How many days he planned to be in Hong Kong depended on how speedily he could arrange a meeting with journalists. “The purpose of my [Hong Kong] mission was to get the information to journalists,” he told the editor of The Guardian after he was safely ensconced in Moscow. He indicates that he was working under a tight clock. The time pressure resulted in his e-mailing an ultimatum to Gellman on May 24: either Gellman would publish the selected documents in The Washington Post within seventy-two hours, or he would lose the exclusive scoop. Snowden wanted the story to break on May 27, without his true identity (which Gellman did not know) attached to it. His identity would be known to a foreign mission in Hong Kong if Gellman acceded to his demands, because, 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, Snowden had plans to deal with a foreign mission. If the Post had accepted his terms, Snowden would have been in a very different position. The story would have broken before Poitras or Greenwald even knew about Snowden’s presence in Hong Kong, and his identity would be secret except for whatever foreign mission he had contacted. But, as we know, the Post turned down his ultimatum.
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 3, when he was supposed to return from his medical leave. If he failed to show up in Hawaii on June 3, alarm bells at the NSA would go off, and it would not take long to find him. Airline records would show that he had flown to Hong Kong. Snowden told Poitras that NSA security would ask, “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 not take long to determine that he had lied about his medical treatment, and then the hunt would begin.
He had, remember, already sent Poitras an enciphered file and told her she would get the key once she followed his instructions. Greenwald had still not committed himself to meeting Snowden. Greenwald was, however, willing to publish the documents once Snowden provided them. That Snowden remained in Hong Kong suggests that his reason for going to and remaining in Hong Kong went beyond just delivering documents to journalists, which he could have done over the Internet. What he could not do in America, without risking arrest, was to make and release a video.
In any event, after his attempt to pressure the Post, Snowden asked Greenwald to fly immediately to Hong Kong. Presumably, he still wanted Greenwald’s story and the video done in Hong Kong before he became a suspect. If Greenwald and Poitras had immediately flown to Hong Kong, it still might have left Snowden an escape window.
But of course 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, as we know, Greenwald and Poitras did not arrive at his hotel in Hong Kong until June 3, only hours before Snowden became suspect at the NSA. “It was a nervous period,” Snowden recalled. Although he bravely told The Guardian “there was no risk” that the information he carried had been compromised by other parties in Hong Kong, that claim was, at best, wishful thinking on his part.
By this time, he had registered at the hotel under his true name and provided his credit card; he was in contact with three high-profile journalists, two well-known hacktivists, and, as he suggested to Gellman, a foreign diplomatic mission.
The mission’s interest would likely be piqued when the newspaper published its first story on June 6. Greenwald then went on TV in Hong Kong, revealing to every interested intelligence service that a defector from the NSA was in Hong Kong providing secret documents.
Poitras released the famous video showing Snowden and secret NSA documents three days later. At this point, Snowden shone brightly as a beacon to NSA secrets to every player in the intelligence game, even if they did not know the extent of the damage he could inflict on American intelligence.
Snowden fogged over his travel plans to the media by telling reporters that he intended to remain in Hong Kong and fight extradition, but certainly the Russian officials whom he contacted became aware that he had other plans, having relayed his request to go to Russia to their superiors in Moscow. And, unlike the media, any sophisticated intelligence service was well aware of his movements. In Hong Kong, cell phones emit their GPS location every three seconds; even if Snowden disabled his own phone, lawyers and helpers could be tracked with ease.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, who was meeting President Obama for the first time in Rancho Mirage, California, on June 8, would have been keenly interested in the unfolding Snowden affair. Obama had publicly called Xi to task for Chinese cyber espionage, and now that charge was undermined by Snowden’s accusation that the United States was engaged in massive cyber espionage. U.S. intelligence verified that China instituted a full-court press of Snowden in Hong Kong immediately after the release of the video. From that moment on, any communication or movement Snowden made during his next fifteen days in Hong Kong would not likely escape China’s scrutiny.
The United States had the ability to also follow Snowden’s movements via the cell phones of his lawyers and other confederates after he surfaced. All tracking could be done by the NSA. What the United States lacked was any practical means to capture a high-profile intelligence defector in a city that was part of China. By this time, U.S. 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 United States. “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a twenty-nine-year-old hacker,” President Obama said on June 27.
The real prize, in any case, was not Snowden but the NSA’s secret documents that he had with him. When Snowden was observed entering the Russian consulate, the game was all but over. U.S. 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 would stop the Russians. Two days later, the “single point of failure,” as Snowden described himself, was on his way to Russia, where his hosts would be calling the shots.
When a victory is obtained in a major sports event, it is cause for public celebrations. The opposite is true in espionage. 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, 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. 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 house had been used to quarter Snowden in his first eleven days in Hong Kong, it would be shut down. If any operatives had been used in Hawaii to guide or assist Snowden, they would be put back into sleeper mode. If any telltale 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 or misleading 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.
To review: When the NSA asserted in the summer of 2013 that over one million documents had been compromised, it was recognizing the most massive failure in its sixty-year history. Not only were NSA secrets taken, 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 former head of the British GCHQ, described it, a “huge strategic setback” for the West. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. 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 U.S. and British intelligence officers worked around the clock in Washington, D.C., Fort Meade, Maryland, and Cheltenham, England, for months on end to determine which parts of the most powerful communications intelligence system in the world could be salvaged from what had been the Snowden breach.
Adding insult to injury, Snowden, speaking from his new perch in Moscow, told applauding audiences that the entire purpose of the U.S. exercise, including deliberately “trapping” him in Moscow, was to “demonize” him. “There was no question that I was going to be subject to a demonization campaign.” Snowden said in Moscow, “They [Greenwald and Poitras] actually recorded me on camera saying this before I revealed my identity.” Snowden asserted this “demonization” was to divert attention from the government’s own crimes. By providing Snowden with this platform to rail against the putative machinations of the United States, Putin laid claim to the moral high ground.
Snowden’s motive in requesting documents from other foreign intelligence services, such as the GCHQ, and copying lists of NSA sources remains unexplained. It is difficult to believe that his motive was whistle-blowing, because these documents were not among those he gave to journalists in Hong Kong. Indeed, he did not provide the journalists with the lists of sources that were particularly relevant to the NSA’s surveillance of Russia. His legal representative in Moscow, Kucherena, confirmed that Snowden had taken secret “material” to Russia and had access to NSA documents that he had not given to journalists. Those unrevealed documents would be prized by many an adversary service. Did he use those documents as leverage in his transformation? The role that Moscow might have played in Snowden’s defection clearly requires a closer examination of the machinations that brought Snowden to Russia. That is why I visited Moscow in October 2015.
PART FOUR
MOSCOW CALLING
Deception is a state of mind—and the mind of the state.
—JAMES JESUS ANGLETON
CHAPTER 24
Off to Moscow
They talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s great.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2015
BEFORE FLYING TO MOSCOW, I arranged to have dinner with Oliver Stone at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of New York. I had greatly respected Stone’s ability as a film director after watching him work on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a film in which I had a cameo role. I had also debated Stone about the historical accuracy of his 1991 movie JFK at Town Hall in New York.
When we dined, he had just written, produced, and directed Snowden, an independently financed film depicting Snowden, as Stone put it, as “one of the great heroes of the twenty-first century.” In preparing for it, Stone had seen Snowden in 2013 and 2014 and had had a six-hour meeting with Putin.
I wanted to talk to Stone not to learn about the film but to learn how he had gained access to Snowden in Moscow. I 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 Files, a book written by Luke Harding. These documents also revealed that Stone had paid Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s legal representative in Moscow, $1 million, supposedly for the rights to his novel, Time of the Octopus. Even by Hollywood standards, $1 million was an extraordinary sum to pay for a yet-to-be-published work of Russian fiction, and it was especially striking because Stone was making a fact-based movie using the actual names of the characters, and he had already bought the rights to The Snowden Files.
“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.
Lawyers often negotiate deals on behalf of a client, but blocking a competing film requires considerably more influence with the powers that be in Russia. Kucherena, though, was no ordinary lawyer. Among other influential positions, I noted earlier, he was on the public board of the Russian federal security bureau, which had assumed the domestic operations of the defunct KGB in April 1995. In light of such connections, Stone said Kucherena might be acting as an intermediary for other parties who controlled access to Snowden in Russia. In any case, his concern was making a movie, and Kucherena delivered the exclusive access to Snowden.
Aside from being a skilled director, Stone is a shrewd producer who knows how to close a deal. He assessed, correctly as it turned out, that his project coupled with the payment to Kucherena would effectively block Sony’s competing project. Where the money went was far less clear.
Toward the end of our dinner, Stone told me that he did not know I was writing a book about Snowden until a few weeks earlier. He learned of my book from Snowden himself. He said Snowden had expressed concern to him about the direction of the book I was writing. “What is it about?” Stone asked me.
I was taken aback. I had no idea that Snowden was aware of my book. (I had not tried to contact him.) I told Stone that I considered Snowden an extraordinary man who had changed history and was intentionally vague in my description of my book’s contents. Stone seemed to be reassured, so I asked him about the possibility of my seeing Snowden in Moscow. He said that I “might want to speak to Anatoly [Kucherena].” Kucherena, it seemed to me, was clearly Snowden’s gatekeeper.
In Snowden’s two years in Moscow, he, or his handlers, had granted only a handful of face-to-face press interviews. Most of these were with the journalists who had published his story, but one was with James Bamford for his 2014 Wired piece. According to Bamford, 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,” Bamford recounted in Wired. After my dinner with Stone, I hoped to find a quicker route.
I was advised by a Moscow-based journalist that I needed a “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 to me. “His name is Kucherena.” Zamir said Kucherena rarely saw journalists, but he had a contact in his office. He further told me Kucherena required any journalist seeking an interview with Snowden to submit his questions to the lawyer two weeks in advance and, if approved, to sign a document stating he 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 Hotel Nat
ional in Red Square because Snowden had gone there for previous meetings with Bamford. So I sent Kucherena, via Zamir, ten questions that I wanted to ask Snowden.
I next obtained a multi-entry Russian visa from the Russian consulate in New York and booked myself a room in the Hotel National.
My night flight from New York to Moscow took just less than eight hours and landed at Terminal D of Sheremetyevo International Airport at 7:40 a.m. on October 29, 2015. I did not immediately proceed through passport control, in part because I wanted to explore the transit zone in which Snowden was supposedly trapped 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 Terminals 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 to journalists, as will be recalled, was two part. First, he said he had planned to board the next fight to Cuba and from there proceed to Ecuador. He said that he was unable to board this flight because his passport had been invalidated by the U.S. government while he was flying to Russia. Second, after discovering his passport had been revoked, he stayed in a capsule hotel in the transit zone for the next thirty-nine 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 p.m. Moscow time on June 23, 2013.
How America Lost Its Secrets Page 27
