The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

by Luke Harding

  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.’

  MacAskill, who watched, gripped, as Poitras filmed, felt Snowden came across even better on camera than in person.

  For the three journalists, those Hong Kong nights and days blurred into one another: a succession of gruelling work periods, fuelled by excitement, adrenaline and paranoia.

  At the Mira, Poitras was soon able to show her video edit to the other two. She had turned Snowden’s interview into a 17-minute film, beautifully framed and with a set-up shot at the beginning showing Hong Kong harbour and a velvety sky. Its title said simply: ‘PRISM Whistleblower’. They discussed possible cuts, with Poitras eventually crunching the interview down to 12-and-a-half minutes, and releasing a second interview later.

  ‘I felt as if he had been thrust into the middle of a spy movie,’ MacAskill says. How on earth were they safely to ship the key material over to New York and London?

  Talking to the Guardian’s editor via encrypted chat, MacAskill said the group needed technical help. David Blishen, the Guardian’s systems editor, was a man who had skills that few working journalists possessed. He also understood how the editorial process functioned. During the WikiLeaks investigation, Blishen helped co-ordinate the redaction of names of sources who had talked to US diplomats and might be at risk if exposed in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Belarus. (This was an important but ultimately futile exercise; in the summer of 2011, six months after the first stories appeared based on US diplomatic cables, Julian Assange released the entire un-redacted cache of documents.)

  Blishen was summoned, headed for the airport, and arrived in Hong Kong the next day. For him, too, the trip was nostalgic. He was born in the then colony in 1972; his father, a British official, had been stationed there. When MacAskill joined him at breakfast the two talked about Scottish newspapers where they had both worked. ‘I was none the wiser why I was really there,’ Blishen says. ‘Ewen gave nothing away.’ Afterwards, MacAskill told Blishen to leave his mo
bile at the hotel reception, and proposed a walk. Once they were outside, MacAskill gave him a memory card; a small, flat, square chip. The SD card didn’t look much. Though it was pretty large – 32 gigabytes.

  Blishen needed to transmit Snowden’s video back to Guardian US in New York. Blishen watched the video first, and he was impressed: ‘He [Snowden] is articulate. He seemed principled. With Assange and Manning, people can question if they are rational. Ed seemed completely normal and plausible.’ Taking the edited version, he anxiously jumped into a taxi to get back to his own hotel in Central.

  The cabbie asked Blishen in sing-song English: ‘Do you want to go and see girls? They cheap. Very pretty. Do you like Asian girls?’

  Blishen needed to get to his room fast. He made clear his lack of interest. The cabbie thought for a moment. His face brightened: ‘Oh, you like boys! Boys! Like me?’ Blishen replied wearily: ‘I’m very boring. I just want to go to my hotel.’ The cabbie persisted: ‘What do you want to do at your hotel?’ Even though it was only 7.30pm, Blishen told the driver he wanted to sleep. ‘I was his worst, dullest passenger ever.’

  Back at the Lan Kwai Fong Hotel, Blishen crypto-messaged the Guardian’s James Ball, in New York. He uploaded the video file via a secure connection in an encrypted folder. He sent over the password separately. Disaster ensued. The Guardian US team proved unable to open the file. Time was running out. In the end, the video file had to go again unencrypted, and potentially hackable by the NSA, though still via secure connection. To everyone’s relief, it arrived unmolested.

  All along, Snowden had made clear that he planned to reveal himself. In New York, the record of Snowden actually speaking was nevertheless cathartic. And reassuring. ‘We were completely blown away. We thought he was cool and plausible. Everything about him seemed credible,’ Millar says. When the moment arrived, with the video ready to go live, the atmosphere in the newsroom was deeply emotional. ‘It was a terrifying moment,’ Gibson adds. The editorial question remained: was this the right thing to do? Once again Snowden was making his own strategic choices – playing his increasingly limited hand of cards his own way.

  Five people, including Rusbridger, were in the office. The video went up around 3pm local time. ‘It was like a bomb going off,’ says Rusbridger. ‘There are a silent few seconds after a bomb explodes when nothing happens.’ The TV monitors were set to different channels; for almost an hour they carried pre-recorded Sunday news. Then at 4pm, the top of the hour, the story erupted. Each network carried Snowden’s image. CNN aired the entire 12-minute video.

  It was 3am in Hong Kong when the video was posted online. Twitter instantly exploded. It was to become the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history.

  ‘It’s a rare thing for a source to come out in public like that. So we knew this video was going to be big,’ MacAskill recalls. ‘The choreography of several huge stories followed by the video was terrific.’

  One moment, Snowden was known only to his friends and family, and a few colleagues. Then suddenly he became a global phenomenon, no longer just an individual but a lightning rod for all sorts of conflicting views about the state, the boundaries of privacy and security, and even the entire modern condition.

  Snowden took all of this with sangfroid and humour. Sitting in room 1014 he chatted online with Greenwald and MacAskill, and joked wryly about his appearance, and the online comments it provoked. It was the first time he had seen the video. (Poitras had sent it to him before but he had had problems with his internet connection and couldn’t access it.) There was one inescapable corollary: now Snowden’s identity was out, he had just become the most hunted man on the planet.

  The chase was already on. Greenwald, in one of his many TV interviews, had been captioned by CNN as ‘Glenn Greenwald, Hong Kong’ – a pretty big clue to everyone watching as to the location of the Guardian’s source. The local Chinese media and international journalists now studied every frame of the video for clues. They were initially thrown off by Poitras’s opening shot, filmed from the W Hotel. They assumed Snowden was there too. But one enterprising hack then used Twitter to identify the Mira from its lamps.

  By Monday 10 June, Snowden was packing his belongings to leave the hotel, as Poitras filmed him for the last time. She felt protective towards him. She had known him the longest, and had believed in him from the beginning. She gave him a hug. ‘I don’t know what he planned for that moment. I had no idea what his next move was,’ she says.

  Snowden vanished.

  At the W Hotel, MacAskill popped out to get a cup of coffee, and to buy himself a suit and a shirt. He had brought enough clothes for a two-day assignment. A crew from CNN doorstepped him. When he returned from Marks and Spencer he found a scene of chaos. TV crews and reporters had staked out the lobby. Not only that but the management said the hotel was now ‘full’ and asked them to leave. They slipped out via a service lift to a waiting taxi and moved into the Sheraton. By the evening, the hacks had found them again. Before going to sleep, MacAskill piled chairs in front of his door. This might give him some warning if someone came for him, he reasoned.

  Two days passed. Greenwald, MacAskill and Poitras marked the end of their trip with wine and cheese in Poitras’s room, overlooking the harbour. MacAskill crashed out, exhausted. In the early hours, Poitras rang with alarming news. Snowden had sent a message saying he was in danger. He hinted that he was about to be arrested, and signed off ominously. MacAskill phoned Snowden’s Hong Kong lawyers, who were now dealing with his case. No response. He called the police station. Recorded message. Two hours later one of the lawyers phoned back to say Snowden was OK. The details were hazy but it appeared Snowden had survived a close call.

  How much longer could he hold out until the US grabbed him?

  8

  ALL OF THE SIGNALS ALL OF THE TIME

  Bude, North Cornwall

  2007 onwards

  ‘We have the brains: they have the money. It’s a collaboration that’s worked very well.’

  SIR DAVID OMAND, FORMER GCHQ DIRECTOR

  It is visible from miles around on its cliff-top. Standing spectacularly exposed on Cornwall’s geographical ‘foot’, which protrudes far into the Atlantic, the eavesdropping station is impossible to hide. Some of the otherworldly array of gigantic satellite dishes are 30 metres across. The dishes are set around a white golf ball-shaped radome: votive objects laid before a faceless god. A high-security fence encircles the complex. Every few metres are CCTV cameras. A sign at the entrance reads: ‘GCHQ Bude’. There are guards. Visitors are unwelcome.

  Near the front gate is Cleave Crescent, a miserable-looking hamlet of terraced houses. Around is a wooded valley, with ash trees, gorse and brambles. From the coast path there are stunning views: scudding waves, a steel-grey sea, and the jagged rock strata at Lower Sharpnose Point. There are gulls and sometimes a sparrowhawk, hovering against a wind-bashed headland.

  One of the more charming files scraped by Snowden from the GCHQ intranet repository is a write-up of a trip to Bude by a group of spying trainees. They got the tour. They were allowed to peek inside the radome, climb up one of the larger satellite dishes, nicknamed Ocean Breeze, and peer at the antennae. On the way home they stopped off for an ice cream and dipped their toes in the Atlantic. The travel blog makes reference to Bude’s original role – contributing ‘Comsat to the SIGINT machine’. In other words, feeding intercepted satellite communications back to British and American intelligence.

  This dramatic look-out on the UK coast has long been used for surveillance. Eighteenth-century customs officers kept watch for smugglers. The Victorian vicar Robert Stephen Hawker built himself a wooden hut to spot shipwrecks. He and his parishioners would fetch the bodies of drowned sailors up the sheer cliffs. During the second world war a military base was constructed, called Cleave Camp: there is a ghostly pillbox where gunners looked out for Nazi invaders.

  GCHQ put a station here on government property in the late 1960s, in order to eave
sdrop on commercial satellite links from Goonhilly Downs on the Lizard peninsula, 60 miles down the road. Goonhilly carried much of the world’s international telephone traffic, but became obsolete and closed in 2008.

  However, Bude is now at the heart of a new and most ambitious secret project, developed by the UK. Its fruits are handed over to London’s US paymasters. The program is so sensitive that exposures of it by Edward Snowden drive British officials into fits of anxiety and rage. Those officials’ dream is to ‘master the internet’. This phrase of theirs was what Snowden meant when he told the startled journalists in Hong Kong that Britain’s GCHQ was worse and more intrusive even than the NSA.

  Bude itself is a small seaside resort, popular with surfers and swimmers. It has a golf course, a high street with shops selling fresh crabs, an open-air swimming pool and a Sainsbury’s store. But its most important role is invisible. Just down the road is Widemouth Bay. Few of the holidaymakers who splash in its bracing waters know of the beach’s significance. But major undersea telecommunications cables from the US’s eastern seaboard emerge here. They are called Apollo North, TAT-8, TAT-14 and Yellow/Atlantic Crossing-2, also known as AC-2. Other transatlantic cables come ashore at nearby Land’s End. Thousands of miles long, the fibre-optic cables are operated by big private telecoms firms, often in consortia.

  The landing points of these submarine cables are so important that the American Department of Homeland Security lists them as critical American national infrastructure (according to leaked US diplomatic messages). In this new world of internet-driven communications, Britain’s position on the eastern edge of the Atlantic makes it a hub. As much as 25 per cent of the world’s current internet traffic crosses British territory via the cables, en route between the US, Europe, Africa and all points east. Much of the remaining traffic has landing or departure points in the US. So between them Britain and the US play host to most of the planet’s burgeoning data flows.