How America Lost Its Secrets

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Snowden did not go through passport control upon arrival. 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 WikiLeaks-supplied “ninja,” to accompany them to a waiting car that whisked them away. According to the account in Izvestia, “A special operation was conducted for his reception and evacuation.” It further said, “Snowden’s flight to Moscow was coordinated with the Russian authorities and intelligence services.”

  If not for the “special operation,” he could have easily gone by foot to Terminal E. It is a nine-minute walk through the transit passageway. Snowden, though, had one good reason for not going to Ecuador, even if Russia had permitted it. He believed that he would be vulnerable to rendition 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 the previously cited interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, in 2014. He had already discussed the likelihood of his being captured in Ecuador with Assange before his departure for Moscow. He later told Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, that he considered himself at risk in Latin America. So why would Snowden, who told Greenwald that his “first priority” was his own “physical safety,” leave the comparative safety of Russia to put himself in jeopardy in Ecuador?

  He had not obtained a visa to Ecuador at its consulate in Hong Kong, as Kucherena confirmed. The Ecuador destination was, as we have seen, a cover story put out by Assange and his associates, and it worked with the press.

  Over a hundred reporters and photographers scrambled aboard Aeroflot Flight SU150 to Cuba the next morning in response to this anonymous tip on a website, but Snowden was not aboard that flight and was not seen in Terminal E. By the time the plane landed in Cuba, Aeroflot denied that anyone named Snowden had ever been booked on any of its flights 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 still in Russia came on July 1, 2013. A statement posted on the WikiLeaks website—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.” In fact, Snowden had not suffered a “penalty of exile,” because his passport was still valid for returning to the United States, but that was not an option for him as the statement made clear.

  Because the Aeroflot flight to Cuba was the only means of getting directly from Moscow to Latin America, Russian reporters, encouraged by WikiLeaks posts, continued taking the daily eleven-hour flight to Cuba until August 1. 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.

  Sarah Harrison, Snowden’s companion on the plane to Moscow, told Vogue that she and Snowden for thirty-nine days had shared a windowless room in the transit zone of the airport 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.

  The polite V-Express desk clerk, who spoke English, showed me the standard windowless double room. It was approximately twenty-four square feet in area. Most of the floor space was taken up by twin beds. Across from the bed, behind a plastic curtain, was a stall with a shower, a toilet, and a sink. It would be very cramped quarters for two people to share for such an extended period. It cost 850 rubles an hour (about $18 in 2013). For thirty-nine days, that hourly charge would have added up to $16,600. Snowden claimed to the BBC that he brought a large cache of cash to Russia, which he could have used to pay the hotel. But such a long stay was not allowed, according to the desk clerk. The maximum stay allowed by the hotel was twenty-four hours. So either the rule was waived for Snowden, or Harrison did not tell the full truth.

  I learned from a former KGB officer that there are VIP quarters beyond the confines of the airport, including suites at the four-hundred-room Novotel hotel, which is located about seven miles away, 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 Snowden was staying elsewhere would help explain the futile search for him by a large number of reporters over those thirty-nine days. When they learned from tweets that Snowden was not aboard the plane to Havana on June 24, for weeks they aggressively questioned all the restaurant employees, security guards, and airport personnel they could find. They also bought business-class tickets on flights just to gain access to VIP lounges in the transit zones. Despite this intensive search, none of them found a single person who had seen Snowden, although his image was constantly shown on airport TV screens. Egor Piskunov, a reporter for RT television, even rented a room in the V-Express Capsule Hotel and “tipped” hotel employees, trying, without success, to get information. Piskunov told me, “It was a total vanishing act.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Through the Looking Glass

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

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014

  WHILE WAITING to hear back from Kucherena’s office, I arranged to meet with Victor Cherkashin, who had 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 and now operated a private security firm in Moscow. I was particularly interested in his recruitment of three top American intelligence officers: Aldrich Ames of the CIA, Robert Hanssen of the FBI, and Ronald Pelton of 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 Chekhov Theater in Moscow.

  Cherkashin, a tall thin man with silver hair, showed up promptly at 1:00 p.m., wearing an elegant gray suit and dark tie. He walked with a spry step. Because he had served in counterintelligence in the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., for nearly a decade, he spoke flawless English.

  I began by asking him about one of the more celebrated cases he had handled for the KGB, that of Ames, who had acted as a Russian mole in the CIA 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 between $20,000 and $50,000 in cash 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. When assessing Ames’s biographical data, Cherkashin said he was looking for a well-placed intelligence officer who was both dissatisfied with and antagonistic to the service for which he worked.

  “The classic disgruntled 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.

  Because Ames had been paid $50,000 in cash by Cherkashin for his first delivery, I asked whether he fit into the category of a disgruntled employee.

  “Wasn’t he just a mercenary?” I asked.

  “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 against 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 a 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,” 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 with Cherkashin: the Robert Hanssen case. From the KGB’s perspective, Hanssen was an extraordinary espionage source. He was a walk-in who never entered the Soviet embassy or met with KGB case officers, but in working as a KGB mole between 1979 and 2001, he had delivered even more documents to the Russian intelligence services than Ames. Cherkashin learned of this potential spy when he received an anonymous letter from him identifying an FBI source in the Soviet embassy. When that tip proved to be accurate, Cherkashin got the resources he needed from the KGB to develop this source. 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 the SVR) paid him $600,000 in cash. In return, the anonymous spy delivered twenty-seven computer disks containing hundreds of secret documents revealing the sources and methods of American intelligence. According to Cherkashin, it was the largest haul of top secret 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 because 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 he had recruited. Cherkashin told me that what mattered 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 elected to provide it with U.S. secrets was a spy.

  “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 who provided secrets to the KGB and the SVR for twenty-two 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 by far our most valuable penetration in the Cold War.”

  “Could Hanssen really be called a mole?” I asked.

  “A ‘mole’ is a term used in spy fiction,” he said. “We prefer 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.

  “If some unknown person simply delivered a trove of communications secrets to the doorstep of Russia, would 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 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, D.C., and asked to see an intelligence officer. After he was ushered into a 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 no longer had access to the NSA. In addition, because the FBI had twenty-four-hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed entering it and had also possibly been recorded asking for an intelligence officer by electronic bugs that the KGB suspected the NSA had planted there. What did the KGB do in a situation in which a former 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 because the KGB rarely got access to any NSA officer, it was worth the risk. So Pelton 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 electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for fifteen days, were from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. 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 to the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB.

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

  “As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was compromised by Pelton, we could use the cable to send the NSA the information we wanted it to intercept.” He said that 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 another debriefing to see if he could recall any further details. According to Cherkashin, the KGB’s job was to leave no stone unturned when it came to the NSA’s sources. In 1985, the KGB’s task ended when Pelton was arres
ted by the FBI. Like Ames and Hanssen, Pelton was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Looking at his watch, Cherkashin politely excused himself.

  I subsequently spoke to Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who had been a foreign intelligence officer in the KGB between 1958 and 1985 and continued his intelligence work until recently as chief counterterrorism expert of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Over a leisurely coffee in the bar of the Hotel National, he told me that many “walk-ins” who contacted Soviet officials in his time were emotionally disturbed, but all of them had to be assessed for possible intelligence value. “Our job was to find espionage sources,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “The Internet has changed the espionage business since secret documents can be massively downloaded by an unhappy employee,” he said, “but they still need to be assessed by a professional.”

  Through the eyes of the KGB, a penetration of American intelligence was clearly opportunistic. If these practices continued, they put Snowden’s situation in a new light for me. If Russian intelligence considered it worthwhile to send a former civilian worker at the NSA, such as Ronald Pelton, two thousand miles from Washington, D.C., 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 were 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 obviously have little hesitancy in acquiring the secrets that Snowden had stolen of his own volition, even if Snowden had 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 former 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 might 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, with both the documents he had taken and the knowledge he had in his head, to deliver the KGB such a coup.