The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (15 page)

In mid-afternoon, Gibson, Rusbridger and the others gathered in the large meeting room at the end of the office. The area had been jokingly dubbed the ‘Cronut’. The reference was to GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped headquarters in England, and to the latest SoHo craze for ‘cronuts’, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut. Several young interns had been liquidising cronuts at a nearby desk; they were writing a feature. Cronut was, perhaps, not the funniest pun in the world. But in these febrile times it stuck.

The mood was lightening – two massive stories, Snowden still in play, an engagement process of sorts with the White House. After a succession of long days merging into muggy nights, the working environment resembled an unkempt student dormitory. Cardboard rectangles of grubby pizza boxes littered the tables; there were take-away cups and other detritus. Someone knocked over a cappuccino. This was Rusbridger’s cue. He reached down for the nearest newspaper, began theatrically mopping up the coffee, and declared: ‘We are literally wiping the floor with the
New York Times
.’

The Snowden revelations were becoming a deluge. On Friday morning the
Guardian
published an 18-page presidential policy directive, dated October 2012 – the document Snowden had revealed to Poitras. It showed that Obama had ordered officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for offensive US cyber-attacks. Like other top-secret programs, the policy had its own acronym – OCEO – or Offensive Cyber Effects Operations. The directive promised ‘unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target.’ The potential effects, it boasted, ranged ‘from subtle to severely damaging’.

The story was a double embarrassment for the White House. First, the US had complained persistently about invasive and damaging cyber-attacks from Beijing, directed against American military infrastructure, the Pentagon and other targets. These complaints now looked distinctly hypocritical; the US was doing exactly
the same. Second, and more piquantly, Obama was due later that day to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California. Beijing had already hit back at US criticism. Senior officials claimed to have ‘mountains’ of evidence of US cyber-attacks, every bit as serious as the ones allegedly carried out by rampant Chinese hackers.

As the day unfolded it became clear that the leaks had got the president’s attention. The NSA programs helped defend America against terrorist attacks, Obama said. He added that it was impossible to have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy: ‘We have struck the right balance.’

Rusbridger and Gibson watched Obama on the TV monitor: the immensity of what the
Guardian
had initiated was sinking in. Gibson says: ‘Suddenly he was talking about us. We felt: “Oh shit. There’s no going back.” ’

Gibson called Hayden again to warn her that another story was coming down the runway, this time on BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The top-secret program allows the NSA to map country by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. Using the NSA’s own metadata, the tool gives a portrait of where the agency’s ubiquitous spying activities are concentrated – chiefly, Iran, Pakistan and Jordan. This came from a ‘global heat map’ slide leaked by Snowden. It revealed that in March 2013 the agency collected a staggering 97 billion intelligence data points from computer networks worldwide.

Gibson launched into her legalistic script, inviting the White House to air its latest concerns. ‘I’m just going to
say my thing,’ she told Hayden brightly. Hayden replied: ‘Please don’t.’ From the NSC, there was, perhaps, a grudging acceptance that the
Guardian
had behaved responsibly. The tone was cordial. That evening, Inglis himself rang. The subject was BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The NSA deputy chief’s response to Gibson was a half-hour lecture on how the internet worked – a patronising tutorial. Still, Gibson notes: ‘They had moved into a place where they were trying to engage with us.’

Like most of the Snowden files, the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT documents were highly specialised, and not easy to parse. The plan had been to publish later on Friday. With journalists gathered round, Rusbridger read the draft story out aloud, line by line.

He stopped several times. ‘I don’t quite get that,’ Millar said.

Very quickly it emerged that more work was needed. In Hong Kong, Greenwald went off to search for more documents that might help. He found several, and the story was then re-written and posted the following morning. Gibson told her non-Snowden staff that they were free to take the weekend off. But practically all journalists came in. They wanted to witness the extraordinary denouement to an extraordinary week.

For Snowden himself now declared his intention to go public. He proposed, he said, to reveal his own identity to the world.

It had been around 3am local time when the
Guardian
broke the first of Snowden’s NSA stories. Returning to his Hong Kong hotel room early the next morning, the three reporters found the whistleblower ecstatic.

His revelation was there, running on CNN at the top of the news. Snowden turned the sound up on his hotel TV. Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s anchor, was sitting with a panel of three pundits: they were discussing the possible identity of the
Guardian
’s mysterious source. Who was the leaker? Someone in the White House, perhaps? A disaffected general? A KGB super-mole? It was a moment of some irony. ‘It was funny watching them speculate who might have leaked it when you are sitting beside that person,’ MacAskill said.

The public response surprised even Snowden. Posts on the internet were massively supportive; already a
grassroots movement, Restore the Fourth Amendment, was springing up. The rapid publication was good for his relations with the
Guardian
: it demonstrated to Snowden that the paper was acting in good faith. All along his goal had been to spark a debate; he felt that the Verizon story was achieving that, making a big splash.

MacAskill wondered if the leaker was going to be smug, thrilled or proprietary to find himself at the centre of world events. Remarkably, he was totally impassive; he listened to CNN intently. He seemed to understand the enormity of what had happened. From this moment there was no way back. If he flew home to Hawaii now, arrest and incarceration would follow. Snowden’s life was never going to be the same again.

So what next specifically? The most likely scenario for him, as Snowden sketched it, was that the Chinese police would arrest him in Hong Kong. There would be a legal tussle. Possibly for a few months. Maybe even a year. At the end of this he would be sent back to the US. And then … well, decades and decades in jail.

Snowden had turned over an enormous quantity of material on portable drives. This included not only the NSA’s internal files, but also British material emanating from GCHQ and apparently trustingly handed over by the Brits to their US colleagues.

‘How many British documents are on these?’ MacAskill asked.

Snowden said, ‘About 50,000 to 60,000.’

He had given months of thought to his planned dealings with the media. He was fastidious. He wanted a series
of strict conditions for handling secret material. He was insistent that NSA/GCHQ documents disclosing spying should go to the respective subjects of surveillance. He felt Hong Kong media should have information relating to spying on Hong Kong, the Brazilian material to Brazilian media and so on. He was categorical on this point. If, on the other hand, the material fell into the hands of third-party adversaries such as the Russians or the Chinese, this would lay him open to the damaging charge that he was little more than a defector or foreign agent – which he wasn’t.

Snowden was alert to the possibility that foreign intelligence services would seek his files, and was determined to prevent this. As a spy, one of his jobs had been to defend American secrets from Chinese attack. He knew the capabilities of America’s foes. Snowden made clear repeatedly that he didn’t want to damage US intelligence operations abroad.

‘I had access to full rosters of anybody working at the NSA. The entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world. The locations of every station we have, all of their missions … If I just wanted to damage the US I could have shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. That was never my intention,’ he said.

He put it in even more vivid terms, when subsequently accused of ‘treachery’: ‘Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace, petting a phoenix, by now.’

During the days of debriefing in Hong Kong, Snowden said citizens in countries that recognised whistleblowing
and public-interest reporting had a right to know what was going on. He wanted the
Guardian
and other media partners to filter out anything that was operational and might damage legitimate intelligence activities. These were his conditions. All agreed.

Technical precautions were taken. The files were on memory cards. They were strongly encrypted with multiple passwords. No one person knew all the passwords to access a file.

The US freelance journalists approached by Snowden now had in their possession a large treasure trove of classified material. The WikiLeaks disclosures, published by the
Guardian
in London in 2010, were of US diplomatic cables and war-logs from Afghanistan and Iraq leaked by the US private Chelsea Manning. A few – just 6 per cent – were classified at the relatively modest level of ‘secret’. The Snowden files were in a different league. They were ‘top secret’ and above. There had once been a melodramatic defection of Cambridge-educated spies to Soviet Moscow – Burgess, Maclean and Philby. But there had never been a mass documentary leak at this vertiginous altitude before.

Snowden generally wore just a casual T-shirt in his room, but on Thursday 6 June, Greenwald organised a switch. Snowden put on a grey, ironed shirt. He moved from his regular perch on the hotel bed to a chair: behind him a mirror was positioned. It made the room seem less tiny and cramped.

Snowden was about to record his first public interview. It would be the moment when he would introduce
himself to the world and would confess – or, rather, proudly own up – to being the source behind the NSA leaks. He told Greenwald: ‘I have no intention of hiding who I am, because I know I have done nothing wrong.’

It was a bold and counterintuitive move, and one that Snowden had contemplated for a long time. His reasons impressed his journalist partners as sound. First, he told MacAskill, he had seen close up the disastrous impact on colleagues of leak inquiries pursuing anonymous sources. He had witnessed the ‘terrible consequences for people under suspicion’. He said he didn’t want to put his colleagues through such an ordeal.

Second, he was aware of the NSA’s ferocious technical capacities; it was only a matter of time before they tracked him down. His plan all along had been that after the first few stories, he would make himself known. This didn’t mean, however, that Snowden wished to emulate Chelsea Manning, whose arrest in 2010 and harsh jail treatment he had followed closely. Snowden said: ‘Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good.’ As a result, Manning was due to face a court martial in Fort Meade, next door to the NSA’s headquarters – one that was shortly to sentence the young soldier to 35 years in prison.

Snowden intimated that Manning had proved the point that it was impossible for a whistleblower to get a fair trial in the US. A long spell in jail would also stymie the public debate Snowden wanted.

Poitras had been filming Snowden from the first encounter; her camera had had a freezing effect on
their early interactions, but now Snowden agreed to talk directly into her lens. He was, as he put it, a ‘virgin source’. Snowden had previously shunned all contact with reporters and the media. He had even avoided showing his face in his girlfriend’s blog. But he was also acutely aware of how much was at stake. What was ultimately important, Snowden accepted, was the public’s verdict. In this context, an interview would help shape perceptions.

Greenwald sat opposite Snowden. He asked the questions. As a lawyer and experienced broadcaster, Greenwald was comfortable with televised interviews. But Snowden’s own on-screen manner would be an unknown quantity.

Snowden, however, gave a remarkable performance for a media newbie, with fluent answers and a cogent account of what had motivated him to take such a radical step. Most importantly, he appeared eminently sane.

Asked why he had decided to become a whistleblower, Snowden said he had struggled inside the system, before finally concluding he had no alternative but to go outside it: ‘When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for these sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee.’

What he seen had ‘disturbed’ him deeply. ‘Even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded,’ he told the
Guardian
. ‘The storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point … you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply
have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.’

He added, by way of explaining his own decision to blow the whistle, with all the foreseeable consequences for the rest of his life: ‘You realise that that’s the world you helped create and it’s gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression.’