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

by Luke Harding

  With my thanks for your service to the nation we both love,

  Edward Snowden

  The letter set out cardinal Snowdon themes: love of country, civic duty, a desire to protect the constitution. Its tone was high-minded and in parts melodramatic: ‘If history proves that to be so, I will not shy …’ But it left no doubt that Snowden was aware of the peril from hostile foreign intelligence agencies, and that he had taken extreme steps to keep his material safe.

  Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, one of Snowden’s few early interlocutors, says that he believes Snowden had put the data beyond reach. ‘I think he rendered himself incapable of opening the archive while he is in Russia,’ Gellman told US radio network NPR. He added: ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t have the key any more. It’s that there is nothing to open any more. He rendered the encryption information impossible to open while he is in Russia.’

  But none of this, of course, meant the Kremlin was uninterested in the contents of Snowden’s laptops. The FSB was adept at electronic surveillance. Like its KGB predecessor, its procedures involved bugging, hidden video cameras and entrapment. Unlike the NSA, the FSB also used what might be called ‘suspicion-ful’ surveillance. With western intelligence agencies, the idea was to monitor a target without him or her ever knowing about it. The FSB, by contrast, also engaged in ‘demonstrativnaya slezhka’, demonstrative pursuit.

  Using tactics perfected by the 1970s Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, the FSB would break into the homes of so-called enemies. Typically these were western diplomats and some foreign journalists. But the FSB also played a leading role in the suppression of internal dissent, and targeted Russians too, including those working for US or British embassies. A team of agents would break into a target’s flat. They would leave clues that they had been there – open windows, central heating disconnected, mysterious alarms, phones taken off the hook, sex manuals by the side of the bed.

  These methods of psychological intimidation became more pervasive during Putin’s second 2004–2008 presidential term, as Kremlin paranoia at the prospect of a pro-reform Orange-style revolution grew. In 2009 the then US ambassador John Beyrle wrote a frank cable to the US State Department, one of several thousand written from Russia and leaked by Chelsea Manning. It read: ‘Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy staff have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more common and bold, and activity against our locally engaged staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.’

  This, then, was the FSB. Ironically, the Kremlin’s security services also carried out widespread NSA-style surveillance on the Russian population.

  Russia’s nationwide system of remote interception is called SORM. The KGB developed SORM’s technical foundations in the mid-1980s; it has been updated to take account of rapid technological change. SORM-1 captures telephone and mobile phone communications, SORM-2 intercepts internet traffic, and SORM-3 collects data from all communications including content and recordings, and stores them long-term.

  The oversight mechanism in the US may have been broken, but in Russia it didn’t exist. Snowden’s documents showed that the NSA compelled phone operators and internet service providers to give information on their customers. Secret FISA court orders made this process legal. The companies could – and would – contest these orders in court, and argued they should be allowed to reveal more detail of what the government agencies were demanding.

  In Russia FSB officers also needed a court order to eavesdrop on a target. Once they had it they didn’t need to show the warrant to anybody. Telecoms providers weren’t informed. According to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, the FSB doesn’t need to contact the ISP’s staff. Instead, the spy agency calls on the special controller at the FSB HQ that is connected by a protected cable directly to the SORM device installed on the ISP network. This system is copied all over the country: in every Russian town there are protected underground cables, which connect the local FSB department with all providers in the region. The result is that the FSB is able to intercept the email traffic of opposition activists and other ‘enemies’ without oversight.

  The wheels of Russian bureaucracy turn slowly. In this case, however, the reasons for delay weren’t official inertia. Putin was carefully weighing up the likely fall-out from granting Snowden asylum. On 24 July, Kucherena said Snowden’s status was still unresolved. In the meantime, Snowden would stay at the Moscow airport.

  The lawyer indicated that Snowden was now thinking long-term about a life and possibly a job in Russia: that he intended to stay in the country and to ‘study Russian culture’. He had apparently picked up a few words of Russian: ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you doing?’ Snowden had even tried khatchapuri, Georgian cheese bread.

  On 1 August 2013 – 39 days after he flew into Moscow – Snowden strolled out of the airport. Russia had granted him one year’s temporary asylum. The state channel Rossiya 24 showed a photo of Snowden’s departure. He was grinning, carrying a rucksack and a large holdall, and accompanied by a delighted Harrison. Out of the transit zone at last, he exchanged a few words with Kucherena on the pavement. Snowden climbed into a grey unmarked car. The car drove off. Snowden disappeared.

  Kucherena showed reporters a copy of Snowden’s new temporary document, which allowed him to cross into Russia. His name, ‘SNOWDEN, EDWARD JOSEPH’, was printed in Cyrillic capitals. There was a fingerprint and fresh passport photo. Security officials said Snowden had left the transit zone at about 3.30pm local time. Russia had apparently not informed the US beforehand.

  Kucherena said he wasn’t giving any details about where Snowden was going since he was the ‘most wanted man on the planet’. A statement from WikiLeaks said that he and Harrison were headed to a ‘secure confidential place’. It quoted Snowden as saying: ‘Over the past eight weeks we have seen the Obama administration show no respect for international or domestic law, but in the end the law is winning. I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with its laws and international obligations.’

  US reaction was bitter. The White House announced that Obama was cancelling his bilateral meeting with Putin scheduled to take place during September’s G20 summit, which Russia was hosting in St Petersburg. The president’s spokesperson Jay Carney said the White House was ‘extremely disappointed’. Carney effectively accused Snowden of gifting US secrets to a rival power: ‘Simply the possession of that kind of highly sensitive classified information outside of secure areas is both a huge risk and a violation. As we know he’s been in Russia now for many weeks. There is a huge risk associated with … removing that information from secure areas. You shouldn’t do it, you can’t do it, it’s wrong.’

  It was left to the Republican senator John McCain to twist the knife further. McCain, whom Snowden, writing as TheTrueHOOHA, had admired, was a long-standing critic of the White House’s efforts to ‘reset’ relations with Moscow – an accommodationist policy which in McCain’s view merely encouraged Putin’s more obnoxious behaviour. McCain tweeted: ‘Snowden stays in the land of transparency and human rights. Time to hit that reset button again #Russia.’

  Where did Snowden go? Red Square and the Kremlin are an ensemble of high ochre walls and golden orthodox towers. At the end of Red Square are the surrealistic onion domes of St Basil’s cathedral.

  If you walk up the hill from here past the Metropole Hotel and a statue of Karl Marx you reach a large, forbidding, classically cut building. This is the Lubyanka. Once the headquarters of the KGB, it is now the home of the FSB. Inside, the answer to that question is certainly known. Meanwhile, Russian journalists would speculate Snowden was staying at a presidential sa
natorium somewhere near Moscow.

  The hacker turned whistleblower had got his asylum. But the longer he stayed out of public view the more it appeared that he was, in some informal way, the FSB’s prisoner.

  12

  DER SHITSTORM!

  Stasi headquarters, Normannenstrasse,

  East Berlin

  October 2013

  OBERSTLEUTNANT GRUBITZ: ‘Dreyman’s good, eh?’

  WIESLER: ‘I’d have him monitored.’

  The Lives of Others, 2004

  In the lobby is a statue of a man with a goatee beard. He is ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of Lenin’s secret police. On the wall is a map. It depicts what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), before its dramatic collapse in 1989. The map is divided into districts. Major cities are marked in bold: (East) Berlin – the capital in communist times – Dresden, Magdeburg, Leipzig.

  This forbidding building in Berlin-Lichtenberg was once the headquarters of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security, an organisation better known by its abbreviation – the Stasi. The Stasi was modelled on Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. It was in part a criminal investigation department. But it was also a secret intelligence agency and a political secret police. For nearly four decades – from 1950 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the Stasi conducted a sweeping campaign against the GDR’s ‘enemies’. These were, for the most part, internal. The Stasi’s declared goal was ‘to know everything’.

  On the first floor are the offices of the man who directed this campaign, Erich Mielke, the Stasi boss from 1957 to 1989. Seen through modern eyes, his bureau seems modest. There is a comfy chair, 1960s furniture, an old-fashioned dial telephone and an electric typewriter. Next door is a day bed in case Mielke needed a snooze. Built into one of the cabinets is a concealed tape machine. There is a large conference room on the same floor. Whenever Mielke met with his fellow Stasi generals he recorded their conversations.

  By the standards of the Soviet bloc, East Germany was a success. In a relatively brief period it managed to establish the most thorough surveillance state in history. The number of Stasi agents grew from 27,000 in 1950 to 91,000 in 1989. Another 180,000 worked as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs), or unofficial informers. The true figure was probably higher. They spied on friends, workmates, neighbours and family members. Husbands spied on wives. By the time of the GDR’s demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

  The Stasi’s favoured method of keeping a lid on dissent was eavesdropping. There was bugging, wiretapping, observation. The Stasi monitored 2,800 postal addresses; the agency steamed 90,000 letters a day. This was laborious stuff. Most of the voluminous information gathered was banal, of little intelligence value. The Stasi’s version of the Puzzle Palace came crashing down on 15 January 1990, when angry protesters stormed Mielke’s compound in Normannenstrasse and ransacked his files.

  Given Germany’s totalitarian backstory – the Nazis then communists – it was hardly surprising that Snowden’s revelations caused outrage. In fact, a newish noun was used to capture German indignation at US spying: der Shitstorm. The Anglicism entered the German dictionary Duden in July 2013, as the NSA affair blew around the world. Der Shitstorm refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet, especially on social media platforms.

  The ghosts of the Gestapo helped define the West German state, which existed next door to the Stasi. The cultural memory of state snooping still haunts its unified successor. Many of the most successful recent German films and books, such as The Lives of Others – a telling fantasy set in the GDR of 1984 – or Hans Fallada’s Nazi-era Alone in Berlin, dramatise the traumatic experience of being spied on.

  For these reasons, the right to privacy is hardwired into the German constitution. Writing in the Guardian, John Lanchester noted that Germany’s legal history focused on carving out human rights: ‘In Europe and the US, the lines between the citizen and the state are based on an abstract conception of the individual’s rights, which is then framed in terms of what the state needs to do.’ (Britain’s common law, by contrast, is different and focused not on the existence of abstract rights but on remedying concrete ‘wrongs’.)

  Germans have a visceral dislike of Big Brother-style surveillance; even today there are few CCTV cameras on the streets, unlike in the heavily monitored UK. Google met widespread resistance in 2010 to its Street View project; click yourself through a map of Germany and you’ll still find large areas pixelated. Germany published its first post-reunification census only in the summer of 2013 – previous ones in the 1980s were widely boycotted because people felt uncomfortable with giving the state their data.

  The days of Adolf and the Erichs – Erich Mielke and Erich Honecker, the GDR’s communist boss – were over. Or that’s what most Germans thought. The NSA’s post-9/11 practices made the German constitution look like something of a bad joke. Snowden’s documents, dripped out in 2013, revealed that the NSA spies intensively on Germany, in many respects out-Stasi-ing the Stasi. For 10 years the agency even bugged the phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s most powerful politician. Merkel grew up in the GDR and had personal experience of living in a pervasive surveillance state. Of the agency’s many poor judgements this was perhaps the crassest: an act of spectacular folly.

  The story began when the Hamburg-based news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA routinely harvests the communications of millions of Germans. In an average month it collects around half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages. On a normal day this includes 20 million telephone calls and 10 million internet exchanges. On Christmas Eve 2012 it collected about 13 million phone calls, the magazine reported. Sometimes the figures are higher. On 7 January 2013, the NSA had nearly 60 million communication connections under surveillance. This data was stored at Fort Meade.

  In addition, the NSA carried out a sophisticated campaign of state-on-state espionage against foreign diplomatic missions in the US. Bugging the Chinese and the Russians was explicable. They were ideological adversaries. But the NSA also spied on friendly embassies – 38 of them, according to a leaked September 2010 file. Targets included the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as several other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.

  The agency’s spying methods were extraordinary. It placed bugs in electronic communications gear, tapped cables, and collected transmissions using specialised antennae. Under a program codenamed DROPMIRE, the NSA put a bug in the fax machine at the EU’s office in Washington. It also targeted the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital Brussels, a venue for top-level summits and ministerial get-togethers.

  Germany and France were close US allies and NATO members. Their governments shared values, interests, strategic obligations. German and American soldiers had fought and died together in Afghanistan. As far as the NSA was concerned, however, France and Germany were fair game. Neither country was a member of Five Eyes, the exclusive Anglophone spy club. Instead they were ‘third-party foreign partners’. An internal NSA power point says bluntly: ‘We can, and often do, target the signals of most third-party foreign partners.’ According to BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, Germany is in the same top category in terms of level of US snooping as China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

  By the time Barack Obama visited Berlin in June 2013 the NSA row was straining US–German ties. In the wake of the revelations, German commentators likened the NSA to the Gestapo. The comparison was overblown. But the disquiet in Germany triggered by Snowden’s disclosures was real enough.

  Obama and Merkel held a press conference in the chancellor’s washing machine-shaped office in Berlin. It was a short but historically resonant walk to the Reichstag, with its transparent Norman Foster dome, and to the Brandenburg Gate. The NSA revelations dominated the agenda.

  Obama sought to reassure. He described himself as a critic of his predecessor. He said he came in with a ‘healthy scepticism’ towards the US intel
ligence community. After closer inspection, however, he felt its surveillance programs struck the ‘appropriate balance’ between security and civil rights. The NSA focused ‘very narrowly’ on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: ‘This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens, or anyone else.’ Obama insisted the system was ‘narrowly circumscribed’. It had saved lives, including German ones.

  Merkel was unconvinced. She acknowledged that intelligence-sharing with the US had helped prevent an Islamist terrorist plot in Germany’s Sauerland region in 2007. Nonetheless, Germans were worried: ‘People have concerns precisely about there having possibly been some kind of across-the-board gathering of information.’

  In an interview with the Guardian and other European newspapers, Merkel was scathing. She described the spying scandal as ‘extremely serious’: ‘Using bugs to listen in on friends in our embassies and EU representatives is not on. The cold war is over. There is no doubt whatsoever that the fight against terrorism is essential … but nor is there any doubt that things have to be kept proportionate.’

  Still, it appeared that Merkel was keen to avoid a full-scale confrontation, her legendary pragmatism once more to the fore. Meanwhile, Der Shitstorm billowed across Germany’s media, in print and online. Generally, the tone was alarmed. The German sage Hans-Magnus Enzensberger referred to the ‘transition to a post-democratic society’. Hans-Peter Uhl, a staunch conservative, called the scandal a ‘wake-up call’. Even the right-wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was worried. Publishing the Snowden files was crucial if freedom were ‘to exist in the future’, it said.

  Nevertheless Merkel chose to downplay the topic in the run-up to Germany’s September 2013 general election, while the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) tried to big it up. The SPD’s strategy backfired when it emerged Gerhard Schröder, the party’s former chancellor, had approved a wide-ranging intelligence-sharing agreement with the US back in 2002.