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, now 21, join him there.

    According to his posts on the Ars Technica web site, he took full advantage of his compensation to live the high life. He gambled on financial developments in the option markets, losing and making substantial sums of money. He also bought a BMW sports car.  While these BMW had a speed control to keep the car within the speed limit, he wrote that he illicitly disabled it so he could exceed this legal limit.  He described in his posts other pursuits, including racing motorcycles it Italy and traveling around Germany with an Estonian rock star (who he did not further identify.)   He also continued his fantasy life in Internet gaming.  The gaming alias he chose was “Wolfking Awesomefox.”  He even indulged in a fantasy gun sport called Airsoft, a variation of paint ball, in which participants used realistic looking pistols to splatter each other with paint.

        His good fortune came to an abrupt end in 2008.  He suffered a massive loss in his options speculations.  He wrote in a post that he had "lost $20,000 in October [2008] alone;” a sum which represented a substantial part of the $66,000 a year CIA salary. He blamed the US financial system, posting on Ars Technica that Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was a “cockbag.”  He also bet against any further rise in the stock market index, asking a user with whom he was chatting on the Ars Technica site in December 2008 to “pray” for a collapse of stock prices.  When his correspondent asked him why he wanted him to pray for a decline, Snowden responded “because then I’ll be filthy fucking rich.”  The stock market, however, continued to rise, and Snowden also lost this bet.

 Snowden lashed out at others on the Internet over these setbacks. He termed those who questioned his financial judgment as “fucking retards.”  As with other setbacks, he blamed them on government officials. He even advertised them in Ars Technica, a closely-watched Internet forum, while serving in the CIA.   Since the CIA was engaged in 2008 in highly sensitive operations to gather banking data in Switzerland-- one of which Snowden later disclosed to the Guardian—any Internet discussion by a CIA employee of financial losses could serve as a beacon to an adversary intelligence services on the prowl for a source.  If any party was looking for a disgruntled US employees, Snowden’s Internet chatter about bad choices in gambling could arouse its interest.  That Snowden used his TheTrueHooHa alias for these Internet posting would not prevent a sophisticated espionage organization, such as the Russian Intelligence service, from quickly uncovering that his true identity was Edward Snowden. Nor would it be difficult to place him at the CIA since, it will be recalled, he was listed by his true name on the roster of the US Mission to the UN.   By consulting personnel records it would further emerge that he did not actually work for the State Department.  Since it was no secret, at least to the Russian Intelligence services, that the US mission in Geneva housed the CIA station for all of Switzerland, it was probable that this brittle gambler who played the options market worked for the CIA.  Even though it cannot be precluded that Snowden was spotted in Geneva by another intelligence service, there is no evidence, at least that I know of, to suggest that he was approached by one.  Nor is there reason to believe that if he had been contacted by a foreign service in 2008, he would have responded positively.  Despite his indiscreet posting about his outside activities, he apparently still respected the boundaries of secrecy that had been clearly defined in the oath he had taken in the CIA.   For example, after the New York Times published an article revealing secret American intelligence activities in Iran on January 11, 2009, Snowden railed against the newspaper on the Internet under his True HOOHA alias, He wrote “This shit is classified for a reason… It’s because this shit won’t work if Iran knows what we are doing.” He clearly recognized that revealing intelligence sources was extremely damaging. As for the New York Times, he said “Hopefully they’ll finally go bankrupt this year.”  When another Internet user asked him if it was unethical to release national security secrets, he answered,”YEEEEEEEEEES.”

    Nevertheless, he had his career-ending problem at the CIA.  As with every CIA officer, he had to undergo a two year evaluation and take a routine polygraph test. It was then, in December 2008, that his superior at the CIA placed the “derog” in his file.  The reason remains somewhat murky.  According to a New York Times story by veteran intelligence reporter Eric Schmitt, Snowden’s superior had suspected that Snowden “was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access.” Schmitt evidently had well-placed sources in the CIA.  He said that he interviewed two senior American officials who were familiar with the case.  According to what they told Schmitt, the CIA superior had decided to “send Snowden home.”    Officially, however, according to a CIA reply to the New York Times report, Snowden had not been fired or accused of attempting to “break into classified computer files to which he did not have authorized access.”  The discrepancy was explained to me by a former CIA officer who had also been at the US Mission in Geneva.  He said that the spin the CIA put on the story was “necessary containment.” After the Snowden breach occurred in June 2013, the CIA had a problem which could, as he put it, “blow up in its face.”  If Snowden had been fired but allowed to keep his secrecy clearance in 2009, the CIA’s incompetency could be partly blamed for the NSA’s subsequent employment of him. If he had broken into a computer he was not authorized, he should have been fired, if not arrested.  What this spin glossed over, according to this former CIA officer, is the part of Snowden’s behavior that concerned his superior.  Technically, Snowden, as a CIA communications officer, was authorized to use the computer system.   The problem was that Snowden had deliberately misused it by adding code to it.  This code could have compromised the security of the CIA’s “live system.”  So while what the CIA public affairs officer said was correct, it clouded the issue.

     For his part, Snowden blamed his career-ending “derog” on an “e-mail spat” with a superior.  From Moscow, he wrote James Risen of the New York Times that his superior officer ordered him not “to rock the boat.” Further, he complained that the technical team at the CIA station in Geneva had “brushed him off” even though he had a legitimate complaint.  When he complained about a flaw in the computer system, he said that his superior took vengeance on him.  He said he added the code to the system prove he was right.  He attributed the “derog” in his file to the incompetence, blindness and errors of his superiors.  According to Snowden, he was a victim.  This would not be the last time he faulted superiors for their incompetency. He would later say that the NSA experts who examined the documents that he had stolen as “totally incapable.”

In any case, in February 2009, Snowden not only had a career-damaging “derog” in his file but he faced an internal investigation of his suspicious computer activities.  According to Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief for Europe, such an internal investigation was not undertaken lightly or because of an “email spat.”  He said that such an investigation was “a big deal” involving the CIA Office of Security in Washington and possibly the FBI.  It would also result in the temporary suspension of his secrecy clearance. This left Snowden with little choice. If he wanted avoid the investigation, he had to resign from the CIA, which he did.  That was the end of the security investigation.  He was clearly bitter about the CIA, posting on Ars Technica on January 10, 2009, “Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the CIA!”  (He was referring to Leon Panetta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff.)  Snowden attributed the origins of his antipathy to US intelligence to his 2007-2009 experiences in the CIA.  Snowden later told Vanity Fair that the 2009 incident in the CIA convinced him that working “through the system would lead only to reprisals.” "Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he told the Guardian in June 2013. "I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."    Snowden, if not yet a ticking time bomb, was certainly a disgruntled intelligence worker before he ever got to the NSA




CHAPTER FIVE
Contractor

“Private contractors don’t clear employees. The government does.”--
                 Admiral Michael McConnell, Vice Chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton


  Snowden, age 26, returned from Europe and moved into his mother’s condo. He was not only unemployed now, having resigned the CIA without qualifying for any benefits, but his financial state had been hurt by the huge losses he had suffered playing the options market in Geneva.  His vision of himself as a secret agent, the unstoppable “Wolfking Awesomefox” may have also suffered.  According to the narrative he later supplied to the Guardian, he had become deeply concerned about the immoral way in which the CIA conducted its intelligence operations in Switzerland.  "Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good," Snowden told the Guardian. By way of example, he said he learned that the CIA had gotten a Swiss banker drunk enough arrested to be arrested when he drove, so the CIA could compromise him. Snowden, who did not drink himself, was appalled at this ploy.  Despite his growing antagonism towards the US government, he had not given up on, if not becoming a secret agent, working in the netherworld of secret intelligence.

    Although Snowden’s career had abruptly ended at the CIA, there still was a backdoor through which he could re-enter the spy world.  It was private corporations that hired civilian technicians to work for spy agencies as independent contractors.   By 2009, The CIA, NSA and other US intelligence services had outsourced much of the job of maintaining and upgrading their computer systems to these private companies.  They supplied the NSA with most of its system administrators and other information technology workers.  This arrangement allowed the NSA to effectively bypass budget limits and other restrictions limiting how many NSA technicians it could recruit.  Instead, of putting these workers on its own payroll, they nominally worked for, and received their paychecks from, private employers.  In fact, many of these outside contractors worked full-time for the NSA.

Snowden applied in April 2009 to one of these private companies, Dell SecureWorks.  It was   a subsidiary of the Dell computer company.  To diverse out of manufacturing computers, Dell had recently gone into the business of managing government computer systems for the NSA and other intelligence services.  As a leading specialist in the field of corporate cyber security, Dell had no problem obtaining sizable contracts for from the NSA’s Technology Directorate.  In 2008, the NSA had in effect outsourced to Dell the task of re-organizing its back-up systems at its regional bases.  Now Dell had to find thousands of independent contractors to work at these bases  In 2009, when Snowden applied,  Dell was seeking to fill positions at the NSA’s regional base in Japan. It first had to find technicians willing to go to Japan. Since Snowden had a long-time interest in going to Japan, he was more than willing to relocate to Japan.

    He had little problem obtaining the job.   Aside from his family connections, he had a single compelling qualification for the job—a top secret clearance. For an outside contractor such as Dell, such a security clearance was pure gold. If a potential recruit lacked a top secret clearance, before Dell could deploy him or her at the NSA, it needed a wait for the completion of a time-consuming background check.  If a recruit already had one, as Snowden did, he could begin working immediately.

   The reason that Snowden still had his secrecy clearance, despite his highly-problematic exit from the CIA, was that the CIA had instituted a policy a few years earlier that allowed voluntarily-retiring CIA officers to keep their secrecy clearance for two years after they left. This “free pass,” as one former CIA officer called the two year grace period, had been intended to make it easier for retiring officers to find jobs in parts of the defense industry that required secrecy clearance.  This accommodation, in turn, made it easier for the CIA to downsize to meet its budget.

Not only did Snowden retain his security clearance, but unlike when he had applied for his job at the CIA in 2006, he now could list on his resume two years experience in information technology and cyber security at the CIA.  All Dell could check was a single fact:  Snowden was indeed employed at the CIA between 2006 and 2009.  His CIA file, which contained the “derog,” was not available to Dell or any other private company.  Even though the CIA had “security concerns” about Snowden, as CIA Deputy Director Morell noted, it could not convey them to either Dell or the NSA.   “So the guy with whom the CIA had concerns left the Agency and joined the ranks of the many contractors working in the intelligence community before CIA could inform the rest of the IC about its worries,” Morell explained. “He even got a pay raise.”    Obviously, this was a glitch in the security system but, as a result of it, Snowden entered the NSA by the back door only five months after being forced out of the CIA.

    For the next 45 months Dell assigned him various IT tasks at the NSA.  In June 2009, he was sent to Japan to work in the NSA complex at the Yokota air base outside Tokyo. He moved into a small one bedroom apartment in the nearby town of Fussia.   His initial job for Dell was teaching cyber security to Army and Air Force personnel.  In this capacity, he instructed US military officers stationed at the base in how to shield their computers from hackers.   Such security training had been required for military personnel dealing with classified material after several successful break-ins to US military networks by China, Russia, and other adversary nations.  Although it finally brought him to Japan, it was not a challenging or interesting job.

But Snowden found diversions in Japan.  In July 2009, he was joined in Japan by Lindsay Mills.  She had become an amateur photographer, specializing in arty self portraits. She also saw herself as a global tourist, writing in her blog after arriving in Japan that had she travelled to 17 countries.  Like Snowden, she also deemed herself, tongue and cheek, a “super hero.”  In this sense, her Internet avatar, was a match for Snowden’s “Wolfking Awesomefox,”

   In Japan, Mills and Snowden spent time with another American couple, Jennie and Joseph Chamberlin, who also worked at the Yokota base.  Jennie, a sergeant in the public affairs section of the US Air force, had been at Art College with Mills, and called herself in her blog the “Little Red Ninja.” Her husband, Joseph Chamberlin was a decorated US Navy pilot who now flew highly-sensitive intelligence-gathering missions from the Yokota base.  When Lindsay Mills arrived she made contact with Jennie, who in the next few weeks showed her many of the sights of Tokyo.  Jennie described Lindsay in her blog as her “super-model friend.” The two couples also went on expeditions in Japan together. Joseph Chamberlin had a car and, as far as is known, he and his wife were the only Americans at the base with whom Snowden socialized.  On August 17, 2009, the foursome attempted to walk up Mount Fuji, but they got lost en route to the tourist site.  Giving up on Mount Fuji, they wound up in the Mount Fuji gift shop.  Jennie described the misadventure in her Little Red Ninja blog:   “Our adventure started off a little rocky with our attempts to find the interstate.  Alas, our iconic mountain was obscured by cloud.  A short stop at the Mt. Fuji combination soba noodle stand/gift shop was enough to whet our appetite for the further exploration that is to come.”  The photographs that day show Snowden wearing Hawaiian shorts, and a black tank top emblazoned with an eagle and the letters USA.  They also show Mills wearing safari shorts, a brown sweater and what appears to be an engagement ring  (possibly to allay suspicions about her living with Snowden.)  “Ed was looking rather rednecky,” Lindsay commented on one the photograph.  Snowden described her, in turn, as “nerdy.”   Finally, after posing for photographs, they found the Suyama-guchi path.  But they never made it to the top.

        Back in Tokyo, Snowden was still seeking to advance himself.  He attempted to get a college certificate by enrolling in a summer on-line course at the University of Maryland’s Asia program.   But, according to the program’s record, he did not succeed in receiving any credit or a certificate from the on-line University.

Finally, in October 2009, Dell assigned Snowden a job in which he had direct access to the NSA’s computers. His new position was a system administrator, which is essentially a tech-savvy repairman. Dell was working on backup system code-named EPIC SHELTER.  For this contract, Dell was transferring large chunks of data from the NSA’s main computers in Maryland to back-up drives in Japan so if there was a communications interruption the system could be quickly restored.  Since most of the classified data was in its encrypted form, it had little value to any outside party.  Snowden’s job was to maintain the proper functioning of computers but, as a system administrator, he also had privileges to call up unencrypted files.  He sat in front of a computer screen all day looking for any problems in the transferring files to back-up servers.  The work was highly-repetitive and exceedingly dull.  Snowden found time to search for anomalies in the system and he claimed to have spotted a major flaw in the security system in late 2009. The flaw was that a system administrator in Japan worked as a singleton and could steal secret data without anyone else realizing that it had been stolen. It intrigued him enough for him to bring it to the attention of his superiors, as he later said. Snowden saw that a rogue system administrator like himself could use his computer privileges to download and steal documents in ways that would go unnoticed.  The emergence of a rogue system administrator was not that farfetched in 2009.   Hacktavists such as Julian Assange had adopted the battle cry: system administrators, or “syst admins of the world unite.”  Instead of asking them to “throw off their chains,” as Marx did, he asked them to send classified documents about secret government activity to the Wikileaks site. Snowden recalled in Moscow in 2014: “I actually recommended they [the NSA] move to two-man control for administrative access back in 2009.” To make his point even clearer, he added: “A whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.”  Not without irony, Snowden himself became that rogue system administrator some three years later at Dell. In fact, he later used the vulnerability he pointed out to steal NSA documents at Dell (before moving to Booz Allen.).

    In September 2009, Snowden made a ten day trip to India.  He later said he was on an official visit “working at the US embassy.”  He was still on the Dell payroll.  Hotel records show that he arrived at the Hyatt Regency hotel in New Delhi on September 2nd from Japan, and at 3:30 pm on September 3rd, checked into the Koenig Inn, a facility that was an annex to Koenig Solutions, a school that gave crash courses on programming and computer hacking.    According to Rohit Aggarwal, the head of the school, Snowden stayed there until September 10th while taking classes with a private instructor.   It cost $2,000 in tuition and fees, which Snowden prepaid from Japan with his own personal credit card.  Even though Snowden later said he only took courses in “programming,” the school’s records show that during that week he took intensive courses in sophisticated hacking techniques.  Although the course was entitled “ethical hacking” that was also a euphemism for teaching the techniques of illicit hacking. The course provided tutoring on hacker’s tools, such as “Spyeye” and “ZeuS,” that are used to circumvent security procedures.  It also demonstrated how these hacking tools could be customized by criminals and spies to break into files, plant surveillance programs, impersonate system administrators, assume the privileges of system administrators in a network, and capture the passwords of others.  On September 11th, Snowden, according to hotel records, left India for Japan.   While the stated purpose of the hacking training was to allow security consultants to detect intruders, it also prepared Snowden to be, if he chooses to be, an intruder in the NSA system.

One problem with working as a contractor is that the standard two-year contracts are not necessarily renewed, making a contractor’s job essentially temporary employment. Nor is there much possibility for advancement for IT workers.  As one contractor told me “It is a dead end job with great pay.”   In the fall of 2010, Snowden’s contract in Japan with Dell SecureWorks came to an end.   Dell then offered Snowden a new position in the United States.

He now was assigned to work at Dell headquarters in Annapolis, Maryland. He rented a modest suburban house shaded by a Sakura cherry tree in suburb of Annapolis, Maryland.  Mills meanwhile was attending a two-week fitness training course at a Yoga camp that qualified her to be a yoga instructor. She then moved in with Snowden.  Even though she had been living on and off with Snowden during the past two years abroad, including while he worked at the CIA in Switzerland and the NSA in Japan, they had not shared a home in America up until now.   The now 25-year old Mills posted on Instagram “Finally in our first US place together.” She also put on line pictures of him in bed with her, who she now affectionately referred to in her posts as a “computer crusader.”

   Dell meanwhile had him to work on problem- solving for its corporate clients.  In preparation for his corporate role, he shaved off this facial hair and, with Lindsay’s help, bought a Ralph Lauren suit.  These corporate clients were assisting the NSA, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Consequently, Snowden dealt with a wide range of intelligence officers, and gave presentations on the vulnerabilities at computer security at the DIA-sponsored Joint Counter Intelligence seminar.

His dealings with these US intelligence officers in no way mitigated his resentment of the intelligence establishment.  What began at the CIA in 2009 as objections to what he saw as the incompetence of his superiors grew into well-articulated disapproval of the way that the US government conducted its intelligence.  He found NSA surveillance particularly worrisome, later telling the Guardian: "They [the NSA] are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them."  He claimed after defecting to Moscow that he had voiced his concerns about what he considered illicit surveillance to ten NSA officials, “none of whom took any action to address them.”  The NSA can find no record of these complaints but if Snowden had indeed complained to these officials while working for Dell, his superiors at Dell either didn’t notice or care that they had a very disgruntled employee on their hand.   He also made no secret of anger at the US government and the corporations that served it on the Internet.  He railed on the Ars Technica site against the complicity of private corporations, such as Dell, that assisted the NSA.  In his on-line posts in 2010, Snowden expressed loathing for the assistance that corporate America was providing the intelligence community.  “It really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behavior bothers those outside of technology circles,” he wrote under his True Hoo-ha alias.  He said he feared that America was already on “a slippery slope,” and suggested, perhaps adumbrating his own later actions, that this corporate assistance to US intelligence “was entirely within our control to stop.”  What the “computer crusader,” as Mills had playfully called him in her Internet postings, expressed in these angry Internet postings was an almost obsessive concern over individuals freely submitting to government authority.   “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types,” he wrote on Ars Technica without mentioning that he himself worked for a corporation, Dell that assisted spy agencies.  He asked rhetorically on this public forum whether the sinister slide towards a surveillance state “sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?”

     The outright contempt he expressed towards this “government secrecy” in no way prevented him from seeking even more secret work at Dell for the intelligence services. In February 2011, after his CIA security clearance ran out, he applied to renew it.  A new clearance required a new background check and filling out (again) the government’s 127-page standard form 86.

Since 1996, background investigations for the NSA, like much of the computer work at the NSA, had been outsourced to a private company.  It had proceeded from the effort of the Clinton Administration to cut the size of the government by privatizing tasks that could be more efficiently done by for profit companies. US Investigations Services, or USIS as it is now called, which won the contract for background checks, was initially owned by the hedge fund Carlyle Group who later sold it to another hedge fund, Providence Equity Partners.  For the hedge funds, profits were the measure of success.  To increase its profits from the contract with the NSA, USIS had to move more quickly in concluding background checks since it did not get paid more extensive investigation.  In 2006, the government learned USIS’s background checks were often prematurely ended.  In Snowden’s case, as USIS did not have access to Snowden’s CIA personnel files, it did not learn about the pending security investigation of him. Nor did it learn from the Internet that he was a disgruntled employee. So Snowden’s new clearance was approved in the summer of 2011, allowing him to continue working for Dell on secret intelligence projects.

Meanwhile, in August 2011, Mills began her own blog entitled “L’s Journey.” In it, she described herself as “a world-traveling pole-dancing super hero.”  By now, she was an accomplished photographer, specializing in taking self-portraits.  Many of her posted pictures were provocative poses of herself in her underwear and various states of undress. She wrote:  “I’ve always wanted to be splashed on the cover of magazines, with my best air-brushed look.” Her wish would be gratified two years later in way she did not anticipate.

   For his part, Snowden seemed happy to encourage her fantasy about being a super hero. He even gave her a Star-Trek-inspired head visor.  Despite all the concerns he voiced about privacy, he did not seem to mind her provocative posts.  On the contrary, he took photographs of her, telling her, at one point, that her photographs were not “sexy” enough.

Snowden meanwhile got offered by Dell a new position at an NSA Kunia regional base in Hawaii. Dell, which was in the process of expanding its government consulting business, wanted him to be a system administrator on the NSA’s back-up system. The NSA needed this system before it could upgrade new security protocols that would audit suspicious activity in real time.  In Hawaii, as in Japan, system administrators still worked as singletons. As Snowden had seen when working in Japan this solo work in an unaudited workplace provided an opportunity for a system administrator like himself to steal documents.  So he may have also realized that as a solo system administrator in Hawaii, he would have this opportunity.

In any case, on March 15, 2012, he accepted the offer. Dell agreed to pay all his relocation expenses and provide him with a housing allowance.

 He found a 3-bedroom house in Hawaii on-line, and arranged to move there on April 2, 2012. 1t was located at 94-1044 Eleu Street in the upper-middle class suburb of Waipahu, only a few blocks from the Royal Kunia country club.  It had a master bedroom with a walk-in closet, a patio deck in back shielded from public view by a clump of palm trees and a large garage with an automatic door. The move to Hawaii entailed a brief separation from his girlfriend since Mills had committed her to attending her girlfriend’s wedding in May.  After he left for his new assignment, she wrote on Instagram, “Sex toy party and then saying goodbye to my man -- well not goodbye so much as see you in two month/s.”





CHAPTER SIX
Thief

 “We begin by coveting what we see every day”

                                    —Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs

     In Hawaii in 2012, Snowden was living a very comfortable life. He was earning from Dell just over $120,000 a year.  His housing allowance from Dell paid the rent on his 1,559 square-foot house.   He had also leased a sporty car.  Looking back at this period of life from Moscow, he said he had been “living in paradise.”

He went to work five times a week, a 15 minute trip drive through a lush landscape with sugar plantations.  After passing through security, he parked his car in a sprawling parking lot, and entered the underground part of the NSA base known as “the tunnel.”  He said in describing the atmosphere, “You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.”  He said that to relieve the tediousness of the work, every two months or so his fellow workers would pass around a naked picture that showed up on their screens.  He explained: “You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who] suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across … an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position.”  Snowden, as will be recalled, was no stranger to posting lewd photographs. Before he joined the CIA, he had posted pictures of himself mooning on the Internet.  He also knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a violation of NSA rules.  But he did not report this illicit activity at the NSA even though he later claimed that it occurred regularly.  He joked in his Moscow interview with the Guardian that some of the nudes were “extremely attractive” and that viewing them was, as he put it, “a sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”

    Snowden also had an interest in American politics. He identified with the Libertarian Party, and at the NSA he made no effort to conceal his political support of its causes.  He became an active partisan of Congressman Ron Paul, the leading figure in the Libertarian Party in 2012. “He's so dreamy,” Snowden posted on the Ars Technica site in March 2009 (just after he registered to vote in North Carolina.)   Since Paul was running as a Presidential candidate in the 2012 Republican primaries, Snowden sent the Paul election committee a contribution of $500.  Snowden’s attraction to the Libertarian ideology of Ron Paul was not that surprising. At the core of Paul’s libertarianism was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the government into private lives.  Snowden shared this same hostility towards government authority, as was clear from his Internet postings.   Like other libertarians, Snowden believed that citizens should not be shackled by Federal law.  He later told a Libertarian gathering, at which Ron Paul also spoke, “Law is a lot like medicine.  When you have too much it can be fatal."   Paul also ardently opposed any form of gun control.  Not only did Snowden support this position in his Internet postings, but so did his girlfriend Lindsay Mills in her own on-line postings.

  Most relevant to his future activities at the NSA, Snowden whole-heartedly agreed with the position of Paul on the dangers inherent in government’s surveillance of US citizens. Paul described the CIA, the organization which had forced Snowden out, as nothing short of a “secret government” and that "In a true Republic, there is no place for an organization like the CIA." He also railed against NSA surveillance.

As is clear from Snowden’s Internet postings, he, like Ron Paul, expressed doubts about the competency of the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government.  Snowden’s own disillusionment about the government may have begun with his rejection, and perceived mistreatment, by the Special Forces of the US Army. It was almost certainly reinforced by his ouster from the CIA.  He later told the Guardian that he was disillusioned as early as 2007 when he learned about the CIA’s methods in compromising Swiss citizens.  He also told the New York Times after he arrived in Moscow that he came to realize while working in the CIA that any attempt redress these wrongs against him by working through the system would only lead to further punishment for him. His critical view of the US government only hardened during the years he worked at the NSA. He described his NSA superiors as “grossly incompetent,” as he later explained to a journalist from Wired magazine in Moscow. At the NSA, he said employees were kept in line by “fear and a false image of patriotism.”  He said that he saw his fellow workers cowed into “obedience to authority” and his superiors induced to break the law.  He became particularly concerned with what he called the “secret powers” of the NSA.  He saw them as “tremendously dangerous.”  By this time, Snowden was fully aware that that the NSA conducted domestic surveillance because he had used his privileges as a system administrator in 2012 to obtain the NSA’s inspector general’s report on a 2009 surveillance program.

     Nevertheless, Snowden continued to work at the NSA, where he was, as he put it, “making a ton of money.”  Mills joined him in his “paradise” in June 2012, shortly before his 29th birthday.  Just before leaving Annapolis, Maryland for Hawaii, Mills posted a semi-nude picture of herself on her blog, “L’s Journey.” In it, her face was covered with a blanket.  The caption under it read: “Trying to avoid the changes coming my way.” In Honolulu, she found “E,” as she called Snowden in her blog, “elusive.”   She found that he preferred to stay at home and avoided meeting other people to the point that her friends “were not quite sure that E. existed.”  At best, one of Lindsay’s friends in an acrobatic class caught a glimpse of Snowden picking her up one afternoon.   Even though Mill’s dated Snowden for eight years, most of her friends, with the exception of Jennie and Joe Chamberlin in Japan, had never met Snowden.  If he had other social interactions in Hawaii, no one he met came forward and spoke of meeting him even after he became world famous.

    Two days after his 29th birthday dinner on June 21st, she described him playfully as a “goof.” She wrote in her blog:”The universe is telling me something and I'm pretty sure it's saying get out, Fuck you Hawaii.”  In early July, she summed up her shaky situation with Snowden, in another blog, writing: “I moved to Hawaii to continue my relationship with E. [but] it has been an emotional roller coaster since I stepped off the plane.”  She also found it odd that Snowden would work on his computer at home hooded under a blanket, as she would later tell the FBI.   She diverted herself by organizing a pole dancing studio in the 400 foot garage of the house. She also joined a New Age yoga studio called “Physical Phatness,” a local acrobatic performance group, and, on Friday nights, pole-danced at the Mercury lounge in downtown Honolulu.

      That same July, Snowden had other things on his mind, including an attempt to advance himself.  Although his position at Dell as a system administrator was a well-compensated one, especially for a 29 year old with no formal education, it carried little prestige.  He sat from 9 AM to 5 PM in a windowless room watching a bank of monitors in the so-called “tunnel” at the NSA.  Many of those who worked him were, as he described them, “eighteen year old
soldiers.  Presumably, they had little interest in discussing with him the weightier issues of the world.  Working as an outside contractor was also a dead-end job that hardly matched the vision he had of himself in his Internet postings.  In real life in a cubicle in the NSA, he decidedly was not the “Wolfking Awesomefox” heroic image he had of himself in his dream vision.

   Whatever his motive, he decided to apply for a position in the NSA itself.  He apparently believed that if he scored high enough in its entrance exam, the NSA would invite him to join it as a Senior Executive Service officer, or SES, which was the civilian equivalent in rank and pay to a flag officer in the US armed forces.  To achieve this SES job, Snowden used his privileges as a system administrator at Dell to hack into the NSA’s administrative files and steal the answers to the NSA exam. As the NSA’s subsequent post mortem would find out, it was the first known document that Snowden took at the NSA.  But it was not the first time he had used his hacking skills to attempt to advance himself.  At the CIA in 2009, as he late said in Moscow, he had added text to his annual evaluation in what he termed “a non-malicious way” to prove a point.  His CIA superior took a much darker view of that incident when the hack was detected, calling for an investigation that, it will be recalled, ended Snowden’s CIA career. At the NSA his intrusion, however, was not detected for almost a year.   “He stole the [NSA] test with the answers, and he took the test and he aced it,” former NSA Director Michael McConnell recounted in a 2013 interview, “He then walked into to the NSA and said you should hire me because I am this good on the test.”   The issue of why he attempted to gain entry into the upper ranks of the NSA in the late summer of 2012 is less clear.  If his Internet posting and Libertarian riffs are an indication of his state of mind in 2012, he was hostile to the surveillance activities of the NSA. If so, it made little sense he would seek a permanent career in the NSA. If this attempted career is considered in light of the career move he made six months later in March 2013 which, as he himself admits, was for the express purpose of getting at tightly-held documents stored on computers that were not available to him in his job at Dell, he may have been seeking wider access in 2012 for a more nefarious purpose than a NSA job.

In any case, despite the near-perfect high grades he scored, the NSA did not offer him a position in the senior executive service job.   While Snowden may have believed such results would elevate him, the NSA’s offer did not meet his expectations. “It was totally unrealistic for Snowden to expect to get a SES position,” a former senior NSA officer told me. Snowden ambitions may have been disappointed in this instance, but it did not prevent him from later claiming that he had been a senior adviser to the CIA and also a senior adviser to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Instead of an SES position, the NSA offered a lowly G-13 job as an information technology worker, which was not an improvement on his job at Dell. He took this slight as evidence of the NSA’s incompetence, subsequently joking to a reporter in Moscow that his ability to steal the test answers should have been seen as a qualification for the NSA job.  In September 2012, he turned down the NSA offer.  If he was to advance himself now, he had to find a new way.




CHAPTER SEVEN
Crossing the Rubicon



“What I came to feel is that a regime that is described as a national security agency has stopped representing the public interest and has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests. “
          --Edward Snowden, interviewed in Moscow 2014

       Soon after Snowden failed to get a SES job at the NSA, he intensified his rogue activities. At that time, Dell was tasked with building an enhanced backup system for the NSA in Hawaii.  Deputy Director Ledgett explained that part of Snowden’s job as a system administrator under contract to Dell was transferring files held at Fort Meade to back-up computers in Hawaii.  He “was moving copies of that data there for them, which was perfect cover for stealing the [NSA] data.”   Snowden took advantage of this cover.

     Snowden expanded his own rogue operation, as Ledgett reconstructed the breach, through the fall and winter of 2012.  There was little risk of him getting caught.  The security measures at the Hawaii base presented no obstacles to him since, as a system administrator, he had privileges that allowed him to copy documents that had not been encrypted.  Indeed, it was part of the process of building the backup system.   The flaw he had pointed to in Japan in which system administrators working solo could safely steal files also existed in Hawaii.  This time, however, instead of bringing it to the attention of the NSA, he used it to himself steal files. He could be confident that his 2012 thefts of documents would go undetected because the NSA’s base had not yet installed an auditing system.  Such real-time auditing of the movement of documents, which was done at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade and most of the NSA’s regional facilities, had not yet been installed at the Hawaii base because a lack of bandwidth prevented the safe upgrading of the software.  This auditing software was scheduled to be installed after the backup system was completed in 2013. The Kunia base was one of the last NSA bases which did not monitor suspicious transfers of files on a real-time basis.  Snowden certainly was certainly aware of this deficiency.  He later pointed out in his interview in Wired magazine in Moscow that the NSA base where he worked did not have an “audit” mechanism.  This security gap allowed Snowden, using his system administrator’s credentials, to copy classified data to a thumb drive without anyone being able to trace the copied data back to him. And, according to the NSA’s subsequent damage assessment, he stole many thousands of pages while working for Dell in 2012 before he contacted journalists.  Deputy Director Ledgett subsequently reported that the NSA analysis the 58,000 documents that were given by Snowden to journalists in June 2013 showed that most of them were taken by Snowden while he was still working at Dell.

This 2012 theft was made even more serious by the interconnection of NSA computers with those of other intelligence agencies.  It will be recalled that prior to the 9/11 attack in 2001, NSA data had been protected by “stove-piping” that separated NSA’ computers from networks used by other intelligence services.  After the 9/11 Commission concluded that part of the reason why US intelligence agencies were unable to “connect the dots” in advance of the attack was because this “stove-piping, the NSA stripped away a large part of its “stove-piping.” One result was that the NSANet, which Snowden had access to at Dell in 2012, became a shared network.  It had common access points.  General Hayden described them to me as the equivalent of “reading rooms” in a library. They served as a means for NSA workers to exchange ideas about the problems they were encountering on various projects for the intelligence community.  In maintaining them, system administrators, or “system admins,” like Snowden acted as the “librarians.” If a stem administrator copied data from this network, no one knew.

 For Snowden, the NSANet, which included CIA and Defense Department documents, provided a rich hunting ground for Snowden in the fall and winter of 2012. Many of the documents he took off the NSANet revealed not only operations of the NSA but also those of the CIA and Pentagon.  By taking them he had come to a Rubicon from which there would be no return.  He later explained in an email to Vanity Fair from Moscow, “I crossed that line.”

As far as is known, he was not sharing them with any other party prior to May 2013.  He was not even yet in contact with Poitras, Greenwald or any other journalists. Presumably, Snowden was collecting them drives, despite the risks that possessing such a collection of secrets might entail, for some future use.

But why would Snowden jeopardize his career and, if caught, his freedom, by undertaking this illicit enterprise?  He may have had by now strong ideological objections the NSA’s global surveillance. As he said later in Moscow,  “we’re subverting our security standards for the sake of surveillance.”  But ordinarily even ideologically-opposed employees don’t steal state secrets and risk imprisonment.  If they are disgruntled, they seek employment elsewhere.  Certainly, Snowden, with his three years experience working for Dell, would have little problem finding a job as an IT worker in the booming civilian sector of computer technology.  Instead of resigning, he sought to widen his access to NSA documents. This behavior suggests to me that he had another agenda.  One possible clue to it is the first document he took; the NSA exam. The secret in that document, the answers to the questions, were a form of power to him: power to burrow deeper into the executive structure of the NSA.  It would unlock the door to door to even the more powerful documents containing the NSA’s sources stored in Level 3 compartments.    His later actions demonstrated that he equated the possession of such secrets with personal power.  For example, after he arrived in Moscow in 2013, he bragged to James Risen of the New York Times that he had access to secrets that gave him great leverage over the NSA. He told him specifically  his access to “full lists” of NSA’s agents and operation in adversary countries could, if revealed, closed down the NSA’s capabilities to gather information in them.

Such a fascination with the power of government-held secrets has always been a core concern of radical libertarians. In his 1956 book The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies, the sociologist Edward Shils brilliantly dissects the fascination with secrecy among individuals on all ends of the political spectrum who fear that government agencies will use covert machinations against them.  In Shils’ concept, this anti-government counter-culture is “tormented” by the government’s possession of knowledge unavailable to them.  Those who subscribe to this culture tend to believe that the agencies that hold these secrets, such as the FBI, CIA and NSA, can control their lives.  The other side of this torment over others holding secrets is the belief that by obtaining such secrets will give individuals power over government.

   Snowden himself was concerned with a coming “dark future,” which he later described as follows: “[The elites] know everything about us and we know nothing about them – because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class… the elite class, the political class, the resource class – we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction of the future but I think there are changing possibilities in this.”

To change the “dark future,” someone would have to know the secrets of the “elites.”  Snowden saw himself as one of the few individuals in a position to seize state secrets from those elites.  He had both a SCI, or Sensitive Compartmental Information, clearance, a pass into a NSA regional base and the privileges of a system administrator.  This position allowed him to steal state secrets—and whatever power that went with them. And if he moved to a position that gave him greater access, he would, in this view, amass even greater power.
 Whatever his actual agenda in 2012, we know that he tested possible reactions to a leak exposing NSA surveillance in the United States. He asked fellow workers at the NSA base in 2012, according to his own account: “What do you think the public would do if this [secret data] was on the front page?”    He asked this question at a time when a large number of State Department and US Army classified documents had been posted on Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website.  While these Wikileaks revelations of secrets were making front-page headlines, the NSA documents that Snowden had taken were far more explosive since they contained NSA intelligence secrets. And no NSA document had ever been published in the press in 2012.  One reason why NSA documents remained secrets, as all intelligence workers at Dell were told when they signed their oath, was that the unauthorized release of communications intelligence documents could violate US espionage laws.

Even so, there was no shortage of activists overseas, such as Assange, who would be willing to publish NSA documents revealing its global surveillance activities. And in answer to his rhetorical question, he no doubt knew that they would cause an immense reaction on the front page. Cyber punks, as these activists called themselves, tended to be hostile to the NSA since they believed (correctly) that it monitored their activities on the Internet.  This anti-NSA view was well represented at the Computer Chaos Club convention in Berlin. In addressing these cyber punks Assange and his followers at Wikileaks declared that the main enemy in cyber space was the NSA.

In the late fall of 2012, Snowden further tested his newly found powers. Using an alias, he reached out to some of the leading hacktavists.  It opened a door for him to the darker side of cyber space.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hacktavist

. “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss gazes into you”. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

By 2012, the alienated hacktavist battling to unlock the secrets of evil corporations and governments had become a stock hero of popular culture.  For example, in the prize-winning Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy by Stieg Larsson, which sold 90 million copies, the heroine, a self-educated hacker in her twenties named Lisbeth Salander steals incriminating documents from computers that provides journalist Mikael Blomkvist with scoops that save the progressive magazine he edits from bankruptcy.  Her sociopathic behavior, which includes embezzling millions of dollars, extortion, maiming and murder, is accepted by the journalists at the magazine because her hacking exposes crimes and abuses of power.  In the realm of non-fiction universe, hacktavists also use their skills to attempt to redress perceived abuses of power, For example in December 2010, the group “Anonymous,”  whose members called “Anon” often wear Guy Fawkes masks resembling those worn in the 2006 movie V Is For Vendetta, launched a successful denial of service attack called “Operation Avenge Assange,” It was aimed at paralyzing companies, including PayPal and MasterCard that refused to process donations for Wikileaks because these “anons” believed that these companies were stifling the freedom of the Internet by hindering the money flow to Wikileaks. Since hacktavists often use illicit means to redress their grievances, such denial of service attacks, theft of passwords and hacking into computers, they must conceal their true identities to avoid the retribution of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.  This requires them to operate on the dark side of cyber space which has become known as the dark net.      Fortunately for hacktavists, the  dark net is accessible to anyone.

  It is a place frequented by those that want to avoid laws, regulations and government surveillance. Its denizens include cyber saboteurs, industrial spies, purveyors of illegal contraband, spammers, pranksters, identity thieves, video pirates, bullies, slanderers, drug dealers, child pornographers, money launderers, contract killers, inside traders, anarchists, terrorists, and the intelligence services of many countries.

   Sue Halpern writing about it in the New York Review of books noted: “My own forays to the dark Net include visits to sites offering counterfeit drivers’ licenses, methamphetamine, a template for a US twenty-dollar bill, files to make a 3D-printed gun, and books describing how to receive illegal goods in the mail without getting caught. There were, too, links to rape and child abuse videos “

    To operate effectively on the dark net, a mask of anonymity is often necessary.  But it is not easy to completely hide enes tracks in cyber space.  The way that the Internet ordinarily works is that whenever an individual sends emails, instant messages, or visits a websites, his or her identity can be referenced by the IP address assigned to him or her by their internet service provider.    The problem is that if dark side users’ IP address is discoverable, they obviously cannot remain anonymous.  So, to evade this built-in transparency in the Internet, dark side users have come to rely on ingenious software to hide their IP address. The most commonly used software for this purpose is TOR.  It was first called The Onion Router, since it moves IP addresses through multiple layers, but it quickly became known simply by its acronym, TOR.   TOR software hides the IP address by routing messages through a network of TOR-enabled relay stations, called “nodes.” Each node further obscure the user’s IP, even from the next node in the network. This scrambling allows messages to exit the chain of TOR nodes without an easily discoverable IP.  By doing so, it “anomizes” each user of the dark side.

   Because of the anonymity it provides, TOR became the software of choice for individuals and organization who wanted to hide their identity.  For example, TOR software made possible Silk Road, which acted as an exchange for drug dealers, assassins, safe crackers, and prostitutes until it was closed down by the FBI in 2011.  It was created by Ross Ulbricht, a libertarian who wore a Ron Paul t-shirt, “to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that led back to them.” (Ulbricht received a life prison sentence for running this criminal enterprise in May 2015.)  To eradicate the Internet trail, Silk Road employed TOR software.

 TOR was also employed to steal and transfer classified secrets by Private Bradley Manning (now called Chelsea Manning.)  He used TOR software to transfer some 50,000 diplomatic cables and military reports from his laptop to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website. Eventually Manning was identified by a fellow hacker, convicted by a military court for violations of the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.  TOR enabled Wikileaks to publish other secret data, such as the theft of Sony’s files allegedly by the North Korean intelligence service in 2015.  It was the means for guaranteeing anonymity to the IT workers who responded to his by now famous clarion call “System admins of the world unite.”  It allowed system administrators who opposed the “surveillance state,” as well as other disgruntled employees of government agencies or corporation, to send documents they copied to the Wikileaks website without revealing their IP addresses.  Since Wikileaks did not know the identity of their sources, they could not be legally compelled to reveal them.   "Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2010.  Indeed without the anonymity provided by its TOR software, Wikileaks could not have easily entered into a document-sharing arrangement major newspapers, including the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais.  Through the magic of TOR, these newspapers simply attribute their sources to Wikileaks which, in turn, made Assange a major force in international journalism/.

    Ironically, TOR originally was a creation of US intelligence.  In the early 2000s, the US Naval Research Laboratory and the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) developed it to allow US intelligence operatives to cloak their movements on the Internet. They could anonymously manipulate web sites operated by Islamic radicals, for example, and create their own Trojan Horse sites to lures would-be terrorists and spies.  As it turned out, that use of TOR software had a conceptual flaw.  If US intelligence services used it, the targets could figure out that anyone visiting a site without an IP address was using TOR software to hide it. If TOR was exclusive used by US intelligence services, the targets could further deduce that all the anonymous visitors were avatars for American intelligence.  It would be analogous to undercover police using pink-color cars that civilians did not use.

   To remedy this flaw, the US government in 2008 made TOR software open-source and freely available to everyone in the world.   It even provided funding for its promulgation with the State Department, the National Science Foundation, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors financing TOR’s core developer.  The public rationale for this generosity was that TOR could serve as a tool for, as the State Department called it, “democracy advocates in authoritarian states."  The result was TOR software became a tool of both intelligence services and their adversaries.

    As TOR software became widely used by adversaries (as well as common criminals), the NSA sought to find vulnerabilities in it.  “It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ that use TOR software to hide their communications, explained a NSA spokesperson.  The NSA’s adversaries also took an interest in identifying TOR users.

TOR software also took on a cult-like importance to hacktavists concerned with the US government tracking their activities.  An illuminating insight into the mind-set of the TOR hacktavists is provided by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick in her 2013 book Privacy For Me Not For Thee.  She describes these hacktavists as largely “radical anarchists,” who believe “the state is all-powerful, that law-enforcement is so strong that it will prevail anyway, and that they are a persecuted minority.”   As a refuge against the surveillance of the state, and in particular the NSA, they not only hide attempt to their own identity nut use encryption to obscure their messages.  Their goal is free their movements from “of any interference from law-enforcement.”  In this mind-set, according to Fitzpatrick,  “They believe government intelligence agencies will stop at nothing to stop them from absolute encryption.”

TOR software was a means to defeat the NSA, but to be successfully there needed to be such a proliferation of TOR servers that the NSA could not piece together IP addresses. The problem was that in 2012 the TOR project, as they called it, was still a very tiny operation in 2012.  It employed less than 100 core developers who were located mainly in Germany, Iceland, Japan, Estonia, and the United States.  Its staff worked mainly out of a single room in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The guiding spirit behind the TOR movement was Jacob Appelbaum, a charismatic 28-year old who had grown up in northern California.  Like Snowden, he had dropped out of high school.  Appelbaum identified himself to his followers on the Internet as a “hacktivist” battling state surveillance.  For him, as with many in the hacktavist culture, the main enemy was the NSA. After all, the NSA had a vast army of computer scientists working to unravel TOR software.   Appelbaum was also well connected in this culture.  He was the North American representative for Wikileaks before he moved to Berlin in 2013. He also managed Wikileaks’ cyber security when it released classified documents in Iceland in 2010.  He was so well-regarded among hacktavists that Assange chose him as his keynote speaker replacement at the “Hackers of the Planet Earth” (HOPE) convention in New York City.  Assange also sung his praises, telling Rolling Stone “Jake [Appelbaum] has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause.”   For its part, Rolling Stone entitled its profile of Appelbaum, “Meet the most dangerous man on the Internet.”   The reason that Assange needed a replacement for this particular event was that he feared he would be arrested if he came to New York because he had released the Manning files on Wikileaks.

   In Berlin, Appelbaum went to extreme lengths to protect himself from American surveillance.  For example, when George Packer interviewed him for the New Yorker, in 2014, he insisted on meeting with Packer naked in a sauna so he could be sure Packer did not have a recording device (other than his notebook.)  Appelbaum stated repeatedly in other interviews that he was being spied upon by America.  While his claims may have sounded paranoid to his interviewers, as a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 famously said, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean that you are not being followed.”   In any event, Appelbaum acted to defeat the perceived surveillance.

Runa Sandvik was another principal core developers in the TOR project in 2012.  A Norwegian national in her mid-twenties, she wrote in 2012 a well-followed blog for Forbes on Internet privacy in which she identified herself as a privacy and security researcher working at the intersection of technology, law and policy.  As a close associate of Appelbaum’s, she worked tirelessly to extend TOR’s cloak of anonymity against the surveillance of the NSA and other would-be intruders of privacy.  Appelbaum and Sandvik shared another distinction. They both came in contact with Snowden before he went public and while he was still working for the NSA in Hawaii.

Snowden was in 2012 a major advocate of TOR software. He made no secret of his concerns about it electronic interceptions.  He even wore to work a jacket with a parody of the NSA insignia, which, instead of merely depicting the NSA eagle, show the eagle clutching AT&T phone lines.  He had also become a member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the digital rights organization that was helping finance TOR.  His efforts on behalf of TOR were not limited to symbolic gestures. Through his work as a system administrator for Dell, he had found documents revealing NSA efforts to defeat TOR’s ability to camouflage its user’s identity on the Internet. Though not yet successful, he found that the NSA was attempting to build back-door entry ways into TOR software.      He also knew that the NSA was becoming increasingly hostile to the spread of TOR software.  One of the NSA documents that he illicitly downloaded was entitled “TOR Stinks.” It described the NSA’s enormous but not fully successful efforts to penetrate TOR servers.  In addition, he downloaded NSA documents describing programs begun in 2012 that aimed at searching the Internet for the cyber-signatures of foreign parties suspected of hacking into US government systems.  So he knew that the NSA considered the TOR movement an enemy.

Nevertheless, Snowden worked to assist the TOR movement. He created TOR’s main exit node in Hawaii in 2012.  This activity required a two gigabyte server called “The Signal,” which he described as the largest TOR relay station in Honolulu.
Sandvik first heard directly from Snowden in November 2012.   At the time, he wrote her under the alias “Cincinnatus,” but also supplied his real name and address in Hawaii so that she could supply him with TOR stickers. So she knew his identity seven months before he went public.  He would later tell Sandvik from Moscow that he had been “moonlighting” on behalf of the TOR cause at the NSA.  By “moonlighting” he meant that in 2012 he had two jobs: Officially he was working as an NSA system administrator; unofficially he was working to advance the TOR Project.   He added, with some understatement, that his moonlighting was “something the NSA might not have been too happy about.”

  By November 2012, while still working for Dell at the NSA, his dual role led him to organize a “crypto party” aimed at finding new recruits for TOR.    The “crypto party” movement itself had been started in 2011 in Australia by Asher Wolf, a radical hacktavist and anarchist living in Melbourne.  She promoted them not unlike the tupper-ware parties of the 1950s.  They worked as follows. The party organizer, usually with a representative of the TOR project, advertised the party on the Internet.  Attendees were encouraged to bring their own laptops so they could install TOR as well encryption software in them. The attendees then would be instructed on how to use it. Finally, those converted to TOR software would be told to proselytize about its virtues by holding their own “crypto party.”  Wolf’s idea was to use these gatherings to expand the realm of TOR.
   On November 18, 2012, Snowden launched his initial crypto party.  It was called the “Oahu Crypto party” and had its own web page. He told Asher Wolf that it would be the first Crypto party in Honolulu. She wrote him back, advising him to “keep it simple.”(Wolf later said she did not know he was working at the NSA.)

  Snowden apparently had no inhibitions in staging a party which the NSA might consider subversive of its battle against TOR.  He even invited his fellow NSA workers in Hawaii as well as others in the local computer culture.  He asked Sandvik, who was living in Washington DC at the time, to participate, proposing that she co-host it with him in Honolulu. He scheduled it for December 11, 2012.  He suggested that TOR stickers that could be used as “swag” to lure an audience.     According to her account, Snowden informed he that he “had been talking to some of the more technical guys at work into setting up some additional fast servers” for TOR.  His “work” place at the time was the NSA. If so, he had already attempted to find co-workers at the NSA who might be interested in attending an anti-NSA surveillance presentation.

    Sandvik not only agreed a to be Snowden’s co-presenter but she made the Oahu Crypto party a TOR-sponsored event.  Sandvik flew to Honolulu on December 6, 2012. It was a fourteen hour flight and a relatively expensive one.  She later told Wired magazine that the invitation from Snowden coincided with her plan to take a “vacation in Hawaii.”  Whatever her reason, it brought her in direct contact with a TOR supporter with access to the computers of its main enemy, the NSA.

On December 11, 2012, following Snowden’s instructions, Sandvik arrived shortly before 6 PM at the Fishcake furniture store in downtown Honolulu.  She proceed to the back of the store where there was a public space called the Box Jelly.  It was used mainly for counterculture events. Folding chairs and work tables had already been set up, Snowden was there waiting for her with Lindsay Mills, who he introduced to Sandvik as his girlfriend.  He told her that she was there to film the event.

     Mills did not mention this Crypto party in her blog. But that Snowden brought her and introduced her to Sandvik suggests that he did not keep secret from her his activities to further TOR.

The event started at six PM sharp. By Sandvik’s count, about twenty people gradually filled the room. Some of them were from the local “Hi-Cap” computer club and other attendees were from Snowden’s NSA base.  Snowden began the presentation by giving reasons why Internet users needed to defend their privacy by using both encryption and TOR software. According to one attendee who asked not to be identified by name, Snowden, while not revealing that he worked for the NSA, spoke with such precise knowledge about government surveillance capabilities that he suspected Snowden worked for the government.   Snowden next introduced Sandvik, who took the podium and discussed the work of the TOR project, stressing the importance of expanding the TOR network.  Following their presentations, Snowden and Sandvik took questions from the audience.

  The Oahu crypto party, according to Sandvik, ended about 10 PM.   No one objected to Mills making a video of the meeting even though it was dedicated to the idea of protecting privacy.  The video was not posted on the Internet so presumably Snowden wanted it for his own purposes.  Afterwards, Sandvik went to a local diner called Zippy’s for a late dinner.   She left Hawaii two days later.

 Even though a number of the prominent hacktavists he invited were unable to attend, Snowden declared the Crypto party a huge success in his after-hours report. One of the people Snowden invited under the alias Cincinnatus was Parker Higgins, who was a prime mover in the previously-mentioned Electronic Freedom Foundation. He now lived in California where he had founded the San Francisco Crypto Party. (Higgins would make headlines in 2013 by flying a chartered blimp over the NSA’s secret facility in Utah and photographing it from the air).   Despite Snowden’s efforts, Higgins wrote him that he was unable to attend the December Crypto Party because of the high price of the airfare that month between San Francisco and Honolulu. (Higgins was hardly poor: his family home in Oahu had been rented to President Obama for two of his vacations in Hawaii.)  As a consolation, Higgins told Snowden that he would try to attend Snowden’s next Crypto Party, which was scheduled for February 23, 2013.

Even while he used his position as a system administrator at Dell for the NSA to download secret documents, Snowden remained in touch with some of the leading figures in the TOR project under his various aliases. He also continued to invite activists to his crypto parties and he openly advertised the Oahu Crypto Parties on the Internet until 2013.  It certainly was not the “loose lips sink ships” mind set of the NSA’s Cold War days. It better reflected on what CIA Deputy Director Morell, who reviewed the situation in 2014 as a member of President Obama’s NSA Review Committee, described as the NSA’s new “culture of transparency.” Even though the NSA’s activities were largely walled off to the outside world, he found that the NSA in the post-Cold War age had encouraged its technical workers to freely discuss challenges that arose in its computer operations. ‘The idea was to spread knowledge and learn from the successes of others,” Morell wrote, “but it created an enormous security vulnerability, given the always-existent risk of an insider committed to stealing secrets.”   According to a former intelligence executive, this new “open culture,” exemplified by largely unrestricted entry to the NSANet by civilian contractors,” fit the culture of the young civilians on the “geek squads” who now ran the NSA’s computer networks.

  It was remarkable that even in such “open culture “Snowden’s crypto party, TOR station, and other anti-NSA activities could go unnoticed. After all, ten or so NSA workers attended the first party it is not unlikely that many of them recognized him as their co-worker.  If so, they knew (as did Sandvik and Mills) that the TOR advocate “Cincinnatus” was Snowden.  He had also not been shy in contacting via email notable enemies of the NSA, such as Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins and Asher Wolf on behalf of the “Oahu Crypto Party.” If anyone, including the security staff of the NSA, had been on the lookout for dissident intelligence workers, this well-advertised gathering, and its organizer, might have been of interest.  In 2014, I asked a former top NSA executive whether such activities on behalf of TOR by a NSA employee would arouse the attention of the NSA’s own “Q” counterespionage unit.  He answered, “Snowden was not a NSA employee.”  As a contract employee of Dell residing in the United States, the NSA could not legally monitor his private activities or intercept his communication.  To do so, would require a FBI request approved by the FISA court.  So Snowden/Cincinnatus was free to operate openly in recruiting NSA workers, hacktavists and computer buffs for his events. Ironically, adversary intelligence services searching for disgruntled intelligence workers had no such constraints.


CHAPTER NINE
The String-Puller

“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere.”

            --Edward Snowden in Moscow, 2013



Downloading NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three weeks after the Crypto party, Snowden began anonymously contacting a high-profile journalist, He used the same alias “Cincinnatus” that he used with Sandvik, and to advertise the Oahu Crypto Party.  The journalist to whom he wrote On December 1, 2012, was Glenn Greenwald, the previously-mentioned Rio-based columnist for the Guardian.
   Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. Up until 2004, Greenwald was a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, and Rosen & Katz.   He was also an entrepreneur owning part of Master Notions, a company which, among other things, had a fifty percent financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym which originally stood for “Hairy Jock.”)   All did not go well with this enterprise.  In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious law suit with his other associates in HJ.  As a result, he had a number of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien by the IRS.

   After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet magazine Salon.  He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against US government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal privacy The extent of his bitter antagonism to the activities of the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of his 2007 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.  His position on surveillance was unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote.      When Barack Obama became President in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.”   Because of his opposition to President Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money.

  In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including Snowden), from Salon to the Guardian. The British newspaper also had a powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published the Wikileaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Private Bradley Manning and published by Assange in 2010.

    Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist.  Like Poitras, he joined the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.  The foundation, which eventually Runa Sandvik and Micah Lee would join, had been set up expressly to funnel money to both Assange’s Wikileaks site and the defense fund for Bradley Manning after he was arrested.  Such a money laundry was necessary because, as will be recalled, American credit card companies were blocking money transfers to these two causes.  This “blockade” was taking its toll on Wikileaks.   According to Assange, “WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances.” So the Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Barlow, one of the song writers for the Grateful Dead band, was one of its chief financial backers. “The first serious info war is now engaged, Barlow declared. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks.” He served with Greenwald and Poitras on its Board in December 2012.

Snowden was an avid reader of Greenwald’s screeds against the government. If he was to assume the role of a modern-day Prometheus, delivering forbidden secrets of the NSA to the public, Greenwald would be a logical candidate to break the story. Snowden could safely assume that Greenwald would be sympathetic to exposing NSA surveillance from his many blogs, tweets and YouTube comments on the subject.  For example, on November 13 2012, just 18 days before Snowden contacted him, Greenwald had written a blog in Guardian asserting that the United States was “a surveillance state run amok.” In it, echoing very closely what Snowden said at his Crypto party, Greenwald wrote that “any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.”  Citing a story in the Washington Post, he continued: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."      As a result, Greenwald called for action in his  blog on November 13, 2012, writing:  “The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that, in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment, monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do.” That same week Snowden invited Runa Sandvik to co-host his crypto party.

One problem for Snowden was reaching out to Greenwald was Greenwald's lack of any encryption for his e-mails. Communicating with a journalist like Greenwald who famously attacked the very organization for which he worked was itself a risky undertaking, especially if he wanted to pass classified NSA documents to him.  If his emails were intercepted by the NSA in Brazil (where Greenwald lived) and where the NSA was not restricted by US law, he could lose his job or even be arrested.  Under his alias Cincinnatus, he told Greenwald that he needed to immediately encrypt his computer.  To make his point, he cited Greenwald’s own November 12, 2012 blog. In it, Greenwald noted that General David Petraeus, then the CIA director, had been caught in a minor sex scandal because his personal emails had been intercepted, Snowden wrote Greenwald that Petraeus would not have been exposed if he had used encryption.  Snowden also sent Greenwald instruction on how to install the necessary encryption software and a link to a 12-minute video on encryption (which might have been the same video he used at his Crypto party a few weeks earlier.)

    Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however. Snowden, unwilling to deal with Greenwald through an unencrypted channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013.  Even so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise.  He sought an intermediary who used encryption.

The alternative route to Greenwald that Snowden chose was Laura Poitras.   He knew she had am association with him.  They both were founding board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Greenwald had also written about her extensively.  For example, he wrote an entire blog about her confrontation with the US government and her plans to make a documentary about the “U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding covert domestic NSA activities”

    Since 2011, Poitras had been filming the construction of a massive NSA repository for data in Bluffdale, Utah.  In the anti-surveillance culture, the structure had become symbolic of the powers of the NSA. In fact, was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins photographed from a blimp in the fall of 2013 and post on the Internet.    Just six months earlier in August 2012, Poitras had released her documentary about the NSA’s use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying,

 Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other impressive credentials.   Born in 1964 in Boston, She came from a wealthy family that donated large sums of money to philanthropic causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After graduating from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996, she pursued a career as an activist film-maker. Her focus quickly became exposing NSA’s surveillance.  One of her short documentaries about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the New York Times website and attracted enormous attention in 2012.  As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she participated in public events with William Binney, the now famous ex-NSA whistle-blower, and Jacob Appelbaum.   In April 2012, for example, she made a presentation at the Whitney Museum in New York with Binney and Appelbaum.  She became such a leading activist against the NSA by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, interspersed clips from her short film in his keynote address at the Computer Chaos Club convention of hacktavists in Berlin in December 2012.  Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply googling Poitras’ name in January 2013, he would have learned about her connections with Greenwald, Appelbaum, Binney, Assange and other leading figures in the anti-surveillance camp. When asked later Snowden why he had chosen her to help him, He replied “I didn’t. You chose yourself.”  The problem for Snowden was anonymously drawing her in to his enterprise.

Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vulnerable to NSA surveillance. To get to her through an encrypted channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January 11, 2013, he wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California.  Unlike Greenwald and Poitras, Lee resided in America.  This U.S. residence meant, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally barred from monitoring his communications.  He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras who, it will be recalled was a founding Board member of that small foundation. Lee also was well-connected to others with whom Snowden had contacted for his crypto party. Lee had been an associate of Runa Sandvik’s at TOR and was a prominent member of Noisebridge, an eclectic anti-government hackers’ commune based in Northern California, of which Appelbaum was also a member.

To contact Lee, Snowden chose the alias Anon108.  Anon was an alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune of hacktavists.   “I’m a friend.” Snowden wrote Lee. “I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email/gpg key for her.”  The “gpg” encryption key he asked for, more commonly called a PGP key, was the so-called public key for an encryption system called Pretty Good Privacy, or, for short, PGP.  This encryption system required both a public and private key.  Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, since Poitras had the latter one.  Lee wrote Poitras about “anon108.” The next day, with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’ public key to Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108.

  With it, Snowden now contacted Poitras directly.  He asked her as a first step to open an anonymous email account using TOR software.  He was now in contact with three members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—Greenwald, Lee, and Poitras. (Sandvik would join the foundation in 2013.)

Poitras later wrote about this initial contact:   “I was at that point filming with several people who were all being targeted by the [US] government.” The people she was filming included Appelbaum, Assange, and two former NSA employees, William Binney and Thomas Drake. It was in the midst of this project when she received the email from Anon108 aka Edward Snowden.

 He next asked Poitras her take out a new enciphering key to use exclusively for her liaison with him.  It provided them both with an extra layer of protection from any surveillance by law enforcement.   Presumably, she accommodated his requests because she anticipated that the anonymous person would use this encrypted channel to send her highly-sensitive material.

   On January 23, 2013 Snowden wrote Poitras under yet another alias.  This time he called himself “Citizen Four.” He wrote: “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.”   She had no way of knowing at this “stage” that, despite giving her his “word,” he was not who he claimed to be.  He was not a  “government employee, “ he was not a “senior” official and he was a member of the “intelligence  community” (which is composed of the intelligence services of the U.S. government .)  He would later also claim to her that he had been “a senior adviser to the CIA” and “a senior adviser to the DIA.”   In fact, he had never held such position at either intelligence service. In January 2013, he was merely a contract employee of Dell working as a computer technician at the NSA base in Hawaii.

Snowden told her in his initial email that he was well-acquainted with her career as an anti-surveillance activist.  He said that he had read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which Greenwald detailed the 40 times in which Poitras was searched by US authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed that she was on a special watch-list and under constant US government surveillance.  She had come under such scrutiny by US authorities, it turned out, because of her documentary about American military abuses of civilians in Iraq in 2005 entitled “The Oath”.  While filming it she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of US troops in Iraq.  Her presence at the ambush site led Army intelligence officers to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge and the government never substantiated it.  Even so, because of this incident, she was kept on a list that caused authorities to search her at airports.  As a result, she took elaborate counter-measures to evade any possible surveillance of her communications.

Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described them in a great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Greenwald.) “Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work, “Greenwald wrote:    “She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.”  She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.”

 Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about government surveillance.  She fully subscribed to his view that that government surveillance was ubiquitous.  Indeed, he later described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.”  He meant it as a compliment.     Such functional paranoia or, “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precautions that she took, dove-tailed with Snowden’s growing conviction that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other journalists.

It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot.  He played on her well-known concern about government surveillance.  He wrote, for example, “The surveillance you’ve experienced means you have been ‘selected’—a term which will mean more to you as you learn how the modern SIGINT system works.” Just as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, according to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because of her work.   The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signal intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite her long-time concerns about being watched by the government. “Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies,” he continued.  “I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a waste of your time.”  Further heightening her concern that she was under surveillance, he asked her to confirm to him “that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase.”  Such precautions were necessary because “your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.”  That “adversary” was, as she knew from her previous film, the NSA.  At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets.

  To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to her that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial set of mind. “If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications,” he explained. “If you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated.”  If her correspondent could be “immediately implicated,” it meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets.  So Poitras knew, as early as January 2013 that she was creating an encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets and who would be incriminated by providing them to her.

   The key source for Poitras’ previously-referred to short video was William Binney.  Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets.  Binney had been a NSA technical director until he had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’ film was called “Stellar Wind.” It indeed led to a major expose of domestic spying by the New York Times in December 2005. After President Bush’s own Justice Department then held that such surveillance was illegal, Congress passed a revision of the Patriot Act in 2007 that effectively legalize the “Stellar Wind” surveillance program on condition that the NSA obtain a FISA warrant for it that would be periodically reviewed by the Department of Justice.

     Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made about Stellar Wind.  He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, US anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was not a law breaker.      But her new source, Snowden, was willing to do what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do.  He was offering in these emails to provide her with secret government documents even though it would implicate him as an outlaw.  To further whet her appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still relevant to her cause.  “What you know as Stellar Wind has grown” he wrote her. In fact, as Snowden knew from the draft Inspector-General report he stole in 2012 that Stellar Wind been terminated in 2011 by the NSA for budgetary reasons. He continued:     “The expanded special source operations that took over Stellar Wind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States.” As a result, he wrote.  “The amount of US communications ingested by the NSA is still increasing.”

    He further offered to substantiate her worst fears about the growth of NSA surveillance’ “I know the location of most domestic interception points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.”  He even proffered, evidence implicating President Barak Obama in illegal surveillance. “There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House. It’s called presidential policy 20,” he wrote her.  It was an 18-page directive that Obama had signed four months earlier in October 2012. Snowden was offering to reveal to her the up-to-date evidence of a surveillance state in America presided over by the President himself.  It was what she had been searching for three years.  How could she, as an activist film-maker, resist such a sensational offer?

He further explained to her that he had placed great trust in his discretion.  “No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions,” he said.

 Poitras must have found it flattering that a total stranger was willing to disclose to her in emails what he would not tell even his “most trusted confidante” about his intentions to commit an illicit breach of U.S. national security.  It was an extraordinary risk he was taking. After all, “Citizen 4” had no way of knowing who she else she told about him.  She had long been concerned, with good reason that the U.S. government was out to get her.  An unknown person offering to supply her with secret documents could be attempting to entrap her.  So he could not preclude she would not consult with others about the offer he was making her.  Since her current documentary project included interviews with Assange, Appelbaum and three ex-NSA executives, intelligence services with sophisticated surveillance capabilities might also have taken a professional interest in her communications, as Poitras herself had suspected.  Even if Snowden was somehow able to use his position as a system administrator at Dell to ascertain that the NSA did not have Poitras under surveillance, he could not be sure that other agencies, such as the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, were not be monitoring his communications with Poitras.  It was, however, a chance Snowden evidently was willing to take.

Snowden, in any case, did not intend to conceal his identity for more than a few months.  He told Poitras he had a specific purpose in allowing her to name him in her film.  Indeed, he said it was essential in his plan to prevent others, including presumably his “most trusted confidante,” from being suspected by law enforcement of helping him in his enterprise.  He prevailed on her to accommodate his plan, saying:  “You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.”  His choice of the imagery of crucifixion suggested that, like Jesus Christ, he was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.

In keeping with their operational security regime, he said that he would first send her an encrypted file of documents that she would not be able to read.  Only after his conditions were met and “everything else is done,” he said “The key will follow.” He was now pulling the strings.  To get that key, she had to follow his instructions.

 One of his conditions was that she helps him recruit Greenwald and other outlets for his disclosures. “The material provided and the investigative effort required will be too much for any one person,” he wrote Poitras. He next directed her to contact Greenwald.   “I recommend that at the very minimum you involve Greenwald. I believe you know him.”  (Snowden apparently did not tell her that he had unsuccessfully attempted to reach out to Greenwald before he had contacted her.)

     His continued interest in Greenwald was understandable.   Aside from Greenwald’s opposition to what he called the “Surveillance State,” he was a gateway to the Guardian.   The Guardian had become an important player in the business of disclosing government by publishing a large part of the US documents supplied to Wikileaks. By breaking whistle-blowing stories about US intelligence, it had also greatly increased the circulation of its website.  As an establishment newspaper, it also gave these Wikileaks stories credibility with the media.  So despite Greenwald’s inability to create an encrypted channel, Snowden still needed him. He had no reason to believe that Greenwald would turn down the opportunity for a whistle-blowing scoop for the Guardian.  After all, the classified documents Snowden would provide him would also give credence to both Greenwald’s book and his many blogs denouncing of US government surveillance.

Aside from Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden sought an outlet inside the American establishment.  So he had Poitras write Barton Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post.  Born in 1960, Gellman graduated from Princeton in 1981, and became an award-winning investigative reporter from the Miami Herald, Washington Post and Time magazine. He was also the author of the 2008 book Angler: the Cheney Vice-Presidency, which been made into an HBO mini-series.    If Gellman could be drawn into the enterprise, he could provide Snowden with a gateway to the Washington Post, the prestigious American paper credited with bringing down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

     Poitras, as the go-between for Snowden, immediately contacted Gellman.  She already knew him from meetings they both attended at NYU’s Center on Law and Security.  After telling him she was involved in a story about NSA surveillance, she suggested that they meet in New York City.

    For their rendezvous, Poitras took a number of precautions to evade anyone attempting to follow her.   She had Gellman first meet her in one coffee shop in lower Manhattan.  When he arrived, she had him follow her on foot to another coffee shop following her anti-surveillance tradecraft.  Once assured no one was watching them, she ordered coffee for herself and Gellman.   Over coffee, she told Gellman about Snowden, who she described as her anonymous source.  She said that he was willing to supply Gellman with documents that would expose domestic surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a story on it for the Washington Post.  Even though Gellman had left the staff of the Washington Post in 2010, he had previously written several stories on that subject for the newspaper.  He was also highly-regarded by the editors there.  He was therefore interested in Poitras’ offer (although he would consult a friend at the Justice Department about the legality of publishing NSA documents.

     Snowden now had laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets; one an establishment newspaper in Washington DC, the Washington Post; and a well-respected international newspaper, the Guardian.

 Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan.  Like Snowden, she did not trust writing him in unencrypted emails and, since Greenwald lived in Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him.

That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to New York to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers, N.Y. sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a pro-Moslem civil rights and anti-Zionist organization.   He had delivered the keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California on November 22, 2012, where his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State” in America received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its east coast chapter.

Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying.  When Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation.  She told him to go back to his room to get rid of the phone. When he returned, phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times.  Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as Greenwald later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.”

After they finally found a secure table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald emails she had received from Snowden under the alias Citizen 4.   Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection to the “long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the alias Cincinnatus.  Reading the emails to Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous correspondent.

When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen 4’s mission statement in which he said his motive was to end the US “surveillance state.” Greenwald was further impressed with the source.  After all, the surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012.  Of course, the close proximity of the phrasing may not have been entirely coincidental.  Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote Greenwald on December 1, 2012.  Snowden the emails identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly expressed including defending American privacy from government intrusions.

  Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results.  He asserted in his email that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause.   “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote.  In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen 4’s bona fides.  He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break the story in the Guardian.

 After he said he was onboard the project, Poitras revealed to Greenwald that Citizen 4 would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks.  According to this timetable, the Greenwald’s scoop, and the “shock” Citizen 4 promised, would come in early to mid June 2013.

    At this point in late April, Snowden was in full control.  Although his day job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely-meaningless encrypted numbers in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location or where he precisely where he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (which, as they only later would find out, was untrue.)  For his part, Greenwald speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief.  Yet by his anonymous emails, and by tugging at their strings, he had lined up three journalists to break his story.

Despite the fact they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted like almost any other ambitious reporter would act if they were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the government. In addition, the information was in line with what they had previously investigated or written about.  None of these journalists had any reason to doubt at this point that their anonymous source was anything but the sincere whistle-blower that he claimed to be.  They could not have known from his anonymous emails that, aside from the whistle-blowing documents he promised them, he was in the process of stealing a large number of documents from the NSA’s National Threat Operations Center that concerned the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign countries. These documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence with them, had little, if anything at all, to do with domestic spying on American citizens.









CHAPTER TEN
Raider of the Inner Sanctum

“They think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically.”

     —Edward Snowden in Moscow



    The nightmare of the NSA is a penetration.  As the CIA, FBI and NSA found out in the 1990s, No intelligence service is invulnerable to it.  Any employee of a large intelligence organization can turn, or be turned, against it.   Among the more than 10,000 intelligence workers employed by the NSA, it is a near certainty that over time one or more of them will become dissatisfied with their work.  He or she may have a personal grievance about their pay, lack of promotion or their treatment by their superiors.  Disenchantment with the NSA may also proceed from idealistic objections. After all, the NSA is in the business of secretly intercepting messages, and an insider could find its spying activities at odds with his or her own beliefs about the violation of privacy.  For any of these reasons, a disgruntled insider could go rogue. He or she then might attempt to right a perceived wrong by disclosing the NSA secrets to another party. That party might then induce or blackmail the rogue employee into disclosing further secrets.  To guard against it, the NSA has developed a well-organized system for stratifying its data so that obtaining critical secrets would require a rogue employee to burrow into its heavily protected inner sanctum.  As part of this system, the NSA divides its data into different tiers depending on the importance of the secrets to its operations.  The first tier, Level 1, is mainly administrative material. This data would include FISA court orders and other directives it employees might need to check on to carry out their tasks.   Level 2 contains data from which the secret sources have been removed.  This tier, available to other intelligence services and policy-makers, includes reports and analysis that can be shared.  The third tier, Levels 3, contains documents that cannot be shared outside of a small group of authorized individuals because they disclose the secret sources through which the NSA surreptitiously obtained the information.   This third tier includes, for example, compiled list of the sources in China, Russia, Iran and other adversary countries. It also disclosed the exotic methods the NSA uses to get some of this data. Level 3 documents also include reports on specific NSA, CIA and Pentagon operations unknown to adversaries. These Level 3 documents are described by NSA executives as “the Keys to the Kingdom” because they could invalidate America’s entire intelligence enterprise if they fell into the hands of an adversary.  And, as far as is known, prior to 2013, there had been no successful theft of any Level 3 documents.
  Because of their extreme sensitivity, Level 3 documents were not handled by most of the private firms providing independent contractors.  At Dell, Snowden had access mainly to Level 1 and Level 2 data (which he could, and did, download from shared sites on the NSA Net.)   These lower level documents had whistle-blowing potential since they concerned NSA operations in the US.  They did not reveal, however, sources that the NSA used in intercepting the military and civilian activities of foreign adversaries.  Consequently, at Dell, while Snowden could find documents of great interest to journalists, he did not have the opportunity to steal far more valuable data, such as the Level 3 lists of the NSA’s sources abroad.

Snowden quit his job at Dell as a system administrator on March 15, 2013 to take another job working the NSA in Hawaii at Booz Allen Hamilton.    Unlike other outside contractors that serviced the NSA, the firm he choose, Booz Allen specialized in handling the NSA’s Level 3 data.

When Snowden applied to Booz Allen earlier in March 2013, the company had no opening for a system administrator at the National Threat Operations Center, an NSA unit in which it dealt with Level 3 data. It did have an opening for an infrastructure analyst, a lower-paying job involving maintaining the computer technology necessary to monitor threats.  Despite the cut in pay, Snowden took that job.  Snowden made no secret of one of his reason for this move.  He subsequently told the South China Morning Post, as will be recalled, that he took it to “get access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA had hacked.”    If so, he was after the keys to the NSA’s kingdom of global surveillance. And Booz Allen held those keys.   "He targeted my company because we enjoy more access than other companies," Booz Allen Vice Chairman Michael McConnell said with the benefit of hindsight.  As a result of the theft, he appraised “an entire generation of intelligence was lost.”  McConnell, a former NSA director before taking the   job at Booz Allen, was in a position to know.

Snowden’s sudden career change had both advantages and disadvantages for the enterprise he was planning. The main advantage was that the job, he would have proximity to the computers in which the “lists” he sought of NSA global sources were kept.  The main disadvantage, aside from a cut in salary, was that he would no longer be a system administrator.  This change meant he would not have a system administrator’s privileges to bypass password restrictions or temporarily transfer data.   Instead, as an infrastructure analyst, he would not have password access, at least during the two-month long training period, to the computers that he had not been specifically “read into,” which did not include those computers that stored the Level 3 lists.  Access to these tightly-controlled compartments was limited to only a handful of analysts at the center who had a need-to-know.

    Nevertheless Snowden applied for the job.    Since it handled higher level secret documents, Booz Allen had stricter requirements for applicants than Dell.  To slip by them, Snowden engaged in a minor subterfuge. He wrote on his application that he was expecting a master’s degree from the online division of Liverpool University in England.  In fact, he had not completed a single course at Liverpool, and would not be receiving any sort of a degree from it. Booz Allen, not fully taking into account the discrepancy in his application, agreed to hire him as a trainee-analyst (and it did not change that decision even after it found out about his subterfuge.).  According to Admiral McConnell, Snowden never actually worked in the Booz Allen offices, which are housed in a skyscraper in downtown Honolulu.  Instead, he was immediately assigned to work at the NSA’s highly-sensitive National Operations Threat Center in the tunnel at the Kunia base.

 Before he could begin working there, however, he needed to fly to Maryland to take a mandatory orientation course at the NSA. The course was given in an 11 story building, with a sheer wall of black glass, on the NSA’s 350 acre campus at Fort Meade in Maryland.  He arrived there from Hawaii on April 1, 2013.    Like every other Booz Allen contractors who work at the NSA’s Center, Snowden was required to sign the “Sensitive Compartmented Information Non-Disclosure Agreement.”  In this document, Snowden acknowledged that he had been granted access to sensitive compartmented information, called SCI, as part of his work and that he understood that any disclosure of that information to an unauthorized person would violate federal criminal law.  He was also told, as were all new contract employees a Booz Allen that its disclosure could damage the interest of the United States and benefit its enemies.  In signing it, he swore an oath not to divulge any of this information without first receiving written approval from US authorities.   So less than two months before he downloaded Sensitive Compartmented Information, he was fully aware of what would be the consequences of divulging this information.  By this time, as discussed in the previous chapter, he had agreed to deliver classified data to three journalists.

     On April 5, 2013, while still in the training facility in Maryland, he apparently sought to establish a paper trail for himself. He wrote a letter to NSA’s General Counsel Office asking whether or not NSA directives take precedence over acts of Congress. A lawyer from the Office of General Counsel responded three days later, addressing Snowden as “Dear Ed.” The lawyer said, agreeing with Snowden, that acts of Congress take precedence over NSA directives.  He also suggested that “Ed” phone him if he needed any further clarification.  Presumably, Snowden had written the letter to elicit a response that he could later use to bolster his claim to be a whistle-blower.  Instead, the “Dear Ed” response was of little use to Snowden, as it did not dispute his point that NSA directives must lawfully conform to the acts of Congress.  The NSA lawyer did not ever hear back from “Ed.”


   Snowden completed his orientation course at Fort Meade on Friday April 12, 2013. While he was in Maryland Snowden, he took time off to pay visits to both of his divorced parents. It would be the last time he would see either of them in the United States.


  He returned on April 13th to Hawaii, One domestic task he to attend to was helping Mills pack up their possessions, which they stored in boxes in the garage.  The lease on their house was up on April 30, 2013, so he found a temporary rental for them just a few blocks away.

     On Monday April 15th, Snowden began on-the-job training as an analyst at the National Threat Operations Center—a training that he would not complete.  The same week he began the training, he prepared his exit by writing Booz Allen that he needed a brief medical leave in May to undergo medical treatment for his putative epilepsy symptoms.  Even though he had no planned any treatments, and, as far as is known did not suffer from epilepsy, Booz Allen required a minimum of one month’s notice for foreign travel.  By making the request, he lessened the likelihood that it would arouse undue suspicion when he departed Hong Kong with stolen documents on May 18, 2013.  This brief window left him some four weeks to take the lists that he coveted.

  Snowden carried out the heist with precision reminiscent of a “Mission Impossible” movie caper.   First, he needed to get passwords to up to 24 compartments at the National Threat Operation Center that he had not been “read into.”  Even in the “open culture” of the NSA this was not an easy challenge since he no longer had a plausible pretext for asking other experienced threat analysts had their passwords, as he did when he was a system administrator at Dell.  He would now be asking them to break strict NSA rules that prohibited intelligence workers from disclosing their passwords to an unauthorized party.  In addition, they were supposed to report anyone who asked to use their passwords.

He may have obtained some passwords through deception, such as tricking them into typing in their passwords in a device that captured them. As the NSA informed Congress in 2014, three of his fellow workers told the FBI that Snowden may have deceived them to gain access their passwords. He may have also have used electronic means to have stolen the remaining passwords. In any case, however he accomplished this incredible feat, he gained access to 24 compartments containing the NSA’s most closely guarded secrets in a matter of a few weeks.

    Next, he had to find the lists he was seeking in a vast sea of data.  He used for this task pre-programmed robotic devices, called “spiders” to crawl through the data and find the files he was after.  Snowden deployed these spiders soon after he began working at the Center, raising the possibility that Snowden had prepared in advance the operation. According to the subsequent NSA damage assessment, Snowden’s spiders indexed well over one million documents. Many of those that he copied and moved were from Level 3 “Sensitive Compartmented Information” according to the NSA analysis.    The spiders also made his penetration relatively safe. As previously mentioned, the Hawaii base did not have a real time auditing system. So alarm bells would go off in the security office when he indexed documents.

    Finally, Snowden had to find a way to transfer this data to a computer with an opened USB port. Most of the computers at the center had had their ports sealed shut to prevent unauthorized downloads. Making the transfer even more difficult, he was working as an analyst-in-training in an open-plan office with security CCTV camera.

    To be sure, there were also service computers with open ports used by the system administrators.  They, after all, had to perform maintenance and back-up work.  Even though Snowden was no longer a system administrator, he might still have been able to steal or borrow a service computer.    Yet, despite all the NSA’s and Booz Allen’s security measures, he managed to download hundreds of thousands of level 3 documents to an unsealed computer.

He also took some less-sensitive documents from the administrative file (which contained mainly Level 1 documents) at the end of April. These late acquisitions included the now famous warrant from the FISA court issued on April 25 2013.

He completed the operation on Friday May 17, 2013, the last day he would ever enter the NSA facility.  He transferred the data he had amassed on the service computer, including the lists of the computers in Russia and China that the NSA had succeeded in penetrating, onto thumb drives.  Finally, he coolly walked past the security guards at the exit, who only seldom performed random checks on NSA employees.

    He had carried out the entire operation with such brilliant stealth he left few, if any clues behind to how obtained 24 of his colleagues’ passwords, moved  the data from many different supposedly-sealed computers  to an opened service machine or how he downloaded these documents to multiple thumb drives without arousing suspicion.  In fact, the theft would not be discovered by the NSA for fifteen days.

His escape was also well-prepared.  Lindsay Mills had departed that morning for a planned two week visit to the outer islands.  This trip allowed him to pack his belongings without saying anything to her that might be difficult to explain to the authorities. He simply left a note she would see on her return, and could show to authorities saying that he was away on a “business trip.” He also called to say good-bye to his mother and sister, who had been planning to visit him in Hawaii that month.






CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Escape Artist

“I’m not self-destructive. I don’t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we can’t win.”

          --Snowden in Moscow



    The next evening Snowden drove to Honolulu International Airport.  He left his leased car in the parking lot.  He took with him only carry-on baggage, including a back-pack and a laptop with a TOR sticker on it. “I took everything I had on my back,” he said.  Before leaving he also packed in his luggage the cash that would pay for his fugitive life.  Along with the cash, he took the thumb drives containing the NSA’s keys to the kingdom.
   At this point, Snowden was still a free man.  He was not wanted by the authorities.  He had provided his employer and the NSA with a medical excuse for his absence from work so he would not be immediately missed. He also had a valid passport, a credit card, and ID.  He had he yet made arrangements to meet the journalists. Snowden’s destination was Hong Kong.     After crossing the International Date Line, Snowden waited three hours in the transit zone of Narita.  Here he was reportedly captured by the airports CCTV cameras sitting alone. He then boarded a plane to Hong Kong.   After the four-hour long flight from Narita, he arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning on May 20th.

He had visited Hong Kong at least once before with Lindsay Mills when he was stationed in Japan.  He had also made some arrangements.  According to Albert Ho, his Hong Kong Lawyer, Snowden stayed at a residence arranged for him in advance by a party whom Snowden knew prior to his arrival. This “carer,” Ho said, had assisted Snowden with his logistics.   For the next ten days, Snowden did not use his credit card or leave any paper trail to his location. Wherever he was, “his first priority,” as he told Greenwald, was to find a place safe from US countermeasures.  He brought with him a large number of electronic copies of NSA documents marked “TS/SCI/ NOFORN, which stood for Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information and No Foreign Distribution.  According to government rules, data carrying these labels could not be removed from a government-approved “SCI facility.”  Yet Snowden, who brought them with him into this semi-autonomous zone in China, intended to break these rules.

   At this venue, Snowden apparently believed he was relatively safe. “That whole period was very carefully planned and orchestrated,” Snowden later told the Guardian in Moscow. Here, for the first time, Snowden communicated directly with first Gellman and then Greenwald.

   He emailed Gellman under the alias “Verax



.”   Already, via Poitras, he had provided this Washington Post journalist with power point slides from a NSA presentation about a joint FBI-NSA-CIA operation codenamed PRISM.  He believed it qualified as whistle-blowing because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting emails, tweets, postings and other Web interactions about foreign terrorists, incidentally also picked up data about Americans.  According to the rules imposed on the NSA  by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever information accidently picked up about Americans was supposed to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers rechecked the data ever 90 says to assure that directive was being carried.  Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA.
   Snowden proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong.   In attempting to persuade him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote him that he had reason to believe that “omniscient State powers” imperiled “our freedom and way of life.”  He noted, with a touch of modesty, “Perhaps I am naïve.” He added dramatically “I have risked my life and family.”  Even so, Gellman declined coming to Hong Kong.  (According to Greenwald, Gellman could not make the trip because lawyers for the Washington Post were uneasy with having a reporter receive classified documents in a part of China.)

     Next, on May 24, 2013, Snowden attempted to apply more pressure on Gellman by telling him that the story about the PRISM program had to be published by the Post within 72 hours.  Gellman could not accede to such a condition because the decision of when to publish a story was made not by him but by the editors of the newspaper. He told Snowden that the earliest the story could be published was June 6, 2013, which was well past Snowden’s deadline.

        Snowden next turned to Greenwald. Both Poitras and Micah Lee had made great efforts to tutor Greenwald on encryption protocols, with Lee, who was in Berkeley, California, sending Greenwald by Fedex a DVD that would allow him to receive both encrypted messages and phone calls. Even then, Greenwald was unable to fully install it.  As a result, Greenwald still had not met Snowden’s requisites on encrypting his computer.

In addition, possibly because of a lost message, Snowden believed that Greenwald was reluctant to fly to the place that he designated for a meeting.   With Gellman uncertain, Greenwald was now essential to his plan. If he was to have any newspaper outlet, he needed to persuade Greenwald to come to Hong Kong.   At this point, he took matters in to his own hands.    On May 25, 2013, Snowden somewhat aggressively emailed Greenwald “You recently had to decline short-term travel to meet with me.”  He added pointedly “You need to be involved in this story."  To further convince him, he suggested that they immediately speak on the phone via a website that encrypts conversations.  The subsequent conversation lasted, according to Greenwald, two hours.

    Snowden began the encrypted call by complaining, “I don’t like how this is developing.”  He made it clear that he, not the journalist he had selected, was pulling the strings.  If Greenwald wanted the scoop, he had to follow Snowden’s instructions, which included dividing the scoops between the Guardian and the Washington Post.  According to his plan, Gellman would break the PRISM story in the Washington Post and Greenwald would break the “mass domestic spying” story in the Guardian.  In addition, he insisted that the Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside its story.  As he envisioned it, the media event would also include a video component in which Greenwald would interview him.

Once Greenwald agreed to this micro-managing, Snowden would send him what he called a “welcome package” of documents to demonstrate his good faith.  His plan also required a face-to-face meeting. When Greenwald said he was aboard the project, Snowden told him “the first order of business is to get you to Hong Kong.”

    Snowden next sent him 20 classified NSA documents labeled “TOP SECRET.” He also included in the package his personal manifesto, which asserted that the NSA was part of an international conspiracy of intelligence agencies that were working to “inflict upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.”

  Meanwhile, Snowden told Poitras, he was sending her a number of NSA documents including a recent FISA warrant.  It had been issued less than a month earlier.  He wanted that FISA warrant to serve as the basis of Greenwald’s scoop.  It was perfect whistle-blowing material for the Guardian because it ordered Verizon to turn over all its billing records for 90 days to the NSA.  It was as close to a smoking gun as anything he had copied at the NSA. It would also get attention since James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, had stated before Congress just two months earlier that the NSA did not collect phone data in America. This warrant would allow the Guardian, in the best tradition of “Gotcha” journalism, to catch Clapper in an apparent lie.

  Continuing his string-pulling, he instructed Poitras not to show the FISA warrant to Greenwald until they were safely aboard the plane. That measure would prevent Greenwald from releasing the story without coming to Hong Kong.  He also sent Poitras an entire encrypted file of NSA documents, saying it would “include my true name and details for the record, though it will be your decision as to whether or how to declare my involvement.”  He did not send her the key to decipher the file, saying “The key will follow when everything else is done.”   He further told her that he preferred that her film focus on him as the sole perpetrator of the leak so that no one else at the NSA would be suspected.     He instructed her “Your destination is Hong Kong.”

   Poitras and Gellman were not the only journalists involved in the news event.  Poitras also asked the hacktavist Jacob Appelbaum to help her interview Snowden about the NSA’s operations.  She later said that she needed someone with technical expertise in government surveillance to test the bona fides of Citizen 4.  She believed that Appelbaum, who had participated in her anti-NSA presentations in 2012, qualified for the position.

  As it turns out, Appelbaum was already known to Snowden.  Appelbaum had communicated with Snowden under his Oahu Crypto party alias about an obscure piece of software just a few after Snowden had met with Runa Sandvik in Hawaii in 2012.  Appelbaum, after all, was Sandvik’s long-time ally in developing the use of TOR software.   However he learned about him, Snowden allowed Appelbaum to put to him detailed questions to concerning the secret operations of the NSA before he met with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. Indeed, Poitras joined him in asking Snowden via encrypted emails, such questions as:  “What are some of the big surveillance programs that are active today and how do international partners aid the NSA?” “Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” and “Do private companies help the NSA?”  Snowden answered them all to the satisfaction of Appelbaum and Poitras. (The interview was published on June16, 2013 with Snowden’s approval on the website of Der Spiegel, the German weekly, which had also published the Wikileaks documents.)

   Even though the days were ticking away while Snowden was waiting for him in Hong Kong, Greenwald still had to overcome a final hurdle at the Guardian. He needed to get a green light to go to Hong Kong from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who was based in New York. Under Gibson’s leadership, the Guardian’s website effectively “gone into the business of publishing government secrets,” as Guardian columnist Michael Wolff pointed out.  Most of these secrets had been supplied by Manning via Wikileaks.   Few, if any of these previous documents the Guardian published were highly-classified and none were SCI top secret documents.  The NSA documents Greenwald had received from Citizen 4 were another matter.  They contained the sort of SCI communications intelligence data that no major newspaper had ever published before.  Their disclosure could even result in journalists being imprisoned since both U.S. and British law criminalized the disclosure by anyone of communications intelligence.  As a lawyer, Greenwald recognized this danger. On the other hand, the NSA documents were far more explosive than the Wikileaks material, and promised an even greater spike in circulation.  So Greenwald assumed that Gibson would be willing to authorize the publication of the documents—and provide the expenses for his trip to Hong Kong to meet the source.

He flew from Rio to New York on May 30, 2013 to meet in person with Gibson, who had concerns about publishing what purported to be top secret documents that came from an anonymous source.  For one thing, she was also not willing to go along with Citizen 4’s demand that the Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside the documents.  Aside from its shrill and alarming tone, it sounded, as she told Greenwald, “a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish.” She was referring to Ted Kaczinski, the deranged mathematician who had maimed or killed 23 people with anonymous mail bombs between 1978 and 1995. Like Citizen 4/Snowden, Kaczynski had demanded that newspapers publish his personal manifesto.  She explained to Greenwald, “It is going to sound crazy to some people.”  Her concern was that it would detract from the credibility of the rest of the story.   Snowden had also written Greenwald a letter explain his position. “Even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it,” Snowden asserted, and paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson, he continued. “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.”   Snowden, showing his cult-like faith in encryption, had “cryptography” for Jefferson’s word “constitution.  Despite his Jeffersonian rhetoric, she decided against publishing it or the Manifesto.  The stolen NSA documents were another matter.  They were an enormous scoop that could have a greater impact than the Wikileaks scoop.   .She was not about to miss publishing it.

  She authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the condition that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had confidence.  He was Scottish-born Ewen MacAskill, a 61-year old veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for the Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the mystery source in Hong Kong for Gibson.  Greenwald accepted her terms.   Poitras, who would be accompanying them, would be paying her own way.

  Snowden, for his part, had a contingency plan in place in case the Guardian failed to publish the story. While Greenwald was negotiating with Gibson, he arranged for Micah Lee, Poitras’ associate at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to build a personal website for him. Writing Lee from Hong Kong under both his alias Anon108 and his real name, Snowden said that he planned to post on it his “anti-surveillance manifesto.” He would also use it to post “a global petition against surveillance. (A year earlier his girlfriend Mills had also asked her followers on her “super hero” blog to sign a petition against government interference with the Internet.)  Snowden had Lee name the site “Supportonlinerights.com.”  According to Lee, the website would be build with a “dead man’s switch,” which would automatically trigger the release of NSA documents if he was arrested.   It was not clear whether Lee was doing this work as a freelancer or in his capacity as the chief technology officer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. After Lee built the website for Snowden It proved unnecessary to activate it since Poitras emailed Snowden that the Guardian had approved the trip, and she and Greenwald were booked on a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong.  They would arrive on June 2, 2013,

    In his preparation to go public in Hong Kong, Snowden showed himself fully capable of orchestrating what would become a major news story. He not only picked the journalists who would break it, but he instructed each of them as to the timing, sequence, and content of their initial disclosures.  In the security of his residence in Hong Kong, he also worked to carefully separate the purloined NSA documents into two very different caches.  "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed,” Snowden explained to the Guardian journalists in early June 2013.   The documents in this first cache were selected to serve what he termed the “public interest.”  In the hands of journalists, these selected documents, and the story he fashioned to accompany them, would burnish his image in the public consciousness as a whistle blower. He did not turn over the second cache, telling Greenwald, “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over.”

   By the time he received the message from Poitras on June 1st, Snowden had finished his preparations for the journalists. With selected documents copied on a thumb drive, he moved from the residence where he had been staying for ten days to a venue for meeting the reporters.  The place he chose was the five-star, $330 a day, Mira hotel in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong.  He checked into room 1014 under his own name and provided the front desk with his own credit card.  He next emailed Poitras his name and the address of the Mira hotel.  There was no longer any reason to hide his true identity because the rendezvous with journalists would make him famous in a matter of days.



CHAPTER TWELVE
Whistle-blower

“They elected me. The overseers...  The [American] system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

                               --Edward Snowden in Moscow



    While Snowden was attempting to reel in the journalists in Hong Kong, Lindsay Mills received a jarring surprise in Hawaii.  When she returned to Honolulu from her “island-hopping” trip, she found Snowden was still away and the rented house partially flooded from a leak. The brief note Snowden left her indicated that her eight year relationship with Snowden had, at least temporarily, been put on hold by him.  “I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation,” she wrote in her journal on June 2nd (which would be June 3rd across the international time line in Hong Kong.)  “I've nearly lost my mind, family, and house over the past few weeks.” She also noted that she her SIM card containing her personal data was gone.  She wrote in her on-line journal” “Oh and I physically lost my memory card with nearly all my adventure photos.”  The loss would make it difficult to reconstruct her past activities with Snowden.
 In Hong Kong, if Snowden was following Lindsay’s online journal, he would have read that his girl friend had returned home, lost her data and needed a “reprieve” from the situation in which he had put her.  But since they were exchanging private text messages by then, he would not have needed to consult her public journal.  Snowden was certainly aware that he would soon be the object of a manhunt that could involve those with whom he was acquainted. He instructed Poitras to mask their email communications in cyber space “so we don’t have a clue or record of your true name in your file communication chain.”  Such precautions were necessary, he explained to her because “every trick in the book is likely to be used in looking into this.”

   The journalists arrived late in the evening of June 2nd, 2013.  Snowden’s message was waiting. Snowden’s instructions were themselves an exercise in control.  Snowden had written them: “On timing, regarding meeting up in Hong Kong, the first rendezvous attempt will be at 10 A.M. local time. We will meet in the hallway outside of the restaurant in the Mira Hotel. I will be working on a Rubik’s cube so that you can identify me. Approach me and ask if I know the hours of the restaurant. I’ll respond by stating that I’m not sure and suggest you try the lounge instead. I’ll offer to show you where it is, and at that point we’re good. You simply need to follow naturally.”  Even though such tradecraft was unnecessary since Snowden was registered at the hotel under his true name, he had provided the journalists with the atmospherics of “an international spy thriller,” as Greenwald subsequently described the instructions.



MacAskill had stayed at the W Hotel when Poitras and Greenwald Poitras went to the Mira Hotel.  Poitras did not want to bring along an uninvited guest to the first meeting with Citizen Four.  As instructed, at 10 AM on June 3rd, she and Greenwald went to the Mira restaurant.  They gave the recognition signal, twice.  After a few minutes, a young man walked over to them, holding a Rubik cube.  Greenwald noted: “The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik’s cube twirling in the man’s left hand.”  The man said “Hello” and introduced himself as "Ed Snowden."       Greenwald was particularly surprised by Snowden’s boyish looks. “The initial impression was one of extreme confusion,” Greenwald wrote in his book.  “I was expecting to meet somebody in his sixties or seventies, someone very senior in the agency, because I knew almost nothing about him prior to our arrival in Hong Kong.”   His initial confusion was understandable.  Snowden, it will be recalled, had falsely identified himself to them in an email as a senior member of the intelligence community.
    Snowden led Greenwald and Poitras through various corridors of the hotel to his room, 1014.  It was in a single room mainly occupied by a king-sized bed.  Its other furniture included a sleek writing desk in the corner, a modernistic chair and a tall lamp.  The bathroom was behind a glass partition, which could be closed off by a black louver blind.  There was also a small refrigerator in the minibar in which Snowden asked them to stow their cell phones,

    Snowden had already told Poitras that he wanted her to make a documentary of the meeting. She therefore wasted no time in mounting her camera on a tripod. “Minutes after meeting, I set up the camera.”  Snowden had told her, as she later recalled, “when you are involved in an action which is likely to get you indicted, you typically don’t have a camera rolling in the room.”  Nevertheless, he allowed her to film his actions for the next eight days.  One possible reason is that he had no intention of standing trial.  In any case, as Poitras found out, Snowden was anything but camera shy.  Over the next week, she would shoot over 20 hours of Snowden’s activities in that small room.  It was essentially a one man show, a presentation of him, by himself, for the appreciation of a global public. Poitras knew virtually nothing about her subject until ten minutes before she began filming him.  She had not even googled him, since she was concerned that her Internet search might alert the NSA and law enforcement authorities

In an extraordinary waiver of his own privacy, he allowed her to film him washing in the bathroom, preening his hair in the mirror, napping on his bed, getting dressed, and packing his bag.  He even permitted her to film a private computer exchange between him and Mills (who was in Honolulu.)  Mills now informed Snowden that two government investigators had come to their home in Hawaii. Mills reported that they were asking her about Snowden’s whereabouts.  Evidently when he had failed to show up for work on June 1st, it set off alarm bells at Booz Allen and the NSA.  Snowden expressed anger to the journalists in the room at the NSA intrusion on the privacy of his girlfriend (although he had left her in the lurch by telling her in the note he was away on a brief business trip.)

   Snowden also performed his security procedures on camera, including stuffing bed pillows under the door to block any eaves-droppers, throwing a red blanket over his head, which he called jokingly his “magical cloak of power.”  He explained to Greenwald that his donned his “cloak” when he turned on his laptop to prevent any hidden cameras in the room from spotting his password.  He also checked the hotel phone for bugs. It was not without irony that he went through these security rituals to protect his data as he allowed Poitras to film NSA data on his computer screen.  Since he planned to use these journalists as his outlets to go public in a few days, the security measures he did while on camera would only serve a temporary purpose.

   The centerpiece of the planned video would take the form of an interview with Greenwald.  Snowden himself provided the talking points.  The filming would eventually provide Poitras with a feature-length movie, CitizenFour, which would be commercially released in October 2014 and win an Academy Award for her.

          The next day, Wednesday June 4th, Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian editor, joined Poitras and Greenwald in Snowden’s room.  Snowden insisted that he also go through the ritual of stowing his cell phone in the mini-bar refrigerator.  Not without irony, Snowden’s own phone can be seen on his bed recharging. Although MacAskill was sent by Gibson to the event to verify the source’s bona fides, he apparently had not been well briefed.  The questioning went as follows:

 MacAskill:    Sorry, I don’t know anything about you.


Snowden: OK, I work for—

MacAskill: Sorry, I don’t know even your name.

Snowden: Oh, sorry, my name is Edward Snowden. I go by Ed

MacAskill went on to ask him to enumerate the various positions he held during his career in intelligence.  Snowden was not entirely truthful in describing himself.  He said that he had been a senior adviser to the CIA, when he had been just a telecommunications support officer in the CIA. He also said he had been a senior adviser at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) even though, according to that intelligence service, he was not actually ever employed there. (He merely spoke at an interagency counterintelligence course the DIA had sponsored.)  He said he had a $200,000 a year salary from Booz Allen when, according to Booz Allen, it was $133,000.  It is understandable that he wanted to impress these Guardian journalists in light of his young age and boyish appearance, even to the extent of meretriciously claiming in the video that he personally had been given the “authority” at the NSA to intercept President Obama’s private communications, which, according to a NSA spokeswoman, was not true. No NSA employee, and certainly not a civilian contract worker, was given the authority to soy on the President of the United States, she insisted. Such career enhancements suggest that Snowden altered factual reality when it suits his purpose with journalists.
Even though Snowden had greatly exaggerated the positions he held with the CIA and DIA, no effort was made to check them by the team of journalists. Instead, MacAskill wrote Janine Gibson in New York “The Guinness is good.”   It was a pre-arranged code by which MacAskill certified Snowden’s credibility for the Guardian.  Gibson told Greenwald to proceed with the story.

     Greenwald wrote his first story about NSA transgression based almost entirely on the FISA warrant that Snowden had copied from the administrative file.  Before the story could be published, however, the Guardian policy required relevant American government officials be allowed to respond. Gibson made the requisite, if pro forma, call to the White House National Security spokesman, Caitlin Hayden, who arranged a conference call with FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis and Robert Litt, the legal officer for the Office of National Intelligence.  After duly taking into account the response of these three officials, which included the admonition by Litt “no serious news organization would publish this,” Gibson gave the green light to publish the story.  It was, after all, an incredible scoop.

    The story finally broke finally on June 5, 2013.  “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers,” proclaimed the Guardian headline.  Under  Greenwald’s byline, it said: “Exclusive: Top Secret Court Order Requesting Verizon To Hand Over Call Data Shows The Scale of Domestic Surveillance Under Obama.”   Along with it was the FISA warrant to Verizon. The PRISM story broke hours later in the Washington Post.   Written by Gellman and Poitras, it claimed that the NSA and FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S, Internet companies which were knowingly participating on the operation.   The latter allegation turned out to be not entirely true, since all the Internet companies cited in the story denied that they had knowingly participated.   But the damage had been done. The back-to-back publication of these two stories by the Guardian and Washington Post provided the explosive “shock,” at least in the global media, that Snowden had predicted.

       Snowden’s identity had not been revealed in either the Guardian or Washington Post stories on June 5th.  Snowden, however, insisted on outing himself.  He explained to Greenwald that he needed to “define himself” before the US Government “demonized” him as a spy.   That self-definition would be accomplished by the 12 minute video, entitled “Whistleblower.” For it, Poitras extracted from the 20 hours she had shot much of the material for the video.  In the filmed interview, Snowden voiced many of the same statements he had made in his manifesto. So he no longer needed to post the manifesto on the Internet.  Instead, he used the video to broadcast his views. When he insisted on the immediate airing of the video, Greenwald told him that by going public in this way he was saying “fuck you” to the American government.   Snowden replied, “I want to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures.”

   On June 9th, the video was posted on the Guardian website with  the Freedom of the Press Foundation getting an on-screen credit. “My name is Ed Snowden,” the extraordinary disclosure began.  He then described how the NSA was watching U.S. citizens.  Even though the NSA subsequently disputed some his more dramatic claims, such as his assertion that he had the authority at the NSA “to wiretap anyone, even the President,” the press largely accepted his claims as established facts. As for American surveillance, he declared “I don’t want to live in a society that does those sorts of things.”

    He had succeeded in defining himself for the public.  The Guardian story accompanying the video carried the headline, “EDWARD SNOWDEN: THE WHISTLE BLOWER BEHIND THE NSA SURVEILLANCE REVELATIONS.”  Snowden’s identity as a whistle-blower was now established in the media. Overnight, Snowden became a global celebrity and, to much of the world, a hero.
     Snowden, in fact, did not sacrifice him.  He vanished from public view after the release of the video. He provided Poitras and Greenwald with thumb drives on which he had loaded the documents he wanted them to use.  The next morning he packed his belongings into a backpack and moved, without notifying the front desk, to the room Poitras had rented at the Mira.
   Complicated schemes, especially when they involve transferring state secrets to unauthorized parties in a foreign country, do not necessarily go as planned.  On the morning of June 10th, 2013, Snowden’s escape plan apparently ran into a problem. Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Mann, the lawyers who, along with Albert Ho, had been retained for Snowden by an unidentified party, received an emergency phone call early in the morning telling them to help Snowden move to a safe location. Although Tibbo would not identify the person who had called, the message had been relayed to Mann and him through Ho’s office.   He told Tibbo over the phone,   “I can make myself unrecognizable”

Tibbo and Mann immediately proceeded to the mall adjacent to the Mira hotel, where they met Snowden.  After he signed a document appointing Ho’s law firm as his “legal adviser,” they slipped out of via the mall exit.

     As his credit card had been frozen, it is not clear who paid his $3,300 hotel bill.  According to hotel records, it was paid by another credit card.  Poitras, who taken a room at the hotel may have used her credit card or Snowden may have had another benefactor in Hong Kong. In any case, the lawyers escorted Snowden to a pre-arranged residence.

  “I am in a safe house for now,” Snowden wrote Greenwald on June 11th.  The situation may not have been totally under his control, since he added: “But I have no idea how safe it is.”

     Greenwald flew back to Brazil that day.  Soon afterward, he would resign from the Guardian and in February 2014 become the co-founding editor of The Intercept, an online publication dedicated to adversarial journalism which was backed by Internet billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

  Poitras remained in Hong Kong, where she moved, along with Guardian reporter MacAskill, to the five-star Sheraton Hong Kong Tower, which, like the Mira hotel, was on Nathan Road in Kowloon.  Her next task was to set up what was to be Snowden’s final interview in Hong Kong.  It was scheduled for June 12th.

   The journalist chosen was Lana Lam, a young Australian reporter working for the South China Morning Post.  Tibbo had suggested Lam to Snowden. She had served as Tibbo’s outlet on previous news stories, and, as he told me, he found her to be a totally reliable journalist. He brought her to Poitras’ suite at the Sheraton in Kowloon (about eight blocks down Nathan Road from the Mira.)  First, Lam had to agree to the conditions of the interview, which included submitting the story to Poitras for Snowden’s approval. Next, as Lam put it, Poitras “confiscated” her cell phone.  Finally, after a ten minute wait, Poitras took her to another room and sat her before a black laptop.  The laptop, which had a TOR sticker on it, had on its screen an on-line chat room where she was connected by Poitras to Snowden.

    “Hi Lana, thanks for coming for this,” Snowden said from his safe house.  He told her that the NSA had intercepted data from at least 61,000 different computers in Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere. To expose what he called America’s “hypocrisy” in accusing China of cyber-espionage, he supplied her NSA documents for the South China Morning Post.  “Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer,” he said. "The United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the People’s Republic of China as well."  Under Poitras’ close supervision, Lam was allowed to ask Snowden further questions about the NSA’s interception of communications in Hong Kong and China.  He told her “I have had many opportunities to flee Hong Kong, but I would rather stay and fight the US government in the courts.”

As mentioned earlier, Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill did not concern themselves with the issue of the mechanics of the largest theft of top secret documents in the history of the United States.  In entire filmed interview at the Mira Hotel, they did not ask their source how he managed to get access to the documents. Unlike those interviews, Lam asked him about how he widened his access.  She cut to the core of the matter by asking him a crucial question. “Why he had switched jobs from Dell SecureWorks to Booz Allen Hamilton in March 2013?  His answer provided her with a real scoop He replied that, “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked."   Snowden told her that he deliberately went to Booz Allen Hamilton to get access to the “lists” revealing the NSA’s sources in foreign countries.  This admission could gravely complicate his legal situation in Hong Kong since it suggested that he meant to steal documents even before he had known their content.  In fact, to protect himself, he restricted Lam from publishing this part of the interview until after he had departed Hong Kong. (It was published until June 24, 2013 a day after he arrived in Russia.)  This condition indicated to Lam that as early as June 12th, if not before that, he was planning on leaving Hong Kong (although he did not tell her his next destination.)

     His interview with Lam went only so far.  He didn’t reveal how he had learned about these “lists” before taking the job.  Nor did he reveal to her how he planned to dispose of these lists.  He made it clear to her, however, that he had not yet disposed of all his secret documents.  “If I have time to go through this information,” he said,  “I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of U.S. network operations against their people should be published.” So as late as June 14th,  Snowden was  still reading and assessing the files he had stolen from the NSA four weeks earlier.

Poitras vetted the Lam interview.  Soon afterwards she suspected that she was being followed. That was likely since by this June 14th all the intelligence services in Hong Kong knew that she was in contact with Snowden.    “I was being tailed,” she recalled in an interview with a Vogue reporter in Berlin in 2014.  “The risks became very great,” she said in describing her situation in Hong Kong. So, on June 15th, she left Hong Kong and flew back to Berlin, where she began editing her footage of the Snowden interview.

  Meanwhile, Snowden was organizing his own exit from Hong Kong. He placed a call to Julian Assange.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Enter Assange

“Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains free.” – Julian Assange

       Born on July 3, 1971 in Queensland, Australia, Julian Assange had made a brilliant career of trafficking in state, military and corporate secrets.  While still a teen-ager, using the alias “Mendax” (the untruthful one), he had hacked into the computers of the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy, NASA, Citibank, Lockheed-Martin and Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission. At the age of 25, pleaded guilty to 25 charges of hacking in Australia, but was released on a good behavior bond.  In 2006, with the spread of TOR software, he co-founded Wikileaks, a website in which secret documents could anonymously be sent and posted. The site received little public attention until Bradley Manning sent it several hundred thousand lowly-classified U.S. military and State Department documents in April 2010.  With these stolen documents, Wikileaks became a media sensation and Assange, the runner-up for Time’s Man-of-the Year for 2010, became a leading figure, along with Appelbaum, in the global hacktavist underground.  In November 2010, however, he also ran into a legal problem.  A judge in Stockholm, Sweden ordered his detention on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.  He denied the charges but he was arrested in London on a European arrest warrant for him.  In December, he was released on a $312,700 bail deposit (supplied by his supporters) and confined to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England. While awaiting the outcome of the extradition proceedings, he lived there with Sarah Harrison, his 28- year deputy at Wikileaks. A graduate of the elite Sevenoaks School in Kent, she also served as Assange’s liaison with the outside world.  Although she officially was given the title “investigative editor” of Wikileaks, she worked so closely with Assange during this period that the British press carried stories saying she was his paramour.  During this period, Harrison also worked on a Wiki leak’s documentary entitled “Mediastan/” The film concerned Wikileaks’ exposure of US secret operations in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.  It was also a project which took her to Russia and provided her with a multi-entry Russian visa.

In June 2012, after the extradition order was upheld, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuador embassy in London. For the next year, his only visible means of income was a weekly program from the embassy. It was sponsored by RT Television, a Moscow-based English-language news channel funded by the Russian government, which would also finance and release “Mediastan.”

   Snowden telephoned Assange at his refuge at the Ecuador embassy on June 10, 2013. According to Assange, Snowden needed his help for his exit plan.  He wanted Assange to use Wikileaks’ “resources” to get him out of Hong Kong.  Assange considered it a surprising request since Snowden had not given any of the stolen documents to Wikileaks.   In their discussion, according to Assange, Snowden claimed that one reason he decided to take the secret NSA documents was the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning after he was arrested in 2010 by the US government. “Snowden told me they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his decision to become a whistleblower,” Assange said in an interview in 2015.    If Manning’s mistreatment was Snowden’s motive, it was a sharp departure from the position that Snowden had taken in his postings on the Ars Technica site in January 2009. He complained in a post on Ars Technica about the detrimental consequences to U.S. intelligence of leakers revealing “classified shit” to the New York Times, and he suggested as punishment “those people should be shot in the balls.”   Either he either had a change of heart about punishment or he was telling Assange what he believed he wanted to hear.

    Assange did not suggest that Snowden go to Ecuador to seek asylum.  He counseled him to go directly to Russia. “My advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences,” he told the (London) Times in 2015. He found “Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia.” Assange had another way for Snowden to defuse the “PR consequences” of Snowden landing in Moscow. A story would be released, coinciding with his departure, asserting that Snowden was “bound for the republic of Ecuador via a safe route.”

When Snowden asked how he would carry out the plan, Assange told Snowden that he would immediately dispatch one of his senior staff members to help him engineer his escape to Russia.     That senior staff member was Sarah Harrison,

 After speaking to Snowden, Assange called Harrison, who was in Melbourne, Australia.  She had gone there a month earlier to help organize Assange’s somewhat quixotic election campaign for President of Australia,     Assange now told her to forget the campaign and go to Hong Kong. Her mission there was to use Wikileaks resources to save Snowden from “a life time in prison.”  Presumably, he also told her that he advised Snowden to proceed to Russia, where Harrison had a visa since part of her work on the Mediastan film was done in Moscow.

    Harrison did not hesitate in following Assange’s instructions.  She later said that she didn’t even bother to pack her clothing.   She caught the next plane out of Australia.

After an eight hour flight, she arrived in Hong Kong on June 11th—the same day that Snowden texted Greenwald he was in a safe house.  Harrison had her own connections in Hong Kong.  Both her two younger sisters, Kate and Alexandra Harrison, who had also attended Sevenoaks, lived there and were part of the expatriate community.  She also had an older brother, Simon Harrison, who headed Avro, a ship brokerage and commodity trading company. Although headquartered in Singapore, Avro also operated out of Hong Kong, and he frequently travelled there.

Like Poitras, Harrison took great care to shield her movements.  She did not even have a Twitter, Facebook or any other social media account.  She made it a point not to own a cell phone for fear of being tracked by an intelligence service.  When she travelled, she bought “burner” phones locally and disposed of them before any calls could be traced back to her. A precaution she took that June was not to meet Snowden face-to-face out of concern about the surveillance of American intelligence in Hong Kong.  Instead, for her first 13 days in Hong Kong, she worked behind the scenes, through intermediaries.  Her task was not only to arrange his escape route but also to create diversions to camouflage his real destination.  Under Assange’s tutelage, she had made deceptive ploys an integral parts of her trade craft.  “We were working very hard to lay as many false trails as possible,” she later told an interviewer in Berlin. According to Assange, she booked decoy flights for Snowden to Beijing, China and New Delhi, India. She also used Snowden’s credit card numbers to pay for the flight to India, She knew that since the card was blocked, there was a high probability that it would come to the attention of US intelligence.  In all, according to Harrison, she booked no fewer than dozen such decoy tickets to confuse Snowden’s pursuers in US and British intelligence.  The only actual tickets she bought for Snowden, according to an Aeroflot official, was a one-way ticket to Moscow.  She paid for it at the last minute.  She also bought a ticket for self on the same flight leaving on June 23, 2013.

The source of the money for the Assange-Harrison operation was unclear.  Subsequently, Harrison said she was setting up secret bank accounts to help organize escape, but in Hong Kong in 2013, Assange says she was using “Wikileaks’ resources.” Harrison said the “Wikileaks team” helped fund Snowden’s flight to Russia from Hong Kong, as well as her own flight there.  But Wikileaks in June 2013 was not an organization with spare cash.  Assange had forfeited his own bail by fleeing the embassy of Ecuador, offending many of his financial supporters in Britain.  He also all but exhausted his bank account.  Aside from money that dribbled in from Poitras’ five-month old Freedom of the Press Foundation, the only visible source of funds for Wikileaks was the previously-mentioned payments Assange received from RT Television. British intelligence officers who reportedly subsequently examined Wikileaks’ bank finances in London found no transfers to the “Wikileaks team” in Hong Kong.

   While Harrison was organizing Snowden’s escape, she remained in the deep background. Meanwhile, mounting pressure was brought on the Hong Kong government to take action by the U.S.  On June 16th, the U.S. government informed the Hong Kong authorities that it had filed a criminal complaint against Snowden and would be seeking his extradition.    Since Hong Kong had a vigorously enforced extradition agreement with the United States, the Hong Kong authority would be expected by the US to take Snowden into custody.  But Hong Kong was not entirely independent in national security issues.  China had the final say in any extradition decision.  In fact, China had explicitly been given the right of vetoing any extraditions for any reason in the formal 1999 agreement between Hong Kong and the U.S.   Since its President had just met with President Obama in California, China also had an interest in avoiding embarrassing public demonstrations on behalf of Snowden.  After he had held his press event, it wanted him out of Hong Kong. According to a well-placed official in Hong Kong, it told the Hong Kong Authority in no uncertain terms that Snowden had to be out of Hong Kong by the end of the week, or June 23rd.

On June 19th, Snowden had a meeting with Tibbo, the barrister who would handle the court case, and Mann and Ho, the Hong Kong solicitors who had been retained for him.  It took place in a small apartment where, according to Ho, they ate pizza while they discussed Snowden’s options.

     Tibbo had a strategy for Snowden.  It required that Snowden remain in Hong Kong, allow himself to be arrested, seek bail and fight extradition in court.  Tibbo said he planned to mount a powerful legal defense against extradition by using a provision in Hong Kong’s extradition treaty with the United States that protects fugitives from persecution on political grounds.  After he told Snowden that it would entail a long court battle, Snowden asked him if he could avoid even being arrested.

    Tibbo explained that Hong Kong courts, which closely follow British law, would certainly issue an arrest warrant for him immediately after the US formally filed charges against him.  Those charges could come within hours, he reckoned.  Soon afterwards, Snowden would be temporarily jailed and his computers, electronic gear and thumb drives would be seized and placed in the custody of the court.  Tibbo would immediately seek his release on bail but could not guarantee an outcome since Snowden, who had fled U.S. jurisdiction, might be considered a flight risk.  If so, Snowden could remain incarcerated during the long court battle.   Even so, during the litigation, Snowden would have a platform to make his case against US surveillance. Indeed, Tibbo’s strategy involved building massive public support for Snowden’s cause.

Once the US government filed charges, he could further expect it would invalidate his passport to go anywhere except for his return to the US and Interpol would issue a red alert to all its members. Since the case involved national security secrets, the Hong Kong court might also deny him any use of the Internet until the case was settled.  If Snowden wanted to leave Hong Kong, he had to act swiftly.

Tibbo, although evasive on the point when I interviewed him, may not have known about the escape Harrison was planning  As far as he could see, Snowden’s other alternatives were not good.  He had no money and his credit card had been blocked.  He had no visas to go any other country and Interpol would issue its own “red notice” as soon as the US filed formal charges against him. At that point, Hong Kong airport authorities would be officially notified and could prevent him from leaving the city.   Even if he somehow got out, he would be an international fugitive. Tibbo counseled Snowden to seek redress in the Hong Kong courts.

 But Snowden had no intention of allowing himself to be arrested.  Despite what he 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 stop over on his escape route. Two later months later and safely in Moscow, he made this point clear in a lengthily interview with Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian.  He told him that it never had 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 been merely using Tibbo, Mann and Ho to provide him with temporary cover while, following the instructions of Assange, Harrison laid down the smokescreen for his escape to Moscow.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fugitive

  “If I end up in chains in Guantanamo, I can live with that.”

                  •  —Edward Snowden, Hong Kong



      During his interview with Poitras and Greenwald, 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 with journalists in Hong Kong.   As early as May 24, 2013, Snowden had suggested to Gellman that he was making arrangements with a foreign government.  To that end, he asked Gellman to insert an encrypted key in Internet version of the NSA expose 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 that foreign government to Gellman so Gellman 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, had not ever 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 in Hong Kong. In late 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 later it was invalidated by Ecuador.)  If Snowden had really planned to go to Ecuador from Moscow, it would require him first going to Cuba.  Cuba did not even require a U.S. passport (as, in 2013, U.S, citizens were not supposed to travel to Cuba.)  He did require a Cuban travel document, which he could have obtained from the Cuban consulate any time during his month in Hong Kong.  Yet he did not ever obtain it.  Nor did he acquire a visa to go to any other country in Latin America or elsewhere.  So where was he headed?

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

    The only one of these three countries, or any other country, that Snowden is known to have dealt with directly during his 33 day stay in Hong Kong, was Russia.  As previously discussed, he had dealings with Russian “diplomatic representatives “, as Putin called them.  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.” Putin’s description suggests the meeting 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 Russia government, he deferred, saying: “My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power.”  As it turned out, Snowden was correct.  The Russian government was not intimidated by the threats of reprisals by the United States, as the Obama Administration would learn after his arrival in Russia on June 23, 2013.  But the only way that Snowden could not have known that fact on June 12th was by being in contact with Russian officials prior to his interview with Lam.  Of course, he may have had multiple contacts on different dates with these officials.  The Russian pro-government newspaper Kommersant reported that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate on more than one occasion and had been given a birthday celebration there on June 21, 2013.

   What we do know about Snowden’s interactions with the Russians in Hong Kong comes partly from Putin’s own description of them.  Putin said, it will be recalled, that his decision to facilitate Snowden’s escape to Russia had been kicked all the way up the Russian chain of command for him to personally decide Snowden’s fate.  Presumably, this decision-making process began earlier than June 21, 2013, when he reportedly came to the consulate.  The question is: how much earlier?  Since Snowden had arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th, 2013, his contacts with Russian officials could have occurred as long as a month earlier.  That would fit in with Snowden telling Gellman on May 24th that he needed his help in dealing with the diplomatic mission of an unnamed country.      In any case, Putin tells us he learned an American “agent of the special services” had contacted Russian diplomats because he wanted assistance.  And Snowden did need assistance to escape from Hong Kong. As he had no visas, he would require the sort of assistance that could only be provided by a government willing to defy the United States. The assistance came from Russia.

Nine days before Snowden boarded Aeroflot flight SU213 to Moscow on June 23rd, the US had filed a criminal complaint against him.  It had also alerted Hong Kong authorities and Interpol when it unsealed the complaint on June 21, 2013. And on June 21st it had invalidated his U.S. passport (although he still had it in his possession at the Hong Kong Airport.)  Since by this time he was the most famous visitor in Hong Kong, his passage through passport control may have reflected the acquiescence of the Hong Kong authorities to the reported request of China to be rid of Snowden by June 23rd.  All we know for certain is that Hong Kong airport police did not stop Snowden.

  He was allowed on the Aeroflot flight at Hong Kong International Airport.  Aeroflot, a state-owned airline, presumably responds to the Russian government when matters of state security are concerned.  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.  These boarding requirements were waived so that Snowden was able to board the flight to Moscow.

    Snowden only met Harrison in person on June 23rd, the day he was to depart Hong Kong.  She was waiting for him in the private car that Jonathan Mann had arranged to take him to the airport that morning.  Snowden was dressed in a grey shirt and khaki slacks. Harrison was also casually dressed in jeans and flip-flops.  She said she chosen this dress style so that they would blend in at the airport with vacationing tourists.  As she had financed the trip, she was apparently now calling the shots.  Harrison’s concern was that they might be arrested at the airport, so Mann accompanied them through passport control.  He was able to do this because he bought a ticker on a cheap international flight. Harrison also gave Mann a phone number to call if they got arrested. When they finally boarded the flight at 12:45 pm, Harrison effectively became Snowden’s second “carer”—a job that would require her presence in Moscow for the next four months.

Once the plane took off, Snowden, who had only said a few words in the car, said to her, as she recalled, the first full sentence she had heard from him.  It 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 24th, a booking was made for Snowden on the Aeroflot flight to Cuba, and this information was relayed to the foreign press organization in Moscow, resulting on over a dozen reporters buying tickets on the flight.  But Snowden never showed up for the flight.  This ruse resulted in these foreign correspondents flying to Havana.   “In some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that [flight] on open lines to lawyers in the United States,” Assange said. One subsequent piece of his misinformation was that Snowden was flying to Bolivia on the private plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales (who was then in Moscow for a meeting.)  That misinformation had the desired effect. US 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 Assange-inspired distraction caused an international incident but did not change the fact that Snowden was in the custody of Russia.
     Snowden himself 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 explained to a reported 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 have provided documents exposing government secrets.)

Snowden meanwhile received sanctuary in Russia.  His public statements in Hong Kong that he was willing to go 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 US 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 messianic role, he could make Internet appearances via Skype to prestigious gathering such as the TED conference where he would be roundly applauded as an Internet hero.  He could be beamed into dozens of ACLU meetings where he would be celebrated as a defender of American liberty. He could describe to sympathetic audiences in Germany, Norway and France the unfairness of the American legal system, asserting that it was denting him a “far trial.”  He could now make front page news by granting interview to the New York Times, Washington Post, Nation and other elite newspapers.  He could join Poitras and Greenwald on the Board of Directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.   He could be the subject of both 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 could also be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.  His could also attract over one-half million followers to his tweets on Twitter in 2015. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won,” he informed the Washington Post in his first live interview in Moscow.  It was a mission that involved a very high stakes enterprise:  taking America’s state secrets abroad.

 How he managed to succeed in this extraordinary undertaking is another story and one which may not lend itself to an innocent explanation.   Whistle-blowers do not ordinarily steal military secrets.  Nor do they flee to the territory of America’s principle adversaries. A fugitive, especially one lacking a Russian visa, does not wind up in Moscow by pure accident.   A Russian President, especially one with the KGB background of Putin, does not lightly give his personal sanction to a high-profile exfiltration from Hong Kong without weighing the gain that might proceed from it. Part of that calculus would be that the defector had taken possession of a great number of classified documents from the inner sanctum of the NSA. To be sure, the practical value of this stolen archive would require a lengthily evaluation by its intelligence services.  Finally, a defector who put himself in the palm of the hand of the FSB in Moscow would be expected to cooperate with it.  Even if such a defector did not carry these files with him to Moscow, intelligence services have the means to recover digital files, even if after they are erased from a computer or if they are sent to the cloud. Once secret documents are taken, they are compromised.  How Snowden succeeded in this coup cannot simply be pieced together from his statements and interviews. The story also requires a visit to the wilderness of mirrors called counterintelligence.

                      ***






PART THREE
THE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CONUNDRUM




“Scenarios deal with two worlds: the world of facts and the world of perceptions. They explore for facts but they aim at perceptions inside the heads of decision makers. Their purpose is to gather and transform information of strategic significance into fresh perceptions”
     —Pierre Wack, Harvard Business Review, 1985







CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Did Snowden Act Alone?

“When you look at the totality of Snowden's actions certainly one hypothesis that jumps out at you, that seems to explain his ability to do all these things, is that he had help and had help from somebody who was very competent in these matters.”

                              --General Michael Hayden, Former Director of the NSA and CIA



  Snowden describes himself a whistle-blower, and, according to the polls, the vast majority of the American public, accept this definition of him.  But the operational distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy is not always clear.  A whistle-blower enters the enterprise of stealing state secrets for reasons of conscience, but so do many spies. Such conscience-driven spies are called, in CIA parlance, “ideological agents.”  For instance, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, who was one of the most important Russian spies in the Cold War, was an ideological recruit.  Maclean stole immensely valuable US nuclear secrets for the Russian intelligence service without receiving any monetary compensation and later defected to Moscow to avoid arrest.
   As it turns out, the acceptance of money is also necessarily a meaningful distinction when it comes to espionage.  To be sure, many spies get paid, but some whistle-blowers also receive paid a rich bounty for their work.  Indeed, under federal laws, whistle-blowers can qualify for multi-million dollars bounties for exposing financial malfeasance.  The whistle blower Bradley Birkenfeld, for example, after he himself was paroled from prison in 2012, received an award of $104 million for providing data that exposed illicit tax sheltering at the Swiss UBS bank.  Assange also offered political whistle-blower six-figure cash bounties from money he raises on the Internet. In 2015, for instance Wikileaks offered S100, 000 bounties to any whistle-blowers who provided the site with secret documents exposing details of the Pacific Trade Agreement.

     Nor is acting alone necessarily a line that divides whistle blowers from spies. In many cases, whistle-blowers have accomplices that help them carry out their mission.   For example, in 1969, the celebrated whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst at the RAND Corporation, had an accomplice, Anthony Russo, who also had worked at RAND. (Both were indicted by the government.)  Acting in concert, they copied secret documents that became famously known as the Pentagon Papers.

Whistle-blowers also can, like conventional spies, enter into elaborate conspiracies to carry out a penetration operation, For example, on the night of March 8, 1971, eight whistle-blowers working together with burglary tools, broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole almost all the FBI files there.  The conspirators escaped and kept their identities secret for over 42 years.

  Self-definitions also do necessarily produce a distinction between whistle-blowers and conventional spies.   Consider, for example Philip Agee.  Agee left the CIA in 1969 for what he described “reasons of conscience.” Specifically, he said he objected to the CIA’s covert support of Latin America dictators.  After contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, he defected to Cuba, where he leaked information that exposed CIA operations.  Although Agee insisted he was a whistle-blower, and he adamantly denied offering any secrets to the Soviet Union, the KGB viewed him as a conventional spy. According to Oleg Kalugin, the top Soviet counterintelligence officer in the KGB in Moscow, who defected to the U.S.,  Agee offered CIA secrets first to the KGB residency in Mexico City in 1973 and then to Cuban intelligence service. Agee provided the KGB with a “treasure trove” of US secrets, Kalugin revealed. “I then sat in my office in Moscow reading the growing list of revelations coming from Agee.”  Despite this disparity, Agee still defined himself to the public as a whistle-blower because he also had exposed CIA operations to the public.

    The Snowden case blurs the demarcation line even further.   Unlike other whistle-blowers who uncovered what they considered government malfeasance by virtue of their job, Snowden, by his own admission, took a new job in 2013 specifically to get access to the SCI files concerning NSA sources that he stole from the Threat Operations Center.  Switching jobs in order to widen one’s access to state secrets us an activity usually associated with penetration agents, not whistle-blowers.  While the technical distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy may still serve the media in the case of Snowden, it does not help in solving the counterintelligence conundrum.

Untangling the strands of the Snowden conundrum is no easy matter. A complex burglary of state secrets had been successfully carried in a supposedly-secure site.  The only known witness, Snowden, had escaped to Russia, where he could be of help in reconstructing the crime.  The stolen data was kept in the equivalent of sealed “vaults”—which were actually computer drives that were not connected to the NSA Network ever there was a locked room mystery, this was it.

  The perpetrator Snowden pierced these barriers by using passwords that belonged to other people and using credentials that allowed him to masquerade as a system administrator. However it was carried out, it was feat required meticulous planning.   As in the earlier example of a hypothetical diamond theft from locked vaults, what is needed is to explain how a perpetrator, who did not himself have the combinations to open them or the means to remove their content, succeeded in the theft.


To address such a mystery, a counterintelligence investigation starts with a tabula rasa, stripping away all the previous assumptions, including that Snowden was the lone perpetrator. Once back at square one, it builds alternative scenarios to test against the known facts. To be sure, scenario-building differs from that of a conventional forensic investigation aimed at finding pieces of evidence that can be used to persuade a jury in a courtroom.  Unlike a judicial investigation concerned with guilt and innocence, scenario-building looks building looks to develop a story that is, concurrently: intrinsically consistent, humanly plausible and symbolically memorable; and in the process, it also identifies and explores the possible holes  in the case. Such scenarios must aim at constituting a limited set of alternatives that are mutually exclusive  The point is to assure that any alternative that fits the relevant facts, no matter how implausible it initially may seem to be, is not neglected.


One of the most vexing problems that had to be explained by these scenarios is how Snowden got the passwords to up to 24 of these vaults.  He could not have obtained these passwords during his previous employment at Dell because Dell technicians did not have access to the Level 3 documents stored in these compartments.  Nor, as was discussed earlier, was he given access to them when he transferred to Booz Allen because he had not completed the requisite training.
    Snowden had also, it will be recalled, relinquished his privileges as a system administrator when he transferred to Booz Allen, so he did not have the privilege to override password protection.  In short, his new position as an infrastructure analyst did not give him the ability to enter compartments which he had not yet been read into.

There are two possible ways he could have gotten these passwords: Either he had assistance from a party who had access to them or he found flaws in the NSA’s security procedures that left the supposedly-closed vaults effectively unlocked.

The Unwitting Accomplice Possibility

As for the first alternative, it is possible whatever assistance that Snowden received was entirely unwitting.  For example, he could have simply asked other analysts at the Center who had been “read into” compartments for their passwords. But such an approach would be extremely risky for him.   If an analyst gave him his password, and it was discovered, that analyst could lose his job. Moreover, any analyst was supposed to report any request for a password to a security officer. Nor was Snowden, who had been working at the Threat Operations Center for just a few weeks as a trainee, well known to other analysts.  So asking them to break the rules was fairly risky for Snowden.    “It is inconceivable to me that his co-workers would divulge their passwords to him,” a former Booz Allen executive, who had also worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told me.  “If he was a system administrator he might trick a threat analyst into entering his password into his computer under the pretext that he needed it to deal with an urgent hardware issue.”   But Snowden was not a system administrator at the Center.  Snowden therefore “had no plausible reason for requesting passwords to compartment he had not been read into,” the former executive said.    I asked him what the chance was of him obtaining some 24 passwords in 5 weeks. “In my opinion, near zero,” he said.  I next asked him whether it was possible that Snowden could have used a device for intercepting another computer’s electronic signals, called by hackers a “key logger.”  Such a device, which was obtainable over the Internet, could be used to steal passwords of the analysts who had been “read into” the compartments. My source said that while it was possible that Snowden smuggled in a key logger in his backpack, it could not be operated wirelessly inside the Center because, like all other NSA facilities, the computers had been insulated to lock-out wireless transmission.  This precaution was taken to guard against an EMP, or Electro-Magnetic Pulse, attack by an enemy.  If so, the only way Snowden could intercept key strokes was to attach a cable from his key logger to each of his fellow workers’ computers.  In this scenario, he would have to surreptitiously build his own wired network connecting his hidden key logger to 24 separated computers. Moreover, he would have to do this wiring in an open-plan office where he could not count on these additional wires, even if rigged one by one, not being noticed by either other analysts on the room or the geek squad of system administrators who regularly checked connections. Making the task even more risky, according to my Booz Allen source, there were closed-circuit cameras.   The only way he could mitigate the risk of detection was by having someone help him build this network.

There was a further security barrier he had to get by. Even after he managed to obtain all the necessary passwords from colleagues, he had to transfer the files to an external storage device.  This was not a matter of simply using a thumb drive because, unlike in caper movies such as Mission Impossible, the ports on the computers at the NSA were ordinarily sealed shut. This measure was done specifically to prevent any unauthorized downloading by NSA workers.    The only people at the Center who had the authorization, and the means, to open these ports and transfer data were system administrators, according to the former Booz Allen executive.  System administrators needed to have this privilege to deal with glitches in the computers.  So they were allowed to open up the sealed ports.   But Snowden was no longer a system administrator and did not have these privileges.  So again, he needed some help. He either would need to borrow another system administrator’s credential or forge his own.  The credential he would need is called a public key infrastructure card with its authentication code embedded in a magnetic stripe. When I asked the former Booz Allen executive if Snowden possessed the skill set to forge such a card, he said that he strongly doubted any NSA employee would be capable of such a forgery without special equipment.   He could have, however, borrowed this credential from a system administrator who was willing to help him. But just asking such a favor could “set off alarms.”

The unwitting accomplice scenario had another stumbling block: time.  We know from Poitras that Snowden told her in early April 2013 that he planned to deliver documents to her in six to eight weeks (which he in fact did.) But he had not yet started working for Booz Allen at the Center until that same month. It does not seem plausible (to me) that in making such a commitment he was merely counting on the kindness of strangers to fulfill it The only way he could have known for certain that he would be able to borrow a public key infrastructure card and obtain the passwords, whether by trickery or by a key router, before he had begun working at the Center was that he already knew someone at the Center who would help him.  But such a contact leads to a witting accomplice scenario.

The Witting Accomplice Possibility

    The witting-accomplice scenario better fits with the principle in logic called Occam’s razor that suggests that in choosing between alternative explanations, the one that requires the fewest assumptions should be given priority.  It would be a relatively easy to gain access to passwords if Snowden had the cooperation of an insider at the center that had been read into the compartments or, even better, if he had the cooperation with a system administrator with the necessary PKI cards and shell keys to bypass the password protection. Such an accomplice could also help explain how Snowden was able to get the job at the Center in the first place; how he knew in advance that he could find there the “lists” of the NSA sources in foreign countries, and how he knew that there were no security traps at the center.  Such a witting accomplice might even have prepared in advance the “spiders” that Snowden used to index the files.

     The witting-accomplice scenario of course requires a somewhat unsettling expansion of the plot.  It means Snowden collaborated with one or more insiders at the Center to steal secret documents.  It is not difficult to imagine, in light of the lax background checks at outside contractors servicing the NSA, that there were others in the “geek squad” that shared Snowden’s antipathy to NSA surveillance.   Certainly, we know that Snowden found other NSA workers who were willing to attend his anti-surveillance Crypto party in December 2012. Anyone of these other potential dissidents could have shared Snowden’s objective of exposing NSA abuses. It would only be a small next step to offer Snowden help if he was willing to go public.  Indeed, if the geek culture produced one Snowden, why wouldn’t it produce others? If such an accomplice lacked Snowden’s willingness to flee to another country, he may have limited his participation to supplying technical assistance.  For his part, Snowden may have agreed to divert suspicion from his accomplice by taking sole responsibility for the crime when he went public.

The problem with this scenario, however, is that no witting accomplices were ever found.  The FBI, which was in charge of the domestic part of investigation of the Snowden case, questioned all of Snowden’s co-workers at the Center over the course of six months but it failed to find anyone who knowingly helped Snowden.  If the accomplice was an idealistic amateur, it is likely the FBI would have found him.  Three co-workers did admit to the FBI that they might have inadvertently given Snowden their passwords but these three slips would not account for Snowden’s breach of all the other compartments. Of course, there may have also been less forthcoming co-workers hid their slips in divulging their passwords to Snowden.

This raises the more sinister possibility that the accomplice was not an amateur co-worker but a deep-cover spy who was already in place when Snowden arrived on the scene.  Such a penetration agent could have been recruited by an adversary intelligence service before Snowden came on the scene.  After Snowden expressed a desire to expose the NSA’s domestic surveillance, it could then have used Snowden as an “umbrella” to hide its own activities. Finding such a means to protect a source while exploiting his or her information is not uncommon in espionage operations, and since Snowden was willing to flee America and go public, he could serve as a near perfect umbrella.  “Snowden may have carried out of the NSA many more documents than he knew about,” a former CIA station chief speculated. It could also account for the disparity between the claims of Snowden and the NSA damage assessment as to the number of the documents that were compromised.

  As farfetched as this mole scenario may seem to the outside world, less than three years before the Snowden breach, the NSA had received a warning from a CIA mole, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 21, that the Russian Intelligence service might have recruited a KGB mole at the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA. No mole was found in 2010, and, if one existed, it could not have been Snowden, who at that time in 2010 was working for the NSA in Japan.  Such a putative mole conceivably could have acquired enough information to later facilitate Snowden’s operation.

  In this scenario, Snowden would not be difficult to spot as a potential collaborator and possible umbrella.  As Snowden acknowledges, he was not a happy worker at the NSA.  He complained between 2010 and 2013 about what he considered NSA abuses to coworkers, superiors and in his posts over the Internet.  If someone assumed the guise of a reluctant whistle-blower, he would have little difficulty in approaching Snowden.  Snowden might not even know his true affiliation beyond that he shared Snowden’s anti-surveillance views. If Snowden then voiced an interest in exposing the NSA’s secrets, this person could supply him with the necessary guidance, steering a still unsuspecting Snowden first to the Booz Allen position and afterwards to his associates in Hong Kong.  By taking sole credit for the coup in the video that he made with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong, he acted, as he told Greenwald, to divert suspicion from anyone else. This move could also any collaborator he may have had in Hawaii time to cover his tracks.

 The astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in regard to searching the universe for signals from other civilizations that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  That injunction also applies to the spooky universe of espionage. The fact that a mole hunt fails to find a hidden collaborator at the NSA does not necessarily mean such a mole does not exist.  Historically, we have many notable cases in which Russian moles eluded intensive investigations for many decades. Robert Hanssen served as a KGB penetration in the FBI for over 20 years without being caught. Similarly, Aldrich Ames, acted as a KGB mole in the CIA for more than ten years, and passed all the CIA’s sophisticated lie detector tests. Both Hanssen and Ames eluded intensive FBI and CIA investigations that lasted over a decade.   According to Victor Cherkashin, their KGB case officer, who I interviewed in Moscow in 2015, the KGB was able to hide their existence from investigators for such a long period partly because of the widespread belief in U.S. intelligence that moles were fictional creatures that sprung from the “paranoid mind” of James Jesus Angleton.  When I then cited the signature line from the movie The Usual Suspects   “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Cherkashin thinly smiled and said “CIA denial [of moles] certainly helped.”

   In view of such past successes of the Russian intelligence services, it cannot be precluded that there was another person in the NSA working with Snowden who used an enthusiastic as cover to prevent any light from falling on his own surreptitious spying.  While it may seem extremely unlikely that Snowden had such assistance, the alternative scenario, that Snowden broke into the sealed compartments and made off with the documents without any assistance, seems equally unlikely.

Even if Snowden had been, as he claims, a pure idealist seeking to right a perceived wrong, it does exclude the possibility of his becoming entangled in the plots of others. Intelligence services make it their business to bring about such witting or unwitting entanglements.








CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Question of When?

“The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security”

—Snowden in Moscow

In his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John LeCarre helped establish the concept in the public imagination of a mole burrowing unto a rival intelligence service.   LeCarre’s now classic mole, code-named by the KGB “Gerald,” managed in the novel to gain access to the inner sanctum of the British intelligence service MI-6.  Aided and guided by his controllers in Moscow, he systematically stole British intelligence secrets. As LeCarre wove the plot, the brilliantly-orchestrated operation involved spotting, compromising, and recruiting others to gradually advance Gerald the mole to a position of power.  Such well-organized penetrations are not limited to fiction.   The career of KGB mole Heinz Felfe, who was advanced through the ranks of German intelligence by an elaborate series of sacrifices by his controllers in Moscow until he actually headed German counterintelligence in 1961, could have served as the non-fiction inspiration for Le Carre’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came out of the Cold.  As US intelligence only found out after the Cold War ended, the KGB also had the ability to sustain moles for decades.


   The CIA also had its share of long term successes, such as Alexander Poteyev, who fed the CIA secrets for over ten years while burrowing into Russian intelligence.   In the choreography of these operations, as in Le Carre’s fiction, rival intelligence services ensnared and sacrificed recruits , as if playing a chess game, to advance their moles.  Despite notable successes such as Felfe, and Poteyev, a great number of these elaborate conspiracies fail insinuate moles in their adversaries’ confidence.  Intelligence services therefore also take advantage of a more prosaic source:  the self-generated spy, or, as they are called in the trade, walk-in.
Although they are largely unsung in novels, these walk-ins are an important part of espionage.  A counterespionage review done for the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIEB) in 1990 found that most US spies in the Cold War had taken documents on their own volition and only afterwards offered them to an adversary service. Self-generated spies have diverse motives. Some intelligence workers steal secrets for financial gains.  Others take them to further an ideological interest.  As opportunistic enterprises, intelligence services do not turn walk-ins away if they have valuable intelligence.  Indeed, some of the most successful moles were not recruited, or even controlled, by spy agencies.  They were self-generated penetrations, or “sources” as the KGB preferred to call them, who first stole secrets and later voluntarily deliver them to an adversary.  Consider the case of Robert Hanssen, who successfully penetrated the FBI for the Russian intelligence services from 1979 to 2001.  He was a “walk-in,” who never entered the Soviet embassy or met with KGB or SVR case officers. Instead, he set his espionage in motion by passing an anonymous letter to Victor Cherkashin, the KGB spy handler working undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C.  From the start of his work for the KGB, Hanssen laid down his own rules.  The KGB would deliver cash from which all the fingerprints were removed to locations, or “dead drops,” he specified.  He would deliver documents exposing FBI, CIA and NSA sources and methods in another dead drop. The KGB would precisely follow his instructions. Cherkashin told me that Hanssen’s “astounding self-recruitment” was executed in such a way that the KGB never actually controlled him. “He was our most important mole and we didn’t ever know his identity, where he worked or how he had access to FBI, CIA and NSA files.” Even so, the KGB (and later SVR) paid him $600,000 in cash. In return, the anonymous spy delivered 27 computer discs containing hundreds of secret documents revealing the sources and methods of American intelligence.  According to Cherkashin, it was the largest haul of top secrets documents ever obtained by the KGB (although it was only a small fraction of the number of top secret NSA, Department of Defense and CIA documents taken by Snowden in 2013.)   Cherkashin told me the price paid by Moscow was a great bargain since it helped compromise “the NSA’s most advanced electronic interception technology,” including a tunnel under the Soviet Embassy. Yet, it was only after newspapers reported that Hanssen had been arrested by the FBI in February 2001 that Cherkashin learned the name and position of the spy that he had recruited.  Cherkashin told me that what matters to the KGB was not “control” of an agent but the value of the secrets he or she delivered.  “Control is not necessary in espionage as long as we manage to obtain the documents.”  So in the eyes of the KGB, anyone who elects to provide it with US secrets is a spy.
  It is also possible to exploit a walk-in even after he has left his service. For example, KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn was an ideological self-generated spy who walked into the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland on Christmas Day 1962. He asked to see the CIA officer on duty announce to him he had collected a trove of KGB secrets, including information that could identify its key spies in the West. He offered to defect to the U.S. The CIA accepted his offer, and through this archive of secrets he had previously compiled, he became one of the CIA’s most productive sources in the Cold War.


     The job of an intelligence service is to take advantage of whatever opportunities comes its way in the form of self-generated spies.  If a Russian walk-in had not yet burned his bridges to his own service, US intelligence officers were under instructions to attempt to persuade the walk-in to return to his post in Russia and serve as a “defector-in-place,” or mole.  “While defectors can and do provide critical information, a CIA memorandum on walk-ins during the Cold War noted, “There are very few cases in which the same individual may not have been of greater value if he had returned to his post.”  Of course if a walk-in believed he was already compromises, as Golitsyn did, a decision would have to be made whether the value of his intelligence merited exfiltrating him to the United States.
 This required evaluating the bona fides of the walk-in.  Not all walk-ins are accepted as defectors. Some walk-ins are deemed “dangles,” or agents dispatched by the KGB to test and confuse the CIA. Others are rejected as political liabilities, as happened to Wang Lijun, a well-connected police chief in China.  In February 2012, Wang, walked into at the US consulate in Chengdu asking from asylum.  The State Department decided against it. After Wang left US protection, he was arrested for corruption and received a 15 year prison sentence.   Such decisions about walk-ins are not made with due consideration, often at the highest level of a government, since exfiltrating a defector can result in diplomatic ruptures and political embarrassments.

Conversely, it raises espionage concerns when an adversary government authorizes the exfiltration of a rogue employee of an intelligence service.  At minimum, it means that a rival government placed value on what the defector could provide it.  The Snowden case is no exception.   Whatever Snowden’s prior relations may have been with Russia, it could prudently assumed that after he fled to Moscow, in light of the intelligence value of the stolen documents, he would wind up in the hands of the Russian security services.  That assumption was reinforced by subsequent countermeasures that were implemented by Russia to block secret sources of NSA surveillance.   “Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks, communications sources dried up, tactics were changed,” Michael Morell who was at that time the Deputy Director of the CIA, revealed.  It indicated that at least part of the US communications intelligence that Snowden had stole was in enemy hands. The CIA and NSA’s monitoring of these countermeasures  was itself extremely delicate since revealing what they learned about Russian and Chinese countermeasures  risked compromising even more U.S communications sources than had Snowden.  General Keith B. Alexander headed both the NSA and Cyber Command at the time these countermeasures were first detected in 2013. He said in his interview with the Australian Business Review: “We absolutely need to know what Russia’s involvement is with Snowden.” He further said, “I think Snowden is now being manipulated by Russian intelligence.  I just don't know when that exactly started."     Much turned on the answer to this “when” question.  The counterintelligence issue was not if this U.S. intelligence defector in Moscow was under Russian control, but when he came under it.

    There were three possible time periods when Snowden might have been brought under control by the Russian intelligence service: while he was still working for the NSA; after he arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013; or after he arrived in Russia on June 23, 2013.

The NSA Scenario

   The first scenario could stretch as far back as when Snowden was forced out of the CIA in 2009.  It will be recalled that the CIA then had planned to launch a security investigation of Snowden but it was aborted when he resigned.  He also had incurred large losses speculating in the financial markets in Geneva, which is an activity which had in the past attracted in interest of foreign intelligence services.  So it had to be considered in this scenario that Snowden had been recruited by the Russians after he left the CIA and directed to take jobs at civilian contractors servicing the NSA. Such “career management,” as it is called by the CIA, could explain why Snowden had switched jobs in March 2013 to Booz Allen Hamilton, which, unlike his previous employer Dell, allowed him to gain proximity the super-secrets list of the telecommunication systems that the NSA had penetrated in Russia and China.  Even though Snowden himself did not have password access to these files, since he was still as a trainee, he managed to acquire the necessary passwords from others working there.  It could also account for why the documents he copied that pertained to NSA operations in Russia were not among those he gave to Poitras, Greenwald and other journalists.  Since Russia has an active intelligence sharing treaty with China since 1996, it could further explain why his first stop was Hong Kong, a part of China.  It was a safe venue for debriefing Snowden, as well as establishing his credentials among journalists as a whistle-blower, before a decision was made to allow him to proceed to Russia.

The nearly fatal problem with this early-recruitment scenario is Snowden contacts with journalists.  Snowden, it will be recalled, had contacted Greenwald in December 2012.  Greenwald was a high-profile blogger in Brazil who did not use encryption or any security safeguards. Next, he contacted Poitras in January 2013 in Berlin who was a magnet for NSA dissidents.    Both of these contacts put Snowden’s clandestine downloading at grave risk. As known opponents of US intelligence agencies, these journalists might be, as they themselves suspected they were, under surveillance by American, British, Brazilian or German intelligence services. Greenwald and Poitras might also tell others who were either under surveillance or informers. So no matter what precaution Snowden took, his secret enterprise, or just the fact he was in contact with anti-government activists might be detected. At minimum, he could lose his access to secrets and be of no further use as a source at the NSA. He could also be interrogated and reveal the way he was brought under control.    If Snowden actually had been under the control of the Russian intelligence service, the last thing it would allow was for him to take such a risk—or even to contact a single journalist.  After all, the purpose of an espionage operation is to steal secrets without alerting anyone, including journalists, to the theft.     A former CIA officer told me that while anything could “go haywire: in an intelligence operation, it would be “unthinkable” that the Russian intelligence service would permit a source it controlled in the NSA to expose himself by contacting journalists.  It was, as he put it, a “lose-lose move.”  Assuming that the operation did not “go haywire,” Snowden’s continued interactions with Poitras and Greenwald made it implausible to me that Snowden was under Russian control before he went to Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Scenario

      The second possibility is that Snowden was brought under Russian control while he was in Hong Kong.  The most compelling support for this scenario comes from Putin himself,  His disclosure about the case leaves little doubt that Russian officials engaged Snowden in Hong Kong, that Putin authorized his trip to Moscow while he was in Hong Kong and the Russian government allowed him to fly to Moscow without a Russian visa. We also know that Snowden indicated to Gellman he was in touch with a foreign embassy and that he met with Russian diplomats in Hong Kong.  We know from US surveillance of his activities in Hong Kong that he contacted the Russian consulate.  And we know that the Russians went to some lengths to facilitate his trip to Moscow. All these pieces in the Hong Kong scenario support the possibility that the Russian intelligence service managed to bring him under its sway during his 33 days in Hong Kong.

      The Russian intelligence service even might have been aware of Snowden, and his anti-NSA activities, before his arrival on May 20, 2013. Snowden, as discussed earlier, was anything but discrete in his contacts with strangers in the anti-surveillance movement, including such well known activists as Runa Sandvik (who he supplied his true name and address via email), Micah Lee, Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins, and Laura Poitras. “It is not statistically improbable that members of this circle were being watched by a hostile service,”   a former NSA counterintelligence officer told me in 2015. When I told him that Poitras and others in her circle had used PGP encryption, aliases and TOR software in their exchanges with Snowden, he said, arching his eyebrows, “That might work against amateurs, but it wouldn’t stop the Russians if they thought they might have a defector in the NSA.”  He explained that both the NSA and hostile services have the “means” to bypass such safeguards.

     I next asked him what the Russian intelligence service would have done if they had indeed spotted Snowden in late 2012 or early 2013.  “Maybe just research him,” he replied.  As we know now, he pointed out. Russia and China probably had access the 127-page standard form in his personnel file that he updated in 2011.   They also had the capability to track his air travel to Hong Kong.  “Could someone have steered him to Hong Kong?” I asked.  He answered. With a shrug, “That depends on whether  Snowden had a confidante who could have influenced him.”

Whenever adversaries became aware of Snowden in this scenario, it was not until after Snowden copied the NSA secrets and took them with him to Hong Kong that Russian intelligence officers offered him a deal.   So from the Russian point of view, Snowden had already burnt his bridges. Since he had used other people’s passwords to get into computers that he was not authorized to use,  illegally moved documents and gave a false reason for his medical leave, it was only a matter of time before NSA investigators would identify him as a possible spy.  He could be of no further use to an adversary at the NSA.  His intelligence value now lay in the documents he had taken with him or stored in the cloud as well as his ability to help clarify them in debriefing sessions.  In addition, he could have a further use to an adversary, especially if he agreed to cooperate.  By virtue of his position as a former insider, he could inflict damage on the morale and public standing of the NSA by denouncing its spying in the media.  So once in Hong Kong, the Russians would have no reason to restrain him from holding a press event or releasing a video,  In fact, in the past the KGB had organized press conferences for all the previous NSA defectors to Moscow.  Hong Kong also might be seen as a perfect venue for a well-staged media event since all the major newspapers in the world had bureaus there.  And his disclosures about the NSA spying coming under the mantle of whistle-blowing could serve to weaken the NSA’s relations with its allies.  The event would also serve to deflect suspicion from any other potential spies in the NSA, if any existed.  Snowden’s going public on June 9th 2013 provided that opportunity.

It is also possible in this Hong Kong scenario that Russian or Chinese intelligence did not become aware of Snowden until after he went public on June 9th 2013 by having the Guardian release his video. At that point, if the Russians or Chinese had any doubts how dissatisfied he was with the NSA, they would be dispelled by the video. Since dissatisfaction is one of the classic means of recruitment in the intelligence business, he certainly would become a prime target for recruitment after he went public.    The CIA also considered the possibility that Snowden also may have been reeled in unwittingly. Its Deputy Director, Michael Morell suggested in his book that Snowden may not himself have fully realized “when and how he would be used.”



  What can be safely assumed is that the decision made by Putin’s intelligence service to allow Snowden to proceed to Russia proceeded from something other than soft-hearted sentiment about his welfare.  In addition, this decision was not made on the spur of the moment.  After Putin learned that there was an American in Hong Kong from the “special services” seeking to come to Russia, he also learned from Snowden’s own disclosure on the video that he had taken to Hong Kong a large number of NSA documents. After that self-outing by Snowden, Putin had at least 14 days to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of allowing him to come to Moscow.   To be sure, we don’t know the precise date of Snowden’s first contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong.   Putin reframed from specifying when Snowden first met them. But whenever it was, we know that he was deemed important enough by the Russian intelligence service for it to bring him to the personal attention of Putin.
       Putin could offer him not only his freedom from arrest but a platform to express his views.  The exploitation of an intelligence defector, even after he yields his secrets documents, can also be part of an intelligence operation.  General Alexander, who ran the NSA during this period, concluded that Putin was playing a deep game with Snowden by “looking to capitalize on the fact that his [Snowden’s] actions are enormously disruptive and damaging to US interests.”  This game, if Alexander’s assessment in correct, might provide Putin with ample reason to have his representatives in Hong Kong offer Snowden an exfiltration deal.

 Snowden hardly was not in any position to refuse such a deal. After the release of the video release, there was no going back to America without his facing a determined criminal prosecution.  If he had researched the issue, he would  have known that in every prior case, intelligence workers who had released even a single classified document  had gone to prison.  As his Internet postings show, he had closely followed the ordeal of Bradley Manning, whose trial was coming to its conclusion while Snowden was in Hong Kong.  So he likely knew that even though the documents Manning had sent to Wikileaks were far less damaging than those Snowden had taken. Manning had been kept in solitary confinement under horrific conditions for over a year while awaiting his trial and was facing a long prison sentence. (Manning was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison.)   There was no reason for Snowden to expect a better outcome for himself if he returned to the US or was arrested in Hong Kong or any other place that had an extradition treaty with the US.  As the Russian officials in Hong Kong might well have informed him, Russia had no extradition treaty with the US,  It was also one of the few places in the world that he could reach from Hong Kong without flying through airspace in which he might be intercepted by a US ally. Moreover, Putin himself had approved his exfiltration, which meant that, even without a valid passport or visa, Snowden could take the direct Aeroflot flight to Moscow.  Snowden’s choice was going to Russia or going to prison.

The Russians could have used this leverage in the Hong Kong scenario to extract a quid pro quo. The price of admission in that quid pro quo was proving all his documents and putting himself in the hands of Russian intelligence.  To be sure, Snowden might have refused this leverage in Hong Kong, and Putin may have decided the terms of the deal could better be negotiated in Moscow.

The Moscow Scenario


    The final possibility is that Snowden did not come under Russian control until after he arrived in Moscow.   Certainly, the Russian intelligence service could afford to wait in Hong Kong before tightening the vice on Snowden.  It knew that Interpol and the US would be pursuing him throughout the world and that Snowden had no valid travel documents to go anywhere else.  It could also have determined that his credit cards had been frozen. So it could afford to wait until his plane landed in Russia.


  After the Russians took him in a “special operation” from the plane at the airport, he was informed by Russian authorities that he would not be allowed to go to Cuba, Venezuela, Iceland, Ecuador, or any other country without the permission of Russian officials, which would not be immediately forthcoming. So he never even showed up for the flight to Cuba (which Assange had  “leaked” to the media he would be aboard.) He was now at the mercy of the Russian authorities.  There was good reason for keeping him in a virtual prison in Russia.   "He can compromise thousands of intelligence and military officials,” Sergei Alexandrovich Markov, the co-Chairman of the National Strategic Council of Russia and an adviser to Putin, pointed out, “We can't send him back just because America demands it."



So Snowden was consigned to the transit zone of the airport, which is a twilight zone neither inside nor outside of Russia, a netherworld that extends beyond the confines of the airport to include safe houses and other facilities maintained by the FSB for the purposes of interrogation and security.  Stranded at the Moscow airport, Snowden had no place to go except into the waiting arms of the FSB. No matter what he had believed earlier in Hong Kong, he would quickly realize that he had only one viable option: seeking sanctuary in Russia.


     Even though the FSB is known by US intelligence to run a strict regime over present and former members of foreign intelligence services, Snowden may not have realized the full extent of the FSB’s interest in him.  He naively told the Washington Post in December 2013 in Moscow, “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”  While he might have sincerely persuaded himself  that he was somehow helping US communications intelligence  in a self-appointed role, those familiar with the activities of the Russian security services find it inconceivable that he could escape their control in Russia. At the very minimum,   a former US intelligence worker who stole American state secrets, such as Snowden, would be under the FSB’s scrutiny.  Andrei Soldatov, the co-author of the 2010 book The New Nobility: the Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, and who was personal knowledgeable about FSB procedures, explained the FSB would monitor “every facet of Snowden's communications, and his life.”    General Oleg Kalugin, who, as previously mentioned, defected from the KGB to the United States in 1995, added that the FSB following the standard operating procedures of the KGB, would be “his hosts and they are taking care of him.” Kalugin further said in 2014 that “Whatever he had access to in his former days at NSA, I believe he shared all of it with the Russians, and they are very grateful”



     American intelligence officers knowledgeable about the operations of the FSB, agreed with Kalugin’s assessment.   General Hayden, for example, who served both as director of the NSA, CIA, and Air Force counterintelligence, told me in an interview that he saw no other possibility than Snowden would be induced to cooperate in this situation, saying “I would lose all respect for the Russian and Chinese security services if they haven’t fully exploited everything Snowden had to give.”   They certainly had that opportunity at Sheremetyevo International Airport: He had already, at least in the eyes of the Department of Justice, betrayed US secrets by stealing them and taking them abroad.  Snowden was held in limbo in the transit zone.  The FSB controlled his access to food, lodgings, the Internet, and whatever else he needed to survive there.  It could also return him to the US if he did not cooperate.  What recourse did Snowden have?  The only party from whom he could seek redress was Putin’s regime.  Russia’s leverage now would be even greater than in Hong Kong. If Putin chose to fully apply it, would be all but irresistible over a fugitive who had literally no place else to go.  In a word, the FSB held all the cards but one—Snowden’s help with the stolen documents. Even if Snowden disliked the tactics of the Russian security services, his situation left him a powerful inducement now not to decline the requests of the Russian authorities.

Two weeks after his arrival, the Russian authorities provided him with a convenient path to full cooperation with Russia.  He was put in contact with Anatoly Grigorievich Kucherena, a silver-haired 53-year old lawyer, who was known as a personal friend of Putin.  Kucherena also did task for Putin’s party in the Russian parliament or Duma.  Most important for Snowden, Kucherena had excellent connections in the Russian security apparatus since he served on the oversight committee of the FSB.  He also offered to serve as the lawyer for Snowden pro bono.   On July 10, 2013, Snowden officially retained him as his legal representative in Moscow. From that point on, he would act as Snowden’s go-between with the FSB and other Russian agencies.


At the outset, Kucherena made it clear to Snowden that he would have to play by Moscow’s rules before the Kremlin would grant him permission to stay in Russia.  To begin with, Snowden had to withdraw any and application he had made elsewhere for asylum.  He had to put his fate entirely in the hands of Putin’s Russia.  He would also have to be fully candid with the Russian authorities about what was of great value to Putin: the secret documents he had acquired.


 Two days later, Snowden made his first public appearance in Russia.  It had been, like previous press conferences with US defectors to Russia, carefully managed,  First, Snowden arrived by limousine at the international transit lounge of Sheremetyevo airport.  He was seated at a table with Harrison.  As Snowden spoke no Russian, a Russian translator was provided.  The small audience included hand-picked Russian officials, including some Putin’s close associates.  They were ushered through passport control by security men to the otherwise cordoned-off lounge.  The cameras for RT television and other Russian channels were already in place.    When everyone had taken their seats, Snowden announced in a quiet voice that was seeking asylum in Russia.  Ten minutes later, Snowden and Harrison were escorted back to the limousine which drove off to an unannounced destination.

      Snowden received Russian identification papers on August 1, 2013 that allowed him to resettle in Moscow.  Not only was he provided with a residence but he was allowed to set up in it a broadcasting studio that could be used for Internet appearance at well-attended events around the world, such as South by Southwest, TED, and other Internet conferences. Snowden was, according to Kucherena, was also furnished with bodyguards. To help earn his keep, he was employed at an unidentified Moscow cyber-security firm.  To complete his resettlement, Lindsay Mills, whom he had left behind in Hawaii, was given a 3-month visa and was allowed to temporarily live with him in Moscow.  This afforded him a life style which Snowden described in an interview as “great.”



Kucherena, although he was acting without compensation from Snowden, later received the stunning sum of one million dollars from Open Road Films, the distributor for Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” movie,  for the  rights to his not completed novel called “Time of the Octopus,”  a story based on his story of Snowden’s stay at the airport.
It would strain credibility that such privileges would be awarded to an intelligence defector who had refused to cooperate with Russian authorities. In Snowden’s case, he was even allowed to participate in a Putin’s telethon on state-controlled television.  On it, he was called on to ask Putin if the Russian government violated the privacy of Russian citizens in the same way that the American government violated rights of its citizens. Putin, smiling at Snowden’s presumably vetted question, answered in a single word: “No.”

    In the Moscow scenario, Snowden received sanctuary, support, perks and high-level treatment by Putin himself because he agreed to cooperate.  If Snowden had not paid the price of admission, either in Russia or before his arrival, he would not have been accorded this privileged status.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”

                                                   --Edward Snowden in Moscow

The critical missing piece in Snowden enigma is the whereabouts of the NSA documents.  Greenwald told the Associated Press that the documents that Snowden had taken from the NSA constituted " the instruction manual for how the NSA is built" and they "would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it." Snowden indeed said on camera in June 2013 that NSA investigators would have “a heart attack” when they discovered the extent the breach.   Ledgett, the NSA official who it will be recalled had conducted the damage assessment, while not having a heart attack, confirmed that the files Snowden had taken a massive number of files, which he pout at over one million documents, and, among them, what he deemed the NSA’s “keys to the kingdom.”  These so-called “keys to the kingdom” presumably could open up the mechanism through the United States learns about the secret activities of other nations, and, by doing so, bring down the American signals intelligence system that had for 60 years monitored government communications.  It had also kept track of adversaries’ missile telemetry, submarine movements, and nuclear proliferation.

  The Snowden breach was not without precedent at the NSA.  There had been two Russian spies at the NSA during the Cold War, Jack Dunlap and David Boone who took a limited number of documents, but no one since the end of the Cold War had taken a single NSA classified document.  Now an insider removed, by any count, tens of thousands of NSA’s documents.  Moreover, many of these documents were classified “TS/SCI”—Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information—which, as NSA secrets went, were the gold standard of espionage. Whatever the assessment of Snowden’s motivation, the single question that needed to be answered was:  What happened to these stolen files?

To begin with, there is a huge disparity between the number of documents that the NSA calculated that Snowden compromised and the number of documents he is known to have handed over to journalists in Hong Kong on a thumb drive.  After the Snowden breach, the House and Senate intelligence committees asked the NSA how many documents were taken by Snowden.  Even though the NSA had employed a world class team of computer scientists, cryptanalysts and forensic experts to reconstruct the crime from the logs, it could not come up with a definitive number.  What it could say was how many documents had been highlighted or selected, coped and moved to another computer.  As the NSA briefed these committees in closed-door sessions, 1.7 million had been selected in two dozen NSA computers during Snowden’s brief tenure at Booz Allen in 2013. This total included documents from the Department of Defense, NSA and CIA.  Of these “touched” documents, some 1.3 million of them had been copied and moved to another computer.  The selection of these documents by Snowden could hardly be considered an accident since Snowden had used pre-programmed spiders to find and index these documents. In addition he had stated that he took the job at Booz Allen to get access to data that had been copied. So, as far as the NSA was concerned the 1.3 million documents he copied and moved were considered compromised.   On top of this haul, Snowden had copied files while working at Dell in 2012.  The total number he stole there is unknown, however, because, as a system administrator there, he could download data without leaving a digital trail.  At best, the NSA investigation could only count the documents that were published or referred to in the press and those found on the thumb drive intercepted in London that traced back to his 2012 work at Dell.  As previously mentioned, more than half the published documents had been taken during Snowden’s time at Dell.

 Snowden supporters, to be sure, do not accept that Snowden stole such a large number of documents.  According to Greenwald, the NSA vastly exaggerated the magnitude of the theft in order to “demonize” Snowden.  Snowden also disputed the 1.7 million number.  He told James Bamford of Wired in early 2014, that he took far less than the 1.7 million documents that the NSA reported was compromised.  He further claimed in that same interview that he purposely left behind at the NSA base in Hawaii “a trail of digital bread crumbs” so that the NSA could determine which documents he “touched” but did not download. If so, these “bread crumbs” were missed by the NSA according to its statement.

    It is within the realm of possibility that the NSA Damage Assessment team under Ledgett falsified its finding to inflate the number of documents that Snowden stole.   NSA executives also might have lied to Congress to the same end.  But why would these officials engage in an orchestrated deception that made them look bad?  Ledgett, after all, had been in charge of the National Threat Operations Center from which most of the Level 3 documents were stolen. By exaggerating the magnitude of the theft it would also magnify Ledgett and other NSA’s failure in its mission to protect US secrets.  Certainly they had no reason to demonize him for legal reasons.   Greenwald and Poitras had already effectively demonized him in this regard. They revealed that Snowden had given them a vast number of NSA classified documents on a thumb drive that revealed, as Greenwald put it, the “blueprints” of the NSA. This drive contained, it will be recalled, no few than 58,000 documents.  As was discussed in Chapter I, just revealing the partial content of a single document to a journalist, as in the case of CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, could result in two years in prison.  So in the eyes of the law disclosing the full contents of 58,000 highly-classified documents constituted an unprecedented breach of the laws passed to protect communications intelligence.    In any case, safely ensconced in Russia, Snowden was not in any legal jeopardy no matter how many documents it was claimed by the government that he stole.   It is also makes little sense that the numbers were falsified by the Department to tarnish Snowden’s image. The 35-page Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment, for example, that said that 900,000 Pentagon documents were compromised by Snowden, was not made public. It was only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015.

What is known is the number of documents that Snowden gave to journalists in Hong Kong.  As will be recalled, Poitras and Greenwald were “writing partners.”  When Greenwald discovered that his copy of the documents were corrupted,  Poitras made a copy of the thumb drive that Snowden gave her in Hong Kong and sent it to her Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro by a courier. That courier was intercepted by British authorities at Heathrow Airport.  When examined,  the Poitras-Greenwald thumb drive contained some 58,000 documents.  This meant that the lion’s share of the 1.3 million documents that the NSA claimed were compromised had not been given to journalists and is unaccounted for.

The numbers game is not only misleading nut unenlightening on the issue of the value of the compromised documents.  Many of the putative 1.3 million documents that the NSA says were copied and moved were duplicate copies. Others were outdated or otherwise useless routing data.  So the quantity does not tell the story. Of far more importance than the quantity of the total haul is  the quality of some of the data that Snowden had copied.  Just a single one of these documents could cripple not just the NSA but America’s entire multi-billion dollar apparatus for intercepting foreign intelligence. The previously-cited summary of requests by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and other agencies for communications intelligence, for example, which was 31,000 pages long,  listed all the gaps in U.S. coverage of adversaries, including those cited by President Obama’s national security team. As Ledgett warned, this single document, if it fell into enemy hands, would provide out adversaries with “a roadmap of what we know what we don’t know and imp/licitly a way to protect themselves.”  The “roadmap” was not found among the files on the thumb drive.  Nor were most of the missing level 3 lists concerning NSA activities in Russia and China found on the thumb drive, even though Snowden said he took taken his final job at Booz Allen to get access to these lists.  If Snowden had not given these documents to Poitras, Greenwald or other journalists, where were they?

The compartment logs showed that Snowden copied and transferred these level 3 documents in his final week at the NSA.  He presumably had them in his possession in Hong Kong after he arrived on May 20, 2013.  On June 3rd, according to Greenwald, he was still sorting through the material to determine which ones were appropriate to give to journalists.  On June 12th 2013, he told reporter Lana Lam in Hong Kong that he was going through the documents, country by country, to determine which additional ones he should pass on to journalists. Eleven days later, he departed Hong Kong for Moscow carrying at least one laptop computer.  Even after arriving in Moscow, he suggested he still had NSA secrets in his possession. "No intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect, “ he wrote to former Senator Gordon Humphrey, “I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture."  Much of the material he copied while working at Booz Allen remained, as far as the NSA could determine, missing.  Had he brought these files under his “protection” to Russia?

An answer came three months later from his Moscow lawyer, Anatoly  Kucherena.  On September 23, 2013, Kucherena had an extensive interviewed on the state owned RT channel.   The interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze, who had a show on RT Television, called “Sophie & Co,” was well-admired journalist in her own right.  She is also the grand-daughter of Edward Shevardnadze, a former foreign minister and Politburo member of the Soviet Union and, after the Soviet Union broke up, the first president of Georgia. Even though she had interviewed many top political figures in Russia, obtaining an hour-long interview with Kucherena was a coup since, up until then, he had not discussed the subject in Snowden in a television interview.    About half-way through the interview, she brought up a highly-sensitive subject of the disposition of the NSA documents. She directly asked Kucherena if Snowden given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong.

If anyone was in a position to know about these documents, it was Kucherena. He had acted as an intermediary for Snowden in his negotiations with Russian authorities, including the FSB.   As such, he would be privy to the status of the secret material that was of immense concern to the Russian intelligence services.   When I interviewed Kucherena in Moscow in 2015, he told me that “all the reports” concerning Snowden had been turned over to him by “Russian authorities” in July 2013. “I had all of Snowden’s statements,” he said. If so, he presumably knew what Snowden had told the Russian security services prior

Had Snowden come to Russia with empty hands or bearing gifts?   Kucherena answered her question without any evasion. He said that Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong.  He had kept the remaining documents in his possession.  That confirmed what Snowden had told Greenwald. Poitras and Lam in Hong Kong.  Snowden told them that he had divided the stolen NSA documents into two separate sets of documents. One set he gave to Poitras and Greenwald on thumb drives.  The other set, which he told them that he considered too sensitive for these journalists, he retained for himself.  As late as July 14, 2013, Greenwald told the Associated Press that Snowden held back documents and  “ "is in possession of literally thousands of documents ... that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."  One issue for U.S. investigators at the NSA, CIA and Department of Defense was what Snowden did with the second set after his meetings with the journalists in Hong Kong.  Did he take these documents with him to Russia?

Shevardnadze, who makes it a point to drill her interviewees, pressed Kucherena as to whether Snowden still had these NSA files, or “material” in Russia.  The dialogue went as follows (from the transcript supplied to me by Shevardnadze.)

          Shevardnadze:  So he [Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been     made public yet?


          Kucherena: Certainly.

    After establishing some part of Snowden’s “material” was still in his possession, Shevardnadze asked the next logical question:  “Why did Russia get involved in this whole thing if it got nothing out of?”
In response, Kucherena elliptically hinted that the unreleased material contained CIA secret files.   “Snowden spent quite a few years working for the CIA.” He said. "We haven’t fully realized yet the importance of his revelations.”  (He was correct that Snowden had stolen a larger number of CIA documents that he had not turned over to journalists, as CIA deputy director Morell confirmed.)

Whatever this material might reveal, the FSB was presumably aware of its existence. After all, Kucherena was on the FSB’s public oversight board. If he had kept Snowden’s possessions of these documents secret from the FSB, he would not have divulged it in an interview on television.

Kucherena’s answer left little ambiguity to the critical question about the fate of the NSA’s missing documents: Snowden had not destroyed the electronic files of NSA documents that he had not distributed to journalists.  He still had them, when Kucherena had reviewed his files in Russia.  Kucherena’s disclosure that Snowden retained these crucial documents did not contradict Snowden’s own story at the time of the Shevardnadze interview.  Indeed, it was completely consistent with the statement Snowden made three weeks after arriving in Russia in his previously-mentioned email to Senator Humphrey.

Snowden subsequently changed his story.  In mid-October, Snowden electronically-informed journalists that he had destroyed all the NSA documents in his possession before flying to Moscow.  So his new story radically contradicted what his own lawyer had said the previous month on television.

To be sure, Kucherena who later confirmed the accuracy of the Shevardnadze interview to me in Moscow in 2015 may have meant to say that Snowden only had access to the NSA documents rather than having the physical files in his possession. It is certainly possible that Snowden transferred the NSA files from his own computers and thumb drives to storage on a remote server in the so-called “cloud” before coming to Russia.     The “cloud” is actually not in the sky but a term used for remote storage servers, such as those provided by Drop Box, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other Internet companies.  Anyone who is connected to the Internet can store and retrieved files by entering a user name and a password.  For Kucherena to be certain Snowden had access to this data, Snowden must have demonstrated his access either to him or the authorities.  The Russians therefore also knew Snowden had the means to retrieve this data. Since the data concerned electronic espionage against Russia, the FSB had every reason to ask him to share his user name and password. If Snowden had encrypted these files, it would also ask for his encryption key.  And the FSB is not known to take a no for an answer in issues involving espionage.

   Even if Snowden refused to furnish his key, it would not present an insurmountable barrier for the FSB.  Snowden may have had confidence in the power of his encryption protocols but, according to a former National Security Council staffer, the Russian cyber service in 2013 had the means, the time and the incentive to break the encryption.   It is unlikely they would have gone to the trouble since they had Snowden in the palm of their hand in Moscow. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that, by one way or another, willingly or under duress, Snowden shared his access to his treasure trove of documents with the agencies that were literally in control of his life in Russia.

Kucherena’s answer to the question of access also may help to explain Putin’s decision to allow Snowden to come to Moscow.  As has been discussed earlier, it was not a minor sacrifice for Putin. His foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had spent almost six months negotiating with Hillary Clinton’s State Department a one-on-one summit between President Obama and President Putin. Not only would this summit be a diplomatic coup for Russia but it would add to Putin’s personal credibility in advance of the Olympic Games in Russia.    In mid-June, after US intelligence reported to Obama’s National Security adviser that Snowden was in contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong, the State Department explicitly told Lavrov that allowing Snowden to defect to Russia would be viewed by President Obama as a blatantly unfriendly act. As such, it could (and did) lead to the cancellation of the planned summit.  So Putin knew the downside of admitting Snowden.

But there was also an upside if Snowden had access to the NSA documents. A large archive of files containing the sources of the NSA’s electronic interceptions, as Snowden claimed he had in Hong Kong, had enormous potential intelligence value   Putin therefore had to choose between the loss of an Obama summit and the gain of an intelligence coup.  That Putin chose the latter suggests that he had calculated that the utility of the intelligence that the NSA archive outweighed the public relations advantages of the Obama summit (which, after Snowden arrived in Moscow, was cancelled by Obama.)   Would Putin have made such a sacrifice if Snowden had destroyed or refused to share the stolen data?  “No country, not even the United States, would grant sanctuary to an intelligence defector who refused to be cooperative,” answered a former CIA officer who had spent a decade dealing with Russian intelligence defectors. “That’s not how it works.” If so, it seems plausible to me that, as Kucherena said, that Snowden’s documents were accessible to him either on a computer or via storage in the cloud after he arrived in Moscow.  It explains why Russia exfiltrated him from Hong Kong and provided him with a safe haven,

 The Quickly Changing Narrative

Just three weeks after Kucherena’s stunning disclosure, Snowden changed the narrative. His first exchange with an American journalist after his arrival in Russia was not until October 1`7, 2013.   It was conducted over the Internet with James Risen, a Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter.  Essentially Snowden supplied answers to a set of questions.  In then, Snowden now asserted he took no documents to Russia. The subsequent front-page story, which carried the headline, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” reported that Snowden claimed that he gave all his documents to journalists in Hong Kong and he brought none of them to Russia. He also said that he was “100 percent” certain that no foreign intelligence service had had access to them at any point during his journey from Honolulu to Moscow.
When I later asked Kucherena in Moscow why Snowden changed his story in direct contradiction of what Kucherena had stated, he said “Wizner.”   He was referring to Ben Wizner, a top-drawer ACLU lawyer based in Washington D.C.   Wizner had joined the ACLU in August 2001 after graduating NYU law school and clerking for a Federal judge.  At the ACLU, he became an effective foe of NSA surveillance.  “I had spent ten years before this [Snowden leak] trying to bring lawsuits against the intelligence community,” he explained in an interview with Forbes in 2014.  Prior to the Snowden leak, he had been consulted frequently by Poitras on government surveillance issues (and appeared in Poitras’ 2010 documentary “The Oath.”)   He had also been engaged in a law suit aimed at exposing the NSA’s subpoenas for Verizon records.

    He had first learned about Snowden in early 2013, while Snowden was still working for the NSA, from Poitras.  At that time, Poitras did not know Snowden’s real name, but she revealed to Wizner that she had found an anonymous source with access to U.S. government surveillance secrets. So he was not completely surprised when Glenn Greenwald, Poitras’ writing partner, asked him in July 2013 to contact Snowden in Russia.

Snowden offered an opportunity  for Wizner since the ACLU already had been pursuing a suit in Federal court against the government’s seizure of Verizon’s billing records. If he could induce Snowden to retain him and the ACLU, he could claim standing in Federal court to represent Snowden in the case. He also fully believed in the salutary benefit of Snowden’s revelations.  They communicated over Skype, according to Kucherena.  When they discussed Snowden’s legal situation in America, Snowden expressed an interest in obtaining some form of amnesty from prosecution in America.  Wizner was willing to attempt to explore making a possible deal with the Department of Justice, but it would not be an easy task, especially if Snowden had turned over NSA documents to a foreign power.

    Even to argue that Snowden was merely a NSA whistle-blower presented a serious challenge for Wizner.  The ACLU had been involved with three previous NSA whistle-blowers, William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and Russell D. Tice, but Snowden’s case differed from those cases in an important ways. Binney, Drake, and Tice had not intentionally taken any NSA documents.  Snowden, on the other hand, had not only taken a large NSA documents but released tens of thousands of these top secret files to journalists based in Germany and Brazil as well as other unauthorized recipients.  In addition, the Whistle Blower Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1989, does not exempt an insider who signs a secrecy oath, such as Snowden, from the legal consequences of disclosing classified documents to journalists or other unauthorized persons.  Consequently, getting some form of amnesty for Snowden required changing Snowden’s public image from that of a person who had damaged America to an image of a person who had helped America.  But if Snowden had taken even a single top secret document to Russia, the case could be made that he had stolen communications intelligence secrets with intent to damage the United States, which under the law could be considered espionage.  In this regard, Kucherena’s disclosure was extremely damaging to Snowden’s position.
    One way to mitigate the damage from it was for Snowden to substitute a new narrative.  In it, he would say to say to hand-picked journalists that he had given all his documents to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong and took none of them to Russia,  Wizner could then  argue that documents such as the FISA warrant were improperly classified secret and that disclosing them served the public good. The government might not be able to contest his claim without further revealing NSA sources.  Under these circumstances, it might be induced to agree to a plea bargain for Snowden.  Changing the narrative would also help enhance his public image as a whistle-blower,
    Whatever the reasoning that led to it, Snowden’s new narrative was that he had destroyed all the documents he had in his possession before coming to Moscow and had no access to any NSA documents, not even those that he had distributed to journalists.
Snowden reinforced this narrative in almost in a series f interviews arranged by Wizner. In December 2013, he met with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.  It was his first face-to-face meeting with a journalist since he had arrived in Russia in June. To advance his narrative , Snowden turned on his laptop to Gellman and, as if proving his point, said to him “there’s nothing on it… my hard drive is completely blank.”   That his computer had no files stored on it actually meant very little. The files could have been transferred to another device, or, as was discussed earlier, to a server in the cloud.    Gellman probed further by asking the precise whereabouts of the files, but, as he reported, Snowden declined to answer that question.  All that he would say was that he was “confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong.”   Since that answer did not nail down the issue, Wizner arranged for Vanity Fair, which was preparing an article on Snowden, to submit questions.  In his reply to them, Snowden wrote s that he destroyed all his files in Hong Kong because he didn’t want to risk bringing them to Russia.   He expanded on this claim in three more interviews arranged by Wizner.  These interviews were with three  journalists who themselves had opposed NSA surveillance: James Bamford writing for Wired magazine, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. He also gave a televised interview to Brian Williams of NBC News in which he explained that since he had no access to the NSA documents in Russia, he could not provide access to the Russians even if they “break my fingers.”
Snowden did he specify where, when or how the putative destruction of the files occurred, and offered no witnesses or evidence, other than a blank laptop screen to corroborate it.  Even though his new narrative was widely accepted by the media,  a self-serving claim by a perpetrator  that files have been destroyed  cannot be accepted at face value in a digital age in which files can be copied to another computer or moved to the “cloud” with the click of a key,.  After all Snowden went to considerable risk to select, copy, and steal these Level 3 documents in mid-May before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong.  They were the last medium of value he held in Hong Kong. These secrets were his potential bargaining chips. Why would he simply erase them in June in Hong Kong?    It is also difficult for me to accept that he would destroy these documents because he feared the Russians might get them. If he was so concerned about the ability of Russian intelligence, he could have stayed in Hong Kong and fought extradition instead of flying to Russia.  Once he made his arrangements to go to Russia, he must have realized that even without the files on his computer, the Russian intelligence service could still obtain the NSA secrets he held in his head.  Indeed, as he told the New York Times, the secrets he held in his head would have devastating consequences for NSA operations.
    In light of Kucherena statement that Snowden had access to NSA documents in Russia, it would require some form of a suspension of disbelief to accept Snowden’s new narrative.  But even if one was willing to accept his erasure claim, it still would not mean that the NSA documents had not fallen into the hands of adversaries.
  If he had destroyed all of the electronic copies of the NSA’s data before boarding his flight to Moscow, he could he be “100 percent” certain, as he claimed that the data had not been accessed by others prior to his departure from Hong Kong. His files could have been copied without his knowledge, just as he had copied them without the NSA’s knowledge.  As former U.S. intelligence officers pointed out to me, adversary services could not be expected to shirk from employing their full capabilities once they learned that an American “agent of special services,” as Putin called him, had brought stolen NSA documents to Hong Kong.  The New York Times reported from Hong Kong that two sources, both of whom worked for major government intelligence agencies, “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.”  That China had the capability to obtain Snowden’s data was also the view of former CIA Deputy Director Morell.  He said:  “Both the Chinese and the Russians would have used everything in their tool kit—from human approaches to technical attacks—to get at Snowden’s stolen data.”
Snowden would not have been a particularly difficult target for them, especially after he started disclosing secrets to journalists at the Mira hotel in Hong Kong.  Not only could the Chinese service approach the security staff at the Mira Hotel but they could track him after he left the hotel and moved, along with his computers, in and out of several residences arranged by his “carer.”  Snowden, after all, had put himself in the hands of people whom he had never met before including three Hong Kong lawyers, a “carer” and three Guardian journalists.  Presumably, the efforts of these adversary intelligence services to find him, and the NSA data, would further intensify after Snowden revealed to the South China Morning Post on June 14, 2013 that he had access to NSA lists of computers in China and elsewhere that the NSA had penetrated.

   It wouldn’t be only the Chinese service on his trail.  The Russian intelligence service would also likely be tasked to acquire these NSA documents after Snowden’s meeting with Russian officials in Hong Kong.  And while he could get away with giving coy and elusive answers to journalists who asked him about the whereabouts of the NSA data, the Russian and Chinese officials in Hong Kong, who could offer him an escape route from prison, likely would demand more specific answers about the whereabouts of data they had no already obtained by technical means.

The Post- Hong Kong Documents

The NSA concern about who had access to its missing files deepened further when NSA documents continued to surface in the press after Snowden went to Moscow.  If US intelligence needed any further evidence that someone had access to the documents, these additional revelations provided it. The most sensational of them was a purported document attributed to Snowden concerning the NSA hacking the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  The story was published on October 23, 2013 on the Der Spiegel website.  The co-author of the story was Jacob Appelbaum.  Even though Snowden had by now been in Russia for four months, he was cited, along with unnamed “others” as the source for the NSA document.  Nor did Snowden deny it. Indeed. He took a measure of credit for the revelation, saying on German TV “What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency.” If Snowden’s  had  released this document, it would be consistent with Kucherena’s assertion that Snowden had access to the archive.

 Adding to the intrigue, Poitras was apparently caught by surprise when the Merkel story broke in Der Spiegel.  She urgently texted Snowden on what she called “background” (which ordinarily means that a journalist will not attribute information to a source.)   She asked him in the text to explain the NSA’s actions. Snowden explained to her that Merkel was listed by her true name (and not by a codename) in the NSA document because the German chancellor was a NSA “target not an asset.” Presumably, Poitras would have already known that distinction if she had the document referred to in Der Spiegel.  If the Merkel document was not among the data given to Poitras in Hong Kong , how did it get to the authors of the Der Spiegel article?

One of the authors, Appelbaum, as discussed earlier, had been in contact with Snowden before he went public.  He had served as Poitras’ co-interrogator of Snowden while he was still working at the NSA in May 2013. Appelbaum also, was one of the leading supporters of Wikileaks.  Since he was famously an advocate of revealing government secrets,  it seems unlikely that he would have delayed releasing such a bombshell about Merkel’s phone if Snowden had given him this document before he had left Hong Kong in June 2013. Why would Appelbaum kept it secret for more than four months? The same pressure to publish would also apply to the journalists Snowden had dealt with in Hong Kong. If Snowden had given Poitras, Greenwald, Lam or MacAskill the Merkel document, or even told them about it in their interviews with him in Hong Kong, the Guardian would have certainly rushed  out such a scoop.

According to source with knowledge of the Snowden investigation, there was no document referencing any spying on Merkel’s phone among the 58,000 documents on the thumb drive that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong.  That absence would explain why Poitras had to send a text to Snowden in Moscow to ask for an explanation after the story broke.    Further confirmation of the absence of this document in the material Snowden provided journalists in Hong Kong comes from James Bamford, a well-respected expert on the NSA. In the course of researching his 2014 article on Snowden for Wired magazine, he was given access to all the documents Snowden gave to Poitras, Greenwald and Gellman.  Bamford used a sophisticated indexing program to search through the database specifically for The Merkel material. , Even so, he did not find any. He reported that no document that even mentioned Merkel given to journalists in Hong Kong mentioned Merkel.  It therefore appeared that the Merkel document was provided to Der Spiegel after Snowden went to Moscow in June. If so, some party had access to NSA documents after Snowden arrived in Russia and provided the authors of the Der Spiegel story with the scoop.  In that context, it may have not been a pure coincide that Kucherena’s disclosed that Snowden had access to documents which he had not given  to journalists in Hong Kong shortly before just such a document was [published in Germany.

For his part, Bamford explored the possibility that there might be another mole in the NSA.  Was it possible another person in the NSA was stealing documents?  He wrote Poitras and asked her whether the Merkel document could have come from another person in the NSA.  He notes that she declined, via a letter from her lawyer, to answer that question.  But since she had not been the author of the Der Spiegel article,  and it had not been given the document, there is no reason to she would know its provenance.

The post-Hong Kong documents did not stop with the Merkel one. Documents continued  to emerge years after Snowden arrived in Moscow.  In June 2015, for example, the Wikileaks website released another putative Snowden document two years after he had supposedly wiped his computer clean in Hong Kong.    It revealed that the NSA had targeted the telephones of the three consecutive presidents of France-- Jacque Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, all of whom were allies of the United States.    Moreover, according to a former NSA official, this 2015 document, like the 2013 Merkel material, not among the data on the thumb drive given to journalists in Hong Kong. The released on the Wikileaks site came at an embarrassing time since in the midst of NATO war games held near the Russian border, which Putin had vehemently denounced,  The accompanying article was co-authored by Julian Assange, who now claimed to have access to Snowden’s NSA material.  Since Assange, it will be recalled, had been in telephonic contact with Snowden in Hong Kong and his deputy, Sarah Harrison, had spent five months in Moscow with Snowden in 2013, it is certainly possible Snowden was his source.  But it seems difficult to believe that Assange waited two years before publishing since he has made it part of his modus operandi to publish documents immediately.  And since Wikileaks receives documents anonymously via its TOR software, any party, with access the Snowden files, could have sent it.

Greenwald and Poitras also released belated documents. On July 15, 2015, for example, their web publication  The Intercept  released a Snowden document that t cited a NSA intercept of Israeli military communications about an Israeli raid in Syria on August 1, 2008.  It revealed that in it a group of  Israeli commandos killed General Suleiman, a top aide to President Assad who had been working with North Korea to build a nuclear facility in Syria. Israel had destroyed that facility in Operation Orchard nearly a year earlier. Whatever the purpose of this new release of a NSA document (which had little, if anything, to do with any of the NSA’s own operations); it was not among the data that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong in 2013, according to a source with access to the investigation.  If so Poitras and Greenwald, like Appelbaum and Assange, were still receiving NSA documents that Snowden had allegedly stolen a long time after he claimed he had destroyed all his files.

The NSA reportedly determined that these belated documents, all of which concerned American allies in Germany, France and Israel, had  been among the material copied during the Snowden breach.  They provided further reason to believe that someone still had access to the documents that were not distributed to journalists in Hong Kong.  Kucherena’s disclosure just before the first post-Hong Kong release that Snowden still had access to the NSA files made it appear plausible that Snowden sent these documents to Der Spiegel, Wikileaks and The Intercept.  A former high-ranking KGB officer I interviewed had a very different view.  He told me that in his experience  an intelligence defector to Russia would not be allowed to distribute secret material to journalists without  explicit approval by the security service tending him.  , and that this injunction would be especially true in the case of Snowden after Putin publicly had forbade him from releasing U.S. intelligence data.  The alternative is that this material was released at the behest of the Russian intelligence service.

The mystery of the post Hong Kong documents also intrigued members in the US intelligence community with whom I discussed it.  When I asked a former intelligence executive about the ultimate source for the Merkel story, he responded: “If Snowden didn’t give journalists this document in Hong Kong, we can assume an intermediary fed it to Appelbaum to publish in Der Spiegel?”  According to him, the NSA investigation had determined that Snowden indeed had copied a NSA list of cell phone numbers of foreign leaders, including the number of Merkel.  This list became the basis of the Der Spiegel story.  It was also clear that Snowden in Moscow gave credence to the release. He made a major point about the hacking of Merkel’s phone in an interview with Wired magazine in 2014.  Just about  two weeks before the leak, Kucherena said Snowden still had access to the documents. Clearly, someone had access. But whoever was behind it, the release of information about the alleged bugging Merkel’s phone resulted in badly fraying US relations with Germany in the midst of developing troubles in Ukraine.  As it later turned, according to the investigation of the German federal prosecutor concluded in 2015, there was no evidence found in this document, or elsewhere, that Merkel’s calls were ever actually intercepted.  Although they revealed little, if anything, the intelligence services of Germany, France and Israel were not already aware of, they raised a public outcry in allies  against NSA surveillance, and the outcry became the event itself.

  While these post-Hong Kong documents had little, if any, intelligence value,  they provided further evidence that at least part of the stolen NSA documents was in the hands of a party hostile to the United States.  If so, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that this party also had access to the far  more valuable Level 3 documents revealing the NSA’s sources and methods, such as the one that Ledgett had described as a “road map” to U.S. electronic espionage against Russia and China.

    Within the intelligence community, this concern was heightened by new counter measure to this espionage employed by Russia and China after Snowden reached Moscow. For example, there were indications that the NSA had lost part of its capabilities to  follow Russian troop movements in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials even went so far as to suggest, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that “ Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping.”

.  Britain also discovered that some of its secret operations had been compromised after Snowden went to Moscow.  According to a 2015 story in the Sunday Times of London, British intelligence had determined that Britain’s intelligence- gathering sources had been exposed to adversary services by documents that Snowden had stolen from the NSA in 2013.  These documents had been provided to the NSA by the GCHQ, the British cipher service.   Unless such intelligence disasters were freak aberrations, it  appeared to confirm General Alexander warning in 2014 that the NSA was “losing some of its capabilities, because they’re being disclosed to our adversaries.”
Snowden’s supporters, to be sure, disputed this view.  If only as an act of faith in Snowden’s personal integrity, they continued to believe his  avowal to Senator Humphrey that he had acted to protect  U.S. secrets by shielding them from adversary intelligence services after he took them abroad.   They also continued to take him at his word when he said he had destroyed all the NSA documents before going to Russia.  Despite such protestation of Patriotic loyalty, U.S intelligence officials could not so easily dismiss the possibility that the missing documents still existed.  After all, a U.S intelligence worker  who is dedicated to protecting American secrets from its adversaries does not ordinarily takes them to an adversary country.  The NSA, CIA and Department of Defense therefore had little choice but to assume the worst had happened: Russia and China had obtained access to the “keys of the kingdom”.  Whatever the extent of the actual damage,  it was up to General Alexander’s replacement, Admiral Michael Rogers, both to restore morale and  rebuilding the capabilities of America’s electronic intelligence in the wake of the massive breach. According to a National Security staff member in the Obama White House, that job would take more than a decade.  Meanwhile,        Whoever now held the keys to the kingdom, one thing was certain: the NSA had failed to protect them. This intelligence failure did not happen out of the blue. Meanwhile, Putin added insult to the injury by awarding the alleged perpetrator sanctuary in Russia.



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Unheeded Warning

 “The NSA—the world’s most capable signals intelligence organization, an agency immensely skilled in stealing digital data—had had its pockets thoroughly picked.”

  •  --CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell

        In April 2010, the CIA received a stark reminder of the ongoing nature of Russian espionage.  It came in the form of a message from one of its best placed moles in the Russian intelligence service. This surreptitious source was Alexander Poteyev, a 54-year old colonel in the SVR, which was the successor agency to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.  While the FSB took over the KGB’s domestic role in December 1991, the SVR became Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service.  Its operation center was in the Yasenevo district of Moscow. The CIA had recruited Poteyev as its mole in the 1990s when he had been stationed at the Russian Embassy in Washington DC. That it could sustain a mole in Moscow for over a decade attested to its capabilities in the espionage business.  After he returned to Moscow, still secretly on the CIA’s payroll, he became the deputy chief of the SVR’s “American” section.  This unit of Russian intelligence had the primary responsibility for establishing spies in CIA, FBI, NSA and other American intelligence agencies.

The SVR’s last known (or caught) mole in US Intelligence was CIA officer Harold Nicholson in 1996.  Before it could now expand its espionage capabilities. It needed to build a network of Russian sleeper agents in the United States.  For this network, it needed to groom so-called “illegals,” or agents who were not connected to the Russian Embassy.  This so-called “illegals” network was necessary since presumably all Russian diplomats, including the so-called “legal” members of Russian intelligence, were under constant surveillance by the FBI.  Advances in surveillance technology in the 21st century had made it increasingly difficult to communicate with recruit through its diplomatic missions.  To evade it, the “American” division of the SVR was given the task of placing individuals in the United States disguised as ordinary Americans.  Their “legend,” or operational cover, could be thin since they would not be applying for jobs in the government. Their job was simply blend in with their community until they were called upon by the “American” department in Moscow to service a mole that had been planted in US intelligence or other part of the US government.  Until there were activated by such a call, they were classified as sleeper agents.  Unlike the SVR’s “legal” officers, who were attached to Russian embassies as diplomats and were protected from arrest by the Treaty of Vienna, the SVR’s illegal agents lack diplomatic immunity.  According to Pavel Sudoplatov, who defected from the KGB in the Cold War, the sole job of such sleeper agents was to “live under cover in the West awaiting assignments for the Center.”   One assignment that justifies the expense of maintaining such agents is to service a penetration, after one is made, in the US intelligence establishment.  While waiting to be activated for such a job, sleeper agents were instructed to build every detail of their cover identity so as to perfectly blend in with Americans.

To build this American network of sleeper agents took the better part of a decade. In 2005, this SVR’s “American” section in Moscow had begun methodically installing “sleeper agents” in the US. Almost all of them were all Russian citizens who had assumed new identities to better blend into their communities.

    The CIA learned of this sleeper program through Poteyev soon after it began.  The issue was how to exploit this knowledge. When I was writing my book on international deception, Angleton had pointed out to me that “the business of intelligence services is understanding precisely the relationship of their opposition to them.” His view, though his opponents inside the CIA would call it with some justification an obsession, was that an intelligence service had focus on the moves of its rivals. To accomplish this “business” in the first decade of the 21st century, the CIA had to establish why its new opposition, the SVR, was laying the foundation for an espionage operation.  What were its priorities in the resumption of the intelligence war? Its inside man, Poteyev, in the SVR, provided it with a tremendous advantage in this relationship.  It knew the links in a sleeper network that the SVR believed was safely hidden from surveillance.  If they were followed, when they were activated they could expose whatever recruits the SVR had in the American government.  The CIA duly shared this information about the sleeper ring with the FBI, which had the responsibility for the surveillance of foreign agents in the United States, The FBI, for its part, kept the Russian sleeper agents under tight surveillance—an operation which grew in complexity and expense as more SVR agents arrived in the US.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Poteyev was following the unfolding operation. Part of his SVR job was to continue preparing these “Americans,” as they were called by the SVR, for their assignments.  Some had been sent as couples, other as singletons.   One of the singletons that Poteyev personally handled was Anna Kushchyenko.  She was a strikingly beautiful Russian student, who changed her name to Anna Chapman by briefly marrying a British citizen she met at a rave party.  After taking his name, she left him.  After completing her training in Russia, the SVR sent her to New York City to establish herself as international real estate specialist.  Other “Americans” under Poteyev’s watch became travel agents, students, and financial advisers.  In all, Poteyev identified to the CIA twelve such sleeper agents.  Since they had been instructed to simply act out their role, while awaiting an intelligence assignment, they presented no real threat.  Even so, the cost of FBI surveillance over the years became sizable. Around the clock surveillance on the movements and communications of a single individual can cost, according to a former FBI agent, over $10,000 a day.

   The situation suddenly changed when the CIA received Poteyev’s message in 2010.  It warned that Russian military intelligence had asked the SVR to activate some of its sleeper agents for a highly-sensitive assignment.  Such a move suggested that Russian intelligence had found a possible source that could supply it with valuable information.   According to a former CIA intelligence official who later became involved in the case, the assignment involved preparing these agents to service a potential source in the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland.  If true, it suggested that Russian intelligence either had found or was working on a means of penetrating the NSA.

    In 2010, the NSA’s “Q” division handled such security and espionage threats.  It reportedly initiated a counter-espionage probe at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters on receiving the tip.  But since the NSA’s cryptological service had in 2010 no fewer than 35,000 military and civilian contractor employees, the search for a possible leak was no easy matter. According to a subsequent note in the NSA’s secret budget report to Congress, it would require “a minimum of 4,000 periodic investigations of employees in position to compromise sensitive information” to safely guard against “insider threats by trusted insiders who seek to exploit their authorized access to sensitive information to harm U.S. interests.”   According to a former executive in the intelligence community, that amount of investigations far exceeded the budgetary capabilities of the NSA. So while the investigation found no evidence of SVR recruitment, it remained possible that Russian intelligence had found a candidate in the NSA.

      Meanwhile, in June 2010, to pre-empt such a leak in US intelligence and avoid any potential embarrassment that could result, the FBI decided it could no longer engage in this sort of an intelligence game with the sleeper network.  It arrested all 12 sleeper agents identified by Poteyev. After receiving a great deal of public attention (which led to them inspiring the FX series: The Americans,”), the sleeper agents were deported back to Russia.  This move had both advantages and disadvantages.  The main advantage was that it severed any communication link between the putative person-of-interest in the NSA and Russian intelligence via the sleeper agents.  The main disadvantage was that it eliminated the possibility that FBI surveillance of the illegals might lead the FBI to a possible recruit in the NSA or elsewhere.

 The pre-emptive arrests also had an unforeseen consequence.  They resulted in accidently compromising the CIA’s own mole, Poteyev.  In entrapping Anna Chapman, who was one of the more active of the sleeper agents, the FBI agent had used a password to deceive her into believing she was speaking to a SVR officer (when in fact she was speaking to an FBI agent who was  impersonating one.)  That unique password had been personally supplied to her by Poteyev.  So Chapman had reason to believe Poteyev had betrayed her,

  When Chapman returned to Moscow after the spy exchange, she was taken to a well-publicized dinner with Putin.  Afterwards, she informed her debriefer at the SVR that only Poteyev had been in a position to know the password that the FBI agent used.  This brought Poteyev under immediate suspicion.   Tipped off by the CIA to the FBI’s error, Poteyev managed to escape by taking a train from Moscow to Minsk in Belarus.  The CIA next exfiltrated him out of Belarus and to the United States.  Poteyev had been saved from prison—or worse, but he was no longer useful to the CIA as a mole.  Without the services of Poteyev in the SVR in Moscow, US intelligence was unable to find out further details about the mission to which Poteyev’s sleeper agents were to be assigned.  All it had discovered was the history of the preparations for a major espionage revival. It now knew that the SVR had installed plumbing in America that one or more agents in this network had been activated to handle a possible recruit in the NSA.  But without anyone left in the sleeper network to follow and without an inside source in the SVR, it had no further avenues to fruitfully pursue.  The revelation of the sleeper agents had little, if any, other intelligence value.

   The NSA’s own security investigation turned up no evidence of a leak at Fort Meade in 2010.  The absence of evidence of a penetration in a security investigation is not in itself evidence of the absence of a penetration.  The Russian intelligence service had demonstrated in the past it was well-schooled in covering its tracks in operations against US communications intelligence. For example, CIA counterintelligence had learned from a KGB defector in the early 1960s that Russian intelligence had penetrated the cipher room at the US Embassy in Moscow and, because of this operation, the KGB was able to decipher crucial communications.  Even so, it failed to find either the perpetrator or any evidence of his existence for more than a half century.  The operation was only definitively revealed by Russian spymaster Sergey Kondrashev in 2007.  Tennent Bagley, who headed the CIA’s Soviet Bloc counterintelligence at the time, late wrote in his book that the ability of Russian intelligence to conceal this penetration for more than a half century “broke the record for secret keeping.”

 This Russian ability to penetrate US intelligence was not entirely defeated by America’s implementation of more sophisticated security procedures, such as the polygraph examination and extensive background checks.  In 1995, only 10 years before Snowden joined it, the CIA's inspector general completed a study of the KGB’s use of false defectors to mislead the US government from the end of the Cold War in late 1980s through the mid-1990s. It found Russia had dispatched at least half-dozen double agents who provided misleading information to their CIA case officers. Because the KGB operation went undetected for nearly a decade, the disinformation prepared in Moscow had been incorporated into reports, which had a distinctive blue stripe to signify their importance, had been provided to the three American Presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.  Even more shocking, in tracing the path of this disinformation, the Inspector General found that the "senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources for this information were controlled by Russian intelligence,” yet they did not inform the President and officials receiving the blue-striped reports, that they had included Russian misinformation. What CIA Director John Deutch called "an inexcusable lapse" also reflected a form of institutional willful blindness in US intelligence, borne out of bureaucratic fear of career embarrassment so well described in LeCarre's spy novels. Detecting intelligence failures has, if anything, become even more difficult in the age of the anonymous Internet.

   The NSA’s vulnerability to intelligence lapses, which became all too apparent with Snowden, had departed America with a large selection of its most secret documents. The Snowden breach demonstrated the NSA had few, if any, fail-safe defenses against a would-be leakers of communication intelligence.  In the new domain of cyber warfare, conventional defensive rules do not apply. “There are no rivers or hills up here. It’s all flat. All advantage goes to the attacker,” Michael Hayden said in an interview  in 2015 with the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.   His point was that since there are no defensive positions, cyber warfare must rely on an aggressive offensive.  If fully successful such attacks would so deeply penetrate the defenses of an adversary intelligence organization that it could not mount any of its own unexpected cyber attacks Such offensive capabilities would make it difficult, if not impossible, for adversary services to recruit a spy in the NSA. .For example, the CIA penetration of the SVR in 2010 prevented it from using its the sleeper network  against U.S. targets.   “The best defense in this game may be an overwhelming offensive,” a former intelligence official said to me. “but that strategy only works if we can keep secret sensitive  sources.”

     Central to this offensive strategy was the NSA’s National Threat Operations Center in Oahu, Hawaii.  It employed threat analysts to surreptitiously monitor the secret activities of potential enemies, mainly China, Russia and North Korea. A large part of their job was to make transparent to the US the hostile activities of the Russian and Chinese services so that they posed little, if any, intelligence threat to America.  This strategy worked so far as the NSA guarded itself but it also raised the issue, as the Roman Juvenal famously warned “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”  Who will guard the guards themselves?

    Less than three years after the NSA had received the Poteyev warning, a 29-year old civilian trainee at the National Threat Operations Center, demonstrated its glaring vulnerability.  Instead of guarding secrets, Snowden stole them. General Hayden described the Snowden breach as the “most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage. Among the documents taken in this security breach were lists of secret NSA sources in China and Russia.  Despite all the measures the NSA had taken to protect its vital secrets, a lowly civilian employee had walked away with the keys to its kingdom In the hands of their intelligence services, these stolen lists had the potential to totally upend the NSA’s offensive strategy.  Since Russia and China have an intelligence treaty for sharing such spoils between them when it is to their mutual advantage, it had to be assumed that if either country had acquired the secrets from Snowden, they would be shared between them altering the balance of power between the communication intelligence services of the US and its adversaries.

 Following the Snowden breach both China  and Russia had immense successes d in breaking through the defenses of US government networks, including the breaches in 2014 and 2015 of U.S. personnel files and background checks. When I asked General Hayden in June 2015 if these successes were made easier by those documents compromised by Snowden, he replied, “Even though I cannot make a direct correlation here, unarguably our adversaries know far more about how we collect signals intelligence than they ever did before [Snowden].”

If Snowden could cause such massive damage, so could other civilian trainees at the NSA. Someone in the chain of command had to take responsibility, General Alexander tendered his resignation on June 30th, 2013. “ I’m the director, “he said, falling on his sword.  “Ultimately, I’m accountable. “ As President Obama did not want the head of the NSA resigning in the midst of the Snowden crisis, he asked him to stay on for another six months.  He then appointed Admiral Michael Rogers to be his replacement.  Meanwhile, it had become undeniable clear to the Review Committee appointed by President Obama in 2013 that the NSA’s own defenses had catastrophically failed.  If so, this change was the equivalent of re-arranging the deck chairs on the S.S. Titanic after it hit an iceberg.

.





PART FOUR


THE GAME OF NATIONS



“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper.”
--David Lynch on his 1986 film Blue Velvet




CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Rise of the NSA

“There are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” -- National Intelligence” – James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence

In the Game of Nations, which is played at a level that often is not visible to public scrutiny, the great prize is state secrets that reveal the hidden weaknesses of a nation’s potential adversaries. The most important of these in peacetime is communication intercepts.  It was just such state secrets that Edward Snowden took from the NSA in the spring of 2013.  Before that breach, America’s paramount advantage in this subterranean competition was its undisputed dominance in business of obtaining and deciphering the communications of other nations.  The NSA was the instrument by which the United States both protected its own secret communications and stole the secrets of foreign nations.  The NSA, however, has an Achilles’ heel: it is dependent on civilian computer technicians who do not necessarily share its values to operate its complex system.  Because of this dependence, it was not able in 2013, as it turned out, to protect its crucial sources and methods.

Snowden exposed this vulnerability when he walked away with, among other documents, the 32,000 page-long country by country descriptions of the gaps in America’s coverage of the communications of its adversaries.    Even though the Cold War had been declared over after the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century earlier, the age-old enterprise of espionage did not end with it.  Russian and China still sought to blunt the edge that the NSA gave the United States.  So the Snowden breach cannot be simply looked as an isolated event. It needs to considered in the context of the once and future intelligence war.

The modern enterprise of reading the communications of other nations traces back in the United States to military code-breaking  efforts preceding America’s entry into the First World War   The invention of the radio at the end of the nineteenth century soon provided the means of rapidly sending and getting messages from ships ,  submarines,  ground forces, spies, and embassies.  These over-the-air messages could also be intercepted from the ether by adversaries. If they were to remain secret, they could not be sent in plain text. They had to be sent in either code, in which letters are substituted for one another, or, more effectively, cipher, in which numbers are substituted for letters.  Making and breaking codes and ciphers became a crucial enterprise for nations. By 1914, the US Army and Navy had set up units, staffed by mathematicians, linguists and crossword puzzle-solvers to intercept and decode enemy messages.  After the war had ended in 1918, these units were fused into a cover corporation called the “Code Compilation Company,” which moved to new offices on 37th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City.  Under the supervision of the famous cryptographer Herbert O Yardley, a team of 20 code-breakers was employed in what was called the “Black Chamber.”   Yardley arranged for Western Union, which has the telegraph monopoly in America, to provide the Black Chamber with all the telegrams coming into the United States.  “Its far-seeking eyes penetrate the secret conference chambers at Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome,” Yardley wrote about the Black Chamber. “Its sensitive ears catch the faintest whispering in the foreign capitals of the world.”  But in 1929, at the instructions of President Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed the Black Chamber saying famously “Gentlemen should not read each other's mail.”  The moratorium did not last long.  With war looming in Asia and Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reactivated the operation as the Signals Security Agency.  It proved its value in breaking the Japanese machine-generated cipher “purple.” In June 1942, using deciphered Japanese messages to pinpoint the location of the Japanese fleet at Midway; America’s won a decisive naval victory in the Pacific.  Germany’s Enigma encoding machines, with three encoding wheels, proved more of a challenge.  Initially British cryptanalysts led by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing succeeded in building a rudimentary computer to decipher German messages to its submarines and bombers, but, in 1942, Germany added a fourth set of encoding wheels, escalation what essentially was a battle of machine intelligence.  The US Navy then contracted with the National Cash Register Company to build a computing machine capable of breaking the improved Enigma, and, in May 1943, it succeeded.     By the time the war ended in 1945, the US had over one hundred giant decryption machines in operation.   This unrivalled capability to read the communications of foreign nations, which remained one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, was transferred to the Army Security Agency based at Fort Meade, Maryland.  Then, on October 24, 1952, President Harry S. Truman, greatly expanded its purview and changed its name to the National Security Agency.

     The NSA was given two missions.  The first one was  protecting the communications of the US government.  The main threat to breaching U.S. government channels of communications was the Soviet. The second one was intercepting all the relevant communications and signals of foreign governments.  This latter mandate included the governments of allies as well as enemies. The President, the other intelligence services and the Department of Defense deemed what was relevant for national security.  Even though the NSA remained part of the Department of Defense, its job went far beyond providing military intelligence.  It also acted as a service agency to other American intelligence services.  They prepared shopping lists of foreign communications intelligence and the NSA fulfilled them.

 As the Cold War heated up in the 1960s, the NSA provided intelligence not only to the Pentagon but to the Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, the Treasury Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the FBI. With a multi-billion dollar “black budget” hidden from public scrutiny, the NSA’s technology directorate invested in state-of-the-art equipment, including super computers that could break almost any cipher, antennae mounted on geosynchronous satellites that  vacuumed in billions of foreign telephone calls and other exotic capabilities.  It also devised stealthy means of breaking into channels that its adversaries believed were secure.  This enterprise required not only an army of  technical specialists capable of remotely intercepting even the faintest traces of  electromagnetic signals, hacking into computers, and eavesdropping on distant conversations, but using  special units, called “tailored access operations,” to plant listening devices in  embassies and diplomatic pouches.  It also organized elaborate expeditions to penetrate cables in enemy territory. In 1971, for example, the NSA had sent a specially-equipped submarine into Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk in Asia to tap through Arctic ice. The target was a Russian cable 400 feet below the surface that connected the Russian naval headquarters in Vladivostok with a missile testing range.

   In 1980, President Ronald Reagan, gave the NSA a clear mandate to expand its interception of foreign communications. In Executive Order 12333, he told the NSA to use “all means, consistent with applicable Federal law and (this Executive) order, and with full consideration of the rights of United States persons, shall be used to obtain reliable intelligence information to protect the United States and its interests.”  It did restrict any foreign country, either an adversary or an ally, from its surveillance.

  The NSA’s target soon became nothing short of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.  “We are approaching a time when we will be able to survey almost any point on the earth’s surface with some sensor,” Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former Director of Central Intelligence wrote in 1985.  “We should soon be able to keep track of most of the activities on the surface of the earth.”   Bobby Ray Inman, a former director of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA, argued that the “vastness of the [American] intelligence ‘take’ from the Soviet Union, and the pattern of continuity going back years, even decades,” greatly diminished the possibility of Soviet deception so long as the NSA kept secret its sources.

 The NSA did not rely entirely on its own sensors for this global surveillance.  It also formed intelligence-sharing alliances with key allies the most important was with the British code-breaking service, called the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which in World War II had achieved enormous success in using computers to crack the German Enigma cipher.  This alliance expanded to include Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in the so-called Five Eyes Alliance.   Since over 80 percent of international phone calls and Internet traffic passed through fiber-optic cables in these five countries, the alliance had the capability of monitoring almost all phone and internet communications.    .The NSA also established fruitful liaisons with the cyber-services of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Israel, Japan, and South Korea, who often were willing to provide the NSA with access to telecommunications links in their countries. These long-term allies greatly strengthened the NSA’s hand in other ways in the intelligence war. For example, the so called “James Bond” provision of the British Intelligence Services Act 1994 allowed officers of the GCHQ to commit illegal acts outside of Brittan including planting devices to intercept data from computer servers, cell phones, and other electronic targets.  And, as Snowden’s release of documents  revealed in 2013 and 2014, these foreign allies fully shared their information with the NSA.

    Of course, the liaison between the NSA and its allies was a two way street.   In 2013, none of these other countries had a global network of geosynchronous sensors in outer space and under the ocean  that could monitor signals from missile launching, submarine, military deployments, nuclear tests and other matters of strategic importance to them.  Nor did these allies have the cipher-breaking capabilities of  the array of NSA super computers.   The NSA had assiduously built these means at a cost of over a half trillion dollars and employed tens of thousands of linguists who could translate almost any dialect or language of interest.

   Even though these allies had their own ciphers services and local capabilities they depended on NSA to provide them a large share of their signal intelligence.  From the perspective of defending themselves from potential threats, the deal that these allies had with NSA was a mutually-advantageous.

    The NSA’s overseas intelligence gathering was not limited to adversary nations. With the exception of the Five-Eye allies, it gathered data that was deemed of importance by the President and Defense Department in friendly countries.  These operations had been approved by every American President, and funded by every American Congress, since 1941.  After all, even in the realm of allies, activities take place that run counter to American interests.  The 911 conspiracy, for example, was hatched in Hamburg, Germany and financed in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.  Nor were American allies unaware of the reach of the NSA.  “Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you.  And it is true we use computers to sort through data by using keywords,” former CIA Director James Woolsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2000, “Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we are looking for?”  Whether or not it was appreciated by other countries, the global harvesting of communication intelligence by the NSA was hardly secret.

As the NSA expanded further, it delegated part of its work to regional bases, including ones in Utah, Texas, Hawaii and Japan.  The paramount task of the NSA remained monitoring the channels of communications that an adversary might use.  The vast proliferation of these channels in cyberspace, which included email, social media, document sharing and other innovations of the Internet age, greatly complicated this task. Even so, this challenge was not insurmountable because most of the Internet actually travelled through fiber-glass land-line cables that crossed the territories of the United States, Britain and Australia.  So the NSA found the technical means, including voluntary gaining access to major Internet companies, to “harvest” vast amounts of this Internet data.  America’s other intelligence agencies quickly recognized the value of the communications intelligence gleaned from foreign telecommunications.   John E. McLaughlin, who was the CIA’s Acting Director in 2004, described the NSA as nothing less than the “very foundation of US intelligence.”  This service proceeded from the immense amount of foreign data that the NSA vacuumed in through its global sensors.  This data allowed the CIA and other US intelligence services a means for verifying the reports of its human sources as well as discovering new targets in adversary nations for further investigation.

By the first decade of the 21st century, the NSA’s surreptitious efforts to render the Internet transparent to US intelligence had earned it a new set of enemies.  They were the previously-mentioned hacktavists who were attempting to shield the activities of Internet users from the intrusions of government surveillance.  They employed both encryption and TOR software to defeat that surveillance.

 The NSA was not about to be defeated by the tactics of amateur privacy advocates. It did not conceal that it was intent on countering any attempt to interfere with its surveillance of the Internet.  It built back doors into their encryption and worked to unravel the TOR scrambling of their IP addresses.  It made leading hacktavists targets. Brian Hale, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, disclosed that the US routinely intercepted the cyber signatures of parties suspected of hacking into US government networks.

    Following the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the surveillance of the Internet also became an integral part of Bush’ administration’s war on terrorism. In October 2001, Congress expanded the NSA’s mandate by passing the USA Patriot Act.  Section 215 of the act directly authorized the NSA, with the approval of the FISA court, to collect and store domestic telephone billing records.  The idea was to better coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence about Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. The mantra in government after the 9/11 was to “connect dots.”  Congress with this back essentially called for demolishing the wall by domestic and foreign intelligence when it came to foreign-directed terrorism. The act effectively made the NSA a partner with the FBI in tracking phone calls made from the phones origination outside the United States by known foreign jihadists.  If these calls were made to individuals inside the NSA was now authorized to retrieve the billing records of the person called and those people who he or she called.  These traces were then supplied to the FBI. When a New York Times expose in 2008 revealing that NSA surveillance has been extended to domestic telephone used, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 explicitly allowing the NSA to continue these practices if it obtained a FISA court order.  Congress also sanctioned the NSA’s supplying the FBI with the emails and other Internet activity of foreign Jihadists if it was suspected of planning attacks in America. This put the NSA directly in the anti-terrorist business in the United States.  It also necessitated the NSA vastly increasing its coverage of the Internet.

     The new duties also increased the NSA’s need to create new bureaucratic mechanism to monitor its compliance with FISA court orders,  Rajesh De, the NSA’s General Counsel at the time of the Snowden breach, described the NSA as becoming by 2013 “one of the most regulated enterprises in the world.”  Grafted onto its intelligence activities were layers of mandated reporting to oversight officials.  Not only did the NSA have its own chief compliance officer,  chief privacy and civil liberties officer, and  independent inspector general but the NSA also had to report to a difference set of compliance officers at the Department of Defense the Office of National intelligence and the Department of Justice   On top of reporting to those officials, the Department of Justice dispatched a team of lawyers every 60 days to review the results of “every single tasking decision” approved by the FISA court. According to Rajesh De, just assembling these reports involved thousands of hours of manpower.   In addition, the President’s Oversight Board required that NSA’s Office of the General Counsel and Inspector General supply it every 90 days with a list of every single error made by every NSA employee anywhere in the world deviating from procedures, including even minor typing errors.  These requirements, according to De, inundated a large part of the NSA legal and executive staff in a sea of red tape.  Yet, this regulation could not undo surveillance programs such as the one Snowden revealed of Verizon turning over the billing records of its custumers to the NSA, because the NSA was in compliance with the FISA court order (even though, as it turned out in 2015, the FISA court may have erred in interpreting the law.)

     The NSA’s focus on surveillance may have led to the neglect of its second mission: protecting the integrity of the channels through which the White House, government agencies and military units send information.  This task had been made vastly more difficult by the proliferation of computer networks, texting and emails in the 21st century. To protect against cyber attacks against government networks, the Pentagon belatedly created the Cyber Command in 2009. In it, the cyber defense units of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force cyber forces, were merged together in this new command put under the command of the NSA director.  NSA director Keith Alexander became the first director of this new command.   One problem for the Cyber command was separating attacks by civilians, including criminals, hacktavists and anarchists, from cyber warfare sponsored and supported by adversary states.  Since foreign intelligence services often closely imitated the tools of civilian hackers, and were even known to provide them with hacking tools.  Even for the Cyber Command, it was not easy challenge to unambiguously determine if the ultimate perpetrator of a cyber attacks was state-sponsored. For example, the identification of North Korea as the principal actor behind the attack on Sony in December 2014 appeared to be a rare success, but many cyber-security experts believed that it might be a false trail used to hide the real attacker.  The problem here was that clues can be fabricated in cyber space to point to the wrong party.

The job of the Cyber command was to prevent such an attack.  To this end, it planted viruses on hundreds of thousands of computers in private hands to act as sentinels to spot other suspicious viruses that could mount such an attack.  So private computers became a new battleground in the cyber was. It also built a capability to retaliate. The problem was that, unlike incoming missiles, cyber attacks which were launched through layers of other country’s computers could not be unambiguously traced back to the true perpetrator.

  This escalation by the Cyber Command set the stage for expanded forms of warfare in Cyber space.  “The Chinese are viewed as the source of a great many attacks on western infrastructure and just recently, the U.S. electrical grid,” General Alexander said in explaining the need for this consolidation. “If that is determined to be an organized attack, I would want to go and take down the source of those attacks.”  The same retaliation would presumably be used against Russia, Iran or any other adversary. Dominance of cyber space itself now became part of the NSA’s mandate.

    Even so, the most important job of the NSA remained intercepting secret information from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  To this end, it had an annual budget of $12.3 billion and some 35,000 military and civilian employees.   In 2012, James Clapper, Jr., the  Director of National Intelligence justified the secret intelligence budget by saying in an open session of Congress,  “We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT [signal intelligence]  capabilities to collect against high priority targets, including foreign leadership targets,” and to develop “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic.”  It was no secret, even before Snowden, that the NSA was engaged with monitoring the Internet.

Through all this tumult the heart of the NSA’s activity remained its 5,000 acre base at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland.  It commanded the most powerful mechanism for intercepting communications that the world had ever seen.  No other country came close to its technology for intercepting information.  The NSA was not only able to intercept secret information from these potential adversaries, but it also, at least not until the Snowden breach, managed to conceal these means from them.  As long as these adversaries remained blind to the ways in which its communications were being intercepted, deciphered and read by the NSA, they could not take effective countermeasures.   Consequently, he NSA had the capability to provide the President and his advisers with continuous insights into the thinking and planning of potential enemies.

Keeping its sources and methods secrets was no easy task.  The NSA’s technicians had to deal with continuous technical challenges to provide a seamless harvesting of data from a wide range of communication devices, including telephones, computers and the Internet.  It required continuous intra-agency communications between the NSA’s own intelligence officers and a growing number of civilian technicians. It even had its own “Wiki-style” network through which they could discuss problems, called the NSANet.  As it could not tightly control access to this technical network, it expunged any mention of the sources and methods from the material circulated on the classified NSA network. Instead, it stored them in discrete computers, called compartments that were disconnected from other computers at the NSA. These compartments could only be accessed by a limited number of analysts and NSA executives who had a need to know about the data they contained.  These compartments were the final line of defense against an inside intruder.

  In 2009, Snowden found his way into the NSA through a temporary job with an outside contractor that had a contract with the NSA’s Technology Directorate to repair and update it back-up system.  Four years later, by maneuvering to get hired by another outside contractor with access to the NSA’s sources and methods, he was able to steal secrets stored in isolated computers bearing directly on the ongoing intelligence war.    Snowden also copied from these compartments in a matter of weeks, as has been previously mentioned, the NSA’s Level 3 sources and methods used against Russia, Iran and China. The Snowden breach demonstrated that the NSA’s envelope of secrecy was at best illusory.

After this immense loss, the NSA’s sources inside these adversary countries were largely compromised even if they were not closed down. Once these adversaries were in a position to know what channels the NSA was intercepting, they could use these same channels to mislead US intelligence.     A former top intelligence official told me “The queen on our chessboard had been taken.”

To be sure, even after the loss of its “queen,” the game was not lost. The NSA moved to mitigate the damage and find new ways of obtaining unexpected intelligence. In June 2014, the new NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers had to confront flagging morale that, according to former director Michael Hayden, was near-paralyzing the intelligence service.  Admiral Rogers recognized that as a direct result of the Snowden breach “the nation has lost capabilities against adversaries right now who are attempting to actively undermine us."  But even with that loss, he observed “the sky has not fallen.”    As in the Chicken Little fable he cited, the world had not ended for the NSA.  Nor had it ended for the multi-billion out-sourcing enterprise it superintended.  The NSA may have lost many of its sources, or “capabilities,” but Rogers held out hope that new sources could be eventually found to replace them. Compromised codes, after all, could be changed. New technological methods could be devised. New vulnerabilities also could be targeted in enemy territories.  Although repairing the damage might take many “decades.” according to Michael McConnell, the Vice Chairman of Booz Allen, the new director had to get on with that task. McConnell, a former NSA director himself, pointed out that the NSA Director’s “first responsibility is to be the chief cheerleader." Rebuilding the NSA capabilities assumed, however, that there would not be another Snowden-size breach.


  The question remained: how could the NSA’s vaunted secrecy have been so deeply penetrated by a mere analyst-in-training at a regional base in Oahu?  The perpetrator himself could not be asked. He was in Moscow, supposedly employed by an unnamed Russian cyber security firm.  He was also in his Moscow interviews pointing to the “incompetence” of the NSA. All that was known for certain about the young man who had taken the “queen” from the board was that he had gained entry to the NSA’s secret chambers through the back door, a portal opened to him by the NSA’s reliance on outside contractors.





CHAPTER TWENTY
The NSA’s Back Door

“You have private for-profit companies doing inherently governmental work like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And there’s very little oversight, there’s very little review.”

          -  Edward Snowden, explaining his access to the NSA in Moscow, 2014

     Prior to Snowden’s theft of NSA documents, the single most shattering blow to the confidence of the US intelligence community was the exposure of Aldrich Ames as a long-serving Russian mole in the CIA in 1994. Ames, it will be recalled, had been a high-ranking CIA officer.  He had even worked at the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group before he was arrested by the FBI.  He had also worked as a mole for Russian intelligence. (His recruitment by the KGB will be further discussed in Chapter twenty-seven.)

 In a plea bargain to avoid the death sentence, he admitted that he had successfully burrowed into the CIA for over nine years on behalf of the KGB. His description of his sub rosa activities as a mole was part of the plea bargain. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.   This stunning revelation shook the CIA leadership to its core. Up until then, as mentioned earlier, CIA executives steadfastly denied that it was possible that the KGB could sustain a mole in American intelligence.  The Ames arrest also led the NSA to reassess its own vulnerability to penetration.  Could there be an Ames inside the NSA?

     The question was considered by the NSA’s National Threats Operations Center, the same unit from which Edward Snowden later stole a huge trove of secret documents.  According to a report in 1996 entitled “Out of Control” (later released by the NSA), the danger of an Ames-type penetration could not be excluded. Even though the “threat officer” who wrote this report was not identified by name, his analysis proved incredibly prescient.  He said that the NSA’s drive to enhance its performance by networking its computers would result in the intelligence services, putting “all their classified information ‘eggs’ into one very precarious basket.” The basket was the computer networks run by technicians called: system administrators.”  He pointed out that the NSA was becoming increasingly dependent on such networked computer systems, and he predicted that the NSA’s “Aldrich Ames.” As he put it, would be a “system administrator”—which was the position that Edward Snowden held nearly two decades later at Dell when he began stealing secrets.

      The NSA’s system administrators were, as the threat officer pointed out, very different from the traditional military employees at the NSA.  They were usually civilians, who effectively served as repair-men for complex computer systems at the NSA.  Moreover, many of them had not been directly hired by the NSA.  Instead, their recruitment had been privatized to outside contractors.

  This outsourcing had deep roots tracing back to the Second World War   Ed Booz, the founder of Booz Allen Hamilton, obtained contracts to help manage ship construction from the US Navy.  After the war ended he sought contracts for his firm in classified work. These contracts grew in size as the NSA needed more and more system administrators and other information technologists to manage the computer networks.  These system administrators needed to be given special privileges to do their service job.  One such privilege allowed them to bypass password protection.  Another privilege allowed then to temporarily transfer data to an external storage device while they repaired computers.  These two privileges greatly increased the risk of a massive breach. Seeing them as the weak link if the chain, the threat officer wrote in the report that “system administrators are likely to be increasingly targeted by foreign intelligence services because of their special access to information.”

Before the computerization of the NSA, the threat officer noted that code clerks and other low-level NSA communicators had been the target of adversary intelligence services.  But the increasing reliance on computer technicians presented foreign intelligence services with much richer targets.  He predicted that they would adapt their recruiting to this new reality. Specifically, he argued that adversary intelligence services would now focus their attention on system administrators.  “With system administrators,” he said, “the situation is potentially much worse than it has ever been with communicators.” The reason: “System administrators can so easily, and quickly, steal vast quantities of information.”

    He further suggested that since system administrators are often drawn from counterculture of hacking, they are more likely to be vulnerable to an adversary service using a fake identity for its approach, or a “false flag.”  A “false flag” was a term originally applied to pirate ship that temporarily hoisted any flag that would allow it to gain close proximity to its intended prey but it modern times describes a technique employed by espionage service to surreptitiously lure a prospect.  As will be more fully discussed in the next chapter, false flags were a staple used by the KGB in espionage recruitments during the Cold War. They were usually employed when a target for recruitment was not ideologically disposed to assisting the intelligence service. To overcome that problem, recruiters  hide their true identities and adopt a more sympathetic bogus one.  In 1973, for example, the KGB, working through one of its agents in the US Navy, used the false flag of Israel, to recruit Jerry Alfred Whitworth, who served as a communications officer with a top secret clearance for the Navy.  Like many other KGB recruits, Whitworth came from a broken family, dropped out of a high school, took technical courses and got a job as a communications officer.  He was not disposed to working for Russia. But he was willing to steal enciphered and plain text cables to help in the defense of Israel. After he was thoroughly compromised by his espionage work, he was told by the KGB recruiter that he was actually working for Russia, but, by this time, he was too deeply compromised to quit.  He continued his espionage work for another 8 years.  (Whitworth, who was arrested by the FBI in 1985, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 365 years in prison.)

The Internet provided an almost ideal environment for false flags since its users commonly adopt aliases, screen names, and other avatars. The threat officer explained how easy it would be for the KGB to adapt such a false flag when dealing with a dissident system administrator working for US intelligence. As the threat officer pointed out in his report, the KGB had used false flags in the late 1980s to surreptitiously recruit members of the “German Hanover Hackers,” a community of anarchistic hackers who breached computer networks for fun and profit.   Up until then, these hacktavists stole corporate and private passwords, credit card information, and other privileged documents as a form of freelance espionage.  Because of their fervent anti-authority ideology, the KGB disguised its recruiters as fellow hacktavists. The KGB succeeded in getting the Hanover hackers to steal log-in account identifications, source codes and other information from U.S. government computer networks.
   The precise vulnerability that this threat officer pointed out in 1996 was system administrators. This weak link became increasingly relevant as the NSA moved further into the digital age. By the beginning of the 21st century, its growing networks of computers were largely run by civilian technicians, including system administrators, infrastructure analysts, and information technologists, who were need to keep the system running.  Despite the warning by the threat officer, the NSA became more reliant on these outsiders as it reorganized to meet its new mandates for surveillance of the Internet in the war on terrorism.   Since the NSA had to compete with technology companies, such as Google, Apple and Facebook, for the services of experienced IT workers, it used private contractors to find them.  They, in turn, recruited civilian technicians from many unconventional areas, including the hacking culture.  Ex-hackers, who lacked (or shunned) employment opportunities in the corporate sector, were suitable candidates for the system administrator jobs that these films had contracted to supply the NSA.  In the rush to expand, little heed was paid to the 1996 warning that this hacking culture might provide a portal to anti-government hacktavist groups.  The NSA became so enamored with this new technology that it neglected the security implications of employing outsiders,  “All of us just fell in love with the ease and convenience and scale [of electronic storage]”, Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA at the time, said to the Wall Street Journal in 2015.  “So we decided to take things we used to keep if not in a safe, at least in our desk drawer, and put it up here [in a computer network], where it’s by definition more vulnerable.”      Making matters even worse, as has been previously discussed, the NSA stripped away much of the so-called stove-piping that insulated highly-sensitive data from the NSA’s other computer networks.  Here they were merely following the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to make their data more accessible to other agencies concerned with potential terrorist attacks.  As a result, the inner sanctum of the NSA became more opened to its new army of civilian technicians.
The universe of independent contractors was governed by very different forces than that of intelligence services. By 2013, much of the job of managing the NSA’s classified computers had been handed over to five private companies: Booz Allen Hamilton, which handled the most highly secret work; and Dell SecureWorks, Microsoft, Raytheon, and IBM.   In many respects, these five companies acted less like management consultants and more like temporary employment agencies in finding for the NSA the computer specialists, who had the necessary security clearances.  Unlike intelligence services, their fate depended on turning profits. Since the value of their contracts was largely limited by competitive bidding, their business plans were predicated on their ability to minimize the costs of fulfilling these contracts.  Their principal cost was the salaries they paid their independent contractors.  Their business plans therefore depended on finding large numbers of computer technicians in the private realm willing to work at a NSA base at relatively-low wages. This task became more difficult as many potential recruits could find higher paying employment with more of a future in the burgeoning private sphere.  They could also increase their revenue streams by getting additional contracts which, in turn, meant recruiting even more workers.  It was hardly a business plan which could afford to give priority to quality control.  In the private sector, there is usually an unambiguous external measure of failure. For example, for an automobile company such as General Motors can measure the performance of its executive by reckoning it change in net income.  With secret intelligence work, the metrics for failure are far less clear. This curious aspect of secret work was part of the advice given to White House lawyer in the Obama Administration seeking a position with the NSA in 2012, He was advised that among the advantages of working for a super-secret agency was that if one errs or has a failure. “It stays secret.”  He later found out in the Snowden case which exploded during his tenure at the NSA, that not all failures stay secret.

Even so, the NSA cannot always find convenient metrics to measures its own failures.  For example, it can quantify the amount of data it is intercepting, it cannot count the intelligence it misses.   There is no getting around the a priori proposition in the intelligence game:  “what is successfully hidden is never found.”   But there is a failure that cannot be hidden:  a security breach in which a perpetrator uses NSA data to publically expose the NSA’s sources. Up until the Snowden breach in 2013, the NSA had had experienced only one such a public failure.  It was the capture by North Korea in 1968 of the USS Pueblo, which had been carrying out highly-sensitive electronic communications interception for the NSA.  Because the Pueblo crew failed to destroy the NSA’s encoding machines, which several days were flown to Russia.  The stakes were so high that the Pentagon even considered using nuclear weapons to limit the damage of the seizure.   The Snowden breach was much worse because, among the thousands of documents he stole, he selected lists of the NSA’s secret sources in adversary nations.   Making matters worse, the Snowden breach was a failure that directly traced back to Booz Allen Hamilton, the NSA’s largest contractor.

   Such a failure calls into question the vexing issue of privatizing secret intelligence.  Booz Allen, like all other outside contractors, was in the business to make money. Indeed, it had found government contracts so much more profitable than its work in the private sector that it sold its private sector unit to Price Waterhouse.  The profitability of government work led the Carlyle group’s hedge fund to acquire a controlling stake in Booz Allen in July 2008. By 2013, it had increased its revenue by $1.3 billion by expanding its government contracts. Even more impressive, its operating margin on these contracts had doubled.  As it turned out, it did not achieve these profits by increasing its core internal staff.  In 2008, it had 22,000 employees on its internal staff, and in 2013, it had roughly the same number on its internal staff. What it expanded was the number of outside contractors it employed.  It added in these five years, by one Wall Street analyst’s calculation, some 8,000 new external workers.  They were employed as system administrators, infrastructure analysts, computer security specialists and other “geek squad” jobs at the NSA and other government agencies.   Their main qualification was their prior secrecy clearances (which saved Booz Allen the expense of vetting them and also the loss income while waiting many months for a clearance.)   Snowden therefore was highly-desirable from an economic point of view for Booz Allen.  Even though he had no prior experience as an infrastructure analyst, and he had been detected being untruthful about his degree in computer sciences, he not only had a SCI secrecy clearance, but he was willing to take a cut in pay.   In keeping with the Booz Allen business plan, such a recruit would provide another cog in its profit machine.

Not only had the NSA outsourced much of its computer operations to private companies but the Clinton Administration in 1996 had privatized background checks for government employees requiring security clearances. The idea backed by Vice President Al Gore was to reduce the size of the Federal government by outsourcing investigating the backgrounds of millions of government applicants for jobs.  The task had been previously been performed by FBI but it was assumed that a profit-making business could do it faster and more efficiently. The private company named United States Investigative Services (USIS) was purchased in 2007 for $1.5 billion by Providence Equity Partners, a rapidly-expanding investment firm founded only four years earlier by graduates of Brown University and the Harvard Business School.  So like Booz Allen, USIS was backed by a hedge-fund determined to make money by systematically cutting the cost of a previously government service.    But such outsourcing had drawbacks. For one thing, unlike the FBI, USIS lacked the investigative clout to gain entry to other the CIA and other government agencies.  For example, when it did the background check on Snowden in 2011, it could not get access to his CIA file. As will be recalled, there was a "derog” in his file that might have set off alarm bells. But because of its lack of access to the CIA, USIS did not learn about the derogatory reports in Snowden’s CIA file.  Nor did it learn that he had been threatened by an internal investigation of his alleged computer tampering in 2009.  The FBI, with its long standing liaisons with the CIA, might have learned this about Snowden if it had done his background check.

   To be sure, the profit calculus might have worked better if it had been coupled with adequate oversight.  But without such oversight, it proved to be a barrier to extended investigations of applicants.  As it turned out, USIS closed cases and cleared applicants without completing an adequate investigation.  According to a US government suit filed in 2014, USIS had prematurely closed over 665,000 investigations in order to get more quickly paid for them.  Since the more cases it completes each month, the more money it receives from the government, the law suit alleged that USIS employees often “flushed,” or ended cases before completing a full investigation, to meet corporate-imposed quotas for getting bonuses.  One employee said in an email cited in the government’s complaint “Flushed everything like a dead goldfish.”   As a result, some of information specialists entering the NSA through the back door of outside contractors were not fully vetted.  (On August 20, 2015 USIS agreed to forfeit $30 million in fees to settle the law suit.)

   USIS was also opened to sophisticated hacking attacks by outsiders. For example, in August 2014, the Department of Homeland Security’s counterintelligence unit discovered such a massive and persistent breach in USIS that it shut down its entire exchange of data with USIS. The intrusion into USIS records in this case was attributed to hackers in China most likely linked to the Chinese intelligence service. Such massive intrusions dated back to 2011.  USIS’ lack of security in its website left a gaping hole through which outside parties, including Chinese and Russian hackers, could learn both the identity and background of information specialists applying for jobs at the NSA.

These private companies had one further security weakness. They did sufficiently protect the personal data of their off-premise employees working at the NSA. Consider, for example, the successful 2011 attack on the Booz Allen Hamilton servers.  The previously-mentioned hackers' group “Anonymous” took credit for it.  It not only breached the security of Booz Allen servers but cracked the   algorithms it used to protect its employees. It next injected so-called Trojan-horse viruses and other malicious codes on Booz Allen servers that allowed it to have future entry.  Presumably, if amateur hackers such as Anonymous could break into the computers of the NSA’s largest contractor, so could the state espionage services with far more advanced hacking tools such as those of Russia and China.     From these sites, an adversary intelligence service could obtain all the job applications and personal resumes submitted to contractors such as Booz Allen.  It could then compile a list of the candidates looking to work at the NSA.

These deficiencies in the private sector were compounded by the failure of security in the government’s own Office of Personnel Management. It used a computer system called E-QIP in which intelligence employees with security clearances, including outside contractors, updated their computerized records to maintain or upgrade their security clearances. For example, Snowden updated his clearance in 2011.  To do so, these employees constantly updated their financial and personal information. As it turned out, there was a major hole in the E-QIP system. It was repeatedly hacked since 2010 by unknown parties. In 2015, the US government told Congress that China was most likely responsible but Russia and other nations with sophisticated cyber services could have also participated in the hacking.  In any case, the records of over 19 million employees, including intelligence workers, became available to a hostile intelligence service.    This breach would allow hostile services a great deal of information about independent contractors working at the NSA. They could then use this data to follow the movements of movement of any of these intelligence workers they deemed of interest.

Despite all the potential flaws in it, the outsourcing system, ii seemed to work until 2013. It even featured a revolving door through which Booz Allen, for example, hired retiring executives from the intelligence services, such as ex-NSA director Michael McConnell, R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, and Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), who later served as Director of National Intelligence.

    The cozy relationship between the private firms and the NSA notwithstanding, the NSA leadership was unaware that outsourcing could create a security problem.  As far back as 2005, Michael Hayden, then the departing head of the NSA, had been warned of one such vulnerability in a memorandum written by a counter-intelligence officer at the NSA.  Like the earlier 1995 report by the threat officer, this memorandum noted the NSA had ceded responsibility for managing its secret systems to outsiders, and warned that the NSA’s reliance on them to manage its computers had opened a back-door into the NSA.  In addition, it warned that once an outside contractor managed to slip in through this back door, he could easily jump from one outsourcer to another.  This was what Snowden did when he moved from Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton in 2013.

   Despite its security flaws, outsourcing provided a number of advantages to the NSA.  For one thing, it provided a means for circumventing the budget restrictions imposed by Congress on hiring new employees.  In addition, since private companies had less-rigid hiring standards, it greatly expanded the pool of young system administrators by tapping into computer cultures that would be antagonistic to working directly for the government.  Finally, it used less NSA resources. Since these information technologists were only temporary employees, they were not entitled to military pensions, medical leave and other benefits.  It was a system which effectively replaced military careerists with free-lancers.

The irony of the situation was that the NSA had surrounded its front doors with rings of barbwire, close-circuit cameras, and armed guards, but for reasons of economy, bureaucratic restrictions and convenience, it had left the back door of outsourcing opened to temporary employees of private companies.  To be sure, it might take some time for them to gain entry to its inner sanctum. “It was not a question of if but when one of the contractors would go rogue,” the former NSA executive who wrote the memorandum told me. Snowden answered that question in 2013 by stealing a vast number of files while working for both Dell and Booz Allen. Even more extraordinary than the theft itself was the reaction to it by the NSA.  It turned out that there was not cost of failure levied against the outside contractor, Booz Allen, which employed Snowden when he bypassed its security regime to steal the keys to the kingdom.  Even though the counterintelligence investigation showed Snowden stole documents from compartments to which he did not have access, the NSA did not penalize his employer, Booz Allen, even though the NSA was set back for decades according even to Michael McConnell, the vice chairman of Booz Allen.  Instead, its revenues and profits from government contracts markedly increase between 2013 and 2015.

    Nor did the NSA alter its reliance on private contractors.  The Snowden breach notwithstanding, the back door to the NSA remained wide opened because by the time of Snowden outsourcing to private companies had become an all but irreplaceable part of the intelligence system in America.




CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Russians Are Coming

"The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century."—Vladimir Putin

   In the first invasion of a European country since the end of the Cold War, Russian military forces moved into the Crimea and other parts of Eastern Ukraine in February and March of 2014.  Unlike with previous Russian troop movements, such as those into Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany during the Cold War, the week-long massing of Russian elite troops and sophisticated equipment for the move into Ukraine almost totally evaded detection by the NSA’s  surveillance.  It failed to pick up tell-tale signs of the impending invasion.  Never before had the NSA’s multibillion dollar armada of sensors and other apparatus for intercepting signals missed such a massive military operation.   According to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cited Pentagon sources, Russian units had managed to hide all electronic traces of its elaborate preparations.  If so, after more than a half-century of attempted penetrations, Russia apparently had found a means of stymieing the interception capabilities of the NSA.

       While American political scientists wrote optimistically about the end of history, Putin had his own ideas about restoring Russia’s power in the post-Cold War.  A formidable KGB officer before he became President of the Russian Federation in 2000, he made no secret that his goal was to prevent the United States from obtaining what he termed “global hegemony.” His logic was clear. He judged the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 to be as, as he put it, “a geopolitical tragedy.”   He argued that the break-up had provided the United States with the means to become the singular dominant power in the world.    He sought to prevent that feared outcome by moving aggressively to redress this loss of Russian power.  He upgraded Russia’s nuclear force, modernized Russia’s elite military units and greatly strengthened Russia’s relations with China.  The last measure was essential since China was Russia’s principle ally in opposing the extension of American dominance.  Yet, there was still an immense gap between it and the United States in communications intelligence.

        Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the NSA had continued to build up its technologically capabilities while those of Russia, which teetered on the edge of collapse in the early 1990s.   But the NSA also had its problems. As previously mentioned, the NSA’s legal mandate had been limited by Congress to foreign interceptions (at least prior to 9/11 in 2001.)  As a result, it was required to separate out domestic from foreign surveillance, a massive process which was not only time-consuming but could generate dissidence within the ranks of American intelligence.  It also could not legally use its surveillance machinery to monitor the telephones and Internet activities of the tens of thousands of civilian contractors who ran its computer networks—at least not unless the FBI began an investigation into them.  Here the Russian intelligence services had a clear advantage. They had a lawful mandate to intercept any and all domestic communications, In fact, a compulsory surveillance system called by its Russian acronym SORM had been incorporated into Russian law in 1995. It requires the FSB and seven other Russian security agencies to monitor all forms of domestic communications including telephones (SORM 1), emails and other Internet activity (SORM-2), and computer data storage of billing information (SORM-3). Not only did Russia run a nationwide system of Internet-filtering in 2013, but it requires their telecommunication companies furnish to it worldwide data.
    The NSA also had to deal with many peripheral issues other than the activities of Russia and China.  It was charged with monitoring everything from nuclear proliferation in Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, to potential jihadist threats everywhere in the world. The Russian intelligence service, on the other hand, could put its limited resources to work on redressing the gap with its main enemy: the United States.

Nevertheless, Putin had to reckon with the reality in 2013 that Russia could not compete with the NSA in the business of intercepting communications.  And if the NSA could listen in on all the internal activities of its spy agencies and security regime, the ability of Putin to use covert means to achieve his other global ambitions would be impaired.  In the Cold Peace that replaced the Cold War, Russia had little hope of realizing these ambitions unless it could weaken the NSA’s iron-tight grip on global communications intelligence.  One way to remedy the imbalance between Russian intelligence and the NSA was via espionage. Here the SVR would be the instrument and the immediate objective would be to acquire the NSA’s lists of its sources in Russia. If successful, it would be a game changer.
Such an ambitious penetration of the NSA, to be sure, was a tall order for Russian intelligence.  Most of its moles recruited in the NSA by the KGB, had been code clerks, guards, translators, and low-level analysts.  They provided documents about the NSA’s cipher-breaking, but they lacked access to these lists of the NSA’s sources and methods

These meager results did not inhibit Russian efforts.  Yet, for almost seven decades, ever since the inception of the NSA in 1952, the Russian Intelligence service had engaged in a covert war with the NSA.    The Russian intelligence service is, as far as is known, the only intelligence service in the world that ever succeeded in penetrating the NSA.  A number of NSA employees also defected to Moscow.  The history of this venerable enterprise is instructive.

  The first two defectors in the NSA’s history were William Martin and Bernon Mitchell. They were mathematicians working on the NSA’s decryption machines who went to Moscow via Cuba in 1960.  The Russian intelligence service, then called the KGB, went to great lengths to publicize their defections.  It even organized a 90-minute long press conference for them on September 6, 1960 at the Hall of Journalists and invited to it all the foreign correspondents in Moscow. Before television cameras, the defectors proceeded to denounce the NSA’s activities. Martin told how the NSA breached international laws by spying on Germany, Britain and other NATO allies.  Mitchell, for his part, suggested that the NSA’s practice of breaking international laws could ignite a nuclear war. Indeed, he justified their joint defection to Russia in heroic whistle-blowing terms, saying, "We would attempt to crawl to the moon if we thought it would lessen the threat of an atomic war."  The NSA historian assessed little damage had been done since the NSA quickly could change the codes they compromised. He noted: “The Communist spymasters would undoubtedly have preferred Martin and Mitchell to remain in place as moles, since their information was dated as of the moment they left NSA.”

 The next NSA defector was Victor Norris Hamilton. He was a translator and analyst at the NSA.  He arrived in Moscow in 1962 and, like Mitchell and Martin, he claimed the status of a whistle-blower.  This time KGB provided a newspaper platform.   Writing in the Russian newspaper Izvestia, Hamilton revealed the extent of US spying on its allies in the Middle East.

   None of these three 1960s defectors revealed what, if any, NSA secret documents that they had compromised.  Nor did any of them ever return to the United States.  Martin changed his name to Vladimir Sokolodsky, married a Russian woman, and died in Mexico City on January 17, 1987.  Mitchell vanished from sight and was reported to have died in St. Petersburg on November 12, 2001. Hamilton, after telling Russian authorities stories about hearing voices in his head because of a NSA device implanted in his brain, was consigned to Special Psychiatric Hospital No. 5 outside of Moscow.

      There were also KGB spies in the NSA who were caught or died before they could defect. One of them was Sgt. Jack Dunlap.  He was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage on July 23, 1963. Although there was no note, his death was ruled an apparent suicide. NSA classified documents later was discovered in his house.  After that, NSA investigators unraveled his decade-long career as a KGB mole.   Dunlap had been recruited by the KGB in Turkey in 1952.  The standard KGB tool kit for recruitment was called MICE. It stood for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Exploitation. The KGB used the first element, money, to compromise Dunlap.  After he was compromised, it exploited him by getting him to steal NSA secrets.  He had access to such secrets because he became the personal driver first to Major General Garrison Coverdale, the chief of staff of the NSA.  After Coverdale retired, he next became the driver for his successor, General Thomas Wattlington.   These positions afforded him a secrecy clearance and, even more important, a "no inspection" status for the commanding General’s cars that he drove. This perk allowed him to leave the base with secret documents, have them photocopied by his KGB case officer, and then return them to the files at the NSA base before anyone else knew they were missing.  He also used, likely at the suggestion of the KGB case officers, his “no inspection” perk to offer other NSA employees a way of earning money. He would smuggle off the base any items of government property off the base that they took.  Once he had compromised them through thefts, he was in a position ask them for intelligence favors.  This NSA ring could not be fully investigated because of his untimely death.   Other than the packets of undelivered NSA documents found in his home, the investigation was never able to assess the total extent of the KGB penetration of NSA secrets.  (Angleton suspected Dunlap was murdered the KGB, in what he termed a surreptitiously assisted death, to prevent Dunlap from talking to investigators.)

   The Russian intelligence services continued recruiting mercenary spies in the NSA for the duration of the Cold War. The KGB successes included Robert Lipka, a clerk at the NSA in the mid 1960s, who was caught in a sting operation by the FBI and sentenced to 18 years in a federal prison.  Ronald Pelton, an NSA analyst, was recruited after he retired from the NSA.  After he was betrayed by a KGB double agent in 1985, was sentenced to life imprisonment, Finally, there was David Sheldon Boone, a NSA code clerk, who between 1988 and 1992, provided the KGB with NSA documents in return for $60,000.  Boone, sentenced to 24 years in prison, was the last known KGB recruitment of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, Russian Intelligence Service officers operated mainly under the cover of the embassies, consulates, United Nations delegations and other diplomatic missions of the Soviet Union. As “diplomats,” they were protected from arrest by the terms of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.  Their diplomatic cover greatly limited, however, their universe for finding potential recruits outside of their universe of international meetings, diplomatic receptions, UN organizations, scientific conferences and cultural exchanges.  They therefore tended to recruit their counterparts in adversary services.

In this regard, the successful entrapment of Harold Nicholson in the 1990s is highly instructive.   From his impressive record, he seemed an unlikely candidate for recruitment. He had been a super-patriotic American who had served as a captain in Army intelligence before joining the CIA in 1980. In the CIA, he had an unblemished record as a career officer, serving as a station chief in Eastern Europe and then the deputy chief of operation in Malaysia in 1992.  Even though his career was on the rise and he was a dedicated anti-Communist, he became a target for SVR when he was assigned to the CIA’s elite Russian division.  Since the job of this division was to recruit Russian officials working abroad as diplomats, engineers and military officers, its operations brought its officers in close contact with SVR officers. Nicholson therefore was required to meet with Russian intelligence officers in Manila, Bucharest, Tokyo and Bangkok and “dangle” himself to the SVR by pretending disloyalty to the CIA. As part of these deception operations, he supplied the Russians with tidbits of CIA secrets, or “chickenfeed,” that had been approved by his superiors at the CIA.  What his CIA superiors did not fully take into account in this spy versus spy game was the SVR’s ability to manipulate, compromise, and convert a “dangle” to its own ends.  As it turned out, Russian intelligence had been assembling a psychological profile on Nicholson since the late 1980s, and found vulnerability: his resentment at the failure of his superiors to recognize his achievements in intelligence.  It played on this vulnerability to compromise him and then converted him to becoming its mole inside the CIA.  He worked for the SVR first in Asia then at the CIA headquarters at Langley, where he was given a management position.  Among other secret documents, he provided the SVR with the identities of CIA officers sent to the CIA’s special training school at Fort Peary, Virginia, which opened up the door for the SVR to make other potential recruitments. Meanwhile, it paid him $300,000 before he was finally arrested by the FBI in November 1996. (After his conviction for espionage, he was sentenced to 23 years in Federal prison.) The CIA post mortem on Nicholson, who was the highest-ranking CIA officer ever recruited (as far as is known), made clear that even a loyal American, with no intention of betraying the United States, could be entrapped in the spy game.

 When it comes to recruiting moles in a larger universe, intelligence services operate much like highly-specialized corporate “headhunters,” as James Jesus Angleton described the process to me during the Cold War era. He was referring to the similar approach that corporate human resource divisions had with espionage agencies. Both “head hunt” by searching through a database of possible candidates for possible recruits to fill specific positions.  Both type organizations have at their disposal researchers to draw up rosters of potential recruits. Both sort through available data bases to determine which of the names on the list have attributes that might qualify, or disqualify, them for a recruitment pitch.  Both also collect personal data on each qualified candidate, including any indication of their ideological leaning, political; affiliations, financial standing, ambitions, and vanities, to help them make a tempting offer.  But there are two important differences.  First, unlike their counterparts in the private sectors, espionage headhunters ask their candidates not only to take on a new job with them but to keep their employment secret from their present employer. Second, they ask them to surreptitiously steal documents from him.   Since they are asking candidates to break the law, espionage services, unlike their corporate counterparts in headhunting, obviously need to initially hide from the candidate the dangerous nature of the work they will do.  Depending on the preferences of the targeted recruit, they might disguise the task as a heroic act, such as righting an injustice, exposing an illegal government activity, countering a regime of tyranny, or some other noble purpose.  This disguise is called in the parlance of the trade a “false flag.”  By using such a false flag, the SVR did not need to find candidate who were sympathy to Russia, or the Putin regime. In its long history dating back to the era of the Czars, Russian intelligence had perfected the technique of false flag recruitment through which it assumes an identity to fit the ideological bent of a potential recruit.

      Russian intelligence was well-experienced with false flags.  It first used this technique following the Bolshevik revolution in 1918 to control dissidents both at home and abroad.  The centerpiece, as later analyzed by the CIA, was known as the “Trust” deception.     It began in August 1921 when a high-ranking official of the Communist regime in Russia named Aleksandr Yakushev, slipped away from a Soviet trade delegation in Estonia and sought out a leading anti-Communist exile he had known before the revolution in Russia.  He then told him that he represented a group of disillusioned officials in Russia that included key members of the secret police, army, and interior ministry.  Yakushev said that they all had come to the same conclusion: the Communist experiment in Russia had totally failed and needed to be replaced.  To effect this regime change, they had formed an underground organization code-named the “Trust” because the cover for their conspiratorial activities was the Moscow headquarters of the Municipal Credit Association, which was a trust company.  According to Yakushev’s account, it had had become by 1921 the equivalent of a de facto government,

     The exile leader in Estonia reported this astonishing news to British intelligence which, along with French and American intelligence, helped fund this newly-emerged anti-Communist group. Initially British intelligence had doubts about the bona fides of the Trust.  So did other Western intelligence services sponsoring exile groups. But they gradually accepted it after they received intelligence reports confirming its operations from many other sources, including Russian officials, diplomats, and military officers who claimed to have defected from the Soviet government in Moscow.  Since these reports all dove-tailed, they recognized the Trust as a real underground organization.

     Once the Trust had been established in the minds of the Western intelligence services, it offered them as well as exile groups the services of its network of collaborators. These services included smuggling out dissidents, stealing secret documents, and disbursing money inside Russia to sympathizers.   Within a year, exile groups in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Helsinki were using the “Trust” to deliver arms and supplies to their partisans inside Russia. The Trust also furnished spies and exile leader’s fake passports which allowed them to sneak back into Russia to participate in clandestine missions.  It even undertook sabotage and assassination missions paid for by Western intelligence services. As they saw with their own eyes police stations blown up and political prisoners escape from prisons, these agents and dissidents came to further believe in the power of the Trust.

    By the mid-1920s, no fewer than eleven Western intelligence services had become almost completely dependent on the Trust for information about Russia.   They also sent millions of dollars into Russia via couriers to finance its activities.

   But suddenly exile leaders working in Russia under the aegis of the Trust began to vanish. Then top western intelligence agents, such as Sydney Reilly and Boris Savinkov were arrested, and their networks were eliminated.  Instead of the Communist regime collapsing, as the Trust had predicted, it consolidated its power and wiped out all the dissident groups.     Finally, in 1929, the Trust was revealed by a defector to be a long-term false flag operation run by the Russian intelligence service. Even the Trust building, rather than being the cover for a subversive conspiracy, was the headquarters for the Russian secret police during this seven-year operation. The secret police had provided the documents fed to Western intelligence, briefed the agents who pretended to defect, published the dissident newspapers the Trust distributed, fabricated the passport it supplied exiles, blew up Russian buildings and staged jail breaks to make the deception more credible.  It also collected the money sent in by Western intelligence services, which more than paid for the entire deception.  Since it was running the show, it could offer those lured into the trap an opportunity to work for it as double-agents. The alternative, if they refused, was to face a firing squad.

    Even after the “Trust” itself had been fully exposed, The Russian Intelligence Service continued to succeed with other false-flag deception, During the Cold War, for example, it set up a fake underground in Poland modeled on the Trust. It was called WIN. It also set up other false flag groups in Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, Albania, and Hungary.  It also had agents masquerade as members of the security services of Israel, South Africa, Germany, France and the US to recruit unwitting agents.  These deceptions became an integral part of the recruitments of the Russian intelligence services.

         Penetrating the NSA and getting access to files from its stove-piped computers was a far more difficult challenge for the SVR. Approaching CIA officers, such as Nicholson, was relatively easy because it was part of the CIA officer’s job to meet with their adversaries. NSA officers, on the other hand, did not engage in “dangles” or even attend diplomatic receptions.  They had not reason, other than a sinister one, to meet with a member of the Russian intelligence service.    Furthermore, unlike CIA officers who, like Nicholson, are often posted in neutral countries where they can be approached in a social context, NSA officers worked at well-guarded regional bases and are not part of the diplomatic life.   Since a known employee of a foreign diplomatic mission could not even approach a NSA officer without arousing suspicion, the SVR would need to use an intermediary, called an “access agent,” whose affiliations with it were not known to the FBI.  Such an operation would require establishing a network of illegals in the America, as the SVR did after Putin became President.  Even them, the intermediary would have to find a plausible pretext to approach the target with revealing his actual interest.

The emergence of computer networks in the 1990s greatly expanded the SVR’s recruiting horizon. It offered an opportunity to penetrate a new layer at the NSA employees: civilian technologists working under contract for the US government.  Many of these civilians at the NSA, especially the younger ones, had been drawn from the hacking and game-playing culture. Some had even taken courses abroad on hacking techniques. They presented the SVR was inviting targets for recruitment.   As was previously mentioned, Russian intelligence had considerable experience in Germany with hacktavists who tended to be anarchists. There were also supporters of the Libertarian movement. The common denominator was often their resentment expressed in their postings s of the United States and its allies attempting to limit the downloading of copy-righted music, movies and software on the Internet, all of which went under the rubric of “freedom of the Internet.”  They also vocally objected to the NSA using built-in backdoors in their software to read their encrypted messages.  They were not difficult to find on the Internet.  The donors to Ron Paul’s Libertarian election campaign (including Snowden) were a matter of public record, for example.

Even if there was no shortage of hacktavists who believed the surveillance of the Internet by the NSA was an evil worth fighting, the SVR still had to find a plausible way of approaching members of this counterculture without offending them.  Clearly, the SVR could no longer use out- of-date Communist and anti-capitalist ideology as a lure.  Russia was far more authoritarian than the U.S, when it came to the Internet.  One viable alternative for the SVR was custom-tailoring false flags to appeal to hacktavists.

    For this purpose the Internet provided a near perfect realm for false flags. Since it is a place where true identities cannot easily be verified, intelligence services could employ a protean kit of disguises to assume false identities to entice potential dissidents into communicating with them.  The KGB’s earlier efforts to use hacktavist groups in Germany had produced little, if any, intelligence because of the “stove-piping” the NSA used to isolate its computers from networks that could be hacked into from the outside. It will be recalled that the NSA threat officer had cited these failures in his 1996 report on NSA vulnerability.  He also said that efforts of the Russian Intelligence Services to use false flag recruitments provided the KGB with “a learning experience.”  The KGB had learned that hacking by itself could not breech the NSA’s protective stove-piping.  He predicted that its next logical move would be to “target insider computer personnel.” These false flag recruitment would aim at, in his view, system administrators, computer engineers and cyber service workers who were either already inside the NSA or who had a secrecy clearance that would facilitate getting jobs with NSA contractors.

Even with an appropriate false flag, the task of finding such a “Prometheus” was daunting.  There were some five thousand civilian technicians at the NSA of all political stripes. Finding the one who met its espionage requisites was the equivalent of seeking the sharpest needle in the proverbial giant haystack.  For espionage purposes, however, recruiters did not have to find the sharpest needle, or any particular one; they just needed to find any needle in a position to cooperate.  They could hone a willing recruit over time to do the job at hand.

  The size of the haystack could also be reduced to more manageable proportions by hacking into the personnel records of the intelligence workers seeking to renew their security clearance.  The Internet provided the SVR with just this opportunity.  As discussed in the previous chapter, holes in the security of the computer networks of the US Office of the Office of Personal Management, USIS and the websites of the companies supplying the NSA with independent contractors had made the background checks on American intelligence workers available to the Chinese and presumably other adversary intelligence service hackers since 2011.  If the SVR had access to this personnel data, the research for a candidate would be greatly facilitated. From the 127-page standard form 86 each applicant for a security clearance submits, the SVR could filter out intelligence workers employed by the NSA by their educational background, employment history, affiliations and foreign contacts. It could then search this data for candidates with a possible hacktavist profile,

This data could next be crossed with a list of individuals SVR in contact with high-profile activists who are part of the anti-surveillance movements. This would include core participants in the TOR project, Wikileaks, Noisebridge, Crypto Parties, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Electronic Freedom Foundation. (Snowden, for example, had been in touch with members all these groups in 2012 and 2013.)

The SVR would have little problem monitoring even encrypted communications with leading figures in the Anti-surveillance world.   These activists, despite secrecy rituals such as putting their cell phones in refrigerators, remain visible to a sophisticated intelligence service such as the SVR.  Consider, for example, the defensive tactics of Laura Poitras, including PGP encryption, TOR software, and air-gapped computers which are computers that have never been connected to the Internet. She also famously changes her tables at restaurants to evade surveillance.  With all these precautions, she did not keep secrets about her sources entirely to herself. Snowden, at a time when he was stealing NSA secrets in February 2013, went to great lengths to impress on Poitras the need for operational security about his contacts with her, but that injunction did not prevent her from telling at least five people about her source, including Micah Lee, the Berkeley-based technology operative for the Freedom of the Press Foundation; Jacob Appelbaum, the TOR proselytizer; Ben Wizner, the ACLU lawyer; Barton Gellman; and Glenn Greenwald.   “It is not me that can’t keep a secret, “Abraham Lincoln joked. “It’s the people I tell it that can’t.”    In the same vein, Poitras could hardly rely on these five confidants not to tell her (and Snowden’s) to others.  Hours after he was told, Greenwald told his lover David Miranda about the source in great detail. He even asked him to evaluate the source’s bona fides for him. Gellman, for his part, raised the matter with a former high official at the Justice Department.

    Moreover, as the intelligence world knew, Poitras was herself a veritable lightning rod for attracting ex-NSA employees who objected to some of its surveillance programs. In 2012, her filming of NSA insiders, including Binney and Drake, would make her communications of interest to any intelligence services that wanted to keep tabs on possible NSA dissidents.

   Nor was Snowden himself overly discreet.  It will be recalled that he had also advertised his TOR-sponsored crypto party activities over the Internet, and supplied Runa Sandvik, who worked with Appelbaum, his true name and address in Hawaii. Sandvik had no reason not to share the identity of her co-presenter with others in the TOR movement. Snowden also had his girl friend make a video of his presentation, as will be recalled.  He also bragged about operating the largest TOR outlets in Hawaii.  Even if his TOR software provided him a measure of anonymity, it was not beyond the ability of the world-class cyber services to crack it.

Under Putin, Russia had built one of the leading cyber espionage services in the world. According to a 2009 NSA analysis of Russian capabilities, which was obtained by the New York Times in 2013, Russia’s highly-sophisticated tools for cyber-espionage were superior to those of China or any other adversary nation.  For example, investigators from FireEye, a well-regarded Silicon Valley security firm, found that in 2007, Russian hackers had developed a highly- sophisticated virus that could bypass the security measures of the servers of both the US government and its private contractors. According to one computer security expert, the virus had made protected Internet websites “sitting ducks” for these Russian sophisticated hackers. The cryptographer Bruce Schneier, a leading specialist in computer security, explained, “It is next to impossible to maintain privacy and anonymity against a well-funded government adversary.”

Nor has the Russian cyber service has made a secret out of the fact that it targets TOR software. It even offered a cash prize to anyone in the hacking community who could break TOR.   Prior to 2013, according to cyber security experts, it spent over a decade building cyber tools aimed at unraveling the TOR networks used by hacktavists, criminal enterprises, political dissidents and rival intelligence operatives.  To this end, it reportedly attempted to map out computers that served as major TOR exit nodes (such as the one Snowden operated in 2012 near a NSA regional base in Hawaii.) It also reportedly attached the equivalent of “electronic ink” to messages which would allow it to trace the path of messages that passed through them. Through this technology, it could tag and follow TOR users as their communications travelled across the Internet. It could even borrow their Internet identities.  To be sure, .the NSA also had such a capability. The Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht discovered to his distress that his TOR software did not make his computer server in Iceland invisible.  According to a former top official in the Justice Department, the NSA was able to locate it by cracking the TOR software, (Ulbricht is currently serving a life prison sentence for his Silk Road activities.).  Unlike adversary services, however, the NSA needs a warrant to investigate US citizens who use TOR.

 Even the NSA is not immune from an attack of its own computers.  CIA deputy director Morell, who served on the committee evaluating the NSA’s vulnerability in the Snowden affair after retiring from the CIA in 2013, wrote in his 2015 book “The Great War of our Times,” that many financial institutions have “better cyber security than the NSA.”    If nothing else, the Internet helped make the activities of US intelligence workers visible to the SVR.

Even if the SVR theoretically had opportunities, it still had to find at least one disgruntled civilian contractor inside in the NSA who had access to the sealed-off computer networks. Did it find its man? If so, was it before or after Snowden arrived in Hong Kong with the Level 3 NSA files?






CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Chinese Puzzle

“The first [false assumption] is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not.”

                  •  Edward Snowden in Hong Kong

     On August 11, 2014, in the Atlantic Ocean, an even took place of enormous concern to U.S. intelligence.   A Chinese Jin Class Submarine launched an Intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile released 12 independently-targeted re-entry vehicles, each simulating a nuclear warhead.  Some 4400 miles away, in China’s test range in the Xinjiang desert, each of the 12 simulated nuclear warheads then hit their targets within a 12 inch radius.    The test firing, which was closely monitored by the NSA, was a strategic game changer.  It meant that a single Jin Class submarine, which carried 12 such missiles and 144 nuclear warheads, could destroy every city of strategic importance in the United States.  U.S intelligence further reported at China would soon fully stealth its newer submarines against detection, “giving China its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent” against an American attack.
   By 2015, as its test in the Atlantic had foreshadowed, China had armed its land-based as well as sea-based missiles with multiple independently targeted warheads. Combined with the state--of-the-art technology it had licensed from Russia, its systematic use of espionage made it possible for China to even build its own stealth fighters.

 Unlike the U.S, China did not achieve this remarkable capability to launch independently-targeted miniaturized nuclear weapons and stealth them by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in developing them.  It obtained this technology mainly through espionage.  The history of this enterprise, though unsung, is stunning. The Chinese intelligence service stole a large part, if not all of America’s secret technology for weaponizing nuclear bombs during the 1980s and 1990s. The theft was so massive that in 1998 the House of Representatives of the US Congress set up a special bipartisan investigative unit called the “Select Committee on National Security and Military and Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China.”   Based on the intelligence amassed by the NSA, CIA and other intelligence services, it concluded in its report that the Chinese intelligence service had obtained both by electronic and conventional spying the warhead design of America’s seven most advance thermonuclear weapons. Moreover, it found that China’s espionage successes allowed China to so accelerate the design, development and testing of its own nuclear weapons that the new generation of Chinese weapons would be “comparable in effectiveness to the weapons used by the United States.”  Further, it found that these thefts of nuclear secrets had not been isolated or opportunistic incidents.  The Committee reported to Congress that they were the “results of decades of intelligence operations against U.S. weapons laboratories.”  The Chinese intelligence service further obtained from private US defense contractors through cyber espionage important elements of the stealth technology used in both advanced planes and submarines.  China shared (or exchanged) the fruits of its espionage on nuclear warhead design with North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Russia.

Despite its formidable intelligence coups in the US, the Chinese intelligence service managed to remain among the most elusive of America’s intelligence adversaries. Its espionage organizations are hidden behind layers of bureaucracy in the Ministry of State Security, Chinese Communist party structures, and the second, third and fourth department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.  Much of its cyber espionage units are concealed on the campuses of its universities.   Its hierarchy, or order of battle, is also obscure. Few traces have been uncovered of any conventional espionage networks in the United States and no major Chinese spy has ever been arrested.  Part of the reason that Chinese espionage has proved so elusive to the eyes of western counter-intelligence, was that, unlike Russia, it did not ordinarily rely on intelligence officers in its embassies to recruit penetration agents to steal secrets.  It did not even have an embassy in the United States during most of the Cold War.  Instead, its services specialize it assembly mosaics of intelligence assembled from a wide variety of sources including non-classified documents, returning graduate students, scientific conferences, exchanges with allies, and a vast operation of  hacking into computers, or cyber- espionage.

Cyber-espionage is indeed a vast enterprise in China.  Graduating over 150,000 computer science engineers, it had no shortage of personnel.  It also had developed the cyber tool kit to gain access to the computer networks of US government contractors and consultants in the private sector and government agencies, planting “sleeper" bugs in net-worked computers.  Like human “sleeper” agents, these hidden programs can be activated when needed for operational purposes.  Chinese controllers can retrieve emails, documents and turn on the cameras and microphones of personal computers, tablets and smart phones.  By 2007, Paul Strassmann, a top US defense expert on cyber-espionage, reported that China had inserted “zombie” programs in some 700,000 computers in the US which could be used to mount cyber attack to retrieve emails from other computers.  The Chinese service also reportedly penetrated companies that provide Internet services, including Google Yahoo, Symantec, and Adobe, which allowed it to track emails and enclosures of individuals.  With such an invisible army of zombie computers, it is not entirely surprising that China finds little need to employ human: sleeper” agents.

  Chinese cyber-specialists used this capability to hack into computers of outside contractors, including Booz Allen and other companies that supplied technologists to the NSA.  It also had notable successes in obtaining the dossiers of US employees and independent contractors at the NSA, CIA and other intelligence services. Its intrusions, as previously noted, into computer network at the Office of Personnel Management traced back to 2009.  Eventually, by 2015, according to US estimates, the cyber attack had harvested over twenty million personnel files of past and present Federal government employees. In addition, it reaped in over 14 million background checks of intelligence workers done by the Federal Investigative Service. All the intelligence workers with a SCI clearance, such as Snowden, were required to provide in these forms information about all their foreign acquaintance, including any non-U.S. officials that the applicant knew or had relationships with in the past. They also had to list their foreign travel, family members, police encounters, mental health, and credit history.  For good measure, Chinese hackers obtained the confidential medical histories of government employees by hacking into the computers of Anthem and other giant heath care companies.   If the Chinese intelligence services consolidated the fruits of these hacking attacks it would have a searchable database of almost everyone working in the American defense and intelligence complex.   From this database, it could track individuals with high security clearances vulnerable to being bribed, blackmailed or tricked into cooperating.   No one doubted that the Chinese would use their cyber capabilities to take advantage of weaknesses in foreign computer systems. General Hayden said of the massive theft of intelligence personnel records: “those records are a legitimate foreign intelligence target.”  He added, “If I, as director of the NSA or CIA would have had the opportunity to grab the equivalent in the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice.”  If that opportunity did not arise for the NSA or CIA during Hayden’s tenure, it may have been because no insider in the Chinese intelligence services provided US intelligence with a road map to it.

     Cyber espionage was not the Chinese Intelligence Service only powerful resource in the intelligence war.  To get both electronic intelligence and human intelligence about the United States, China also had a highly-productive intelligence sharing treaty with Russia.   It was signed in 1992 after the Soviet Union was dissolved.  Although the terms of this exchange remain secret, defectors from the Russian KGB and SVR reported that Chinese intelligence received from Russia a continuous stream of communication intelligence about the US in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  Russia’s intelligence resources during this period were formidable.  They included geo-synchronous satellites, listening stations in Cuba, sleeper agents and embassy-based spy networks. Presumably, this relationship further deepened under President Putin’s regime.  Putin asserted in his speeches in 2014 that Russia and China continue to share a key strategic objective: countering the United States’ domination of international relations, or what Putin terms, “a unipolar world order.”   China’s President Xi Jinping expressed a very similar view, saying in 2014 in a thinly-veiled reference to the United States, stating that any American attempt to “monopolize” international affairs will not succeed.


 Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been the major supplier of almost all of China’s modern weaponry.  It licenses for manufacture in China avionics, air defense systems, missile launchers, stealth technology, and submarine warfare equipment.  To make these arms effective, it also provides China with up-to-date intelligence about the ability of the United States and its allies to counter them.  While such intelligence cooperation may be limited by the reality that China and Russia still compete in some areas, there is no reason to assume that they do not share the fruits of their cyber and conventional espionage against the NSA.  After all, the NSA works to intercept the military and political secrets of both these allies.   Moreover, NSA secrets might are a form of currency in the global intelligence war.

Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong in May 2013 made the Chinese intelligence service, willy-nilly, a potential player in game.  Hong Kong is a part of China, even if independently administrated, and, as such, China has full responsibility for its national security and foreign affairs. This mandate includes monitoring foreign intelligence operatives. The Chinese intelligence service accordingly runs much of the local intelligence apparatus in Hong Kong.  For this purpose, it maintains its largest intelligence base outside of mainland China in Hong Kong.  Its officers are stationed officially in the Prince of Wales skyscraper in central Hong Kong and unofficially maintain informers in Hong Kong’s police, governing authority, airport administration and at other levers of power in Hong Kong.  It checks the computerized visitors entering Hong Kong, and has the capability to ferret names that match those in the immense date base its global cyber espionage has amassed. When it detects the entry of any person of possible intelligence interest, it has the opportunity of using its sophisticated array of cyber tools to remotely steal data from those individuals.  Such remote surveillance was so effective in 2013 that the US State Department had instructed all its personnel in Hong Kong to avoid using their Iphones, Androids, Blackberries and smart phones when travelling to Hong Kong or China.  Instead, it has supplied them with specially-altered phones that disable location tracking and have a remotely-activated switch to completely cut off power to it circuitry. No one in the intelligence community doubts the prudence of taking such precautions in the realm of China.

Once Hong Kong had served as a window into China for Western intelligence, but in the first decade of the 21st century, the Chinese intelligence service had achieved such a pervasive presence in Hong Kong, and such ubiquitous electronic coverage of diplomats and other foreigners even suspected of involvement in foreign intelligence work, that the CIA and British intelligence found it almost as difficult to operate in Hong Kong as in mainland China.  The CIA as well as the DIA kept a few officers there, but, as a former CIA station chief told me in September 2013, that for the purposes of intelligence operations, the CIA “regards Hong Kong as hostile territory.”

   Snowden apparently knew the limits of CIA operations in Hong Kong. It indeed provided him with an envelope of protection.  He told Greenwald, as will be recalled, that he was counting on the Chinese presence in Hong Kong to deter the CIA from intruding on their meetings.

    Snowden also must have realized that he was entering the Chinese sphere of influence when he flew to Hong Kong in May 2013.  Yet, he took with him level 3 NSA secrets which he could assume would be of great interest to China.  In fact, he advertised this fact in his interview with the South China Post, a newspaper controlled in 2013 by mainland China.   Whatever he may have assumed about the inability of the CIA to stop him in Hong Kong, he had no reason to assume that Chinese intelligence service would relegate itself to purely passive role, especially when secret NSA’s documents were in a hotel room in Hong Kong.   Snowden may have esteemed himself to be an independent actor playing Prometheus on a global stage provided by YouTube, but the Chinese may have viewed him as nothing more as another pawn in the Game of Nations.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Pawn in the Game

“The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.”
                                          --Edward Snowden in Moscow, 2014


    When Snowden arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013 he became a person on interest to any parties who knew, or later learned, about his coup.  How could they not be interested this intelligence defector?  He had brought with him enough US government secrets to, as he put it, make NSA “sources go dark that were previously productive”.     Snowden also fully realized the lethal situation that his possession of NSA documents put him.  He was after his arrival in Hong Kong, as he put it, the NSA’s “single point” of a potential catastrophic intelligence failure.  He also stated the consequences if caught, telling Poitras:   “The US Intel community will certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure.”
The reason that Snowden considered himself of such importance to be the “single point of failure” was the pay load of secrets he was carrying.  He possessed thumb drives full of files so critical to the NSA that in the wrong hands they could cause, in his view, many of the key sources of the entire US communication intelligence service to “go dark.” Not only was he carrying these files, but he had willingly bought them inside the territory of China; a place in which America’s main adversaries, China and Russia, could operate freely.  Whoever he sought to deal with in Hong Kong, or whatever idealistic axe he intended to grind there, he could not expect his position as a “single point of failure”—a position he advertised in his email correspondence—would not attract the attention of other players in the game of nations.
The enormous power of the NSA rested on a frail thread: its ability to keep secret from its foes its sources and methods.  General Alexander could call the NSA’s communication intelligence “the queen on the chessboard,” but, like the queen in a chess game, it could be captured by a well-placed pawn. In this case, the pawn, which had it in his power to expose the NSA’s critical sources and methods, would also be considered fair game for capture by an adversary.  And both the Chinese and Russian cyber services, whether working alone or together, had the technological means in China to tap into Snowden’s computer.  They also had an interest in learning how the NSA was listening in on their secret communications.  If any further incentive was needed, an intelligence service could barter them to other countries whose signals were also intercepted by the NSA.  Michael Morell, the CIA’s  Deputy Director at the time, said in his book “The Great War of Our Times” that just a few selected parts of Snowden’s cache could be traded to the intelligence services of Iran and North Korea.
Snowden, realizing that he now represented that weak link in the architecture of America’s intelligence system, made a move from the U.S. that greatly increased the stakes.  He entered what he knew to be hostile intelligence territory with his stash of stolen secrets.  He did so, as he explained to Greenwald in Hong Kong, to reduce the possibility of an American countermove against him or his associates in the media. But while succeeding in limiting the reach of the CIA, FBI, NSA and their allies, he willy-nilly put himself under the protection of America’s adversary, the Chinese security services.  In light of the counterintelligence training he had received at the CIA, he could not be unaware his move into Chinese-controlled territory would not prevent adversary services, which also had the home court advantage, from stepping in.   He also gave adversaries an ample, if not wholly irresistible reason, to enter the game by saying that he had access to NSA’s sources in China.
How could they resist such a prize?

As confidant as Snowden may have been that he was in control, the CIA believed that confidence was misinformed. CIA Deputy Director Morell said, after reviewing the case on a panel appointed by President Obama:  “Snowden thinks he is smart, but he was never in a position in his previous jobs to fully understand the immense capabilities of our Russian and Chinese counterparts.”  He could adopt a self-confident tone in his post-mortem conversations with journalists in Moscow, but he had no means to block the efforts of the Chinese or Russian services in Hong Kong.    These intelligence services had no restrictions on their actions. For example, the Chinese intelligence service could have spotted him on his arrival in Hong Kong simply by cross- checking its aforementioned database of US intelligence workers who had applied for a renewed security clearance in the past three years.  It could have pinpointed his whereabouts through its informant network in the Hong Kong Police and the security staffs of hotels.  Snowden’s mysterious “carer” would not be immune from detection by that network.     Russia, China’s longtime intelligence ally, would not even need to go to such lengths since, as Putin gloatingly confirmed, he contacted its diplomats in Hong Kong. The Russian intelligence service would them swing into action while Russian “diplomats” entered into talks with him. The Russians would also glean from Snowden’s request for asylum that Hong Kong was only a temporary stopover for him,
“The purpose of my [Hong Kong} mission was to get the information to journalists,” he would tell the Guardian after he was safely ensconced in Moscow.  After that brief mission, he was “done” in Hong Kong. Where he planned to go next, mainland China was only a taxi ride away and there was a direct flight to Moscow.

     Snowden does not say how many days he planned to be in Hong Kong, but he indicated that he was working under a tight clock. The time pressure resulted in him emailing Gellman at the Washington Post an ultimatum on May 24, 2013: either Gellman publish the selected documents in the Washington Post within 72 hours or he would lose the exclusive scoop.  He wanted the story to break on May 27, 2013 without his true identity (which Gellman did not know). Hid identity would be known to a foreign mission in Hong Kong if Gellman acceded to his demands.  Since as previously mentioned, Gellman’s story would enclose an encoded signal he planned to use as proof of his bona fides.  So even before the Guardian reporters had agreed to come to Hong Kong, he had plans to deal with a foreign mission.  But he planned to keep his name out of it.  Instead, he insisted Gellman include in it a coded signal in it.  When the Washington Post turned down his ultimatum, he needed a different plan.
     Time was running out if he was to break the story and leave Hong Kong before the NSA realized he was missing.   At best, he was safe until June 3rd.  That was when he was supposed to return from his two-week medical leave for getting treatment for epilepsy. But if he failed to show up in Hawaii on June 3rd, alarm bells at the NSA would go off.  It would not take long to find him. Airline record would show that he had flown to Hong Kong.   The NSA security staff would ask questions, as Snowden explained from Moscow: “This guy isn’t where he says he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be getting medical treatment. Why the hell is he in Hong Kong?”   It would then determine he had lied about his medical treatment, and it would immediate go after him with the full power of the U.S. government.
 The day after his attempt to pressure the Washington Post, he asked Greenwald to drop everything he was doing and immediately fly to Hong Kong.   He had, it will be recalled, already sent Poitras an enciphered file, and told her she would get the key once she and Greenwald followed his instructions. Presumably, he wanted Greenwald’s story and the video done in Hong Kong before he became a suspect.  If they had immediately flown to Hong Kong that May, it still might have left Snowden an escape window.

As Snowden found out, when dealing with journalists, things do not always go as planned. Greenwald, although agreeing to come to Hong Kong, waited in New York for two days while the Guardian editors completed their due diligence.  Poitras waited with him.   As a result of this delay, Snowden’s clock ran out.  Greenwald and Poitras did not arrive at his hotel in Hong Kong until June 3rd.  It would be only hours before he became a prime suspect. “It was a nervous period,” Snowden recalled. Although he bravely told the Guardian, “there was no risk of compromise/” That claim was, at best, wishful thinking on his part.

By this time, he was no longer invisible.  Not only had he registered at the hotel under his true name and provided his credit card, but he was he in contact with three high-profile journalists, two well-known hacktavists and, as he suggested to Gellman, a foreign diplomatic mission.  Even if Snowden had failed to persuade the Washington Post to publish a coded identifier, the mission’s interest would likely be piqued when the newspaper published it first story on June 5th.  Even if adversary intelligence services had missed Snowden and his archive of NSA documents earlier in May,  they would not neglect the availability of such a prize after the NSA stories broke in the Guardian and Washington Post on June 5th. Greenwald even went on TV in Hong Kong, revealing to every interested intelligence service, in the unlikely event that that they did not already know, that a defector from the NSA was in Hong Kong.


     Now there was no point in keeping his identity a secret.  On June 9th  Poitras released the famous video showing Snowden a secret  NSA documents,  At this point, Snowden shone so brightly as a beacon that every player in the in the intelligence game would realize that Snowden was a pawn to be captured.


     Snowden still was able to fog over his travel plans, at least in the media, by telling reporters that he intended to remain in Hong Kong and fight extradition in court, but certainly the Russian officials whom he contacted knew he had other plans.  They had even relayed his request to go to Russia to Putin. His movements were also no secret to sophisticated intelligence services.  In an era in Hong Kong ii which cell phones emit their GPS location every 3 seconds and CCTV cameras scan many street intersections, it is not easy to conceal one’s whereabouts.  In Snowden’s case, his photograph was constantly on television, posters and giant billboards.  Even if he threw away his own phone, his retinue of lawyers and helpers could be tracked with ease.


  China, who’s President, Xi Jinping was meeting President Obama for the first time in Rancho Mirage, California on June 9th, would have certainly been keenly interested in the unfolding Snowden affair.  After all, Obama had publically put on his agenda that week calling Xi to task for Chinese cyber espionage.  Such a charge was undermined by Snowden’s globally-publicized accusation that the United States was engaged in massive cyber espionage.  In any event, as US intelligence verified, China had, almost immediately after the release of the video, instituted a full court press of Snowden in Hong Kong.  Its security apparatus presumably had the means to monitor his room as well as those of Poitras and Greenwald.   From that moment on, it is not likely that any communication or movement, Snowden made during his next 18 days in Hong Kong would escape its scrutiny.

The U.Ss also had the ability to track Snowden’s movements via the cell phones of his lawyers and other confederates after he surfaced.    This tracking could all be done by the NSA.  What the U.S. lacked was any practical means to capture a high-profile intelligence defector in a city that was part of China.  By this time, US intelligence had established that Chinese and Hong Kong security services were monitoring Snowden’s every move.  This left few options in the game for the U.S.  “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” President Obama said on June 27, 2013.



  The real prize, in any case, was not Snowden himself but the NSA’s secrets documents that he had with him in Hong Kong.  When Snowden was observed entering the Russian consulate, the game was all but over.  US diplomats could protest over back channels to Moscow, as they did, but, with a trove of NSA secrets at stake, there was little expectation that they stop the Russians.  Two days later, the ”single point of failure,” as Snowden described himself, was on his way to Russia, where he would be subject to Moscow’s rules.

When a victory is obtained in a major sports event, such as the world cup, it is celebrated with victory dances, parties and ticker-tape parades. The opposite is true in the Game of Nation. An intelligence victory involving secret documents, even if it cannot be entirely hidden, is kept veiled, as far as is possible, to increase the value of the coup.     “The final move in any sophisticated intelligence game,” Angleton told me in relation to espionage intelligence coup, is “obscuring a success.”


Following Angleton’s precept the Russian or Chinese intelligence services, if they had a role in acquiring the product of the self-described “single point of failure,” would work to cover their tracks in the affair even before the Aeroflot plane carrying Snowden touched down at Sheremetyevo International Airport on June 23, 2013.    If any false flag operations had been used to trick, mislead, or otherwise induce Snowden to come to Hong Kong, they would be disbanded.  If any safe housed had been used to quarter Snowden in his first 11 days in Hong Kong, they would be shut down.  If any operatives had been used in Hawaii to guide or assist Snowden, they would be put back into the sleep mode.  If any tell-tale traces had been left in chat rooms or social media, they would be systematically deleted.    Even more important to the ultimate success of such a communications intelligence coup, measures would be taken to conceal the extent of the damage done by the “single point of failure” by not precipitously closing down compromised sources.   Snowden might believe that the power of the information he held was so great that, if disclosed by him, all the NSA’s sources would immediately go dark in Russia and China, but Russia might not wish to provide such clarity to its adversaries. An intelligence service need not close down channels it discovers are compromised by an adversary.  Instead it can elect to continue to use them and furnish through them bits of sensitive information to advance its own national interest. The real danger here was not that the NSA’s “lights” would dramatically be extinguished but that all the future messages illuminated by those lights would be less reliable sources of intelligence.   The Game of Nations is, after all, merely a competition among adversaries to gain advantages by the surreptitious exchange of both twisted and straight information.  When the NSA asserted in the summer of 2013 that over one million documents, it was recognizing the most massive failure in its 60 year history. Not only NSA secrets, but secret files from the CIA, the British GCHQ, and America’s cyber military commands, had been compromised.  It was, as Sir David Omand, the head of the British GCHQ described it, a "huge, strategic setback" for the West. The genie could not be put back in the bottle as there is not a reset button in this game. The best that the NSA could do now was damage control while its adversaries took full advantage of the setback.  Several hundred  US and British intelligence officers worked around the clock in Washington DC, Fort Meade, Maryland and Cheltenham, England for months on end to determine if which parts could be still salvaged from what had been until the Snowden breach the most powerful communications intelligence system in the world.


Adding insult to injury, Snowden, speaking from his new perch in Moscow, told applauding audience that the entire purpose of the U.S. exercise, including deliberately “trapping” him in Moscow, was to “demonize” him.  For Russia, it was a textbook move. By providing Snowden with this platform to rail against the surveillance practices of his adversaries, Putin laid claim to the moral high ground in the Game of Nations.


What remains missing from this picture is Snowden's motive in requesting documents from other foreign intelligence services, such as the GCHQ, and copying lists of NSA sources.  It is difficult to believe that his motive was conventional whistle-blowing since these documents were not among those l he gave to journalists in Hong Kong.  It will be recalled that his legal representative in Moscow, Anatoly Kucherena, said that he taken to Russia, and had access to, NSA documents that he had not given to journalists.  He had gone effort in his final weeks at the NSA to take documents that any adversary service would prize. Copying them was, as we have seen, part of his well-calculated plan.  Did he use them, as he used the documents he gave to Poitras, Greenwald and Gellman, as leverage in his transformation?  Since the role that Moscow may have played in Snowden’s remarkable defection, while less visible than that of the movie-makers, journalists and activist, cannot be ignored in this puzzle.  Since it requires a closer examination of the machinations that brought Snowden to Russia, I made arrangements to visit Moscow in October 2015.











             PART FIVE


 WALKING THE CAT BACK




Deception is a state of mind—and the mind of the state
               --James Jesus Angleton






 Chronology 3
Snowden in Russia

               2013

June 23         Snowden arrives from Hong Kong at Sheremetyevo International                                           Airport on Aeroflot flight SU213 at 5:15 PM local time.

                     Sarah Harrison arrives from Hong Kong at Sheremetyevo International                                           Airport on Aeroflot flight SU213 at 5:15 PM local time.

 July 12            Snowden, in his first public appearance in Russia, holds press                                             conference at Sheremetyevo International Airport,

July 14             Snowden first meets Anatoly Kucherena, his lawyer-to-be

August 1          Snowden’s application for asylum is granted for one year.

September 23 Kucherena states Snowden has access to NSA documents in Russia

October 2         Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, Coleen Rowley and

Jesselyn Radack meets with Snowden and Harrison.

October 10      Snowden aided by ACLU legal team put together by Ben Wizner

October 16      Snowden interviewed, via Internet, by James Risen (NY Times)

November 1     Snowden joins the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation

November 3     Sarah Harrison departs from Moscow.

December 21   Snowden meets with Gellman; his first in person interview in Moscow.

2014

January 2         Snowden meets in Moscow ACLU lawyers Ben Wizner and Anthony Romero

August 1           Snowden’s residence permit is renewed for three years





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dinner with Oliver Stone

“I had to ‘tune to [Snowden’s] wavelength’ and try to balance between the rational and intuitive perception of his world. Having experienced these incredible sensations, I realized that I had to write about them, but only in the form of a novel that would not claim any sophisticated philosophical conclusions."

           —Anatoly Kucherena




Before flying to Moscow, I arranged to have dinner with Oliver Stone at Parma, an Italian restaurant on the upper east side of New York.  I had greatly respected Stone ability as a film director after watching him work in Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, a film in which I had a cameo role.  I also had debated Stone about the historic accuracy of his 1990 movie JFK at Town Hall in New York.
  When we dined, he had just written, produced, written and directed “Snowden,” an independently-financed film depicting Snowden, as put, as “one of the great heroes of the 21st century.”  In preparing for it, he had not only seen Snowden in 2013 and 2014, but he had had a six-hour meeting with Putin.

The reason I wanted to talk to him was not to learn about the film but to find about how he had made to gain access to Snowden in Moscow.   I already knew from the documents taken from Sony Pictures Entertainment allegedly by North Korea that Stone had paid the Guardian $700,000 for the film rights to “The Snowden File,” a book written by Luke Harding.  This was not a surprising sum since it provided a basis for movie which describes Snowden’s coup. But these documents also revealed that Stone had paid Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s legal representative in Moscow, $1 million dollars, supposedly for the rights to his novel Time of the Octopus.   Even by Hollywood standards one million dollars was an extraordinary sum to pay for a yet-to-be published work of Russian fiction, and it was especially striking since Stone was making a fact-based movie using the actual names of the characters.   “Is your script based on Kucherena’s “Time of the Octopus?” I asked.

“No,” Stone replied, “I haven’t used it.”  He said that the payment was for what he termed “total access.”  He explained that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the producers of the James Bond franchise, had optioned Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide”  to make into a movie about Snowden for Sony.  Stone said that the million dollar deal with Kucherena effectively guaranteed that any competing project would not have access to Snowden. Sony consequently put the competing film on hold.

 To be sure, it is not unusual for a lawyer to negotiate a deal on behalf of a client, but a lawyer ordinarily does not have the power to block a competing film access to their client.  Clearly, Kucherena was no ordinary lawyer.  Among other positions, he was on the public board of the FSB security service.    In light of such connections, Stone said Kucherena might be acting as an intermediary for other parties who did control access to Snowden in Russia but that were not his concern.  Kucherena delivered the exclusive access to Snowden.

 Aside from being a skilled director, Stone is a shrewd producer who knew how to close a deal.  He assessed, correctly as it turned out, that the payment to Kucherena would effectively block Sony’s competing project.  Where the money went was far less clear.

     Towards the end of our dinner, Stone told me that he did not know I was writing a book about until a few weeks earlier.  He learned of my book from Snowden.  He said Snowden had expressed concern to him about the direction of the book I was writing.  “What was it about?” Stone asked me.

    I was taken aback.  I had no idea that Snowden was aware of my book project, as I had not tried to contact him.    I told Stone that I considered Snowden to be extraordinary man who had changed history.  Although I was intentionally vague in my description, Stone seemed to be reassured.

    That Snowden was aware that I was investigating him presented an opportunity.  I asked Stone about the possibility of my seeing Snowden in Moscow.

   Stone did not offer to arrange such a meeting.  He said only that I “might want to speak to Anatoly [Kucherena].”  This conversation suggested to me that Kucherena was Snowden’s gate-keeper.

    In his two years in Moscow, Snowden, or his handlers, had granted only a handful of face-to face interviews.  One was with James Bamford, who was writing an article on Snowden for Wired magazine in 2014.  But it took nearly nine months to arrange the meeting.  “I have been trying to set up an interview with him [Snowden]—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. “ he recounted in Wired. After my dinner with Stone, I hoped to find a quicker route.

First, I was advised that I needed a Moscow “fixer,” the curious term that journalists commonly use to describe a local intermediary who arranges appointments in foreign countries.  I retained Zamir Gotta, a highly respected TV producer in Moscow, who I was told had helped “fix” the Bamford interview with Snowden.
“There is only one door to Snowden,” Zamir wrote me. “His name is Kucherena.”  Since Zamir said Kucherena rarely saw journalists he that he had a contact in his office.  He further told me Kucherena required that any journalist seeking an interview with Snowden to submit his questions to him two weeks in advance and, if approved, sign a document stating I would not deviate from the questions.  Next, my questions had to be translated from English to Russian (even though Snowden does not speak Russian) and then vetted by Kucherena’s staff.   Zamir also suggested I stay at the National hotel in Red Square because Snowden has gone there for previous meetings with Bamford. So I sent Kucherena, via Zamir, ten questions that might interest Snowden (if they ever reached him.)

   I next obtained a multi-entry Russian visa from the Russian consulate in New York, booked myself a room in the National hotel with a view of the Kremlin   and used all my remaining frequent travel miles to book a direct flight on Aeroflot to Moscow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Vanishing Act

“They talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s great.”—Snowden Moscow, 2015

My night flight from New York to Moscow took less than eight hours.  It landed at 7:40 AM on October 29, 2015 at terminal D a Sheremetyevo International Airport.  I did not immediately proceed through passport control, not just because I wanted to avoid the killer bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but because I wanted to explore the transit zone in which Snowden was supposedly trapped in for six weeks.

   Sheremetyevo Two, where all international flights land, was built in the waning days of the Cold War for international passengers arriving for the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics.  It was modernized in 2010, including opening a walkway that connects Terminal D, E and F for transit passengers.

 Snowden had vanished, at least from public view, in this complex of terminals for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013.  His explanation, as will be recalled, was two-part.  First, he had planned to board the next fight to Cuba, and from there proceed to Ecuador. But he was unable to board this flight because his passport had been invalidated while he was flying to Russia by the U.S. Government.  Second, after discovering his passport had been revoked, he stayed in a capsule hotel in the transit zone for the next 38 days.

  To better understand the plausibility of his version of those events, I proceeded through the transit passage to Terminal F where Snowden’s plane from Hong Kong had landed at 5:15 PM Moscow time on June 23, 2013.

    Snowden did not o through passport control on June 23rd.  Before any of the other passengers were  allowed to disembark from the plane, Russian plainclothes officers from the Special Services boarded the plane and asked both Snowden and Sarah Harrison, his Wiki leak’s supplied “ninja,” to accompany them to a waiting car that whisked them away.  Assange and Harrison had organized a number of decoy flights.  They may have confused U.S and British intelligence services, as they were intended to do, but they evidently did not fool the Russian intelligence services.  According to the account in Izvestia, “a special operation was conducted for his reception and evacuation.” It further said:  “Snowden flight to Moscow was coordinated with the Russian authorities and intelligence services.”  What was less clear is whether Snowden had voluntarily participated in this “special operation” that effectively took him into custody.    Wherever Snowden and Harrison were next taken-- the “transit zone” extends beyond the airport to medical and other facilities— he was not brought to Terminal E, where the next Aeroflot flight to Cuba departed at 1:40 PM on June 24th 2013.

Yet, if not for the “special operation”, he could have easily gone by foot to Terminal E. It was, as I found, only a nine minute walk through the transit passageway in which one does not have to show a passport.   But that raises the question: Was Snowden’s plan really to go to Ecuador?

Consider Snowden’s putative motivation in seeking sanctuary in Ecuador: his safety.  Yet, Snowden assessed that he would be vulnerable to capture by the U.S. government in Ecuador. “If they [the U.S. Government] really wanted to capture me, they would’ve allowed me to travel to Latin America, because the CIA can operate with impunity down there,” he explained in a recorded interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, in 2014, He had previously discussed the likelihood of his being captured in Ecuador with Julian Assange in Hong Kong in June 2013 before his departure for Moscow. He also told Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, that he considered that he was at risk in Latin America.  This vulnerability was no minor matter to Snowden. He told Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong, before arranging to fly to Moscow, that his “first priority” was his own “physical safety.”  Since he did not believe Ecuador was a safe place for him, why would he leave the comparative safety of Russia and risk being kidnapped by American forces in Latin America?

Nor was a U.S. passport a prerequisite for U.S. citizens flying to Havana in 2013.  Since the State Department did not sanction travel to Cuba for the general public, the vast majority of Americans going to Cuba obtained a travel document from a Cuban consulate so the Cuban entry stamp would not be marked in their passport.)   So Snowden, if he really had intended to fly to Cuba, only needed this document.  He had over a month to obtain it from the Cuban consulate in Hong Kong.  But he did not.  He could also have obtained a visa to Ecuador at its consulate in Hong Kong.  But he did not.  According to his lawyer Kucherena, who closely examined his passport in July 2013, Snowden had no visas at all.  Unlike his words, Snowden’s actions were with any plan to go to any place in Latin America.

     Shortly after the “special operation,” a tip was placed on a publicly-accessible Russian website saying that Snowden was booked on the Aeroflot flight SU-150 to Cuba on June 24th.  In response to this anonymous tip, Russian and foreign news organization in Moscow ordered their reporters to buy tickets on that flight With their tickets, reporters swarmed into the departure area of the airport in such numbers that the police had to set up cordons.  They checked all the VIP lounges, restaurants, rest rooms and boarding area for the next seven hours, but Snowden was nowhere to be found. A Russia Today reporter later said “It was a total madhouse. Everyone was screaming ‘Snowden’ at the airport ground staff.” Over a hundred reporters actually boarded the plane.

  In fact, Snowden had never checked in for that flight and, as far as is known, was never seen in terminal E.     Only after the plane took off did the journalists realize Snowden was not aboard it.    All they could do was photograph two of the unoccupied seats, 17A and 17 C, which they reported in tweets were Snowden’s and Harrison empty seats.   By the time the plane landed in Cuba Aeroflot denied that anyone named Snowden had ever been booked on any of its flight to Cuba, a denial it continued to repeat to every reporter who queried the airline for the next six weeks.

The first news that Snowden was even in Russia came on July 1, 2013.  A statement posted on n the Wikileaks web site and signed “Edward Snowden,” after thanking “friends new and old” for his “continued liberty,” accused President Obama of pressuring “leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions. It added: “This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression.”    Since the Aeroflot flight to Cuba was the only means of getting directly from Moscow to Latin America, Russian reporters, encouraged by the Wikileaks post, continued taking the daily 11 hour flight to Cuba until August 1, 2013, The charade only ended when Kucherena said in a press conference at the airport that Snowden would be taking up residency at an undisclosed location in Moscow, and walked out of the airport with Snowden.

The question remained: where had Snowden been staying for those 39 days?  Sarah Harrison, his companion on the plane, told Vogue that she and Snowden had shared a windowless room in the transit zone, where they watched TV, washed their clothes in a sink basin and ate meals from the nearby Burger King.  The only hotel with windowless rooms in the transit zone in 2013 was the Vozdushny V-Express Capsule Hotel, located next to a newly-opened Burger King restaurant.
   I next went there. The polite V-express desk clerk, who spoke English, showed me the standard windowless double-room.  It was approximately 24 square feet, the size of a large shipping container.  Most of the floor space was taken up by twin bed. Across from the bed, behind a plastic curtain, was a stall with a shower, a toilet and sink.  Not only was it very cramped quarters for two people to share but it was fairly expensive.  It cost 850 rubles an hour (about $18 in 2013.)  For 39 days that hourly charge would add up to $16,600.   Even though Snowden claimed that he brought a large cache of cash to Russia, such a long stay was not allowed, according to the desk clerk.  The maximum stay allowed by the hotel was 24 hours.  So either the rule was waived for Snowden or he moved to another facility not available to the public.

I learned from a former KGB officer, there are a number of VIP quarters beyond the confines of the airport, including suites at the 400-room Novotel hotel, which is located about seven miles from the airport, that are used for debriefing  and other purposes by the security services.  According to him, the security services are not restricted from entering and leaving the transit zone.

The possibility that he was staying elsewhere would help explain the futile search for him by of a large number of reporters over those 39 days.  When they learned from tweets that Snowden was not aboard plane to Havana on June 24th, they aggressively questioned every restaurant employees, security guards and airport personnel for weeks they could find. Some reporters even took rooms in the V-Express Capsule Hotel and “tipped” maids and other hotel employees. They also bought business-class tickets on flights to gain access to all the public VIP lounges in the transit zones.  Despite this intensive search, none of them found anyone who had seen Snowden although his image was constantly shown on airport TV screens. Egor Piscunov, a Russian journalist who checked into the capsule hotel for 4 hours told me, “It was a total vanishing act.”



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Through the Looking Glass

 “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there”

                —Edward Snowden in Moscow

     While waiting to hear back from Kucherena’s office, I arranged to meet with Victor Ivanovich Cherkashin, who gad been one of the most successful KGB spy handlers in the Cold War. Cherkashin, born in 1932, had served in the KGB’s espionage branch from 1952 until 1991. He now operated a private security firm in Moscow.  I was particularly interested in his recruitment of three top American intelligence officers; Aldrich Ames in the CIA, Robert Hanssen in the FBI and Ronald Pelton in the NSA.  I hoped that seeing these intelligence coups through the eyes, and mind-set, of their KGB handler might provide some historical context for the Snowden defection.   So I invited Cherkashin to lunch at Gusto, a quiet Italian restaurant, located near the Chekov Theater in central Moscow,

    Cherkashin, a tall thin man with silver hair, showed up promptly at 1 pm.  Wearing an elegant grey suit and dark tie, he walked with a spry step.  Since he had served in counterintelligence in the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C.  for nearly a decade, he spoke flawless English,

    I began the interview with one of the more celebrated cases he handled: the KGB recruitment of Aldrich Ames.  Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, had worked as a Russian mole between April 1985 and January 1994.   In those nine years, he rose, or was maneuvered by the KGB, into a top position in the CIA's highly-sensitive Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, which allowed him to deliver hundreds of top secrets to the KGB.  In return, according to Cherkashin, Ames received in cash between $20,000 and $50,000 for each delivery, which amounted to $4.6 million over the nine years.

    I asked Cherkashin about the weakness the KGB looked for in an American intelligence worker that might lead him to copy and steal top secret documents.  How did he spot a potential Ames? Was it a financial problem?  Was it a sexual vulnerability? Was it an ideological leaning?

  “Nothing so dramatic,” he answered.  What he looked for when assessing Ames’s potential was an intelligence officer who is both dissatisfied and antagonistic to the service for which he works.”

   “The classic disgruntle employee,” I interjected.

   “Any intelligence officer who strongly feels that his superiors are not listening to him, and that they are doing stupid things, is a candidate,” he continued.  He said he had found that the flaw in a prospect that could be most dependably exploited was not his greed, lust, or deviant behavior but his resentment over the way he was being treated.

    “Is that how you spotted Ames?”

“Actually he approached us, not vice versa.”  It was his job in the CIA to approach opposition KGB officers. “But yes we saw the potential,” he said.

   Since Ames had been initially paid by Cherkashin $50,000 in cash for his first delivery, I asked whether he fit into the category of a disgruntled employee. “Wasn’t he a mercenary/”

   “I knew from our intelligence reports that he needed money for debts stemming from his divorce,” he answered. “But he was also angry at the stupidity and paranoia of those running the CIA. Ames told me at our first secret meeting that they were misleading Congress by exaggerating the Soviet threat.” Cherkashin evaluated Ames as a man who felt not only slighted by his superiors but “helpless to do anything about it” within the bureaucracy of the CIA.  “The money we gave, even if he could spend only a small portion of it, gave him a sense of worth.”  He explained that the KGB had an entire team of psychologists in Moscow that worked on further exploiting Ames’s resentment at his superiors.

   The search for an adversary intelligence officer who resents his service was not limited to KGB recruiters.  It was also the “classic attitude” that the CIA sought to exploit in its adversaries, according to its former deputy director.  “You find someone working for the other side and tell him that he is not receiving the proper recognition, pay and honors due him,” Michael Morell said, pointing out that the same “psychological dynamic” could be used to motivate someone to “act alone” in gathering espionage material.

      I next turned to an even more important KGB coup:  his Robert Hanssen case. Hanssen was the FBI counterintelligence officer who worked as a KGB mole for 22 years between 1979 and 2002 and had delivered even more documents to the Russian intelligence services than Hanssen. “Did Hanssen’s dissatisfaction with the FBI, or his objections to its policies, play a role in his recruitment?” I asked.

    “I didn’t recruit Hanssen,” Cherkashin replied, “He recruited himself.  I never even knew his name or where he worked.”  He added: “So I knew nothing about his motivation other than that he wanted cash.”

     “So he was mercenary,” I suggested.

     “All we knew was that he delivered valuable documents to us and asked for cash in return.” he said.  “We didn’t control him, he controlled us.”

An uncontrolled mole that provided secrets to the KGB and SVR for 22 years was very different from fictional moles in the spy movies.  I asked whether it would have been better if the KGB had him under its control.

    “Possibly,” Cherkashin answered, “but as it turned out Hanssen was our most valuable penetration in the Cold War.”

Unlike Ames, whose nine-year career as a mole could be managed by the KGB, Hanssen decided what secret documents to steal and when to make contact or a delivery.  He refused to even allow the KGB to suggest a site. All the communications with him were by letter or to a phone number in a used car ad Except for putting money into a dead drop, the KGB played only a passive role in the espionage.  “Could Hanssen really be called a mole?” I asked.

   “A mole is a term used in spy fiction,” he said.  “We prefer to the more general term ‘espionage source.”

   “So anyone who delivers state secrets to the KGB, for whatever reason, is an espionage source?” I asked.

 “Certainly, if the information is valuable to us,” Cherkashin answered. “Hanssen delivered secrets exposing American human and electronic operations against Russia.  He was our most valuable espionage source.  It is the delivery of secrets, not the methods used, that counts.”

“If some unknown person simply delivered a trove of top-secret communications secrets to the doorstep of Russia would they it be accepted?” I asked with Snowden in mind.

    “I can’t say what the SVR would do today.  I am long retired” he said, with a nostalgic shake of his head. “But in my day, we needed some reason to believe to believe the gift was genuine.”

   “Would you need to vet the person delivering it?”

   “With Hanssen we did not have that opportunity,” he said. “If we believed the documents were genuine, we would of course grab them.”

   The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton,  the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979.  Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the KGB.  On January 14, 1980, he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington DC and asked to see an intelligence officer.  After he was ushered into secure debriefing room, he said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but he wanted money in return.   What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton even though he was no longer working at the NSA, and Pelton no longer had access to the NSA.  In addition, since the FBI had 24 hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed entering it and also possibly had been recorded asking for an intelligence officer by electronic bugs that the KGB suspected that NSA had planted in the embassy.  What did the KGB do in a situation in which ex-civilian employee at the NSA possessed no documents?

Despite the risks involved, Cherkashin decided Pelton had to be debriefed by communications intelligence specialists. So he had him disguised as a utility worker and smuggled out in a van to the residential compound of the Ambassador in Georgetown. A few days later, he was dropped off at a shopping mall, “Why did you go to such effort if Pelton had neither documents nor access to the NSA?” I asked.

   “It was the information in his head that we wanted.”  Cherkashin said that as KGB rarely got access to any NSA officer, it was worth the risk.  So he was given $5,000 in cash and a plane ticket to Vienna, where he was domiciled at the residence of the Soviet ambassador to Austria.  A KGB’s electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for 15 days, were from 8 AM to 6 PM.  In them, Pelton managed to recall  Project A, a joint NSA-CIA-Navy operation in which submarines  surreptitiously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected a to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.  Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB.

   “Did the information in his head proved valuable?” I asked.

   “As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was compromised by Pelton, we could use the cable to send to the NSA the information we wanted it to intercept.”   He said while actual NSA documents would have proved more useful than someone’s memories, “Our job is to take advantage of whatever we can get.”

   Two years later, Pelton was again flown to Vienna for a follow-up debriefing to see if he could recall any further details. Finally, in 1985, Pelton was arrested by the FBI and, like Ames and Hanssen, sentenced to life imprisonment.

    Looking at his watch, Cherkashin politely excused himself, saying he had work to do.  On parting, I signed a copy of my book on Angleton for him and thanked him for his insights.

  Through the eyes of the KGB, a penetration of American intelligence was clearly opportunistic.  If these practices continued, they put the Snowden case in a new light for me.  If Russian intelligence considered it worthwhile to send an ex-civilian worker at the NSA, such as Ronald Pelton, from Washington D.C. 2,000 miles to Austria so that its specialists could debrief him on the secrets he held in his head, it would have an even greater interest in exfiltrating Snowden from Hong Kong to get, aside from his documents, whatever secrets he held in his head.  If Russian intelligence was willing to opportunistically accept the delivery of U.S. secrets from an unknown espionage source that it neither recruited nor controlled, such as Hanssen, it would have little hesitancy in acquiring the secrets that Snowden had stolen on his own volition, even if Snowden acted for idealistic reasons.  If Russian intelligence focused its search pattern on disgruntled American intelligence workers, such as Ames, it is plausible that it spotted Snowden through his Internet rants against U.S. surveillance.   Even if it had missed Snowden in Hawaii, a disgruntled ex-civilian employee at the NSA would have received its full attention after he contacted Russian officials in Hong Kong.  While the tactics of the SVR may have changed since Cherkashin retired, its objectives remained the same. And the NSA remained its principal target.  Nor is there any reason to doubt that it still measures success in its ability to obtain, by whatever means, the secret sources and methods of its adversaries. Snowden was in a position, both with the documents he had taken and the knowledge he had in his head, to deliver the KGB such a coup.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Handler

As for his [Snowden’s] communication with the outside world, yes, I am his main contact

                 --Anatoly Kucherena, September 23, 2013

      Time was rapidly running out for me in Moscow.  On November 1st, I still had not been able to make contact with Anatoly Kucherena, and my flight back to New York was in five days. My fixer, Zamir, had been trying to arrange an appointment for three weeks but he had only received one call back from Kucherena’s assistant, Valentina Vladimirovna Kvirvova. She wanted to know how I knew Oliver Stone.  He told her of my part in Stone’s movie Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. That was the last he had heard from her.  Meanwhile a Moscow based journalist told me that she had waited 18 months to hear back from him giving up.  I also learned from a Russian researcher that Kucherena had not given a single interview to any journalist since his television interview with Sophie Shevardnadze on September 23, 2013.  And no Russian journalist, or any Moscow-based foreign journalist, had ever obtained an interview with Snowden.   At this point, Zamir was becoming increasingly doubtful about getting my access to either Kucherena or Snowden.

    But I had another contact in Moscow.  When I had been investigating the 2006 Polonium poisoning of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, I had interviewed a number of people in Moscow, including Andrei Lugovoy.  A former KGB officer assigned to protecting the Kremlin’s top members in the 1990s, Lugovoy later opened his own security company. In 2005, he became a business associate of Litvinenko’s in gathering information, and made regular trips to London to meet with him.   Since he had tea with Litvinenko at the Millennium hotel in London on November 1, 2006, the day Litvinenko was poisoned, he became the main suspect in the British investigation. He could not be extradited, however.  After reconstructing the chronology of the crime, I established that Litvinenko had been contaminated with Polonium at a Japanese restaurant some four hours before his tea with Lugovoy.  I therefore wrote that Lugovoy could not have poisoned Litvinenko in the Millennium hotel, a finding that he said he greatly appreciated.

Lugovoy was elected to the Duma in 2008, and also hosted a 24 part television series espionage for which he was personally decorated by Putin. He was also now reputed to be in the inner circle of power in Moscow.  So I called him.

   We arranged to meet in the lobby bar of the National Hotel.  A short but well-built man with a bullet-style haircut, Lugovoy showed up promptly at 1 PM. After discussing some of the subsequent developments in the still-lingering Polonium investigation, I asked him if he knew Kucherena.

         “I don’t know him, but I know someone who does,” he answered. “Why are you interested in seeing Kucherena?”

      I told him that I wanted to speak to him about Snowden but that I had been unable to arrange a meeting.

    “That’s no problem,” he said, raising his cell phone (which never left his hand.) He hit a number the speed dial, and spoke rapidly in Russian (which I do not understand.)  He cupped his hand over the phone and asked how long I would be in Moscow.

    After I told him that I was leaving on Friday, he spoke again in to the person on the other end. “You will have an appointment on Thursday,” he said.

     Later that afternoon Valentina, Kucherena’s assistant, called to say that Kucherena would be happy to see me at his office at 6 PM on Thursday.  I didn’t ask Lugovoy who he had called or how this had happened. Clearly, whoever Lugovoy called had the power to arrange the meeting. Power evidently works in unseen ways in Putin’s Russia.

Kucherena’s office was only two subway stops from the National hotel, and I arrived ten minutes early.  A receptionist showed me into a well-lit square room with an elegant table in the center.  There was a sumptuous basket of exotic fruit on the table and large portraits of racehorses on the walls.  Another door opened, and a tall, graceful woman came into the room and introduced herself as “Valentina.”   She was wearing a well-fitting black dress, striking jade necklace and high heels.  When she asked whether I would like anything to drink, it seemed more like the prelude to an elegant dinner party than an interview about Snowden.

As Kucherena did not speak English, I brought Zamir along to translate for the conversation, but Valentina also spoke very good English.  She apologized for the delay in responding to my requests, explaining that she received “thousands of requests” for interviews and did not have time to answer them.  When I asked how many were answered, she shrugged and said “not many.”

 At that moment, Kucherena entered with a jaunty step, a cherubic face and an untamed white hair. He was wearing grey slacks, a partially buttoned cashmere polo sweater and a fully engaging smile.

As I had learned from his entry in Wikipedia, he was born in a small village in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia in 1960, and he had obtained his law degree from the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute in 1991.   He opened his own law firm in Moscow in 1995.  Kucherena’s well-known friendship with Putin evidently had not hurt his law practice.  His clients had included such well-connected defendants as Viktor Yanukovych, the overthrown president of Ukraine in 2014; Grigory Leps, a Russian singer blacklisted by the U.S. for allegedly acting as a money courier for a Eurasian criminal organization; Valentin Kovalev, a former Russian Minister of Justice charged with corruption; and Suleyman Kerimov, a civil servant from Dagestan, who had amassed an estimated fortune of $7.1 billion.  Kerimov recently had been charged for manipulating a Potash cartel case in Belarus.  Most of these clients were reputed to be part of Putin’s inner circle.

To break the ice, I asked him about Oliver Stone. I knew he had a small role in Oliver Stone’s forthcoming movie “Snowden.” in which he plays Snowden’s lawyer in Moscow.

   “I was impressed by how few takes he needed to shoot my scene,” he answered.

   “How did you come to be Snowden’s lawyer?” I asked.

   “Snowden picked me from a roster of 15 lawyers with which he had been given.”  He then went to Sheremetyevo International Airport to meet his new client.  They met on the morning of Friday July 12, 2013.  At that point, he said that Snowden had been held virtually incommunicado for 20 days.  Other than Russian officials, the only person he had been allowed to see during this period was Assange’s aide, Sarah Harrison.

   “Where in the airport did you meet him?” I asked. Was it in a VIP lounge?”

   “It was in the transit zone,” he replied coyly. “That is all I can say.”  They spoke through a translator, as Snowden did not speak Russian.  By this time, Sarah Harrison had sent 21 countries petitions for asylum that were signed by Snowden.  Whatever their purpose, Kucherena did not consider them helpful.   “I told him that if he wanted to get sanctuary in Russia, he would have to immediately withdraw all the petitions in which he had asked other countries for asylum.”  Kucherena said that otherwise he could not represent him. Snowden agreed to that condition.

  Later that afternoon Kucherena accompanied Snowden to area G9 in the transit zone where they emerged from a door marked “authorized personnel only” shortly before 5 PM.  The room was packed with representatives of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Wikileaks and other Moscow-based activist groups. They had been invited the previous  day by an emails signed “Edward Snowden”  instructing then to go  to Terminal F at Sheremetyevo International Airport where they would be met by airport personnel carrying a “G9.”  It was a rare, if not unprecedented, event, for an American citizen to defect to Russia.

Wearing an open-neck blue shirt and badly-creased jacket, Snowden read a prepared statement that accused the United States government of violating the universal declaration of human rights and described himself as a victim of political persecution.      He then formally announced that he was “requesting asylum in Russia.”

In discussing this meeting, Kucherena told me that Snowden had not intended to seek asylum in Russia when he arrived on June 23.  Since he also said he had not met Snowden prior to July 12th, I asked how he knew Snowden’s intentions.

     “When I accepted the case, I received Snowden’s dossier.” He answered. “I was able to see all his interviews.”

    Presumably Snowden’s dossier included his interviews with the FSB, SVR and other Russian security services.  If so, it would explain how Kucherena could be so certain that Snowden had brought “material” with him to Russia that he had not provided to journalists in Hong Kong.  Before meeting with Kucherena, I had met with Sophie Shevardnadze, the previously-mentioned grand-daughter of Politburo member Edward Shevardnadze and widely-followe3d television journalist.  She told me that Kucherena had personally approved the translation of the interview into English.  So I asked Kucherena about his 2013 interview with her, which was the last interview he had given about Snowden.  It will be recalled that in response to a question about whether Snowden had secret material with him in Russia, Kucherena had said “certainly.”  Was this exchange accurate?

   “It was accurate,” he answered.

Snowden himself had said in Hong Kong that he had only given journalists some of the state secrets he had stolen and that he deemed others too sensitive for journalists.    So I sought to find out from Kucherena which documents Snowden had taken to Russia.  I went about it in a roundabout way.    When Shevardnadze asked him about the secret material Snowden had might reveal in Russia, Kucherena pointedly called her attention to Snowden’s CIA service, suggesting that he might possess CIA files.  I also knew that in his roman a clef novel which Oliver Stone had optioned for $1 million, he had Joshua Frost, the thinly veiled Snowden-based character, steal a vast number of CIA documents that could do great damage to U.S. intelligence.  By retaining them, Frost made himself a prime target of the CIA.  So I asked “Is Joshua Frost fact or fiction?”

 “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “If I said he was Snowden it would violate the attorney client privilege.”
    “I understand,” I persisted, “But did Snowden do what Frost did in your book.”
     “That is for you to decide,” he answered with a sly smile.  “It’s my first novel.”

When I asked if he could arrange for me to see Snowden, he said that first I would have to first submit my questions to Ben Wizner, Snowden’s American lawyer.  He made it clear to me that the exposure of Snowden to journalists, or at least the vetting of journalists, had been outsourced to Wizner, “After that the final decision is up to Snowden,” he said.  That seemed to conclude the interview but, as I got up to leave, he added, “His legal defense is fairly expensive and Snowden is running out of money.”
    I was intrigued by this parting remark.  Snowden, as far as I knew, didn’t need a legal defense because he was not charged with a crime in Russia and the United States had no extradition treaty with Russia.  But I asked, “Could I make a contribution to his defense fund?”
             “It would be greatly appreciated,” he said, “We will supply you with instructions to wire the money to our bank.”
             “How much should I send?”
             “That’s up to you,” he said, getting up to walk me to the door. “I should add for the record that the contribution will not influence Snowden's decision to see you.”
             “I will send the wiring instructions” Valentina said as I left. “I hope you come back to Moscow.”

While Kucherena did not arrange an interview with Snowden, as I had hoped, he did something I considered more important.  He confirmed the accuracy of his September 2013c assertion that Snowden had brought secret material to Russia; material he had not given to journalists in Hong Kong.   After what I learned from Cherkashin about the lengths that Russian intelligence would go to obtain U.S. communications intelligence secrets, I viewed Snowden’s access to this material to be a crucially important part of the mystery.
    As for Snowden, I would send my questions to Ben Wizner and, if he and Snowden approved them, I would fly back to Moscow.  But I decided that I was not going to send money to Kucherena— or to Snowden.

                                     PART SIX

                                  CONCLUSIONS





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Snowden’s Choices


“It is the choices we make that show who we truly are”

                          J.K Rowling, the Philosopher’s Stone


     Whereas Russian authorities had the opportunity to thoroughly debrief Snowden as to his motive for stealing state secrets, US authorities did not have that opportunity (and it seems unlikely that they will have it in the foreseeable future.)  So Snowden’s motive is a missing part of the puzzle. It also cannot even be assumed that he had a single consistent motive during the nine-month course of his illicit copying of documents.  Snowden has shown, if nothing else, that he is adaptable.   He may have began taking documents for one reason and found other reasons as he proceeded in his quest. Many of the circumstances of his probes, contacts, theft and escape remain disputed by his supporters and shrouded by the secrecy of the NSA.  What we do know is that Snowden made four extraordinary choices during the nine month period in 2013 that speak to the concerns that may have guided his actions.    In the case of a classified intelligence breach, as in a chess game, the sequence of moves a player makes provides an important clue to his strategy.


    The first move that Snowden made in preparation of the Level 3 breach was switching jobs on March 15th 2013.  Snowden chose to leave his job as a system administrator at Dell SecureWorks to take job at Booz Allen as an analyst-in-training. His motive was not money, as it was a lower-paying position.  At the time, he made this choice he had already set up an encrypted channel with Laura Poitras for the purpose of sending her secret material.  But he did not have to change jobs to send her secrets. So what was his purpose in making this fateful choice?


The job change was not necessary to expose NSA domestic activities. If he had only wanted to be a whistle-blower, there were ample documents about the NSA’s activities already available to him on the NSANet.  He also had access at Dell to the administrative file which contained the FISA court orders issued every three months to Verizon.  In addition, as the NSA’s damage assessment established, before switching jobs Snowden had already taken most of the documents pertaining to the NSA’s domestic operations that he could have supplied to Poitras and Greenwald for whistle-blowing purposes.  Indeed, while still at Dell, it will be recalled, he had he had told Poitras he had a copy of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a document in which President Obama authorized the NSA to tap into fiber cables crossing the United States.   Snowden described it to her as “a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House.” True, he took a more recently-issued FISA warrant and PRISM presentation in April after switching jobs, but he could have just as easily taken the January 2013 version of the FISA warrant from the administrative file of Dell.  It would have had the same explosive effect in the media.




Nor did he switch jobs to lessen the risk of getting caught. He actually put himself in far greater jeopardy by switching jobs. At Dell he was relatively safe from apprehension since he could take documents, such as the above-mentioned Presidential Policy Directive 20, from access points at the NSA shared by many of his peers. Since these shared access points provided the equivalent of a common reading room at a library, it would be difficult to trace the theft of any documents taken from them to a particular user. Indeed, if he just wanted to expose the NSA’s domestic operations, he could have done the entire operation at Dell.  He even could have sent Poitras documents anonymously over his own TOR software and server.  And he could have remained in his self-described “paradise” in Hawaii with his girl friend.
     Yet he chose to move to Booz Allen he also greatly increased the risk of exposure because the auditing system at Booz Allen could trace back unauthorized copying (though not in real time.)  Presumably he knew, as he later told Greenwald and Poitras, that stealing documents at the Booz Allen job meant that he would either go to prison or escape from America.  He didn’t want to face prison time, so the job change required an escape plan.  In keeping with the latter option, only about a week after he started work at the Booz Allen-managed facility, he submitted a request for a medical leave of absence.

   We can safely assume that the reason for him to make this risky switch in employment was because he wanted something beyond the whistle-blowing documents.  He wanted now to get documents that were not available at the Dell job.  One such document he took was the top-secret Congressional Budget Justification Book for Fiscal Year 2013. This “black budget,” as it is called in Congress, contained the entire Intelligence Community’s priorities for, among other things, monitoring the activities of potential adversaries and terrorist organizations. It specified the money requested by not only the NSA, but the CIA, DIA, National Reconnaissance Office and other intelligence services.  Snowden could not have considered the budget illegitimate, since is duly approved by both houses of Congress and the President.  Nor could he objected to its secrecy since he himself had sworn oaths to protect all classified documents to which he was privy for the past eight years.  If it was not for purposes of whistle-blowing, presumably he had another purpose for taking such a document.  It certainly held value to other actors.  “For our enemies, having it is like having the playbook of the opposing NFL team,” said CIA Deputy Director Morell in 2015. “I guarantee you that the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, would have paid millions of dollars for such a document.”   Unlike Ames, Hanssen and Pelton, Snowden was not after money.  He sought documents that enhanced his power and importance.


  He made no secret of this part of his motive after he got safely to Hong Kong. As will be recalled in answer to a question from the journalist Lana Lam about his motive for changing jobs, he answered that he took the Booz Allen job to get access to secret lists that were not available to him by working for Dell.  These documents certainly increases his value to other nations since they included Level 3 lists revealing the NSA’s sources in Russia, China and other foreign countries.


    Snowden also wanted more than NSA secrets.  He used his new position, and widened access at Booz Allen, to go after secret documents from the intelligence services of Britain, Australia. New Zealand and Israel He revealed this operation only after receiving sanctuary in Russia.  He told an interviewer that by moving to his new Booz Allen job as an infrastructure analyst he gained the ability to pry secrets out of the allied of the NSA. “I had a special level of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac’,” he said.  This “priv ac” status, he further explained, allowed him to request files from other services cooperating with U.S. intelligence.  By way of example, he described one file from the British GCHQ cipher service that he copied, stole and provided to other parties.  It exposed  a legally-authorized British operation to collect electronic data on terrorist matters in Pakistan by tapping into Cisco routers used by telecom companies in Asia.  This GCHQ operation, as he himself recognized, violated neither British nor American law.  He told a BBC interviewer in regard to that file:”What's scariest is not what the government is doing that's unlawful, but what they're doing that is completely lawful.” So his criteria for taking such documents were not their illegality.  Nor did the fact they were lawful actions stop him from taking highly-sensitive GCHQ documents referring to them.  In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job,   he also used this same newly-acquired “Priv Ac” at the NSA to steal files from the Israeli, Canadian and Australian intelligence services.


      Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the purpose of penetrating other/r western intelligence services is not the conventional mission of a whistle-blowing.  In the parlance of intelligence operations, an employee of an intelligence service who changes his jobs\ solely to steal the more valuable secrets of services is called an “expanding penetration.”


    It is not possible to believe that Snowden did not know the damage that the highly-sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its allies.  Even if they did not reveal any unlawful American activities, could do immense damage to Western intelligence.  Indeed, he said as much once he got to Moscow.  In respect to China alone, he  told James Risen, the New York Times’ national security reporter, in October 2013 that he had had “access to every [NSA] target, every [NSA] active operation” that could turn out the NSA’s “lights” in China.  He no doubt assumed that he had the same power to close down the NSA’s operations in Russia.


His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began working at Booz Allen.  .  It was a carefully calculated move.  As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance that by switching to the job at Booz Allen he would gain the opportunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’ secretive National Threat Operations Center’s  chief business was, as its name suggests, countering direct threats from China, Russia and other adversary states, and that, to deal with these threats, the NSA had used sophisticated methods to hack into the computers of adversaries.  The NSA was even able to remotely gain entry to adversary computers that were not hooked into a network.  “It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” Snowden later said from Moscow.  He had a planned target: getting the lists of the enemy computers that the NSA hacked into.


    He also knew he was undertaking s a dangerous enterprise.  He would tell Poitras in Hong Kong that the NSA would literally “kill” to protect their secrets.  He also said he could be seized in a rendition operation by the CIA in Hong Kong. He even foresaw the probability that he “would be in an orange jumpsuit, super-max prison in isolation or Guantanamo.”


     He knowingly chose this course, despite the possibility of assassination or imprisonment, presumably because he believed the value of the secrets he would obtain by switching jobs outweighed the risk of imprisonment. Part of his calculus might have been the belief that the NSA lists, GCHQ documents and other material in his possession could give him great leverage, if he chose to exert it, in his future dealings with intelligence services (including the NSA.)  If so, his choice to widen his access was also a choice to empower himself.


      The second choice of consequence that Snowden made was to make Hong Kong his first stop.   He had many other options.  He could have remained in America, as almost all previous whistle-blowers in the past had chosen to do.  If he did that, he would have to make his case in court (and, in that case, the level 3 documents he took might have been retrieved before they fell into unauthorized hands.)  He could have also chosen to make a cross-border escape to a country that did not have an active extradition treaty with the United States.  He could have, for example, taken a direct flight to Brazil, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.  Brazil also had the advantage of being the home country of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who he wanted to break the whistle-blowing story.  As Greenwald seemed (at least to Snowden) hesitant to travel 12 times zones away to meet an anonymous source, Brazil also would have been a more certain place to meet Greenwald.   If some consideration by Snowden precluded Brazil as a destination, Snowden could have also gone to Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, Iceland, or Venezuela, which are also countries that do not have active extradition treaties with the United States.        Yet, instead of proceeding to a country from which he could not have been extradited, he flew to Hong Kong, which had a vigorously enforced extradition agreement.


     His reason for choosing was not to keep a previously arranged rendezvous with a journalist.  As previously mentioned, when he left Hong Kong not a single journalist had agreed to meet him in Hong Kong.  Indeed, Gellman considered Hong Kong, as he put it, “in the jurisdiction of a country that’s unfriendly to the United States,” and notified Snowden that he would not be able to journey to Hong Kong.    Yet, even without any appointments with journalists, he chose to fly to Hong Kong.  So his choice was not based on either evading extradition or on accommodating journalists.

       He chose Hong Kong for another reason. He told Greenwald Hong Kong, as a part of China, could provide him protection from any countermeasures by U.S. intelligence agencies. He made that consideration clear, saying that that Snowden’s “first priority was to ensure his physical safety from US interference.” Hong Kong “was part of China’s territories, he [Snowden] reasoned, and American agents would find it harder to operate there than other places,” according to Greenwald.   Snowden further reckoned that China’s control over Hong Kong prevented “American agents from breaking down the door” of the hotel room and from seizing him.   Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA station chief, told me that Snowden was correct in his assessment of that Hong Kong advantage. Drumheller said that Hong Kong was “home court” for the Chinese intelligence services. It played a: dominant role” in running the police, airport passport control and security regime there. According to Drumheller, this reality limited the role that American and British intelligence operatives could play there and Snowden would be protected in Hong Kong against an intrusion by America. “Snowden obviously knew this from his training at the CIA,” Drumheller said.

      As the Chinese service was under no such restrictions, Snowden had gained protection at a price.   While no US or British intelligence operatives would be in a position to retrieve the NSA files he had brought with him to Hong Kong, Chinese operatives, and their allies in the intelligence war, would have a free hand in Hong Kong.  Yet, Snowden chose to put his physical safety in the hands of China.
       One reason why Snowden may not have been overly concerned about Hong Kong’s extradition treaty with the U.S. was that he had never intended to test it by staying in Hong Kong after his media events.  Snowden told the editor of the Guardian from the safety of Moscow, Hong Kong was only a temporary stop over.  He added in the interview that allowing himself to become part of an extradition proceeding in the Hong Kong court was not part of his plan. If so, the Hong Kong lawyers, who believed they had been retained pro bono to battle against extradition, were part of a charade.  Hong Kong merely was a protected stopover. The stopover may have provided him with a further advantage.  If he had gone directly to his next destination, Moscow, and he provided the same journalists with the same documents at a press conference in Moscow, his status as a whistle-blower might have been viewed with less sympathy in the media.  Even the Guardian, for example, might have been reluctant to publish a Moscow-based story revealing British and American communications intelligence secrets,

   The third choice Snowden made, and the choice that most effectively defined him to the public, was to reveal himself as the man behind the leak in a video in Hong Kong.   He not only  identified himself as the person who stole the government documents published by the Guardian and Washington Post, but he incriminated himself further on camera by allowing Poitras to film him actually disclosing  NSA’s secret operations to Greenwald.  By disclosing classified data to Greenwald, an unauthorized person, he intentionally burned his bridges.

    What makes this choice intriguing is that there was no evident need for him to expose himself in this way.  If he merely wanted to be a whistle-blower, he could have, as Bradley Manning did, anonymously sent the documents to journalists as “Citizen 4.”  In fact, in late May 2013, that was exactly what he did.  He sent Barton Gellman the PRISM scoop anonymously which the Washington Post published on June 6th, 2013. In that scoop, Snowden’s name was not revealed. He also sent Greenwald and Poitras documents while he was still the anonymous source “Citizen 4.”  Neither Gellman nor Greenwald had suggested the need for a face-to-face meeting with Snowden.   Even after he had revealed his true identity to Poitras and Greenwald on June 2nd 2013,   Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill offered him the option of remaining an unnamed source for the stories.  He said, as he later told Vanity Fair. “You should remain anonymous; the stories are just as good without you.”  However, anonymity was not part of Snowden’s long game.

 The reason he gave Greenwald in Hong Kong for going public in this way was to avoid any suspicion falling on his co-workers at the NSA.  Yet, if merely wanted to take sole responsibility for stealing state secrets, he did not need to be the subject of a documentary.  He could have simply allowed Greenwald to identify him by name as the source in the stories.  That would not present an issue since he had not been identified by either name or position in the initial stories published on June 5th and 6th by Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman. In short, he did not act to defect suspicion from his co-workers for the initial investigation.  Why now?

   The one thing that Snowden could not accomplish by anonymously transferring the documents to journalists was a starring role in the drama. If he had appeared digitally-masked in Poitras’ video with an altered voice, he would not achieve fame in the media.  For that, he needed to allow Poitras to film him committing the crime of turning over NSA documents to Greenwald.     This video was also the result of his advanced planning. Indeed, one reason he chose Poitras was that she was a prize-winning/ documentary film-maker who had already made a documentary about NSA whistle-blower William Binney.  Snowden, while he was still working at the NSA in March 2013, made it clear how he intended to use Poitras' film-making skills.  He told her: “My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back.”

    He chose to make himself the on-camera star of a 20-hour long reality show. This sensational footage would transform him in the public’s mind into a selfless hero. It would be a mistake to assume that the central role he gave himself was an exercise in narcissism.  It was an integral part of his personal transformation.   After this globally-watched video, he was no longer a near non-entity servicing a computer system at a back-water NSA base in Hawaii. In the space of 12 minutes on television, he had emerged from the shadowy world of electronic intelligence and became one of the most famous whistle-blowers in modern history.  It was a mantle that would allow him to also become a leading advocate of privacy and encryption rights as well the leading opponent of NSA spying.  While this remarkable transformation may not have been his entire motive, it certainly was the result of the choice he made to go public.


     The final choice he was made to board a non-stop flight to Moscow on June 23, 2013.
To remain in Hong Kong once a criminal complaint was leveled against him would have meant that, at the very minimum, Hong Kong authorities would seize him and the alleged stolen property of the US government in his possession. Even if he was released on bail, the Hong Kong authorities would almost certainly retain all the NSA and GCHQ files he had gone to such lengths to steal.  He also would not be allowed to leave Hong Kong and possibly denied any access to the Internet. As he demonstrated by his subsequent actions, this option was not acceptable to him.
Once the U.S. criminal complaint was unsealed on June 21, 2013, which became all but inevitable after his video, his only route out of Hong Kong went through two adversaries of the United States, China and Russia.   China, as far as is known, did not offer him sanctuary.  According to one U.S diplomat, it may have already obtained copies of Snowden’s NSA files, and did not want the problem of having Snowden defect to Beijing. In any case, if it had not already acquired the files. It could assume it would receive that intelligence data from its Russian ally in the intelligence war.   Whatever its reason, China did not use its considerable power in Hong Kong to block Snowden’s exit.
    Nor did Snowden obtain a visa to any country in Latin America or elsewhere during his month-long stay in Hong Kong.  As in the oft-cited Sherlock Holmes’ clue of the dog that did not bark, Snowden’s lack of any visas in his passport strongly suggests that he had not made plans to go anyplace but where he went: Moscow. His actions here, including his contacts with Russian officials in Hong Kong, speak louder than his words.
Snowden chose, if he had any choice left at all, the Russian option.   Just as he believed Chinese intelligence could protect him in Hong Kong from the United States, he could assume that the FSB could protect him in Moscow from the United States. He was not entirely nave about its capabilities. During his service in the CIA, he had taken a month-long training course at the CIA’s “farm” at Fort Peary in which counterintelligence officer taught about the capabilities the Russian security services

      To be sure, he might not have known that Moscow would be his final destination.   He may have naively believed that Russia would allow a defector from the NSA who claimed to have had access to the NSA’s sources in Russia and China leave Moscow before its security services obtained that information. But that was not to be.
It is not uncommon for a defector to change sides in order to find a better life for himself in another country. Some defectors flee to escape a repressive government or to find one in which they believe they are more closely attuned. But Russia is ordinarily not the country of choice for someone such as Snowden seeking greater civil liberties and personal freedom.   So why did Snowden choose Russia for his new life?


   The four choices that Snowden made in 2013 did not come out of the blue. They all were planned out well in advance.  He applied for the job to Booz Allen in February 2013, more than a month before leaving his job at Dell.  He applied to Booz Allen for his medical leave, although in fact he had no medical problem, a month before departing for Hong Kong.  He brought with him to Hong Kong enough cash to pay his living expenses, according to him, for the next two years. He arranged the encrypted channel with Poitras in February 2013, three months before he would induce her to come to Hong Kong.   He made contact with a foreign diplomatic mission at least a month before flying to Moscow and, at some point, met with Russian officials, who arranged a visa-less entry for him.  He called Assange in London to arrange for Wikileaks help, 13 days before departing to Moscow, and Assange accommodated him by laying down a smoke screen of decoy flights to facilitate his escape from Hong Kong and sending him a helper.

    Taken together, these actions show that Snowden was determined to succeed where others before him had failed.  He not only wanted to take full credit for stealing files from the NSA but he wanted to escape any American retribution for his act.  His decision suggests to me a highly-intelligent, carefully calculating man who was hell-bent on finding a new life for himself in a foreign country.  There is a common thread that runs through these four choices.  It is a willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve this new life, including disregarding his oath to protect secrets and instead transporting them on thumb drives to a foreign country.  To protect himself, he was also willing to rely on the influence of an adversary intelligence services in Hong Kong and put himself of the hands of Russian authorities in Moscow.  He also was willing to use some of his classified documents as a medium of exchange, if not bait, with journalist to get the public attention he sought.   These choices paid off for him.  The video presentation he partly authored changed his status in the eyes of the public from a document-stealer to whistle blower.  Against all odds, Snowden succeeded in transforming himself from a low-level computer technician working, without any public recognition at the NSA into an internationally-acclaimed spokesman against the NSA’s surveillance.  And in Moscow, he could enjoy a safe life, free from the threats of a CIA rendition team dropping from the sky or extradition proceedings. He was now under the protection of Putin’s Russia.  As far as Snowden was concerned, as he told Gellman of the Washington Post on December 21, 2013 in Moscow, “The mission’s already accomplished.”








       CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
The Whistle Blower Who Became a Controlled Source



“The [U.S.] government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken”
      —Edward Snowden in Moscow




In Moscow I had learned that Russian intelligence services use the broad, umbrella term “espionage source” to describe moles, volunteers and anyone else who delivers another state’s secrets to it.  It applies not only to documents but to the secret knowledge that such a source is able to recall and includes both controlled and uncontrolled bearers of secrets.  It is also a job description that fitted Edward Snowden in June 2013.
     Unless one is willing to believe that the Putin regime acted out of purely altruistic motives in exfiltrating this American intelligence worker to Moscow, the only plausible explanation for its actions in Hong Kong was that it valued Snowden’s potential as an espionage source.   Snowden’s open disillusionment with the NSA presented the very situation that the Russian intelligence services specialized in exploiting.   He had also revealed to reporters in Hong Kong that he had deliberately gained access to the NSA’s sources and methods and he that he had taken to Hong Kong highly-classified documents. He further disclosed that, before leaving the NSA, he had gained access to the lists of computers that the NSA had penetrated in foreign countries. He even went so far as to describe to these journalists the secrets that he had taken as a “single point of failure” for the NSA. And aside from the documents he had copied, he claimed, it will be recalled, that he had secret knowledge in his head that, if disclosed would wreak havoc on the entire U.S. foreign  intelligence system.    “If I were providing information that I know, that’s in my head, to some foreign government, the US intelligence community would … see sources go dark that were previously productive, he told the editor of the Guardian in Moscow.

In short, he advertised possessing precisely the priceless data that the Russian intelligence services had been seeking, with little success, for the past six decades. These electronic files could provide it with the keys to unlock the NSA’s entire kingdom of electronic spying.    Could any world-class intelligence service ignore such a prize? To miss the opportunity to gets in hands such a potential espionage source would be nothing short of gross negligence.
In fact, as has been already established in these pages, this golden opportunity was not missed in Hong Kong.  Even if the Russian intelligence service had not previously had him in its sights – which, as discussed in chapter XV, appears to me to be extremely unlikely-- he made contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong, and Putin, as he himself said, personally approved allowing Snowden to come to Russia.   Putin’s s decision no doubt set in motion the operation to exfiltrate him on Aeroflot, the state-controlled airline.
    We know that the Russian government acted in advance to facilitate Snowden’s trip from Hong Kong.  Without such an intervention, it would not be possible for an American without an entry visa to Russia, or, for that matter, any other country to check-in and board an Aeroflot flight to Moscow.  Aeroflot had to be instructed to allow Snowden on the plane without a visa. We also know that a special operation was mounted to take Snowden off the plane once it landed in Moscow.  Such an operation could not have been done without advance planning.  Nor would he be removed from the plane without a plan for his stay in Russia.   Since Putin himself has taken credit for authorizing Snowden’s trip to Russia, there is no reason to doubt that these plans, and whatever cover stories were deemed necessary, were approved at the highest level of the regime.
When an intelligence service makes such elaborate preparations for extracting a foreign intelligence worker, it presumably also expects to debrief him or her on arrival.  Pelton, for example, who had access to far less valuable information than had Snowden, was held incommunicado in Vienna for two weeks during his debriefing.  What would be inconceivable would be for an intelligence service to go to such lengths to bring a potential espionage source such as Snowden to Russia and allow him to catch the next plane to Latin America.   The false report provided to the press that Snowden was flying to Latin America was likely nothing more than a cover story to confuse foreign observers while he was receiving his initial debriefing and evaluation.
    When it comes to the esoteric enterprise of reconstructing the work of U.S. signals intelligence, military as well as civilian experts in cryptology, computer sciences and communications are necessary.  Unlike in the case of Pelton, Snowden had secret material in his possession, at least according to Anatoly Kucherena. Even if Russian intelligence had already acquired copies of his electronic files prior to Snowden’s arrival in Moscow, Snowden’s interpretation of them would be part of the debriefing since intelligence data needs to put in context.  “This debriefing could not be done overnight,” according to a former high-ranking officer in the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.   “There is no way that Snowden would not be fully debriefed,” he said.  He also said GRU specialists in signal intelligence would be called in.
We know that the Putin regime paid a significant price in terms of the cancellation of the pre-Olympics summit with Obama. Having to accept the onus of declining relations with the Obama administration, it is hard to believe that it didn’t attempt to get the bonus of signals intelligence from Snowden.  The GRU, SVR and other Russian intelligence services would not be denied the opportunity to y question Snowden until to all they had squeezed out of him whatever state secrets he had or knew during the 38 days that he had vanished from public sight.   Since Snowden was rewarded with sanctuary, a residence and body guards, there is no reason to doubt that he satisfactorily accommodated his interrogators.  While he might elect to continue believing that he a whistle-blower true to his ideals, as far as Russian intelligence was concerned, he was an espionage source.  /
 For an intelligence service, the game is not over when it obtains state secrets.  It still needs to fog over the extent of its coup, as far as possible, to prolong the value of the espionage.  Hence it is plausible that the story that Snowden had thoroughly destroyed all his data he stolen the prior month prior to departing for Russia as well as the story that he had turned down all requests to be questioned by the FSB and other Russian intelligence officials were part of his legend.  The repetitions of these uncorroborated claims in his press interviews also may have enhanced his public image for the ACLU effort to get clemency for him.  Even so, in view of the importance of such communication intelligence to Russia, it would be the height of naiveté for U.S. or British intelligence to accept such claims as anything more than part of the cover story.

 As for the Snowden’s motive, I see no reason to doubt Snowden’s explanation that he stole NSA documents to expose NSA surveillance that he believed was an illicit intrusion into the privacy of individuals.  Such disaffection is not a unique situation in the intelligence business.  Many of Russia’s espionage sources before Snowden were also dissatisfied employees who had access to classified secrets.  Like some of them, Snowden used his privileged access to blow the whistle on what he considered to be the improper activities of the organization for which he worked.   In that sense, I fully accept that he began as a whistle-blower, not as a spy. It was also as a whistle-blower that he contacted Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman, who published  the scoops he provided in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Washington Post,
Snowden’s penetration went beyond whistle-blowing, however. He copied a vast number of electronic files, including the level 3 files that contained the NSA’s most sensitive sources and methods.  While these files had little, if anything, to do with domestic surveillance or whistle-blowing, they gave him the sense of power he demonstrated in asserting that he could make all of U.S. communication intelligence “go dark” all over the world.  We know from Kucherena that he did not share part of data with journalists.  Instead, he took it to Russia.
As far as carrying out the most damaging part of the operation, he could not have acted entirely alone.  It will be recalled that the deepest part of his penetration was during the five weeks he worked at the National Threat Operations Center in Hawaii as a contract employee of Booz Allen Hamilton.  It was there that he copied level 3 files, including the so-called road map to the gaps in American intelligence. During this period, as discussed in Chapter III, Snowden had neither the passwords nor system administrator’s privileges that would allow him to copy, transfer and steal the electronic files.  He therefore must have obtained that assistance from some who had the passwords and privileges.  Even if that reality does not sit well with the NSA administration, there is no reason to assume that Snowden was the only disgruntled employee at that NSA facility in 2013. That a dozen or so NSA co-workers attended his anti-surveillance Crypto party in 2012 shows that others shared his sensibilities and antipathy towards NSA surveillance.  It therefore seems plausible to me that he found a co-worker willing to cooperate, or vice versa, a co-worker found him. To be sure, Snowden might not have been aware of his new accomplice’s true motives or affiliations. But without some co-worker providing him with entry to the sealed-off computers, he could not have carried out the penetration. To our knowledge, whoever helped him evidently did not want to expose himself to prosecution or defect from the NSA.  That was Snowden’s role. By accepting the sole blame in the video that Poitras made about him in Hong Kong, Snowden shielded  anyone else from suspicion, which was, as he told Poitras, his purpose,  Whoever helped him may still be working at the NSA.
  To be sure, there remains another glaring gap in the chain of events that led Snowden to Moscow: his whereabouts and activities during his first eleven days in Hong Kong.  Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, even speculated that Snowden might have been taken to mainland China during this period.  What drove his speculation was the admission of U.S. intelligence that, despite its vast global resources for searching credit card charges, banking transactions, hotel registrations, emails, police records and even CCTV cameras, neither it, nor its allies, were able to find a trace of Snowden.  It was, in a phrase later made famous by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “A known unknown.”  Yet there provided no basis to speculate that he was in mainland China.  He could have been staying in a well-prepared safe-house anywhere in Hong Kong or even at the home of an unknown associate.  All that is really known is that soon after he emerged from this venue and gave his celebrated interview to journalist he was aboard an Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow where he would become, if he was already, a potential espionage source for Russia.
Whatever his initial motivation may have been, Snowden’s actions would appear squarely at odds with his assertions of serving his country’s interests.  Even accepting that he began with a sincere desire to be a world-class whistleblower, his mission evolved, deliberately or not, into one that led him to disclose key communications intelligence secrets to a foreign power with an agenda that can hardly be aligned with his country’s interests.   In the end, it is Snowden’s actions, not his words that matter.




                                  EPILOGUE


                         THE SNOWDEN EFFECT




CHAPTER THIRTY
The Consequences for the ‘War on Terrorism’ “

“Because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging.”

                          CIA Director John Brennan in response to the Paris attack, November 2015



In the evening of November 13, 2015, normal life in Paris was brought to a screeching halt by nine Jihadist terrorists acting on behalf of ISIS.  Three blew themselves up at the stadium at Saint-Denis, where President Hollande was attending a match between France and Germany, while the others shot killed 130 people at cafes, restaurants and a theater.  388 others had been wounded in the carnage.  The attack was planned over many months by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year old Belgium citizen of Moroccan origins, who served ISIS as a logistics officer in Syria in 2014.  To organize the attack, he smuggled three suicide bombers into Europe through Greece, raise financing, set up a base in the Molenbeek section of Brussels, import deactivated assault weapons from Slovenia (which then had to be restored by a technician), buy ammunition, acquire suicide vests, obtain “burner” cell phones, rent cars and make on-line bookings for quarters in Paris for the nine attackers.. Even though Abaaoud was well known to western intelligence services, none of the communications surrounding the preparations for the attack came to the attention of the NSA or its allied services in Europe.
Those Paris attackers who did not kill themselves with their suicide vests were killed by the police, but the real challenge in such a terrorist operation is not bringing culprits to justice after the massacre civilians.  It is preventing them from carrying it out.  As “soft targets,” such as restaurants, cafes, theaters and street gatherings, cannot be continually protected by police, the only practical means by which a government can prevent such attacks is to learn in advance about their planning and preparations.   One means of acquiring this information is by listening in on the channels through which members of loosely-knit terrorists organizations, such as ISIS, communicates with one another.  This form of intelligence-gathering obviously works best so long as the terrorists remain unaware that the communication channels they are using are being monitored.  Once they find out that their messages and conversations are being intercepted, they will likely find a safer means to communicate important information.  For that reason, communications intelligence organizations keep the sources and methods they employ for monitoring these channels in a tightly-sealed envelope of secrecy.

        Yet, in June 2013, the NSA found that envelope had been breached by Snowden who deliberately compromised three programs that it used to keep track of terrorist organizations around the world.  The first system he divulged, and the one which though it received the most public attention, did the least damage, was what the NSA called the 215 program because it had been authorized by section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001.  This program amassed, the billing records of every phone call made in America that could be used as a data base by the FBI.  The idea was that when any foreigner on the FBI’s watch list of terrorists called anyone in the U.S. the FBI could trace that person’s entire chain of telephone contacts to try to determine if he was connected to a terrorist cell.  There was, however, a major flaw in this program: it did not cover e-mail and other Internet messaging, which 2013 had largely replaced telephone calls.   In addition, terrorist organizations had become fully aware of the vulnerability of telephoning overseas.  So although the NSA could cite a handful of early successes that “215” yielded, Snowden’s exposure of it did only limited damage/

    But Snowden did not stop with “215.” He next did vastly more damage by exposing the PRISM program also called “702” since it was authorized in 2007 by section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.)  Since a large part of the fiber cables on which the world’s  Internet runs pass through the United States, the NSA was able to intercept  91 percent of its data, including Google searches, social media postings, Skype conversations, messages on Xbox Live, Instant messaging services, tweets on Twitter and e-mails. The CIA and FBI could then track the movements of foreign terrorists.  Up until June 6, 2014, terrorist groups presumably were unaware of the NSA’s capacity to vacuum in even encrypted parts of the Internet since they used it for their lethal planning.   This ignorance gave U.S intelligence an important edge in pre-empting terrorist actions.   According to the testimony of General Alexander, data intercepted under PRISM helped detect and thwart no fewer than 45 terrorist attacks prior to Snowden’s making this capability known.

The third NSA program of interest to Jihadists that Snowden revealed was called XKeyscore.  Using Internet data from PRISM, it created the equivalent of digital fingerprints for suspected foreign terrorists based on their search patterns on the Internet.   This made it difficult for a terrorist suspect to hide on the Internet.  He might attempt to evade surveillance by using a different computer and another name but, unknown to him, the XKeyscore algorithms would continue to track him under his new alias.

To even further enable furtive Internet users evade surveillance, Snowden provided in an interview specific data about the secret sources and methods used both the NSA and British GCHQ.  He revealed, for example that the GCHQ had deployed the first "full-take" Internet interceptor that “snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit.”    When asked how to circumvent it, he replied: “you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances. Their fibers are radioactive, and even the Queen's selfies to the pool boy get logged.”   Aside from this warning about using Internet providers whose wiring passes through Britain, he also warned Internet users against using  the services of American  Internet companies since the NSA considered “telecom collaborators to be the jewels in their crown of omniscience. “  Snowden also suggested that to avoid being automatically “targeted” by the NSA, one should avoid “jihadi forums.”  These tips for evading U.S. and British surveillance, far from being an off-hand leakage of information, were supplied by him in written answers to interrogatives sent to him by Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum while Snowden was still on the NSA payroll in May 2013.  If he intended to damage the NSA’s ability to monitor unsuspecting individuals abroad, he clearly succeeded.  Just as Robert Hanssen had compromised the NSA’s interception of communication at the Soviet Embassy in the 1990s, Snowden compromised the NSA’s interception of Jihadist targets on the Internet.

   The Snowden intervention was soon felt by the CIA.  “Within weeks of the leaks,” writes Michael Morell, then CIA deputy director.  He notes that “Terrorist organizations around the world were already starting to modify their actions in light of what Snowden disclosed.  Communication sources dried up.”  What heightened Morell’s concern about this loss of intelligence sources was the discovery a 26-page document on an ISIS computer in Syria indicating that the terrorist group had been considering using plague germs and other biological weapons on foreign targets.  The NSA was also seeing the Snowden effect on the war on terrorists.  In 2013, the FBI, CIA, and DIA had compiled a watch list of some 400 foreign terrorist targets for NSA’s PRISM program.  Up until June 6th, many of these targets frequently used Internet services, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Xbox live, to send what they believed would be hidden messages.  After the PRISM story broke in the Washington Post on June 6th, the NSA “saw one after another target go dark,” according to a senior executive involved in that surveillance.  In 2014, Admiral Rogers, the new NSA director, was even blunter.  Asked whether or not the disclosures by Snowden had reduced the NSA’s ability to pursue terrorist, he answered: “Have I lost capability that we had prior to the revelations? Yes.”

   In Moscow, Snowden insists that not a single death has been traced back to his disclosures.  I agree that it would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that he is responsible for any single event, such as the massacre in Paris in November 2015, because we cannot know whether or not a jihadist involved in the event, such as Abdelhamid Abaaoud in the case of Paris, would have used the Internet if Snowden had not exposed the interception of it by the NSA.  But however sincere were his intentions, Snowden cannot escape his responsibility for his actions. He totally and purposefully compromised an intelligence operation that could prevent such villainous attacks.





//


CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Consequences for America: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

 [TK]




END NOTES

Prologue
On The Trail of Snowden



  1.   “No Such Agency”—The best description of the birth of the NSA can be found in James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1982, pp. 1-4


  2.   “the NSA learned …”—Author Interview with General Keith Alexander


  3.  “12 minute video …”—This extraordinary video can be seen at http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video
/  All of the dozens of video Snowden made after this initial one can be viewed in chronological order at: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/snowden.html

  4.  “I had written several books …”_-- My first book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, (Viking Press, New York 1966) examined the failure of the FBI, Secret Service and CIA to establish the context of the John F. Kennedy Assassination.  This interest continued on other of my books, including  Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1989), in which I  investigated the vulnerability of intelligence services involved in espionage during the Cold War;  Agency of Fear (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1977), in which I explored intelligence failures of domestic intelligence in the war on drugs; and James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right (Fast Track Press/EJE Publications, New York 2011).



  5.  “extraditing Trent Martin …”—The FBI press statement on this case was released March 27, 2013, less than two months before Snowden bought his ticket for Hong Kong. https://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2013/australian-research-analyst-extradited-on-insider-trading-charges


  6.  “It’s very mysterious …”—Author’s interviews, Michael Hayden


  7.  “My first surprise …” -- I interviewed 6 members of the Mira staff, all of whom asked me not to identify them. Te-Ping Chen, a journalist for the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, also received some similar replies when she interviewed Mira hotel employees the day Snowden left the Mira.  Te-Ping Chen and Ken Brown, “Snowden’s Options for Refuge Narrow,”  Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2013


  8.  “He sent journalist Glenn Greenwald …”—Greenwald’s description of his encounters with Snowden is taken mainly from Chapter I, “Contact his book,” and Chapter II “Ten Days in Hong Kong” of his book. See Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide, (Metropolitan Books, New York) 2014, pp7-32.


  9.  “directly contacted via email…”—See Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, “Code Name Verax: Snowden, in exchange with Post reporter, made clear he knew risks,
Washington Post, June 9, 2013



  10.  “He proposed we meet…”—Author’s interview with Keith Bradsher.  Bradsher wrote a number of excellent articles about Snowden and Ho. See Keith Bradsher, “Hasty Exit Started With Pizza Inside a Hong Kong Hideout.” New York Times, June 24, 2013
       11.  “Appointment with Robert Tibbo…”==Author’s interviews with Tibbo.

       12.  “Meet with me on condition…”—this source, as well as many others in the investigation, spoke to me on condition that I did not identify them by name.

     Chapter I

     The Great Divide

          1.  CitizenFour can be seen in its entirety on-line at https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/

          2.  “Sitting on his unmade bed…”— George Packer, “The Holder of Secrets,” New Yorker, October 20, 2014


     3.  “This powerful narrative…” See Greenwald, op. cit. pp. 248-254. Snowden “Trapped: Interview with Brian Williams, May 28, 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview

          4.  “When two NSA analysts…”—“Claim US Spy Caught with Secrets.” Los Angeles Mirror, p.1, August 2, 1960. Also see, Rick Anderson,, “Before Edward Snowden,” Salon, July 1, 2013


          5.  “Man up”—Interview with John Kerry, CBS This Morning (TV), May 28, 2014

     6.   “British cyber service GCHQ …”—RT Television report “NSA, GCHQ targeted Kaspersky, other cyber security companies.”  http://www.rt.com/usa/268891-nsa-gchq-software-kaspersky/



     7.   “He posted about it…”—Snowden’s wrote in chat rooms on the Ars Technica site between May 2001 and May 2012.  His posts are quoted by Joe Mullins, “NSA leaker Ed Snowden’s life on Ars Technica,” Ars Technica, June 13, 3013. (Hereinafter cited as Ars Technica report.)  http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/nsa-leaker-ed-snowdens-life-on-ars-technica

          8.  “Ben Wizner, a lawyer…”-- Wizner called his representation of Snowden the “work of a lifetime.”  Kashmir Hill, “How ACLU Lawyer Ben Wizner Became Snowden’s Lawyer,” Forbes, March 10, 2014.


     9.  “Six government employees…”   Matt Apuzzo, “C.I.A. Officer Is Found Guilty in Leak Tied to Times Reporter,” New York Times, January 26, 2015. The notable exception to policy of seeking imprisonment of intelligence workers found guilty of passing classified information to journalist is the extraordinary case of ex-CIA director General David Petraeus.  General Petraeus had given classified information from his personal notebooks to his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell. Although none of this information appeared in her 2012 biography All In: The Education of Davis Petraeus, he had violated his oath to protect this information.  Yet, in a 2014 deal with the Justice Department, General Petraeus was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.  See Eli Lake, “Petraeus, Justice and Washington’s Culture of Leaks,” Bloomberg View, March 4, 2015 http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-04/petraeus-justice-and-washington-s-culture-of-leaks
          10.  In an interview in Moscow…”—Snowden met with James Bamford, the author of the 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. In Moscow in June 2014. James Bamford. “Edward Snowden: The Untold Story,” Wired, August 2014. (Hereinafter Bamford Wired.)



          11.  “We’ve crossed lines.”  --- Snowden quoted by Bamford, Wired


     12.  “Congressman Ron Paul organized…”—Rebecca Shabad, “Former Rep. Ron Paul launches petition for Snowden clemency,” The Hill, February 13, 2014.  “Rand Paul” support, see Katie Gluck, “Rand Paul Backs Snowden,” Politico, January 5, 2014
     13.   “We actually buy cell phones…”  Snowden quoted in “New Guardian Interview with Edward Snowden,” Guardian, July 17, 2014. http://www.activistpost.com/2014/07/new-guardian-interview-with-edward.html
          14.  “Dominique Strauss-Kahn….”—Edward Jay Epstein, “What Really Happed To Strauss-Kahn” New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011
          15.  “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...”—Newt Gingrich, “A Government Snoop That Puts the NSA to Shame,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2015

          16.  “The FISA court…”  The history of the FISA court is a matter of public record. http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/courts_special_fisc.html

          17.  ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack, ”-- Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick, “For NSA chief,  Terrorist Threat Drives Passion to ‘collect it all,” Washington Post,  July 14, 2013


          18.  “Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals…”—Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman. “NSA Collection of Bulk Data Ruled Illegal.” New York Times, May 5, 2015.  This court decision was stayed three months later on August 27, 2015 by a 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals on procedural grounds.  By this time, however, the legal issue was rendered moot by Congress.  See http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/2015/


          19.  “This program was not entirely secret…” Timothy B. Lee, “Here Is Everything We Know About Prism to Date,” Washington Post, June 12, 2013


          20.  “. By the Lawfare Institute’s count,” https://www.lawfareblog.com/snowden-revelations

    21. “Edward Snowden is not the "whistleblower" …”--   “NSA Director Adm. Michael       Rogers discusses freedom, privacy and security issues at Princeton University,” http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2015/03/nsa_director_admiral_michael_rogers_during_princet.html

    22. “Snowden stole from the United States.” Mark Hosenball, “U.S. Spy Agency Targets    Changed Behavior after Snowden,” Reuters, May 12, 2014

     23. "The vast majority of the electronic documents…”—“Snowden Leak Could Cost   Military Billions: Pentagon,” NBC News, March 6, 2014

     24.  “Has caused grave damage to our national security.”—Hearings Before Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, January 27, 2017, See: http://www.dia.mil/News/SpeechesandTestimonies/ArticleView/tabid/11449/Article/567078/dia-director-flynn-unauthorized-disclosures-have-caused-grave-damage-to-our-nat.aspx
     25. “John Walker”— See “The Spy Cases,” Appendix A of this book.

     26. “The CIA’s assessment was no less grim…”—Michael J. Morell, The Great War of our Time, Twelve. New York 2015. P.298

     27. “The greatest damage to our combined nations’ intelligence systems.” Transcript of Interview with General Keith Alexander, Australian Financial Review, May 8, 2014.

     28. “Act of treason…” ---Jeremy Herb and Justin Silk. “Sen. Feinstein Calls Snowden’s NSA Leaks “Act of Treason,” The Hill, June 6, 2013

     29.” Rep. Mike Rogers….” Tim Curry, “House Intelligence Chair Hints at Russian Help in Snowden Leaks,” January 18, 2014. NBC News http://www.nbcnews.com

     30. “Were briefed by David Leatherwood…”—See “Unclassified Declaration of David G. Leatherwood,” U.S. DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.Case 1:10-cv-02119-RMC Document 63-8 Filed 04/26/13, https://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/shaffer/042613-leather.pdf

     31. “William Martin and Bernon Mitchell”—See the Spy Cases,” Appendix A of this book.

     32.”Fact and Fable in Psychology,” Joseph Jastro, Fact and Fable in Psychology, Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1900, pp.202-204

     33. “I haven’t shot anybody…”  Statement Analysis: “The Last Words of Lee Harvey Oswald.” http://www.statementanalysis.com/lee-harvey-oswald/
     Like Snowden, Oswald was a high school dropout from a broken family who joined an elite unit of the U.S military but failed to get an honorable discharge, became hostile to policies of the U.S. government and defected to Russia.  See Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, McGraw-Hill Book Company, (New York, 1978) pp.64-104

     34. “He gave her his word.” Snowden emails to Laura Poitras, see: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/snowdens-first-emails-to-poitras/


     35.”a bodyguard of lies…”— Churchill wrote “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies” in the fifth volume of his autobiography Closing the Ring, (Houghton Mifflin, 1951)
     36. “Clapper answered that the NSA…”—the transcript was published by the Washington Post, January 29, 2014.  For Clapper’s earlier closed door testimony, see Stephen Aftergood, “The Clapper Lie and the Senate Intelligence Committee,” FAS. January 6, 2014, https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/01/clapper-ssci/


  37.  “On his application to Booz Allen…” -- Mark Hosenball, “NSA contractor hired Snowden despite concerns about resume discrepancies,” Reuters, June 20, 2013
  38.  “Read in” new reports…”—Snowden Q&A, Moscow July 12, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNQSVurlAak
  39.   ABC News reported…”--James Gordon Meek, Kirit Radia, Leezel Tanglao and Dean Schabner, “NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Seeks Asylum in Ecuador,” ABC News, June 23, 2013. http://abcnews.go.com/International/nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-seeks-asylum-ecuador/story?id=19466318


  40.  “Read in the media…”—Snowden Q&A, Moscow July 12, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNQSVurlAak




     38. “Morell would go no further…”-- Michael J. Morell, the Great War of our Time, Twelve. New York 2015. P.284

     39.”Angleton…” See Appendix A. “my book on deception…” Edward Jay Epstein, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1989

     40. “The Enigma machines…”—Hugh Sebag-Montefoire, Enigma: the Battle for the Code (John Wiley and Sons, New York), 2001, pp 286-294
     CHAPTER TWO
     The Crime Scene Investigation


          1.  “Any private contractor…”—Snowden Interviewed by Brian Williams, NBC, May 28, 2014 (Hereinafter Snowden NBC Interview.)
          2.  “About 15 miles….”—U.S. Navy Information Operations Command, “History of NIOC Hawaii”, http://www.public.navy.mil/fcc-c10f/niochi/Pages/AboutUs.aspx
          3.  “Keith Alexander, the four-star general who headed…”—Author’s Interview with Keith Alexander
          4.  “The NSA meanwhile notified the FBI…”— Author’s interview with anonymous source A, a former government intelligence executive familiar with the initial investigation.
          5.  “Within the next few days…” …”— Author’s interview with anonymous source A, a former government intelligence executive familiar with the initial investigation.
          6.  ”Copied “over 900,000” military files…”—the document was obtained via a Freedom of Information request by VICE.  See Jason Leopold, “Inside Washington's Quest to Bring Down Edward Snowden,” Vice, June 4, 2015
          7.  “NSA did not immediately share with the CIA….” Morell, op.cit. pp. 283-288
          8.  “By late July, NSA investigators…”-- Author’s interview with anonymous source B, a former government intelligence executive familiar with the initial investigation.
          9.  “They could walk out the door,” Snowden interview, German NDR TV, January 26, 2014. http://www.tagesschau.de/snowden-interview-englisch100.pdf
          10.  “According to Ledgett, the perpetrator…”Tabassum Zakaria and Warren Strobel, “After 'cataclysmic' Snowden affair, NSA faces winds of change,” Reuters December 13, 2013
          11.  “the analysis of the logs,” Author's interview with Source A

          12.  Services’ “black budget…”-- Morell .op.cit. p. 285
               13.  “Something is not right,” Alexander…”--“Interview transcript: General Keith Alexander,” Australian Financial Review. http://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/interview-transcriptformer-head-of-the-nsa-and-commander-of-the-us-cyber-command-general-keith-alexander-20140507-itzhw#ixzz3m6TkuRa1
          14.  “This discovery came when…”—Guardian staff, “Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours, Guardian, August 18, 2013


          15.   “What we know, what we don’t know…”-- Bryan Burroughs, Sarah Ellison and Suzanna Andrews. “”The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair, May 2014. (Hereinafter “The Snowden Saga.”)

          16.  “Discussed the chronology of the copied documents…” – Author’s Interview with Source A

          17.  “Down-loading documents for some 10 months…” Ledgett was interviewed in this time-line by Bryan Burroughs. See “The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair, May 2014
          18.  “ Snowden had not yet completed his…” – Author’s Interview with Source A
          19.  “FBI faced a dilemma…”-- Author’s Interview with a former Justice Department official with knowledge of the Snowden case, hereinafter Source C.
          20.  “Pandora’s Box…”-- Author’s Interview with a Congressional aide with knowledge of investigation, hereinafter Source D.
          21.   “Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, See “The Spy Cases,” Appendix A of this book.
          22.  Intention of staying in Russia…”-- Snowden NBC Interview. Op cit.  Bamford, Wired. Op. cit.   Jane Mayer “Snowden Calls Russian-Spy Story “Absurd” in Exclusive Interview,” New Yorker, January 21, 2014. December 28, 2014.
          23.  “State Department revoked…”- Author’s interview with a former member of the National Security staff who cited State Department records. Also, Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, told AP "As is routine and consistent with US regulations, persons with felony arrest warrants are subject to having their passport revoked," That arrest warrant was issued on June 14, 2013. The State Department Operations Center alert said “Snowden's U.S passport was revoked on June 22, 2013” after the Justice Department unsealed the charges that had been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on June 14, 2013. “The Consul General in Hong Kong confirmed Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden's passport was revoked on June 22,” according to the State Department's senior watch officer.
          24.  “Putin had personally approved…”—Jennifer Martinez, “Report: Snowden Passport Revoked,” The Hill, June 23,2013


          25.  “CIA also had reports…”—Morell .op.cit. pp284-5


          26.  “Putin gave a lengthy interview…”—Interview Channel One. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19143


          27.  “Snowden’s lawyer Tibbo…”—Author’s interview with Robert Tibbo in Hong Kong


          28.  “When Snowden first met Greenwald…”—Greenwald, op cit. p.35


          29.  “Lewd photographs of foreign suspects…”—Snowden interview, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Surveillance,” HBO ,April 6, 2015, http://www.thejournal.ie/edward-snowden-says-the-us-can-look-at-nude-photos-2032314-Apr2015






     CHAPTER THREE

     Tinker

            1.  “You get exposed to a little bit of evil…” Bamford. Wired. op. cit
            2.  “Lon Snowden, like his father …”—The best reporting on Snowden’s childhood was done by Suzanne Andrews. See: Bryan Burroughs, Sarah Ellison and Suzanna Andrews. “”The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair, May 2014.
            3.  “Snowden, alone, stayed home…”—Author’s interview with Joyce Kinsey.
            4.  “Posting under the alias The TrueHooHa…”--Ars Technica Report. Op. cit.
            5.  “Brad Gunson, who knew him….”-- Carol D. Leonnig, Jenna Johnson and Marc Fisher, “Who Is Edward Snowden,” Washington Post, June 15, 2013

            6.  “To Anime conventions …”—Christopher Johnson, “Chatting about Japan with Snowden, Japan Times, June 18, 2013.
            7.  “His “body fat percentage to between…”— Carol D. Leonnig, Jenna Johnson and Marc Fisher, “Who Is Edward Snowden,” Washington Post, June 15, 2013
            8.  “I’ve always dreamed…”-- Ars Technica Report. Op. cit
            9.  “Admiral Edward J. Barrett…”—Coast Guard Biography, http://www.uscg.mil/history/people/Flags/BarrettEBio.pdf, Also, For his FBI career, see http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/OathBetrayed/FBI%2047.pdf
            10.  “Army records show…”—Author’s interviews.  US Army spokesman George Wright stated Snowden was enrolled in program between May 7, 2004 and September 28, 2004. Spokesman Colonel David Patterson said "He attempted to qualify to become a Special Forces soldier but did not complete the requisite training and was administratively discharged from the Army,"
            11.  “He took a job as a security guard…” – “The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair.op.cit.
            12.  “So sexxxy it hurts”—The information about Snowden’s modeling career comes from his posts on Ars Technica.  See “Ars Technica Report,” op.cit.
            13.  “Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father…”— Daniel Bates, “Snowden totally abandoned his girlfriend when he fled amid NSA revelations, her dad says,” Daily Mail, January 17, 2014.  The information about Lindsay Mills comes from her Twitter and Instagram postings.
            14.   “The CIA’s minimum requirements in 2006///”  CIA website, https://www.cia.gov/careers/application-process
            15.  “Deputy Director Ledgett…” is quoted in “The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair, op.cit.
            16.  “He pointed out from Moscow…”—Snowden interview with Brian Williams. NBC Interview, op.cit.
               CHAPTER FOUR
               Secret Agent

               1.  “An hour-long NBC television interview….” Williams. NBC    Interview, op.cit.
               2.  “Part of a 12 man team…”-- Author’s Interview with former CIA officer who requested anonymity (Hereinafter Source E.)
               3.  “The only person there to…”—Mavanee Anderson interview, “Edward Snowden's Friend Mavanee Anderson Exclusive Interview,” MSNBC,”Last Word,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=beQUMdolBWE
               4.  “He received an unfavorable evaluation,,,”—Eric Schmitt, “C.I.A. Warning on Snowden in ’09 Said to Slip Through the Cracks, New York Times, October 10, 2013
               5.  “It was not a stellar…”—Author’s interviews with Tyler Drumheller
               6.  “Snowden’s superior had suspected…”-- Eric Schmitt, “C.I.A. Warning on Snowden in ’09 Said to Slip Through the Cracks, New York Times, October 10, 2013
               7.  “The discrepancy was explained…”—Author’s interview with Source E.
               8.  “Snowden blamed his career-ending…”— Snowden was interviewed via the Internet by James Risen, James Risen, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” New York Times, October 17, 2013
               9.  “NSA experts who examined…”—Snowden interview with James Bamford. Wired, op.cit.
               10.  “Snowden later told Vanity Fair”—“The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair.op.cit.
               11.  "I realized that I was…”—Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations,” Guardian, June 9, 2013

CHAPTER FIVE
Contractor

     1.  “Much of what I saw in Geneva…”-- Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations,” Guardian, June 9, 2013

     2.  “This “free pass,” as …”—Author’s Interview with Tyler Drumheller

     3.  “So the guy with whom the CIA…:-- Morell. Op.cit. p. 284

     4.  “His initial job for Dell…”—“The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair, op,cit.

     5.   The information about Lindsay comes from her postings on Instagram and her blog “LS Journey.”  https://twitter.com/lsjourneys.  The information about her and Snowden’s travel to Mount Fuji and other places in Japan come from the Little Red Ninja blog written by Jennie Chamberlin. https://www.facebook.com/Little-Red-Ninja-214045021941347/timeline/

     6.  “He attempted to get a …”—Mark Hosenball, “NSA contractor hired Snowden,” Reuters, June 11, 2013.

     7.  “System code-named EPIC SHELTER,” --“The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair, op,cit.

     8.  “Since most of the classified…”—Author’s interview with Source A

     9.  “Spotted a major flaw….”—Snowden interview with Bamford in 2014. See Bamford Wired, op.cit.

     10.   “I actually recommended they…”—ibid.

     11.  “Snowden made a ten day…”—Shane Harris, “What Was Edward Snowden Doing in India?” Foreign Policy, Jan 13, 2014. Also, Shilpa Phadnis, “Edward Snowden sharpened his hacking skills in Delhi.” Times of India, December 4, 2013

     12.  ““It is a dead end…” Author’s interview with a former Booz Allen employee, who requested anonymity.  (Hereinafter referred to as Source F.)

     13.  “Shaded by a Sakura tree…:-- The description of Snowden’s life in Maryland come entirely from Lindsay Mill’s Internet postings. “LS Journey.”  https://twitter.com/lsjourneys.

     14.  "They [the NSA] are intent …”-- Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations,” Guardian, June 9, 2013

     15.  “None of whom took any action…”--Andrea Peterson, “Snowden: I raised NSA concerns internally over 10 times before going rogue,” Washington Post, March 7, 2014.  The NSA’s response came from NSA spokesperson, Vanee Vines—Author’s Interview.

     16.  “US Investigations Services, or USIS…”-- Dion Nissenbaum, “U.S. Gives New Contract To Firm That Vetted NSA Leaker Edward Snowden,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2014l.  For history, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USIS_(company)



CHAPTER SIX
Thief

          1. “In Hawaii in 2012…”—Author’s interview with former Dell executive who requested anonymity because of company policy about Dell employees discussing the Snowden case.

          2. “Living in paradise…” Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations,” Guardian, June 9, 2013

          3. “You’re in a vaulted space…”—Transcript of interview with Snowden in Moscow. “I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,” Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

          4. “Law is a lot like medicine …”-- David Weigel, “Edward Snowden and Ron Paul Kick Off Libertarian Student Conference,” Bloomberg News, February 13, 2015. For Ron Paul position on “secret government, see http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/06/02/413952/US-Ron-Paul-CIA-NSA-secret-government

          5. “Fear and a false image…”—Bamford Wired, op. cit.
          6. “Snowden was fully aware…”—James Risen email interview with Snowden in Moscow.  James Risen, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” New York Times. October 17, 2013 (Hereinafter referred to as Risen interview)
          7. “Called “Physical Phatness,” Lindsay Mills’ Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/lindsay.mills.90/about

          8.” It was the first known document…”—Ledgett revealed this in an in interview with Vanity Fair.  “The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair, op. cit
          9.” Whatever his motive, he…”  Snowden’s obtaining the NSA examination is described by Michael McConnell. See Rachael King, “Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden's Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2014.  The extended video of interview is at: www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304626804579363651571199832
          10 “It was totally unrealistic…”-- Author’s interview with source B
          11.”Subsequently joking to a reporter,” Bamford Wired. op.cit



CHAPTER SEVEN
Crossing the Rubicon

          1. “What I came to feel…”—Snowden quoted in “I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,”Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

          2. “Deputy Director Ledgett explained…”--“The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair, op. cit

          3.  “Such real-time auditing…”—Author’s interview with source B

          4. “As he pointed out…”—Bamford. Wired/ op.cit

5.”Was still working at Dell…”-- “The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair, op. cit

6 “This 2012 theft was made…”—Author’s interview with Michael Hayden

7.” “I crossed that line…”--“The Snowden Saga,” Vanity Fair, op. cit

           8. “We’re subverting our security…”—Transcript Snowden ‘interview on PBS. James Bamford and Tim De Chant, “Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare,” Nova, January 8. 2015. www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/military/snowden-transcript

          9.”Bragged to James Risen…”-- James Risen, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” New York Times. October 17, 2013

          10. “Torment of Secrecy..”—Edward Shils, book The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies, (Free Press, Chicago), 1956. Passim

          10. “A coming “dark future,”-- Arundhati Roy, “Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack,” Guardian, November 28, 2015

          11. “Violate US espionage laws…”—Author’s interview with Michael Hayden

          CHAPTER EIGHT

          Hacktavist



               1.  “The group “Anonymous…”— Gabriella Coleman,  Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, New York), 2014, pp 1-8
               2.  Sue Halpern, “In the Depths of the Net,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015

                    3.  “What do you think the public would do…”—Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished,” Washington Post, December 23, 2013

               4.  “Silk Road, which acted…”-- Homer Jenkins, “The Anti-Hero of Silk Road.” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2015.  Also, author’s interview with a Justice Department official who requested anonymity.

                    5.  “Assange said in an …”-- Michael Hastings, “Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, January 18, 2012.  Also see Julian Assange introduction to Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange, Underground. (Canongate, Edinburgh) 2012

                    6.  “TOR originally was a…” – Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack, (Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, New York) 2014, Kindle edition.  Fitzpatrick reconstructs the history of TOR in Part VI

                    7.  “The result was …”-- Yasha Levine, “Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government,” Pando, January 16, 2014. https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/

                    8.  “The NSA’s adversaries also …”=Jacob Appelbaum and Roger “How governments have tried to block TOR,2011,//www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ, December 28,2011

                    9.  “The state is all-powerful,”-- Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack, (Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, New York) 2014, Kindle edition.

                    10.  “The most dangerous man…”--Rolling Stone interview with Jacob Appelbaum, “Meet the Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace: The American Behind Wikileaks, Rolling Stone, December 2,2010

                    11.  “Appelbaum acted to defeat-…”—George Packer, The Holder of Secrets, The New Yorker, October 20, 2014

                    12.  “She identified herself in Forbes…”—Runa A Sandvik, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/runasandvik/

                    13.  “TOR Stinks…”—Sean Michael Kerner, “Snowden Leaks Show NSA Targets Tor,” E Week, October 4, 2013

14.  “Parody of the NSA…”—Kashmir Hill, “A Q&A with Edward Snowden,”  Fusion, September 24, 2015, http://fusion.net/story/201737/edward-snowden-interview/

                    15.  “He had been “moonlighting”…”-- Runa Sandvik,” What Edward Snowden said at the Nordic Media Festival,” Forbes, May 10, 2015
                    16.  “According to her account, Snowden…”—Sandvik did not reveal her encounter with Snowden in any of her blogs until 11 months after Snowden went public in June 2013.  It was only after Greenwald disclosed in his book No Place to Hide that Snowden used the alias Cincinnatus that Internet investigators discovered that he had hosted with Sandvik the Crypto Party.  Sandvik then wrote her account of it, See Runa A. Sandvik, “That One Time I Threw a Crypto Party with Edward Snowden,” Forbes, May 27, 2014. Also, Kevin Poulsen, “Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii,” Wired, May 21, 2014

                    17.  “Snowden declared the Crypto party…”—All of Snowden’s post-party activities in 2012 and 2013 come from the Twitter account of “Oahu Crypto Party”. [TK]

                    18.  “NSA’s new “culture of transparency”—Morell. op. cit, p. 288

                    19.    “According to a former intelligence executive,”—Author’s interview with a Defense Intelligence Agency officer who requested anonymity,

                    20.  “I asked a former…”—Author’s interview with source A

                 CHAPTER NINE

                 The String-Puller

                      1.  ““It wasn’t that they put …”-- Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished,” Washington Post, December 23, 2013

                      2.  “The Journalist to whom…” –The description of Snowden’s attempts to contact Glenn Greenwald in December 2012 and January 2013 can be found in Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide, (Metropolitan Books, New York, 2014, pp. 7-10

                      3.  “Up until 2004, Greenwald…”-- Mark Memmott, “He Broke the NSA Leaks Story, But Just Who Is Glenn Greenwald?" NPR, June 11, 2013.  For his part ownership of  HJ website, see Dareh Gregorian, “Glenn Greenwald, journalist who broke Edward Snowden story, was once lawyer sued over porn business,” Daily News, June 26, 2013 Also, Jessica Testa, “How Glenn Greenwald Became Glenn Greenwald,” Buzzfeed, June 26, 2013, www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/how-glenn-greenwald-became-glenn-greenwald#.uyOxxkEAlq/

                      4.  ““By ordering illegal eavesdropping…”—Greenwald. No Place to Hide. op.cit. p.2. On Ron Paul, ibid, p.24

                      5.  “Freedom of the Press Foundation …”-- Michael Calderone, “Freedom Of The Press Foundation Launches To Support WikiLeaks,” Huffington Post, December 16, 2012

                      6.  “The first serious info war…”-- David Sarno, “Hactivists fight for their cause online,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2010

                      7.  “Snowden also sent Greenwald…”—Greenwald. No Place to Hide, op. cit, p.2

                      8.  “Government’s increasing powers of…”—Glenn Greenwald, “U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border,” Salon, April 8, 2012

                      9.  “Sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State…”-- Glenn Greenwald, “FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation,” Guardian, November 13, 2012

                      10.  “, Poitras had been filming…”--Adan Salazar, Mini documentary reveals full extent of ‘Stellar Wind’ domestic spy program,” Infowars, August 28, 2012 http://www.infowars.com/mini-documentary-reveals-full-extent-of-stellar-wind-domestic-spy-program/

                      11.  “Poitras had other impressive credential…”— New School blog, “Laura Poitras: Secret No Longer,” New School News, August 14, 2013 http://blogs.newschool.edu/news/2013/08/laura-poitras-secret-no-longer/#.VggJhN_BzGc

                      12.  ““I didn’t. You chose yourself.”—Snowden’s emails to Laura Poitras were extracted from her film CitizenFour and published in Wired. See Andy Greenberg, “These Are the Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His Epic NSA Leaks,” Wired, October 13, 2014 (Hereinafter Snowden Emails to Poitras.)

                      13.  “He wrote to Micah Lee…”—Micah Lee’s involvement with Snowden, although know to journalists Greenwald and Poitras since April 2013, was not revealed to the public for some 18 months. See Micah Lee, “Ed Snowden taught me to smuggle secrets past incredible danger.” The Intercept, Oct 28, 2014.

                      14.  “Anon108 aka Edward Snowden…”--



15.  “I was at that point filming…”—Poitras interview by Amy Goodman. Democracy Now, January 15, 2015. http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/1/15/oscars_2015_laura_poitras_film_on
                                   16.  “I am a senior government employee..”-- Snowden Emails to Poitras. op.cit


                      17.   “Surveillance of her communications…”--  Glenn Greenwald, “U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border,” Salon, April 8, 2012
                                   18.  “Kafkaesque government harassment.”-- Ben Child, “Citizenfour director Laura Poitras sues US over 'Kafkaesque harassment',” Guardian, July 14, 2015

                                   19.  “The only person “more paranoid…”—Snowden Interviewed by Katrina vanden Heuval and Stephen F. Cohen, “Snowden Speaks: A Sneak Peek an Exclusive Interview,” The Nation, (website), October 10, 2014 http://www.thenation.com/article/edward-snowden-speaks-sneak-peek-exclusive-interview/

                                   20.  “You have been ‘selected’…”-- Snowden Emails to Poitras. op. cit.

                                   21.  “Binney had been a...”—Frontline Interview, “William Binney,” PBS. December 13, 3013, //www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-william-binney/

                                   22.  “What you know as Stellar Wind,”-- Andy Greenberg, “These Are the Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His Epic NSA Leaks,” Wired, October 13, 2014

                                   23.   “Presidential policy 20…”

                                   24.  “My most trusted confidante...”-- Andy Greenberg, “These Are the Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His Epic NSA Leaks,” Wired, October 13, 2014

                      25.  “He had Poitras write Barton Gellman...”—The Frontline Interview, “Barton Gellman,” PBS, March 7, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-barton-gellman/

                      26.  “CAIR, a pro-Moslem…”-- CAIR-NY Blog “Glenn Greenwald Speaks at CAIR-NY Annual Banquet,” May 16, 2013, https://cair-ny.org/blog/glenn_greenwald_speaks_at_cairny_annual_banquet.html#sthash.6DVny6U8.dpuf

                                   27.  “After they finally found…”—The descriptions of the initial two meetings between Greenwald and Poitras in April 2013 are provided on Greenwald’s 2014 boo, Greenwald, No Place to Hide. op. cit. p. 5ff.

                 CHAPTER TEN


                 Raider of the Inner Sanctum

                 1.”They think there’s a smoking gun...”—Bamford. Wired. op. cit.

                 2.”System for stratifying its data…”—Michael McConnell interview, Rachael King, “Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden's Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2014.
                 3.” Snowden applied to Booz...”—Author’s interview with Source F
                 4.”Snowden made no secret…”—Lana Lam. the South China Morning Post, June 23, 2013
                 5.”He targeted my company…”-- Rachael King, “Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden's Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2014.
                 6. “Engaged in a minor subterfuge...”-- -- Mark Hosenball, “NSA contractor hired Snowden despite concerns about resume discrepancies,” Reuters, June 20, 2013
                 7.”He would not have password…”—Author’s interview with Source A
                 8.”Establish a paper trail…”—Director of National Intelligence, “IC on the Record,” (Blog on Tumbler) May 27, 2014. http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/87218708448/edward-j-snowden-email-inquiry-to-the-nsa-office
                 For Snowden response, see: Washington Post staff, “Edward Snowden responds to release of e-mail by U.S. officials.” Washington Post, May 29, 2014
                 9.”He returned on April 13th…” Lindsay Mills’s blog.op.cit
                 10. “A brief medical leave…”—Author’s interview with Source B
                 11. “Three of his fellow workers…”-- Stephen Braun, "NSA to Congress: Snowden copied co-worker's password,” Military Times, February 13, 2014.
                 12. “Robotic devices, called “spiders”…”-- David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best N.S.A.” New York Times, February 8, 2014
                 13.”Finally, Snowden had to…” Author’s interview with Source F
                 14. “Famous warrant from the FISA…”—The document can be seen in the National Security Archives. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB436/docs/EBB-059.pdf


CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Escape Artist



          1.  “I’m not self-destructive…”—Bamford. Wired. op.cit.
          2.  “At this point, Snowden…”—Author’s interview with former DIA officer who requested anonymity.

          3.  “He had visited Hong Kong….”—Lindsay Mills’ blog, op.cit.

          4. “According to Albert Ho…”-- Keith Bradsher, “Hasty Exit Started With Pizza inside a Hong Kong Hideout.” New York Times, June 24, 2013. Also, author’s interview with Keith Bradsher.

         5. “For the next ten…”-- author’s interview with former DIA officer who requested anonymity.

         6. “His first priority,”—Greenwald, No Place to Hide. op cit. p. 43

         7. “That whole period was...”-- “I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,”Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

         8. “He emailed Gellman under…”-- Barton Gellman, “Code name ‘Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risk.” Washington Post, June 9, 2013

         9. “Gellman could not make…”—Greenwald. No Place to Hide. op.cit. pp 51-52

         10. “More pressure on Gellman...”-- Barton Gellman,”Code name ‘Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risk.” Washington Post, June 9, 2013

         11. “You recently had to decline…”-- Greenwald. No Place to Hide. op.cit. p 11

         12. “Continuing his string-pulling…”— Andy Greenberg, “These Are ‘the Emails Snowden Sent to First Introduce His Epic NSA Leaks,” Wired, October 13, 2014


         13. “The hacktavist Jacob Appelbaum…”-- Jacob Appelbaum, “Edward Snowden Interview: The NSA and Its Willing Helpers.” Spiegel On Line, July 8, 2013, //www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edward-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html

          14.”Overcome a final hurdle…”-- Greenwald. No Place to Hide. op.cit. p16-18
          15. “Miss publishing it…”—The description of the Guardian’s reaction to Greenwald’s offer of a scoop was reported by Luke Hardy, a Guardian reporter commissioned by the Guardian editor to write “the Snowden Files,” a book that Oliver Stone bought the film rights  from the Guardian for $700,000.  See The Snowden Files. op cit. p.100-115

          16. “Arranged for Micah Lee…”-- Micah Lee, “Ed Snowden taught me to smuggle secrets past incredible danger.” The Intercept, Oct 28, 2014.

          17. “I took everything I…”—Edward Snowden and Peter Taylor, “Are you a traitor,” Transcript. BBC Panorama, October 15, 2015 (Aired on BBC October 10, 2015)


               CHAPTER TWELVE
               Whistle-blower

               1.  “They elected me. The overseers...”-- Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished,” Washington Post, December 23, 2013.

               2.  “Received a jarring surprise…” Lindsay Mills’s blog, op.cit.

               3.  “Every trick in the book…” Snowden Poitras emails. Op.cit.

               4.  “On timing, regarding meeting…”—The description of the meetings with Snowden in Hong Kong, June 3-June 9, is taken from Poitras’ documentary CitizenFour. 2014,  The film, hereinafter referred to as CitizenFour, can be found at: https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/

               5.  “The initial impression was…”—Greenwald, No Place to Hide, op. cit. p. 30.

                    6.  “Minutes after meeting, I…”--…”— George Packer, “The Holder of Secrets,” New Yorker, October 20, 2014

                    7.  “Guardian policy required…”-- Luke Hardy, The Snowden Files: the Inside Story of the Most Wanted Man in the World (Vintage New York) 2014, p. 114-116

                    8.  “The next morning he…”-- George Packer, “The Holder of Secrets,” New Yorker, October 20, 2014

                    9.  “I am in a safe house..,”—Greenwald, No Place to Hide, op.cit. p.82

                    10.  “Chosen was Lana Lam…”-- Lana Lam, “Post reporter Lana Lam tells of her journey into the secret world of Edward Snowden,” South China Morning Post, June 12, 2014.  Also, author’s interview with Lana Lam and Robert Tibbo

               11. “I was being tailed…”--Sara Corbett. “How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport,” Vogue, February 19, 2015

                         CHAPTER THIRTEEN

                         Enter Assange

                              1.  “Thanks to Russia …”--Julian Assange, “How 'The Guardian' Milked Edward Snowden's Story,” Newsweek, April 20, 2015
                              2.  “Julian Assange had made…”-- David Leigh and Luke Harding, “Julian Assange: the teen hacker who became insurgent in information war,” Guardian, January 30, 2011

                              3.  “Sarah Harrison, his comely…”—Sarah Ellison, “The man who came to dinner,” Vanity Fair, October 2013

                              4.  “Snowden telephoned Assange…”-- Assange interview in (London) Sunday Times. Giles Whittell, “Julian Assange unmasked.” Times Magazine, August 29, 2015.  Also, “Snowden told me they had abused Manning…”— Michael Sontheimer, “Spiegel Interview with Julian Assange,” Spiegel Online International, July 19. 2015

                              5.  “Assange called Harrison...”-- …”--Sara Corbett. “How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport,” Vogue, February 19, 2015

                              6.  “We were working very hard…” –Ibid.

                              7.  “U.S. government informed the…”-- Jane Perlez and Keith Bradsher, “China Said to Have Made Call to Let Leaker Depart.” New York Times, June 23, 2013

                              8.  “Tibbo had a strategy…”—Author Interview with Robert Tibbo

                              9.  “The purpose of my mission...”-- “I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,”Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian, July 18, 2014.

                         CHAPTER FOURTEEN

                         Fugitive

                         1. “If I end up in chains…” Snowden video on Guardian site. June 17, 2013, //www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-video-interview

                         2. “Insert an encrypted key…”--…”-- Barton Gellman, “Code name ‘Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risk.” Washington Post, June 9, 2013

                         3.  “I can’t help him evade…”—Gellman quoted in “The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair. op.cit

                         4.”Asked Fidel Narváez...”-- Juan Forero, “Ecuador’s strange journey from embracing Snowden to turning him away,” Washington Post, July 2, 2013

                         5. “My only comment is that...”—Lana Lam, “Whistle-blower Edward Snowden talks to South China Morning Post,” South China Morning Post, June 12, 2013

                         6. “His passage through passport …”-- Jane Perlez and Keith Bradsher, “China Said to Have Made Call to Let Leaker Depart.” New York Times, June 23, 2013

                         7. “Snowden only met Harrison...”-- Sara Corbett. “How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport,” Vogue, February 19, 2015

                             8.  “Assange continued creating…”-- Assange interview, (London) Sunday Times. Giles Whittell, “Julian Assange unmasked.” Times Magazine, August 29, 2015.
                             9.  “Three-mile radius…”-- Sara Corbett. “How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport,” Vogue, February 19, 2015






                                                                             CHAPTER FIFTEEN
                                                                           Did Snowden Act Alone?



                         1.  “Totality of Snowden’s Actions,”— Author’s interview with Michael Hayden. Also, “Hayden interview,” Meet The Press, NBC, December 15, 2013
                         2.  “Maclean stole immensely valuable…”—See Appendix A, Donald Maclean

                              3.  “Whistle blower Bradley Birkenfeld…”-- David Kocieniewski, “Whistle-Blower Awarded $104 Million by I.R.S.” New York Times, September 11, 2012

                         4.  “Whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg…”-- Martin Arnold, “Pentagon Papers Charges Are Dismissed,” New York Times, May 11, 1973

                         5.  “FBI office in Media…”-- Mark Mazzetti, “Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows,” New York Times,  January 7, 2014

                         6.  “Agee left the CIA…”—See Phillip Agee in Appendix A

                              7.  “Kalugin a top Soviet…”—See Oleg Kalugin in Appendix A

                              8.  “A treasure trove of…”—Christopher Andrews, The Sword and the Shield (Basic Books, New York) 2000 p.206

                              9.  “It is inconceivable to me…”— Author’s interview with a former Booz Allen executive who requested anonymity.

                              10.  “We know that Snowden…”-- Runa A. Sandvik, “That One Time I Threw a Crypto Party with Edward Snowden,” Forbes, May 27, 2014.

                              11.  “The FBI, which was…”-- Author’s interview with a Senate Intelligence Committee staff member who requested anonymity.

                              12.  “Snowden may have carried…”—Author’s interview with Tyler Drumheller.

                              13.  “As Snowden acknowledged, he…”--  Bamford, Wired, op.cit.

                              14.  “Absence of evidence is…”—Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Random House, New York) 1980. P. 49

                              15.  “We have many notable cases…” For the cases of  Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, see Appendix A

                              16.  “The greatest trick the…”—Author’s interview with Victor Cherkashin.   The quote from The Usual Suspects was adopted by the movie from Charles Baudelaire’s observation, “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.”




                           CHAPTER SIXTEEN
                           The Question of When

                              1.  “The NSA was actually…”--James Bamford and Tim De Chant, “Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare, Nova, PBS. January 8, 2015

                              2.  “The career of KGB…” -- Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, (Yale University Press, New Haven) 2008, p. 46.  See also, Heinz Felfe in Appendix A

                              3.  “A counterespionage review done…”—Author’s interview with a member of PFIAB who requested anonymity

                              4.  “Hanssen laid down his …”—Author’s interview with Victor Cherkashin, Also see Victor Cherkashin and Robert Hanssen in Appendix A

                              5.  “KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn…”-- Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, (Yale University Press, New Haven) 2008, pp. 6-11  See Also, Anatoli Golitsyn in Appendix A

                              6.  “Wang Lijun, a well-connected…”-- Steven Lee Myers and Mark Landler, “Frenzied Hours for U.S. on Fate of a China Insider,” /New York Times, April 17, 2012

                              7.  “Within weeks of the…”—Morell, op.cit. p. 294

                              8.  “I think Snowden is…”--Vincent Kessler, “Snowden being manipulated by Russian intelligence: ex-NSA chief,” Reuters, May 7, 2014

                              9.  “A former CIA officer…”—Author’s interview with Tyler Drumheller

                              10.  “It is not statistically improbable…”—Author’s interview with former NSA officer who requested anonymity.

                              11.  “When and how he…”-- Morell, op.cit. p. 296

                         12.  “Looking to capitalize on…”—Transcript of Interview with General Keith Alexander, Australian Financial Review, May 8, 2014.

                              13.  "He can compromise thousands…”--Carol J. Williams, “NSA leaker Edward Snowden seeks return to U.S., on his terms,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2015
                              14.   “I am still working for…”-- Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished,” Washington Post, December 23, 2013

                              15.  “Every facet of Snowden's…”--Janet Reitman, “Snowden and Greenwald,” Rolling Stone,  December 4, 2013

                              16.  “His hosts and they…”--Richard Byrne Reilly, “Former KGB general: Snowden is cooperating with Russian intelligence,” Venture Beats, May 22, 2014

                              17.  “I would lose all respect…”—Author’s interview with Michael Hayden.  Also, Richard Byrne Reilly, “Former NSA director: 'I would lose all respect for Russia if they haven't fully exploited Snowden.” Venture Beats, May 23 2014

                              18.  “He was put in contact…”—Der Spiegel interview with Anatoli Kucherana, “Snowden's Lawyer: 'Russia Will Not Hand Him Over’,” Spiegel Online International, June 24, 2013.

                              19.  “An interview as “great…”-- James Bamford and Tim De Chant, “Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare, Nova, PBS. January 8, 2015



                         20.  “One million dollars for…”—This payment was revealed in the Sony documents allegedly stolen by North Korea.  They were posted on the Wikileaks website.  Author’s interview with Oliver Stone.
                              21.  “Putin’s telethon on…”-- Elias Grolla, “Snowden Called in to Putin’s Telethon. Does That Really Make Him a Kremlin Pawn?” Foreign Policy, April 17, 2014

                           CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

                           The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing

                              1.  “There’s a zero percent…”-- James Risen,   “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” New York Times, October 17, 2013

                              2.  “The instruction manual …”--Glenn Greenwald, “Guardian Journalist: Snowden docs contain NSA 'blueprint',” USA Today, June 15, 2013

                              3.  “A heart attack” when…”—Sound track, CitizenFour, op.cit

                              4.  “Keys to the Kingdom…”—Walter Pincus, “Snowden still holding ‘keys to the kingdom’,” Washington Post, December 18m 2013.  Also, Richard Ledgett interview, :60 Minutes,” CBS, December 15, 2013

                              5.  “Jack Dunlap and David Boone…”  See Appendix A.

                              6.  “Of these “touched” documents…”—Author’s Interview with Source A.

                              7.  “This total included documents…” Author’s interview with a staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who requested anonymity.

                              8.  “Snowden also disputed the…”—Bamford, Wired, op cit.

                              9.  “Via a Vice magazine…”--  Jason Leopold, “Inside Washington's Quest to Bring Down Edward Snowden,” Vice, June 4, 2015

                              10.  “A roadmap of what…”—The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair. op. cit.

                              11.  “The compartment logs showed…”—Author’s interview with Source A.

                              12.  "No intelligence service…”-- Glenn Greenwald, “Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey,” Guardian, July 16, 2013

                              13.  An answer came three…”-- Sophie Shevardnadze, “'Snowden believes he did everything right' - lawyer Anatoly Kucherena,” RT Television, September 23, 2013 //www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/snowden-russia-lawyer-kucherena-214/

                              14.  “I had all of…”—Author’s interview with Anatoly Kucherena

                              15.  “Shevardnadze, who told me…”—Author’s interview with Sophie Shevardnadze

                              16.  “He was correct that …”—Morell, op. cit. p. 287.  Also, Author’s interview with Anatoly Kucherena

                              17.  “Russian cyber service had…”—Author’s interview with a former member of the staff of the National Security Advisor.

                              18.  “State Department explicitly told…”-- Author’s interview with a former member of the staff of the National Security Advisor.

                              19.  “In this exchange…”-- James Risen, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” New York Times, October 17, 2013

                              20.   “I had spent ten years…”--Kashmir Hill, “How ACLU Attorney Ben Wizner Became Snowden's Lawyer,” Forbes, March 10, 2014

                              21.  “Russians can't break my finger …”-- NBC Interview with Brian Williams, op. cit.  See also The Snowden Saga, Vanity Fair. op.ed and Bamford. Wired. op.ed.

                                  19  “Chinese government had managed…”-- Jane Perlez and Keith Bradsher, “China Said to Have Made Call to Let Leaker Depart.” New York Times, June 23, 2013

                                  20  “Both the Chinese and the Russians…”—Morell. op. cit. p. 284

                                  21  .”What I can say…”—Snowden Interview, ARD-TV, January 26, 2014. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B95Id3j0M0lrdDA5WlZ4dllUbjg/preview

                                  22  “She urgently texted Snowden…”—Laura Poitras, CitizenFour.

                                  23  “Poitras’ co-interrogator of Snowden.” Jacob Appelbaum, “Edward Snowden Interview: The NSA and Its Willing Helpers.” Spiegel On Line, July 8, 2013

                                  24  “There was no document…”—Author’s interview with Source B

                                  25  “He reported that no…”—Bamford, Wired. op.cit

                                  26  “Another mole in the NSA…”-- Bamford, Wired. op.cit

                                  27  “Greenwald and Poitras also…”-- Staff, “Snowden leak: Israeli commandos killed Syrian general at dinner party.” Jerusalem Post, July 16, 2015/  Also, Author’s interview with Source B

                              28. “Putin publicly forbade him…”—Interview Channel One. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19143.  Also Author’s interview with former Russian intelligence officer who requested anonymity...

                              29. “If Snowden didn’t give...”—Author’s interview with Source B


                              30. “German federal prosecutor concluded…”-- Theodore Schleifer, “Germany drops probe into U.S. spying on Merkel,” CNN Politics,


                               June 13, 2015
                              31.  “ NSA lost sight of…”-- Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes and Siobhan Gorman, “U.S. Scurries to Shore Up Spying on Russia,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2013


                              32. “Britain also discovered…”-- Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman, “British spies betrayed to Russians and Chinese,” Sunday Times (London) June 14 2015.



                                   32.  “Losing some of its capabilities…”--Chris Strohm and Gopal Ratnam, “NSA Leader Seeks Openness on Secret Surveillance Orders.” Bloomberg News, June 13, 2013. Also Author’s Interview with a staff member of National Security Council who requested anonymity.


CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Unheeded Warning



          1.  “The NSA—the world’s…”—Morell, op. cit. p. 287
          2.  “Alexander Poteyev, a 54-year old…”-- Sergei L. Loiko, “Former Russian spymaster convicted of treason,” Los Angeles Times. June 28, 2011

          3.  “Harold Nicholson in 1996…"—See Harold Nicolson, Appendix A

          4.  “According to Pavel Sudoplatov…”—p.xxii

          5.  “The CIA learned of this…”—Author’s interview with Source B

          6.  Preparing these “Americans,”-- FBI, “Operation Ghost Stories: Inside the Russian Spy Case.” October 31,2011, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/october/russian_103111/russian_103111

          7.  “Angleton had pointed out…”—Author's interview with James Jesus Angleton.

          8.  “The situation suddenly changed…”-- Bill Gertz, “Counterspies hunt Russian mole inside National Security Agency,” Washington Times, December 1, 2010. Also, author’s interview with Bill Gertz.

          9.  “A counter-espionage probe…”—Author’s interview with former NSA executive who requested anonymity.

          10.  “Insider threats by trusted insiders…”--Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, “‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives.” Washington Post, August 25, 2013

          11.  “The pre-emptive arrests also…”-- Gregory L. White, “Russia Convicts Former Spy Official for Exposing Agents in U.S. Ring,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2011

          12.  “Turned up no evidence…”-- Author’s interview with former NSA executive who requested anonymity.

          13.  “Broke the record for…”—Tennent Bagley, Spy Master, (Sky Horse Publishing, New York) 2015, p.3

          14.  “Russia had dispatched at least…”—Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, (Doubleday, New York) 2007, pp.450-451.  Also, Walter Pincus, “CIA passed bogus news to presidents,” Washington Post, October 31, 1995

          15.  “There are no rivers…”—Michael Hayden interview in Wall Street Journal.   Gerald Baker, “Michael Hayden Says U.S. Is Easy Prey for Hackers,” Wall Street Journal June 22, 2015

          16.    “The best defense in this…”—Author’s interview with Source B/

          17.  “Meanwhile, it had become…”—Morell. op. cit. p. xv

































          CHAPTER NINETEEN
          The Rise of the NSA

          1.  “There are many things…” -- Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished, “ Washington Post, December 13, 2013

          2.  “By 1914, the US Army…”—National Security Agency, Pearl Harbor Review: The Black Chamber, NSA, 2009 https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/pearl_harbor_review/black_chamber.shtml

          3.   “Its sensitive ears catch ,,,”—David Kahn, The Codebreakers (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1967  p.358

          4.  “Expeditions to penetrate cables…”—Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, (Simon and Schuster, New York), 2005, pp. 471`-5

          5.  “In 1980, President Ronald Reagan…”—David R. Shedd, “How Obama Unilaterally Chilled Surveillance,” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2015

          6.  “We are approaching a…”--Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Houghton Mifflin, New York) 1985, p.92

          7.  “Vastness of the…”—Woodward. op.cit. p.202

          8.  “James Bond” provision of the…”--Ian Cobain, “How secret renditions shed light on MI6's license to kill and torture,” Guardian, February 13, 2012

          9.  “The NSA had assiduously…”Kevin Poulson, “New Snowden Leak Reports ‘Groundbreaking’ NSA Crypto-Cracking,” Wired. August 29, 2013

          10.  “Yes, my continental European…”—R. James Woolsey, “Why we spy on our allies,” Wall Street Journal. March 17, 2000

               11.  “Very foundation of US intelligence…”--John McLaughlin, “We need NSA to do what it does -- it makes us safer,” Press of Atlantic City, January 8, 2014

          12.  “It made leading hacktavists…”-- Charlie Savage, Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson and Henrik Moltke, “Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border,” New York Times, June 4, 2015

          13.   , Rajesh De, the NSA’s …”—Rajesh De, “Former NSA Lawyer on ‘Harm’ of Edward Snowden’s Revelations,” Bloomberg, July 27, 2015. https://bol.bna.com/former-nsa-lawyer-on-harm-of-edward-snowdens-revelations/

          14.  “The attack on Sony…”-- Rob Lever, “Some Experts Still Aren't Convinced That North Korea Hacked Sony,” Business Insider, December 30, 2014

          15.  “The Chinese are viewed …”--General Alexander quoted in: Kelley Vlahos, “America’s Already-Failed Cyber War,” The American Conservative, July 23, 2015

          16.  “We are bolstering our…”--Staff, “Black Budget: Congressional Budget Justification Excerpt,” Washington Post, August 30, 2013

          17.  “These compartments were the…”—Author’s interview with Source B

          18.   “The queen on our chessboard…”—Author’s interview with Source A

          19.  “To confront flagging morale…”—Author’s interview with Michael Haydon

          20.  “The nation has lost …”--Nicole Mulvaney,”NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers discusses freedom, privacy and security issues at Princeton University,” N.J. com. March 14, 2015.  http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2015/03/nsa_director_admiral_michael_rogers_during_princet.html

               21.  “Although repairing the damage…”-- Rachael King, “Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden's Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2014.

            CHAPTER TWENTY

            The NSA’s Back Door



            1.  “You have private for-profit …”--James Bamford and Tim De Chant, “Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare.” PBS Nova, January 8 2015
            2.  “Ames had been a...”—See Aldrich Ames, Appendix A

            3.  “All their classified information...”—Anonymous, “Out of Control,” NSA. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-009.pdf

            4.  “Whitworth came from a...”-- See Jerry Whitworth, Appendix A

            5.  “All of us just…”-- Gerald Baker, “Michael Hayden Says U.S. Is Easy Prey for Hackers,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2015

            6.  “White House lawyer …”-- Rajesh De, “Former NSA Lawyer on ‘Harm’ of Edward Snowden’s Revelations,” Bloomberg, July 27, 2015. https://bol.bna.com/former-nsa-lawyer-on-harm-of-edward-snowdens-revelations/

            7.  “North Korea in 1968…”-- John Prados and Jack Cheevers, “USS Pueblo: LBJ Considered Nuclear Weapons,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 453, January 23, 2014

                 8.  “Booz Allen, like all…”—  Booz Allen Hamilton issued a history of its evolution in 2004.,\ “Helping Clients Envision the Future,” PDF file, 2004 https://www.boozallen.com/content/dam/boozallen/documents/90th-History-Book-Complete.pdf

            9.  “The private company named… Julie Cresswell, “The Private Equity Firm That Grew Too Fast,” New York Times, April 24, 2015

            10.  “USIS had prematurely closed…”-- Tom Hamburger and Debbi Wilgoren, “Justice Department says USIS submitted 665,000 incomplete background checks,” Washington Post, January 23, 2014

            11.     “USIS was also opened to…”-- Ellen Nakashima, “DHS contractor suffers major computer breach, officials say,” Washington Post, August 6, 2014

            12.  “Successful 2011 attack on…”-- Andy Greenberg, “Anonymous Hackers Breach Booz Allen Hamilton,” Forbes, July 11, 2011

            13.  “A computer system called E-QIP…”-- Joe Davidson, “ Federal background check system shut down because of ‘vulnerability’,” Washington Post, June 29, 2015

            14.  “This memorandum noted the…”—Author’s interview with a former NSA executive who requested anonymity.

            15.  “NSA was set back…”-- Rachael King, “Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden's Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2014.

            CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

            The Russians are Coming

     1.  “The break-up of the…”--Nick Allen, “Soviet break-up was geopolitical disaster, says Putin,” The Telegraph, April 26, 2005

     2.  “ Russian units had managed…”-- Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes and Siobhan Gorman, “U.S. Scurries to Shore Up Spying on Russia,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2013

     3.  “Russian acronym SORM had…”-- Stephen Aftergood, “The Red Web: Russia and the Internet,” FAS, October 5, 2015. https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2015/10/red-web/


     4.  “William Martin and Bernon Mitchell…”—David P. Mowry, “Betrayers of the Trust,”  Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series, (NSA) February 28, 2003

     5.  “Victor Norris Hamilton…”-- Staff, “American Defector Is Found in Russian Prison,” New York Times, June 4, 1992

     6.  “He was found dead of…”—Edward Jay Epstein, “The Spy Wars,” New York Times, September 28, 1980

     7.  “Robert Lipka, a clerk…”—See Robert Lipka Appendix A

     8.  “ David Sheldon Boone…”—See David Boone, Appendix A

          9.  “Harold Nicholson, the CIA’s deputy…”— Elizabeth Farnsworth, “Update on the Case of CIA Agent Harold Nicholson,” PBS (Transcript) November 19, 1996. See Also “AFFIDAVIT IN SUPPORT OF COMPLAINT, ARREST WARRANT AND SEARCH WARRANTS UNITED STATES v. HAROLD J. NICHOLSON.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/ciaspy/affidavt.htm

          10.  “Well-experienced with false flags…”—Edward Jay Epstein, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA,(Simon and Schuster, New York) 1989, pp 22-28

          11.  “When it comes to recruiting moles…” –Author’s interviews with Angleton.

          12.  “The “Trust” deception…”-- Edward Jay Epstein, Deception: the Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA, (Simon and Schuster, New York) 1989, pp 22-28. Also, Author’s interview with Raymond Rocca, the CIA’s former research chief for the Counterintelligence staff.

          13.  “With “a learning experience…”-- Anonymous, “Out of Control,” NSA. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-009.pdf

          14.   “From the 127-page…”--David Larter and Andrew Tilghman, “Military clearance OPM data breach 'absolute calamity' ,” Navy Times, June 18, 2015

          15.   “It is next to impossible…”--Bruce Schneier quoted in Homer Jenkins, “The Anti-Hero of Silk Road.” Wall Street Journal, June 3,2015

          16.  “Under Putin, Russia had…”-- Nicole Perlroth, “Online Security Experts Link More Breaches to Russian Government, New York Times, October 28, 2014

          17.  “The Silk Road founder…”-- Homer Jenkins, “The Anti-Hero of Silk Road.” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2015.  Also author’s interview with a former Justice Department official who requested anonymity.

          18.  “Better cyber security than…”—Morell. op.cit. p. 291

       CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

       The Chinese Puzzle

     1.  “The first [false assumption] …”—Snowden video in Hong Kong


          2.  “Giving China its first…”--2014 Annual Report to Congress by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, quoted in David Tweed, “China Takes Nuclear Weapons Undersea Away From Prying Eyes, Bloomberg Business, December 8, 2014
          3.  “Results of decades of...”—Select Committee, U.S. Congress, Report, 1999. http://www.house.gov/coxreport/chapfs/over.html

          4.  “A vast enterprise in China…”-- Nir Kshetri, The Rapidly Transforming Chinese High-Technology Industry and Market (Chandos Publishing, London) 2008. p.92

          5.  “By 2007, Paul Strassmann…”-- Staff, “China 'has .75M zombie computers' in U.S.,”  UPI, September 17, 2007

          6.  “Cyber attack had harvested…”-- James Lewis, “Hackers May Have Obtained Names), New York Times, June 11,2015

          7.  “Those records are a legitimate...”-- Gerald Baker, “Michael Hayden Says U.S. Is Easy Prey for Hackers,” Wall Street Journal. June 21, 2015

     8.  "Any attempt to monopolize…"-- Patrick Goodenough, “Chinese President in Veiled Warning to the US: Don’t Try to ‘Monopolize Regional Affairs.’ CNS News May 22, 2014

          9.  “This mandate includes monitoring…”—Author’s interview with a dormer U.S. intelligence officer stationed in Hong Kong who requested anonymity.

     10.  “Regards Hong Kong as ...”—Author’s interview with Tyler Drumheller



          CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

         The Pawn in the Game

       1.  “The whole key is...”-- Transcript of interview with Snowden in Moscow. “I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,” Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript.
       2.  “Sources go dark that…”—ibid.

       3.  “Single point of failure…”—Ibid.

       4.  “If any further incentive…”—Morell. op.cit. p.286

       5.  “Snowden thinks he is…”-- Morell. op.cit.p.285

       6.  “The purpose of my…”--“I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,” Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

  7.  “The time pressure resulted…”-- Barton Gellman, “Code name ‘Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risk.” Washington Post, June 9, 2013

       8.  “This guy isn’t where…”-- I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,” Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

       9.  “It was a nervous period…”—ibid.

       10.  “I’m not going to…”—David Boyer, “Obama on Snowden: ‘I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker’,” Washington Times, June 27, 2013

       11.  “Angleton told me in…”—Author’s interview with James Jesus Angleton

       12.  “Sir David Omand, the…”-- Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman, “British Spies betrayed to Chinese and Russians,” Sunday Times (London), June 14, 2015

       13.    “Adding insult to injury…”--

       14.  Katrina vanden Heuval and Stephen F. Cohen, “Snowden Speaks: A Sneak Peek an Exclusive Interview,” The Nation, (website), October 10, 2014 http://www.thenation.com/article/edward-snowden-speaks-sneak-peek-exclusive-interview/



       CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
       Dinner with Oliver Stone

  1.  “I had to tune to…”--Stuart Kemp, “Oliver Stone Options Novel by Edward Snowden's Russian Lawyer,” Hollywood Reporter, June 10, 2013



       2.   “Before flying to Moscow…”—Author’s Interview with Oliver Stone
       3.  “$1 million dollars for…”--Mike Fleming, Jr. “Oliver Stone Buys Edward Snowden Russian Lawyer’s “Novel” About Asylum-Seeking Whistleblower,” Deadline, June 10, 2014

       4.  “For nine months...”- Bamford, Wired. op. cit.

       5.  “The only door to…”—Author’s email exchange with Lazamir Gotta




  6.         CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
        The Vanishing Act

       1.  . “The talk about Russia…”--“The NSA was actually…”--James Bamford and Tim De Chant, “Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare, Nova, PBS. January 8, 2015

       2.  8. “Izvestia, “a special operation…”— Andrei Gridasov, Igor Yavlyansky and Mary Gorkovskaya “Secret Services in Moscow with Wikileaks conducted Operation Snowden,” Izvestia, June 23, 2013

       3.  “If they [the U.S. Government]…”-- Katrina vanden Heuval and Stephen F. Cohen, “Snowden Speaks: A Sneak Peek an Exclusive Interview,” The Nation, (website), October 10, 2014

       4.   “Discussed the danger with Assange …”-- Assange interview, (London) Sunday Times. Giles Whittell, “Julian Assange unmasked.” Times Magazine, August 29, 2015.

       5.  “Everyone was screaming ‘Snowden’…”—Author’s interview with Irina Galushka

       6.   “Sarah Harrison told Vogue …”-- Sara Corbett. “How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport,” Vogue, February 19, 2015.

  7.  “So either the rule…”—The maximum stay is listed on the hotel’s website. http://www.eng.v-exp.ru/servicepayment/

       8.  “Traveling under a false name …”—Author’s interview with Irina Galushka,

       9.  “Statement on the Wikileaks…”-- “Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow,” https://wikileaks.org/Statement-from-Edward-Snowden-in.html

       10.  “Terminal D contains a…”—Author’s interview with Andrei Lugovoi.

       11.   “It was a total…”—Author’s Interview with Egor Piskunov

           CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

   Through the Looking Glass



1.  “There’s definitely a deep state…”-- Katrina vanden Heuval and Stephen F. Cohen, “Snowden Speaks: A Sneak Peek an Exclusive Interview,” The Nation, (website), October 10
       2.  “According to Cherkashin, Ames…”- Author’s interview with Victor Cherkashin
       3.  Morell. op.cit. p. 297

       4.  “Pelton had left the NSA…”- George E. Curry, “Ex-intelligence Expert Guilty Of Espionage, Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1986.Also, see Pelton in Appendix A

       5.  “Signed a copy of my book…”-- Edward Jay Epstein, James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right. op cit.  In handing Cherkashin my book, I told him that his recruitments of Ames and Hanssen had validated Angleton’s theory that the KGN was capable of sustaining long-term moles in U.S. intelligence.




6.                                   CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
                 The Handler



  1.  “As for his [Snowden’s] communication…”-- Anatoly Kucherena Interview, “Snowden believes he did everything right,” Sophie & Co, RT Television, September 23,2013
  2.  “I learned from a Russian researcher…”-- Author’s interview with Vassili Sonkine

  3.  “When I had been investigating…”—Edward Jay Epstein, Annals of Unsolved Crime, op.cit, pp. 209-240

  4.  “I don’t know him...”—Author’s interview with Andrei Lugovoi

  5.  “It was a rare…”— The vast majority of the 15 Americans defectors to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, including Joel Barr, Morris and Lona Cohen, Victor Hamilton, Edward Lee Howard, George Koval, Bernon Mitchell, William Martin, Isaiah Oggins, Alfred Sarant, Robert E. Webster and Flora Wovschin were involved in espionage.  The remaining three, Harold N. Kochs, a Catholic Priest protesting the Vietnam War, Arnold Lockshin, a Communist party organizer, and Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. Marine, defected for idealistic principles.  All were given asylum, and two, Webster and Oswald, redefected to the United States.

  6.  “They had been invited…”—Tanya Lokshinam “Meeting Edward Snowden,” Dispatches, July 13,2015 https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/12/dispatches-meeting-edward-snowden

  7.  “Read a prepared statement…”—“Statement by Edward Snowden,” July 12, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/Statement-by-Edward-Snowden-to.html.

  8.  “I asked  how he…”-- Author’s interview with Anatoly Kucherena.

  9.  “Kucherena had personally approved….”—Author’s interview with Sophie Shevardnadze

     CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

              Snowden’s Choices

     1.  “He also had access…”—Author’s interview with Source A

     2.  “Presidential Policy Directive 20…”—Greenwald. op.cit. p. 75

     3.  “Trace the theft of…”—Author’s interview with Michael Hayden

          4.  “I had a special level…”-- Edward Snowden and Peter Taylor, “Are you a traitor,” Transcript. BBC Panorama, October 15, 2015 (Aired on BBC October 10, 2015)

     5.  “Robert Hanssen changed positions…”—See Robert Hanssen, Appendix A

     6.  “In respect to China alone…”-- James Risen, “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” New York Times, October 17, 2013

     7.  “If things went wrong…”-- Edward Snowden and Peter Taylor, “Are you a traitor,” Transcript. BBC Panorama, October 15, 2015 (Aired on BBC October 10, 2015)
     8.  “Gellman considered Hong Kong…”-- Barton Gellman, “Code name ‘Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risk.” Washington Post, June 9, 2013

     9.  “First priority was to…”—Greenwald. op.cit. p.49

     10.  “Snowden obviously knew this…”—Author’s interview with Tyler Drumheller

     11.  “Snowden told the editor…”-- I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,” Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

     12.  “MacAskill offered him the…”—The Snowden Saga. Op.cit.

     13.  “He applied for the job…”—Author’s interview with a former Booz Allen employee who requested anonymity.

     14.  “He had also brought…”-- Edward Snowden and Peter Taylor, “Are you a traitor,” Transcript. BBC Panorama, October 15, 2015 (Aired on BBC October 10, 2015)



     15.  “He made contact with a…”--“Gellman considered Hong Kong…”-- Barton Gellman, “Code name ‘Verax’: Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risk.” Washington Post, June 9, 2013
     16.  “The mission’s already accomplished…”-- Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished, “ Washington Post, December 13, 2013

     17.  “His legal representative in Moscow…”-- Sophie Shevardnadze, “'Snowden believes he did everything right' - lawyer Anatoly Kucherena,” RT Television, September 23, 2013.




     18.  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
          The Whistle-Blower Who Became an Espionage Source



     1.  “The government’s investigation failed…” Bamford. Wired. Op.cit
     2.  “If I were providing…”-- “I, Spy: Edward Snowden in Exile,” Ewen MacAskill and Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian, July 18, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-interview-transcript

     3.  “For our enemies, having...”—Morell. op.cit. p. 294

          4.   “There is no way…”—Author’s interview with an intelligence source who requested anonymity

     5.  “Pelton, for example, who…”—Author’s interview with Victor Cherkashin.

     6.  Staff, “Congressman says Snowden planned escape to China,” UPI. June 16, 2013

     7.  Donald Rumsfeld, Press Conference at NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium, June 6, 2002

       CHAPTER THIRTY

       The Consequences for the War on Terror



  1.  “Because of a number of…”--Amy Davidson, “Don’t Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks,” The New Yorker, November 19, 2015
       2.  “None of the communications…”-- David Gauthier-Villars, “Paris Attacks Show Cracks in France’s Counterterrorism Effort,” Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2015

       3.  “Testimony of General Alexander…”--  Ellen Nakashima,“Officials: Surveillance programs foiled more than 50 terrorist plots.” Washington Post, June 18, 2013

       4.  “A third NSA program…”-- Glenn Greenwald, “XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet,” Guardian. July 31, 2013

       5.  “To assist furtive Internet users…”--  Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, “Edward Snowden Interview: The NSA and Its Willing Helpers.” Spiegel Online International. Jul 8, 2013

       6.  “Within weeks of the…”—Morell, op.cit. p.294

       7.  : What heightened Morell’s concern…”—ibid. p.315

       8.  “The NSA was also…”—Author’s interview with Source A

       9.  “Admiral Rogers, the new…”-- Bill Gertz, “NSA Director: Snowden’s Leaks Helped Terrorists Avoid Tracking,” Washington Free Beacon,February 24, 2015


















     10.      APPENDEX A
        SPIES AND ESPIONAGE SOURCES
[TK]
























4
Topics

government oversight investigative journalism national security
People Mentioned

Barack Obama 44th President of the United States
Bill Clinton Former U.S. President
George H W Bush
Hillary Clinton Former Secretary of State
Jeffrey Epstein Financier
Edward Snowden NSA Whistleblower
Edward Jay Epstein Investigative Journalist
Sarah Harrison WikiLeaks Deputy
Oliver Stone Film Director
Julian Assange WikiLeaks Co-founder