The documents he stole at Booz Allen certainly increased his value to adversary nations, because they included lists revealing the NSA’s sources in Russia, China, and other foreign countries.
Snowden wanted more than just 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 allies of the NSA. “I had a special level of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac,’ ” he said. This “priv ac” status did not allow him to bypass the password protection at sealed-off compartments at the NSA, but it did allow him to request files from foreign 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 Snowden knew, 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. 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 Western intelligence services is not the conventional mission of a whistle-blower. In the parlance of CIA counterintelligence, the actions of an employee of an intelligence service who changes his jobs solely to steal the more valuable secrets of this service is called an “expanding penetration.” It is not possible to believe that Snowden did not know the immense damage that the highly sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its allies could cause.
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. 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’s 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 had hacked into.
He also knew he was undertaking a dangerous enterprise. He even mentioned the possibility that he would be “in an orange jumpsuit, super-max prison in isolation or Guantánamo,” perhaps even assassinated.
He knowingly chose this course presumably because he believed the value of the secrets he would obtain by switching jobs outweighed the risk of imprisonment. Or worse. 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). His choice to widen his access was made, if not to get rich, to empower himself.
The Second Decision
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 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 an 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, whose cooperation he sought. Snowden could have gone to many other countries without extradition treaties with the United States. Yet, instead, he flew to Hong Kong, which had an extradition agreement that had been enforced throughout the past decade with Hong Kong courts ordering the arrest of almost every fugitive charged by U.S. authorities. He could expect that when the United States filed a criminal complaint, Hong Kong authorities would seize him and the alleged stolen property of the U.S. government in his possession. Even if he were released on bail and successfully defeated extradition in a Hong Kong court, the Hong Kong authorities would almost certainly retain all the NSA and GCHQ files he had gone to such lengths to steal.
His reason, as he told Greenwald, was that China could provide him with physical protection from any countermeasures by U.S. intelligence agencies such as “American agents…breaking down the door” of the hotel room and seizing him. China also had sway over Hong Kong’s security activities.
Hong Kong was therefore merely a protected stopover en route to his next destination. If he had gone directly to Moscow and 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 Decision
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 The Washington Post but also incriminated himself further on camera by allowing Poitras to film him actually disclosing the 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 Four.” In fact, in late May 2013, that was exactly what he did. He anonymously sent Gellman the PRISM scoop, which the Post published on June 6. He also sent Greenwald and Poitras documents while he was still the anonymous Citizen Four. 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 3, the 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 having any suspicion fall on his co-workers at the NSA. Yet in the initial stories published by Greenwald, Poitras, and Gellman, Snowden had not allowed the reporters to identify him by either name or position. If he did not act to deflect suspicion from his co-workers for the initial investigation, why do it a week later? In the intervening week, the FBI had already launched its criminal investigation. In any case, he did not need to be the subject of a documentary film to take sole responsibility for stealing state secrets. He could have simply allowed Greenwald to identify him by name as the source in the stories.
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’s video with an altered voice, he would not achieve fame. To do that, he needed to allow Poitras to film him committing the crime of turning over NSA docu
ments to Greenwald. This video was also part of his advance planning. Indeed, one reason he chose Poitras was that she was a prizewinning documentary filmmaker. Snowden, while he was still working at the NSA in March 2013, made it clear how he intended to use Poitras’s filmmaking skills. He told her, “My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back.” Making himself the on-camera star of a twenty-hour-long reality show, edited first into a video and then a full-length documentary, transformed him in the public’s mind into a hero.
It would be a mistake to assume that the central role he gave himself was simply an exercise in narcissism. After the video was released, he was no longer a near nonentity servicing a computer system at a backwater NSA base in Hawaii. He had emerged from the shadowy world of electronic intelligence to become 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 as the leading opponent of NSA spying. While this remarkable transformation might not have been his entire motive, it was certainly the result of the choice he made to go public.
The Fourth Decision
The final choice he made was to board a nonstop flight to Moscow on June 23. Once the U.S. criminal complaint was unsealed on June 21, he needed to leave Hong Kong; his continued presence would have been a complication for the Chinese president, Xi, scheduled soon to meet President Obama. 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 cited by The New York Times, China might 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 monthlong 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 actually went: Moscow. His actions here, including his contacts with Russian officials in Hong Kong, speak louder than his words.
Just as he believed the Chinese intelligence service could protect him in Hong Kong from a physical attack by agents of the United States, he could assume that the FSB could protect him from them in Moscow. He was not entirely naive about its capabilities. During his service in the CIA, he had taken a monthlong training course at the CIA’s “farm” at Fort Peary, in which counterintelligence officers taught about the capabilities of the Russian security services. He couldn’t have 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 to leave Moscow before its security services obtained that information.
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 to its values. Russia, however, 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 just discussed that Snowden made, taken together, 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 also 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. A common thread that runs through these four choices 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 adversary intelligence services in Hong Kong and put himself in the hands of Russian authorities in Moscow. He was also willing to use some of his classified documents as a medium of exchange, if not bait, with journalists to get the public attention he sought.
These choices paid off for Snowden, the new hero of millions. 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. The press had a field day with the domestic surveillance documents that he gave them. As far as Snowden was concerned, as he told Gellman on December 21, 2013, in Moscow, “The mission’s already accomplished.”
CHAPTER 28
The Espionage Source
The government’s investigation failed. [It] didn’t know what was taken.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014
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 fit 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 recognized 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 that he had taken highly classified documents to Hong Kong. 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 that the secret knowledge in his head, if he disclosed it, would wreak havoc on U.S. intelligence. “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 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 get its hands on such a potential espionage source would be nothing short of gross negligence.
In fact, 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 earlier, appears to me to be extremely unlikely—he made contact with Russian officials in Hong Kong, and Putin personally approved allowing Snowden to come to Russia.
This decision made it possible for Snowden, without an entry visa to Russia, or, for that matter, any other country, to check in and board an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. 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 executed without advance planning. Nor would he be removed from the plane without a plan for his stay in Russia. Once Putin approved it, there is little reason to doubt that the plans to get Snowden to Moscow, and whatever cover stories were deemed necessary to obscure them, had been carried out professionally by Russia’s special services.
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. Pelt
on, for example, who had access to far less valuable information than had Snowden, was held incommunicado in Vienna for two weeks during his debriefing. It would be inconceivable for an intelligence service 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 there was likely nothing more than a smoke screen 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. communications intelligence, military as well as civilian experts in cryptology, computer sciences, and communications are necessary. Snowden had secret material in his possession. That he brought part of this material to Moscow is confirmed in recorded interviews by two Kremlin insiders, Kucherena and Klintsevich. The House Select Committee on Intelligence also reached that conclusion based on still-secret U.S. intelligence. Snowden’s interpretation of the material would be part of the debriefing because intelligence data needs to be put in context.
How America Lost Its Secrets Page 30
