No Place to Hide

by Greenwald, Glenn

  Predictably, Gregory repeatedly depicted me as something other than a “journalist.” He prefaced one question by proclaiming: “You are a polemicist here, you have a point of view, you are a columnist.” And he announced: “The question of who’s a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you’re doing.”

  But Gregory wasn’t the only one making these arguments. Not one of the Meet the Press panel, convened to discuss my exchange with Gregory, objected to the notion that a journalist could be prosecuted for working with a source. NBC’s Chuck Todd bolstered that theory by ominously raising “questions” about what he called my “role” in “the plot”:

  Glenn Greenwald … how much was he involved in the plot?… did he have a role beyond simply being a receiver of this information? And is he going to have to answer those questions? You know, there is—there is—there is a point of law.

  One CNN show, Reliable Sources, debated the question while a graphic remained on the screen that read, “Should Glenn Greenwald be prosecuted?”

  The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus—who spied on US students abroad on behalf of the CIA in the 1960s—wrote a column strongly suggesting that Laura, Snowden, and I were all operating as part of a plot secretly masterminded by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The column was filled with so many factual errors (ones I documented in an open letter to Pincus) that the Post was forced to append an unusually large, three-paragraph, two-hundred-word correction acknowledging multiple mistakes.

  On his own CNBC show, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin said:

  I feel like, A, we’ve screwed this up, even letting [Snowden] get to Russia. B, clearly the Chinese hate us to even let him out of the country.… I would arrest him, and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who’s the journalist who seems to want to help him get to Ecuador.

  That a reporter for the Times, which had fought all the way to the US Supreme Court in order to publish the Pentagon Papers, would advocate my arrest was a potent sign of the devotion of many establishment journalists to the US government: after all, criminalizing investigative journalism would have a grave impact on that paper and its employees. Sorkin did later apologize to me, but his remarks demonstrated the speed and ease with which such assertions gain traction.

  Fortunately, this view was far from unanimous among the American press corps. Indeed, the specter of criminalization prompted many journalists to rally in support of my work, and on various mainstream television programs the hosts were more interested in the substance of the revelations than in demonizing those involved. Much condemnation of Gregory’s question was voiced during the week following his interview. From the Huffington Post: “We still can’t quite believe what David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwald just now.” Toby Harnden, the Washington bureau chief of the UK’s Sunday Times, tweeted: “I was jailed by Mugabe’s Zimbabwe for ‘practicing journalism.’ Is David Gregory saying Obama’s America should do the same?” Numerous reporters and columnists at the New York Times, the Post, and other places defended me both publicly and privately. But no amount of support could counter the fact that the reporters themselves had sanctioned the prospect of legal jeopardy.

  Lawyers and other advisers agreed that there was a real risk of arrest should I return to the United States. I tried to find one person whose judgment I trusted to tell me that the risk was nonexistent, that it was inconceivable that the DOJ would prosecute me. No one said that. The general view was that the DOJ would not move against me explicitly for my reporting, wanting to avoid the appearance of going after journalists. The concern was rather that the government would concoct a theory that the supposed crimes I had committed were outside of the realm of journalism. Unlike the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, I had traveled to Hong Kong to meet Snowden before publishing the stories; I had spoken to him regularly once he arrived in Russia and had published stories about the NSA on a freelance basis with newspapers around the world. The DOJ could try to claim that I had “aided and abetted” Snowden in his leaks or had helped a “fugitive” flee justice, or that my work with foreign newspapers constituted some type of espionage.

  Moreover, my commentary about the NSA and the US government had deliberately been aggressive and defiant. The government was no doubt desperate to punish someone for what had been called the most damaging leak in the country’s history, if not to alleviate institutional rage, then at least as a deterrent to others. Since the head most wanted on a pike was safely residing under the shield of political asylum in Moscow, Laura and I were a desirable second choice.

  For months, several lawyers with high-level contacts in the Justice Department attempted to obtain informal assurances that I would not be prosecuted. In October, five months after the first story ran, Congressman Alan Grayson wrote to Attorney General Holder, noting that prominent political figures had called for my arrest and that I had had to decline an invitation to testify before Congress about the NSA due to concerns about possible prosecution. He concluded the letter saying:

  I regard this as regrettable because (1) the commission of journalism is not a crime; (2) on the contrary, it is protected explicitly under the First Amendment; (3) Mr. Greenwald’s reports regarding these subjects have, in fact, informed me, other members of Congress, and the general public of serious, pervasive violations of law and constitutional rights committed by agents of the government.

  The letter asked whether the Department of Justice intended to bring charges against me and whether, should I seek to enter the United States, “the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, or any other office of the federal government intends to detain, question, arrest or prosecute” me. But as Grayson’s hometown paper, the Orlando Sentinel, reported in December, Grayson never received a response to his letter.

  At the end of 2013 and into the beginning of 2014, the threat of prosecution only increased as government officials kept up a clearly coordinated attack designed to criminalize my work. In late October, NSA chief Keith Alexander, in an obvious reference to my freelance reporting around the world, complained “that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling,” and he chillingly demanded that “we”—the government—“ought to come up with a way of stopping it.” House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers, at a hearing in January, repeatedly told FBI director James Comey that some of the journalists were “selling stolen property,” making them “fences” or “thieves,” and he then specified that he was talking about me. When I began reporting on Canadian spying with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the parliamentary spokesman for Stephen Harper’s right-wing government denounced me as a “porno-spy” and accused the CBC of buying stolen documents from me. In the United States, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper started using the criminal term “accomplices” to refer to journalists covering the NSA.

  I believed that the probability of arrest upon my return to the United States was less than 50 percent, if only for reasons of image and worldwide controversy. The potential stain on Obama’s legacy, as the first president to prosecute a journalist for doing journalism, was, I assumed, sufficient constraint. But if the recent past proved anything, it was that the US government was willing to do all sorts of reprehensible things under the guise of national security, without regard to how the rest of the world perceived them. The consequences of guessing wrong—ending up in handcuffs and charged under espionage laws, to be adjudicated by a federal judiciary that had proved itself shamelessly deferential to Washington in such matters—were too significant to blithely dismiss. I was determined to return to the United States, but only once I had a clearer understanding of the risk. Meanwhile, my family, friends, and all sorts of important opportunities to talk in the United States about the work I was doing were out of reach.

  That lawyers and a congressman considered the risk real was itself extraordinary, a powerful measure of the erosion of press freedom. And that journalists had joined
the call to treat my reporting as a felony was a remarkable triumph of propaganda for the powers of government, which could rely on trained professionals to do their work for them and equate adversarial investigative journalism with a crime.

  * * *

  The attacks on Snowden were of course far more virulent. They were also bizarrely identical in theme. Leading commentators who knew nothing at all about Snowden instantly adopted the same script of clichés to demean him. Within hours of learning his name, they marched in lockstep to malign his character and motives. He was driven, they intoned, not by any actual conviction but by “fame-seeking narcissism.”

  CBS News host Bob Schieffer denounced Snowden as a “narcissistic young man” who thinks “he is smarter than the rest of us.” The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin diagnosed him as “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen pronounced that Snowden “is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic,” referring to the report that Snowden covered himself with a blanket to prevent his passwords being captured by overhead cameras. Cohen added, bizarrely, that Snowden “will go down as a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood” and that his supposed desire for fame will be thwarted.”

  These characterizations were patently ridiculous. Snowden was determined to disappear from sight, as he said, to do no interviews. He understood that the media love to personalize every story, and he wanted to keep the focus on NSA surveillance, not on him. True to his word, Snowden refused all media invitations. On a daily basis, for many months, I received calls and emails from almost every US television program, TV news personality, and famous journalist, pleading for a chance to talk with Snowden. Today show host Matt Lauer called several times to make his pitch; 60 Minutes was so relentless in their requests that I stopped taking their calls; Brian Williams dispatched several different representatives to make his case. Snowden could have spent all day and night on the most influential television shows, with the world watching him, had he wanted to do that.

  But he was unmovable. I conveyed the requests and he declined them, to avoid taking attention away from the revelations. Strange behavior for a fame-seeking narcissist.

  Other denunciations of Snowden’s personality followed. New York Times columnist David Brooks mocked him on the grounds that “he could not successfully work his way through community college.” Snowden is, Brooks decreed, “the ultimate unmediated man,” symbolic of “the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.”

  To Politico’s Roger Simon, Snowden was “a loser” because he “dropped out of high school.” Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also serves as chair of the Democratic National Committee, condemned Snowden, who had just ruined his life to make the NSA disclosures, as “a coward.”

  Inevitably, Snowden’s patriotism was called into question. Because he had gone to Hong Kong, assertions were made that he was likely working as a spy for the Chinese government. It’s “not hard to image that Snowden has been a Chinese double agent and will soon defect,” announced veteran GOP campaign consultant Matt Mackowiak.

  But when Snowden left Hong Kong to travel to Latin America via Russia, the accusation seamlessly switched from Chinese to Russian spy. People like Congressman Mike Rogers made this charge with no evidence at all, and despite the obvious fact that Snowden was only in Russia because the United States had revoked his passport and then bullied countries such as Cuba into rescinding their promise of safe passage. Moreover, what kind of Russian spy would go to Hong Kong, or work with journalists and identify himself publicly, rather than passing on his stash to his bosses in Moscow? The claim never made any sense and was based on not a particle of fact, but that was no deterrent to it spreading.

  Among the most reckless and baseless innuendos spread against Snowden came from the New York Times, which claimed that he had been allowed to leave Hong Kong by the Chinese government, not Hong Kong authorities, and then added a rank and damaging speculation: “Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.”

  The New York Times had no evidence at all that the Chinese government had been able to obtain Snowden’s NSA data. The paper simply led readers to conclude that it had, based on two anonymous “experts” who “believed” it may have happened.

  At the time this story ran, Snowden was stuck at the Moscow airport and unable to go online. As soon as he resurfaced, he vehemently denied, via an article I published in the Guardian, that he had passed any data to China or Russia. “I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops,” he said.

  The day after Snowden’s denial ran, Margaret Sullivan criticized the Times for its article. She interviewed Joseph Kahn, the paper’s foreign editor, who said that “it’s important to see this passage in the story for what it is: an exploration of what might have happened, based on experts who did not claim to have direct knowledge.” Sullivan commented that “two sentences in the middle of a Times article on such a sensitive subject—though they may be off the central point—have the power to sway the discussion or damage a reputation.” She concluded by agreeing with a reader who had complained about the story, saying: “I read the Times for the truth. I can read publication of speculation almost anywhere.”

  Via Janine Gibson, Times executive editor Jill Abramson—at a meeting to convince the Guardian to collaborate on certain NSA stories—sent a message: “Please tell Glenn Greenwald personally that I agree with him completely about the fact that we should never have run that claim about China ‘draining’ Snowden’s laptops. It was irresponsible.”

  Gibson seemed to expect that I would be pleased, though I was anything but: How could an executive editor of a newspaper conclude that an obviously damaging article was irresponsible and should not have been published, and then not retract it or at least run an editor’s note?

  Aside from the lack of evidence, the claim that Snowden’s laptops had been “drained” made no sense on its own terms. People haven’t used laptops to transport large amounts of data in years. Even before laptops became common, quantities of documents would have been stored on discs; now on thumb drives. It is true that Snowden had four laptops with him in Hong Kong, each one serving a different security purpose, but these had no relation to the quantity of documents he carried. They were on thumb drives, which were encrypted through sophisticated cryptographic methods. Having worked as an NSA hacker, Snowden knew that they could not be cracked by the NSA, let alone by Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies.

  Touting the number of Snowden’s laptops was a deeply misleading way to play on people’s ignorance and fears—he took so many documents, he needed four laptops to store them all! And had the Chinese somehow drained their contents, they would have obtained nothing of value.

  Equally nonsensical was the notion that Snowden would try to save himself by giving away surveillance secrets. He had dismantled his life and risked a future in prison to tell the world about a clandestine surveillance system he believed must be stopped. That he would reverse himself by helping China or Russia to improve their surveillance capabilities, all to avoid prison, was just inane.

  The claim might have been nonsense, but the damage was as substantial as it was predictable. Any TV discussion of the NSA invariably involved someone asserting, with no contradiction, that China was now in possession, via Snowden, of the United States’ most sensitive secrets. Under the headline “Why China Let Snowden Go,” the New Yorker told its readers, “His usefulness was almost exhausted. Intelligence experts cited by the Times believed that the Chinese government ‘had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden
said he brought to Hong Kong.’”

  Demonizing the personality of anyone who challenges political power has been a long-standing tactic used by Washington, including by the media. One of the first and perhaps most glaring examples of that tactic was the Nixon administration’s treatment of Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, which included breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst to steal Ellsberg’s files and pry into his sexual history. As nonsensical as the tactic might seem—why would exposure of embarrassing personal information counter evidence of government deceit?—Ellsberg understood it clearly: people do not want to be associated with someone who has been discredited or publicly humiliated.

  The same tactic was used to damage Julian Assange’s reputation well before he was accused of sex crimes by two women in Sweden. Notably, the attacks on Assange were carried out by the same newspapers that had worked with him and had benefited from Chelsea Manning’s disclosures, which Assange and WikiLeaks had enabled.

  When the New York Times published what it called “The Iraq War Logs,” thousands of classified documents detailing atrocities and other abuses during the war by the US military and its Iraqi allies, the paper featured a front-page article—as prominently as the disclosures themselves—by pro-war reporter John Burns that had no purpose other than to depict Assange as bizarre and paranoid, with little grip on reality.

  The article described how Assange “checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.” It noted what it called his “erratic and imperious behavior” and “delusional grandeur,” and said his detractors “accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States.” And it added this psychological diagnosis from a disgruntled WikiLeaks volunteer: “He is not in his right mind.”

  Casting Assange as crazy and delusional became a staple of US political discourse generally and the New York Times’s tactics specifically. In one article, Bill Keller quoted a Times reporter who described Assange as “disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”