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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 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 the rights of its citizens. Putin, smiling at Snowden’s presumably vetted question, answered in a single word: “No.”
In the Moscow scenario, the Russians acted to advance their interests. They gave Snowden sanctuary, support, perks, and high-level treatment because he agreed to cooperate with them. If Snowden had not paid this basic price of admission, either in Russia or before his arrival, he would not have been accorded this privileged status.
CHAPTER 17
The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing
There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013
A CRITICAL MISSING PIECE in the 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 that 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, for his part, said on camera in his Hong Kong interview in June 2013 that NSA investigators would have “a heart attack” when they discovered the extent of the breach.
Ledgett, the NSA official who had conducted the damage assessment, while not having a heart attack, confirmed that Snowden had taken a massive number of documents and among them was what he deemed the NSA’s “keys to the kingdom.” These keys could presumably open up the mechanism through which 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 sixty 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 Sheldon Boone, who took a limited number of documents, but no one since the end of the Cold War is known to have taken a single NSA classified document. Now an insider had removed a vast number of the NSA’s documents. Many of these documents were classified TS/SCI—“Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information”—which, as NSA secrets went, were deemed the gold standard of espionage because they revealed the sources used in communications intelligence. Whatever the assessment of Snowden’s motivation, the single question that needed to be answered was, what happened to these stolen files?
Recall the 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. When the House and Senate Intelligence Committees asked the NSA how many documents Snowden took, the NSA could not come up with a definitive number despite having employed a world-class team of experts to reconstruct the crime. The NSA could say that 1.7 million documents had been selected in two dozen NSA computers during Snowden’s brief tenure at Booz Allen in 2013, including documents from the Department of Defense, the NSA, and the CIA. Of these “touched” documents, some 1.3 million had been copied and moved to another computer.
There was evidence that Snowden had used preprogrammed spiders to find and index the documents. He had said that he took the job at Booz Allen to get access to data that he copied. So as far as the NSA was concerned, of course, 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. As a system administrator there, he could download data without leaving a digital trail. As previously mentioned, more than half the documents actually published in newspapers had been taken during Snowden’s time at Dell.
Snowden’s supporters do not accept that he 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 magnitude of the 1.7 million number. He told James Bamford of Wired in early 2014 that he took far fewer than the 1.7 million documents that the NSA reported were compromised. He offered, however, no more specific details on the magnitude of his theft. Nor did he offer Bamford any way to verify his assertion other than to say that he had purposely left behind “a trail of digital bread crumbs” at the NSA base in Hawaii so that the NSA could determine which documents he “touched” but did not download. A government official familiar with the investigation said no such “bread crumbs” were found by the NSA.
It is possible that the NSA Damage Assessment team under Ledgett falsified its findings or otherwise inflated the number of documents that Snowden stole. NSA executives might have also lied to Congress to exaggerate the loss. But why would these officials engage in an orchestrated deception that made them look bad? Exaggerating the magnitude of the theft would only magnify Ledgett and the NSA’s failure in its mission to protect U.S. secrets.
Officials had no reason to demonize Snowden for legal reasons. He already had been. Greenwald and Poitras had already 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 fewer than 58,000 highly classified documents. In the eyes of the law, that constituted an unprecedented breach of the laws passed to protect communications intelligence. In any case, in Russia Snowden was not in any jeopardy, no matter how many documents he was said to have stolen. Interestingly, the thirty-five-page Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment reports that 900,000 Pentagon documents compromised by Snowden were not made public. That was only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015.
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 whole story. Of far more importance 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 multibillion-dollar apparatus for intercepting foreign intelligence. The previously cited road map, which was thirty-one thousand pages long, listed critical gaps in U.S. coverage of China, Russia, and other adversaries, including those cited by President Obama’s national security team. It was not found among the files on the thumb drive given to Poitras and Greenwald. 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 had 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 when he arrived on May 20. On June 3, according to Greenwald, Snowden had sorted through the documents to determine which ones were appropriate to give to journalists. On June 12, he told the 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. 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 the 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 soon came from Snowden’s Moscow lawyer. On September 23, Anatoly Kucherena was extensively interviewed on the RT channel in Russia. The interviewer, Sophie Shevardnadze, who had a show called SophieCo, was a well-admired journalist. She is the granddaughter of Eduard 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 because, until then, he had not discussed Snowden in a television interview.
About halfway through the interview, Shevardnadze brought up the highly sensitive subject of the disposition of the NSA documents. 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 interest 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.
Had Snowden come to Russia with empty hands or bearing gifts? Shevardnadze directly asked Kucherena if Snowden had given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong. Kucherena answered her question without any evasion, saying 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 he considered too sensitive for these journalists, he retained for himself. U.S. investigators at the NSA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense would like to know what Snowden did with the set of documents he had retained for himself and had not shared with the journalists in Hong Kong.
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.
Shevardnadze asked the next logical question: “Why did Russia get involved in this whole thing if it got nothing out of it?”
Kucherena replied, “Snowden spent quite a few years working for the CIA. We haven’t fully realized yet the importance of his revelations.” Kucherena was on the FSB’s public oversight board. He was clearly in the picture. Kucherena’s answer was completely consistent with the statement Snowden made three weeks after arriving in Russia in his previously mentioned e-mail to Senator Humphrey.
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 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 Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other Internet companies. Anyone who is connected to the Internet can store and retrieve files by entering a user name and a password.
For Kucherena to be certain Snowden had access to the so-far-unrevealed data, Snowden must have demonstrated his access either to him or to the authorities. The Russians obviously knew Snowden had the means to retrieve this data one way or the other. Because the data concerned electronic espionage against Russia, the FSB would have been keen to obtain the documents, and the FSB is not known to take no for an answer in issues involving espionage.
Even if Snowden refused to furnish his key encryption, 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 it would have had to go through the trouble. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that, 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 on the television program may also help to explain Putin’s decision to allow Snowden to come to Moscow. 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 also it would add to Putin’s personal credibility in advance of the Olympic Games in Russia. In mid-June, after U.S. 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. Putin knew the downside of admitting Snowden.
But if Snowden had a large archive of files containing the sources of the NSA’s electronic interceptions, as Snowden claimed he had in Hong Kong, there was an enormous potential intelligence upside. Putin had to choose between the loss of an Obama summit and an intelligence coup. Would Putin have made the choice he did 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 believe that, as Kucherena said, the documents Snowden brought to Russia explain why Russia exfiltrated him from Hong Kong and provided him with a safe haven.
The Quickly Changing Narrative
Three weeks after Kucherena’s appearance on Shevardnadze’s show, on October 17, Snowden had his first interview exchange with a journalist since his arrival in Russia. It was over the Internet with James Risen of The New York Times, as noted earlier. Snowden now asserted a very different narrative. The subsequent front-page story, which carried the headline “Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia,” reported that Snowden claimed he gave all his documents to journalists in Hong Kong and 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, Snowden’s ACLU lawyer in Washington, D.C. Wizner had joined the ACLU in August 2001 after graduating from 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 frequently been consulted by Poitras on government surveillance issues (and appeared in Poitras’s 2010 documentary, The Oath). He had also been engaged in a lawsuit aimed at exposing the NSA’s subpoenas for Verizon records.
He had first learned about Snowden from Poitras in January 2013 while Snowden was still working for Dell at the NSA base in Hawaii. At that time, Poitras did not know Snowden’s real name, but she informed Wizner that she was in touch with a person identifying himself as a senior officer in U.S. intelligence. (Poitras did not know at that time that her source, Snowden, was lying to her about his position.) Wizner also was shown e-mails by Poitras in which Snowden said he had information about the government’s secret domestic surveillance program. Wizner, according to Poitras, advised her to stay in touc
h with this source.
On July 13, 2013, after Snowden asked for asylum in Russia, Kucherena arranged an encrypted chat between Snowden and Wizner. According to Wizner, Snowden asked him at the outset, “Do you have standing now?” It was a question that suggested that Snowden was aware that the ACLU needed to gain standing in federal court to challenge the government’s alleged domestic surveillance. Up until now, it was unsuccessful because it had no way to show it was a victim of surveillance. The FISA order to Verizon, which Snowden had taken had provided that standing to Wizner and the ACLU.
Aside from the opportunity Snowden offered the ACLU, Wizner no doubt believed in the salutary benefit of Snowden’s revelations. When they discussed Snowden’s legal situation in America, Snowden expressed an interest in obtaining some form of amnesty from prosecution. 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 an NSA whistle-blower presented a serious challenge for Wizner. The ACLU had been involved with previous NSA whistle-blowers, but Snowden’s case differed from those cases in important ways. Those whistle-blowers had not intentionally taken any NSA documents. Snowden, on the other hand, had not only taken a large number of NSA documents but also released tens of thousands of these top secret files to journalists based in Germany and Brazil, as well as to other unauthorized recipients. In addition, the Whistleblower Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1989, does not exempt an insider, such as Snowden, who signs a secrecy oath from the legal consequences of disclosing classified documents to journalists or other unauthorized people. Consequently, getting some form of amnesty for Snowden required bolstering his image as a person taking personal risks to fight for America. But if Snowden had taken even a single top secret document to Russia, it would strengthen the case in the court of public opinion that he had stolen communications intelligence secrets with the intent to damage the United States, which under the provisions of federal law could be considered espionage. In this regard, Kucherena’s disclosure was extremely damaging to Snowden’s position, and Snowden had, after all, already found refuge in Russia. Snowden had two options, according to Wizner, the “first is to be where he is in Russia. And the second is to be in a maximum security prison cell, cut off from the world.” These, of course, would be the options of any espionage defector who fled to Russia.
How America Lost Its Secrets Page 19
