His answer was chilling. Here was someone, a kid—yes, at seventy-two, everyone was a kid to me—who, like Manning, believed he had unique access, was someone who could “see everything.” Like Manning, he had appointed himself as judge over what he had seen, and then, without conducting an investigation or calling out wrongdoers, was going to bring about justice in ways that multiple executive branch agencies, Congress, and federal courts—which were all aware of and conducted oversight of the very programs that concerned him—apparently were unable or unwilling to do. Unlike Manning, however, Snowden had unique IT accesses and had acted methodically to steal secrets, continuing to collect them for a full six months after first communicating with the person to whom he planned to leak, tricking his coworkers into giving him their passwords, even changing to a new job with different accesses to get at other files he wanted to leak. The materials Manning had leaked were embarrassing; the secrets Snowden was releasing were revealing to our adversaries and international terrorist groups how to avoid or thwart our surveillance. By the time the video was published online, Edward Snowden had bid farewell to Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill and gone to ground in Hong Kong with Sarah Harrison, Julian Assange’s most trusted aide and someone who actually knew how to disappear.
In Washington and at NSA headquarters in Maryland, the IC scrambled to learn what they could about Edward Snowden. By all accounts he was a high school dropout who’d later earned a general equivalency diploma and was a capable software engineer. He’d enlisted in the Army and had suffered stress fractures in his legs from unaccustomed exercise during basic training. His Army records indicated that, instead of recycling him to a later training class to allow him to heal, they’d simply discharged him. He’d gotten work as a security guard for a publicly acknowledged NSA facility at the University of Maryland in 2005, and then applied for and got an IT job at the CIA. After a six-month training course in 2006, the CIA stationed him in Europe, where his supervisor and coworkers considered him difficult to deal with. Fearing he was going to be fired because of an incident in 2009, he resigned, listing his girlfriend’s health issues as his reason for leaving.
And here’s where an IC security vulnerability became glaringly evident. The CIA hadn’t attached any alerts to his background profile, and when Snowden applied to become an NSA IT administrator, contracted through Dell Technologies, NSA supposedly never verified his references. NSA assigned him in Asia, then back to Maryland, and then to Hawaii in March 2012, where he worked on IT systems in the agency’s information-sharing office. In that role, he had access to a vast array of NSA systems, programs, and data. In March 2013, he left Dell to work for Booz Allen Hamilton in a similar role, still at NSA Hawaii, and he continued to steal classified material. Because of his frequent job-hopping, his employment history was difficult to reconstruct, but by late Monday, we knew where he’d worked and generally what information he’d had access to, and we knew he’d used his system administrator privileges to get to many things he should not have had access to.
We learned later that he had begun copying and stealing classified material across multiple systems almost as soon as he arrived in Hawaii in March 2012. Our security programs were not designed to monitor users’ electronic behavior across multiple systems and domains, and NSA couldn’t distinguish what he’d actually copied and stolen from what he’d merely examined. He’d skirted security safeguards by accessing information through the accounts of coworkers, one of whom lost his job and career for giving his login information to Snowden, who claimed to need it for his system administrator work.
Also tellingly, when retracing his steps, NSA found that he’d applied to work in the agency’s Tailored Access Operations office as one of its truly elite “hackers.” The TAO qualification test is notoriously difficult—as one would expect—and about 50 percent of applicants fail. Snowden took the test, passed, and was offered a job in TAO as a general schedule government employee, though he believed he should have been graded as a senior executive service officer. (SES officers make up less than one half of 1 percent of the government workforce, and I don’t know of anyone who was promoted to that position in his twenties.) He turned the position down, citing his larger salary as a contractor. When reconstructing his steps in 2013, NSA discovered that he had used his IT administrator privileges to access the account of the person in charge of administering the TAO qualification test and had stolen and viewed the test before taking it. Cheating on a test to become a spy is an amusing premise for Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us. It’s obviously not acceptable in the real world of US intelligence.
On Tuesday morning I entered the Oval Office with a sense of foreboding; a day and a half after Snowden had been identified publicly, I would have to brief the president on what we knew. My trepidation wasn’t just because the news was bad, but because I simply had so little information to report. In the anteroom outside the Oval, I mentally ran through the questions we didn’t have answers for: Was Snowden recruited by or working with a foreign intelligence agency? Did he have help? Where was he in Hong Kong? Why did he go to China? What was he going to do with whatever he took? And most critical, what exactly did he steal? I knew this would be an entirely different “truth to power” moment than I’d ever had in the Oval Office before. This time I wasn’t asserting an intelligence hard fact that went against my principal’s worldview, but instead was about to inform the president of the United States that we’d potentially had one of the worst thefts of US secrets in the history of intelligence—and that I couldn’t tell him much for certain beyond that fact. This wasn’t exactly the IC’s—or my—finest hour.
I could usually tell how an Oval session was going to go by what the president was doing when I arrived. If he was walking around, standing at the credenza by his scheduler’s desk scanning the newspapers, or standing outside the office chatting with the White House staff, it would probably go pleasantly. That morning I found President Obama already in his seat, studying his iPad with a grim look. He didn’t glance up when I walked in.
Since my days of briefing signals intelligence intercepts of the Vietcong to General Westmoreland, I’ve always felt more comfortable having the aid of some sort of graphic depiction, as both a memory crutch and a security blanket. For this meeting I came equipped with printed graphic depictions of all the NSA and IC systems Snowden had had access to, where he’d been stationed in Hawaii, the hotel where he’d first gone in Hong Kong, and the progress of his seven-year IC career.
When the president finally looked up, I held out a chart showing Snowden’s job-hopping career. As he scanned the graphic I started to discuss the very little that we knew about Snowden. President Obama held up a hand to stop my talking, glanced over the page one more time, and waved it away too, saying, “We’ll get more detail later.” There was a pause—I have no idea how long—and then he shook his head, incredulous. Everyone else was very still and silent, trying to avoid being noticed.
The president never raised his voice but turned his frustration on me. “How could you people allow this guy to jump around like this and not see that he was a problem child?” My fifty years of experience, mostly as the “junior guy in the room,” told me not to answer, just let him vent. He described what he’d seen of this as “bush league.” My job was supposed to be getting the agencies to talk to one another, and yet NSA officials had no idea that they were hiring someone the CIA considered problematic and untrustworthy. Worse, that failure had happened on Obama’s watch, during his first year as president. He fumed about all the ways this was going to hurt his relationships with foreign leaders—a ramification I’d certainly considered—and he complained how it was going to distract from and set back other agenda items, like health care, climate change, and legalizing same-sex marriage, just when our nation was making progress—things I hadn’t fully considered. He didn’t yell. He didn’t call me names. But for the ten minutes or so we had allocated for the intelligenc
e session that morning, he released the steam of his slowly boiling anger at me. I left the Oval that morning feeling like an omega dog slinking away from a confrontation with the alpha, not quite sure if he’s actually hurt or just feeling that way. We had badly let down the president, and for that matter, the nation. I wanted to disappear into the woodwork.
Leaks continued to drip through the Guardian and the Washington Post, and on Thursday, June 13, Snowden gave an interview to the South China Morning Post, claiming that NSA was hacking computers in Hong Kong and mainland China and that, while he felt the United States was bullying China to extradite him, he had no intention of leaving and would fight extradition in Hong Kong’s court system.
The following day, the US Justice Department brought formal charges against Snowden under the 1917 Espionage Act, and the UK government took steps to prevent him from traveling through their airspace. Perhaps in retaliation, on Sunday the Guardian dragged the UK into the fray with an article saying the GCHQ—their NSA equivalent—had spied on global leaders during the 2009 G20 Summit in London.
More stories and more leaks spilled out every day. One claimed that the GCHQ tapped fiber-optic cables belonging to the communications companies to gain access to the world’s emails, Facebook posts, and internet histories, and that they then shared all of that information with NSA. Another said that the US courts were complicit in enabling NSA to use “inadvertent” collections against Americans. Many—if not all, but who could keep track?—of these stories were inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete in how they characterized intelligence activities. Still, many did reveal vital secrets, and we watched as our intelligence advantage eroded. There wasn’t much we could do about the factual errors, as attempting to correct them would mean revealing actual intelligence sources and methods that weren’t in the leaks.
As I dealt with the fallout within official channels, I was grateful for former intelligence officials like Mike Hayden, who could appear on TV and say things I couldn’t say as DNI. On Friday, June 14, in a conversation with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Mike laid out how the publication of the leaks was undermining national security:
We’ve reminded our enemies how good and comprehensive we are at this. We will punish American businesses that have cooperated—under US law and at the direction of a US court. This is bound to be bad news for them, in terms of their international business. And then, finally, globally, a country or a source that might be thinking of cooperating with the United States should have almost no confidence in our discretion or in our ability to keep a secret.
Over the next year and more, Mike would be an IC surrogate for many of the difficult conversations to come, including debates about balancing civil liberties protections against security. At several points he spoke about the metadata program, explaining what it was and wasn’t. Noting other actions we as citizens take for the common good, like following traffic laws and submitting to searches before boarding planes, he posed the reasonable question: What are we willing to let our Intelligence Community do in the name of public safety? I didn’t consider that to be a rhetorical question, and wished we as a nation could arrive at a reasonable consensus answer.
Two weeks into the deluge of Snowden stories, the entire IC was constantly on edge and on the defensive. We issued statements explaining the procedural steps that prevented NSA analysts from doing the kind of surveillance Snowden said they were engaged in. We published papers discussing how the oversight process involved all three branches of government and how everyone was checking everyone else’s work. Those publications were ignored, disregarded, or scoffed at by the skeptical media and by politicians with axes to grind. What bothered me the most was that in the public discussion of intelligence, there seemed to be an implicit, nearly universal narrative that the IC’s workforce was filled with people scheming to spy on their friends, neighbors, and citizens at large. That story simply did not describe the Intelligence Community people or mission I knew and believed in. The fact that we had neither the inclination, authority, nor resources to actually do what we’d been accused of didn’t seem to matter.
IC service starts with swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States—the same oath the military takes. Intelligence officers of all types have the same dedication to public service that our uniformed troops do, and they make the same sort of sacrifices. IC people do shift work, keeping watch through the night. They toil long hours, staying until the job is done, because they can’t bring classified material home to finish after dinner or bedtime stories. And when they do get home, they don’t get parades, and they aren’t able to boast to their parents or children, “I did that”—I made this research breakthrough, I brokered a partnering agreement with a foreign power, or I broke up this terrorist plot. IC service means toiling in anonymity and not getting public recognition for achievements. It means accepting less pay to serve. And for many members of the IC in the summer of 2013, it meant enduring government-mandated furloughs and trying to pay bills with 10 percent less income.
Intelligence officers deploy to dangerous places, away from their families. Some lose their lives, and some of them will never have their sacrifice publicly acknowledged—even in death. In the lobby of CIA headquarters, 125 stars are carved into the white marble wall, one for each CIA officer who died in service. In the book at the base of the wall, only 91 names are listed. The other 34 stars have no names associated with them, because public disclosure of the officers who lost their lives, or public discussion of their missions, would mean revealing national security secrets. NSA has a similar display honoring an even greater number of people who’ve paid the ultimate price. Those officers knew what that sacred trust meant when they took on the missions that cost their lives. And in June 2013, one of their own—a former CIA employee who became a contractor with NSA—had betrayed that trust and revealed many damaging secrets about how the IC did its job.
On June 21, for the first time, we took the extraordinary step of declassifying a major program—the metadata storage governed by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Snowden had made public the mechanics of how the program worked, and the media had run with the story, stating as fact that anything IC employees physically could do with this program—and honestly, many things we physically couldn’t do—we were doing. In declassifying it we went to great lengths to defend its utility. Looking back, I think it was a mistake to oversell Section 215. At one point NSA asserted that its authorities had led to the disruption of fifty terrorist plots, when in fact those plots turned out to have been thwarted through a combination of surveillance authorities. Section 215 was actually a rarely used safety net, but one we were reluctant to live without. If an incident like the Tsarnaev brothers blowing up two pressure cookers filled with shrapnel occurred, or if we uncovered another active plot, we used Section 215 authorities to quickly check if further attacks were imminent. We should have just explained that. We had had serious discussions of whether the metadata storage program governed by Section 215 was even an “intelligence” database, since it really functioned as a reference to confirm or refute a potential domestic terrorist nexus—a need identified by the 9/11 Commission. It might have been more appropriate for the database to be held by the FBI or DHS, rather than NSA.
Regardless, the upshot of declassifying the Section 215 program for me personally was that I was able to send a letter to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Feinstein. That letter explained that during the unclassified hearing three months earlier, when questioned by Senator Wyden, I was thinking only about the unclassified FISA Section 702 program when I’d answered, and not about the then-classified Patriot Act Section 215 program. Our declassification of the 215 program finally allowed me to correct the record. As I wrote, “I have appeared before congressional hearings and briefings dozens of times, and have answered thousands of questions, either orally or in writing. I take all such appearances seriously and prepare rigorously for them. But mistakes w
ill happen, and when I make one, I correct it.” My letter did nothing to change the public discussion about me, but it felt good to admit publicly to a mistake I’d made publicly. I’m not sure anyone noticed.
As I was sending that letter, all eyes and all cameras were again focused on Hong Kong. After bringing charges against Snowden, the US government had suspended his passport, which should have prevented him from leaving the city. However, on June 23, Hong Kong authorities allowed him, accompanied by Sarah Harrison, to board a flight to Moscow. His plan was to eventually get to Ecuador, the same nation that was protecting Julian Assange in its London embassy. China waited until the flight had cleared its airspace to announce that Snowden had left. Hong Kong authorities said the United States had made a mistake with paperwork, one that invalidated our invalidation of Snowden’s passport. I suspect China and its new president, Xi Jinping, were happy for any excuse to remove themselves from this awkward diplomatic situation.
Vladimir Putin held a different worldview. For him, Snowden’s arrival was an opportunity to slowly torment his old adversary—the United States—one that could be available to him for as long as he desired. So the Russian government officially recognized the US revocation of Snowden’s passport and refused to let him board a transfer flight. Snowden and Harrison were left stranded in the Moscow airport, unable to pass through customs into Russia and not permitted to board a flight to anywhere else. A group of journalists, who either didn’t know or didn’t believe Moscow was keeping Snowden from traveling, figured out that the next leg of his planned trip to Ecuador would be a flight to Havana the following morning, June 24. They bought all the remaining tickets for the flight and boarded with cameras and notepads, ready to capture the story of a lifetime. When the plane left without Snowden, the journalists took turns tweeting pictures of his empty seat.
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