One way to mitigate the damage was for Snowden to substitute a new narrative. Wizner took it upon himself to screen potential journalists and other outlets for Snowden. He told a reporter for The New York Times that, except for Oliver Stone, all individuals who have “met with Snowden have just gone through me, and we’ve hooked it up.” Nor did he limit his extraordinary control to interviews. In the case of Stone’s movie Snowden, Wizner asked for the right to veto any shots featuring Snowden in the film. In it, he would tell handpicked journalists that he had given all his documents to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong and took none of them to Russia. Wizner could then argue that documents such as the FISA court order were improperly classified secret and that disclosing them served the public good. The government might not be able to contest his claim without further revealing NSA sources. Under these circumstances, it might be induced to agree to a plea bargain for Snowden. Changing the narrative would also help enhance his public image as a whistle-blower.
Snowden’s new narrative that he had destroyed all the documents he had in his possession before coming to Moscow and had no access to any NSA documents, not even those that he had distributed to journalists, was reinforced in a series of interviews that Wizner helped arrange. “I went the first six months without giving an interview,” Snowden later said. “It wasn’t until December 2013 that I gave my first interview to Barton Gellman.” (Snowden did not count his Internet exchange with Risen in October as an “interview.”)
In late December 2013, Snowden met with Barton Gellman. It was his first face-to-face meeting with a journalist since he had arrived in Russia in June. Snowden turned his laptop toward Gellman and, as if proving his point, said to him, “There’s nothing on it….My hard drive is completely blank.” That his computer had no files stored on it at that moment of course meant very little. Just six weeks earlier, Snowden had met with the former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who had been invited to meet him in Moscow along with three other American whistle-blowers. At that meeting, he told McGovern that he had stored all the NSA data he had taken on external hard drives. Gellman asked about the precise whereabouts of the files, but, as he reported, Snowden declined to answer that question. He would only say that he was “confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong.” That answer did not nail down the issue, so Wizner arranged for Vanity Fair, which was preparing an article on Snowden, to submit questions. In his reply to them, Snowden wrote that he destroyed all his files in Hong Kong because he didn’t want to risk bringing them to Russia. He expanded on this claim in three more interviews. These interviews were all with three journalists who had opposed NSA surveillance: James Bamford, writing for Wired magazine; Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. He also gave a televised interview to Brian Williams of NBC News in which he explained that because he had no access to the NSA documents in Russia, he could not provide access to the Russians even if they “break my fingers.”
Snowden did not specify where, when, or how the putative destruction of the files occurred and offered neither witnesses nor evidence, other than the meaningless blank laptop screen, to corroborate it. Still his new self-serving narrative was widely accepted by the media. The fact remains, though, that Snowden went to considerable risk to select, copy, and steal Level 3 documents before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong. These secrets were his last potential bargaining chips. Why would he have destroyed them in June in Hong Kong?
It is also difficult for me to accept that Snowden would destroy these documents because he feared the Russians might get them. If he was so concerned about the possibility, he could have stayed in Hong Kong and fought extradition instead of flying to Russia. Surely he must have realized that even without the files on his computer, the Russian intelligence service could still obtain the NSA secrets he held in his head. Indeed, as he told the Times, the secrets he held in his head would have devastating consequences for NSA operations.
In light of Kucherena’s statement that in Russia Snowden had access to NSA documents, it would require a serious suspension of disbelief to accept Snowden’s new narrative. Even if one were willing to accept his new claim, it still would not mean that the NSA documents had not fallen into the hands of adversaries. If he had destroyed all of the electronic copies of the NSA’s data before boarding his flight to Moscow, he still couldn’t be “100 percent” certain, as he claimed, that the data had not been accessed by others prior to his departure from Hong Kong. His files could have been copied without his knowledge, just as he had copied them without the NSA’s knowledge. As former U.S. intelligence officers pointed out to me, adversary services could not be expected to shirk from employing their full capabilities once they learned that an American “agent of special services,” as Putin called him, had brought stolen NSA documents to Hong Kong.
The Times reported from Hong Kong that two sources, both of whom worked for major government intelligence agencies, “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents” of the laptop that Snowden brought to Hong Kong. That China had the capability to obtain Snowden’s data was also the view of the former CIA deputy director Morell. He said, “Both the Chinese and the Russians would have used everything in their tool kit—from human approaches to technical attacks—to get at Snowden’s stolen data.”
Snowden would not have been a particularly difficult target for them, especially after he started disclosing secrets to journalists at the Mira hotel. Not only could the Chinese service approach the security staff at the Mira, but they could track him after he left the hotel and moved, along with his computers, in and out of several residences arranged by his carer. Snowden, after all, had put himself in the hands of people whom he had never met before, including three Hong Kong lawyers, a carer, and three Guardian journalists. It is likely that the efforts of these adversary intelligence services to find him, and the NSA data, would further intensify after Snowden revealed to the South China Morning Post on June 12 that he had access to NSA lists of computers in China and elsewhere that the NSA had penetrated.
It wouldn’t be only the Chinese service on his trail. The Russian intelligence service would also likely be tasked to acquire these NSA documents after Snowden’s meeting with Russian officials in Hong Kong. And while he could get away with giving coy and elusive answers to journalists who asked him about the whereabouts of the NSA data, the Russian and Chinese officials in Hong Kong who could offer him an escape route from prison would likely demand more specific answers about the whereabouts of data they had not already obtained by technical means.
The Post–Hong Kong Documents
The NSA concern about who had access to its missing files deepened further when NSA documents continued to surface in the press after Snowden went to Moscow. If U.S. intelligence needed any further evidence that someone had access to the documents, these additional revelations provided it.
The most sensational of them was a purported document attributed to Snowden concerning the NSA hacking of the cell phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The story was published on October 23 on the Der Spiegel website. Appelbaum was the co-author of the story. Even though Snowden had by now been in Russia for four months, he was cited in the story, along with unnamed “others,” as the source for the NSA document. Snowden did not deny it. Indeed, he took a measure of credit for the revelation, saying on German TV, “What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency.” If Snowden had been involved in the release of this document, it would be consistent with Kucherena’s assertion that he had access to the archive.
Adding to the intrigue, Poitras was apparently caught by surprise when the Merkel story broke in Der Spiegel. She urgently texted Snowden on what she called “background” (which ordinarily means that a journalist will not attribute information to a source). She asked him in the text to explain the NSA’s actions. Snowden explained to her that Merkel was listed by her
true name (and not by a code name) in the NSA document because the German chancellor was an NSA “target not an asset.” Presumably, Poitras would have already known that distinction if she had the document referred to in Der Spiegel. If the Merkel document was not among the data given to Poitras in Hong Kong, how did it get to the authors of the Der Spiegel article?
Appelbaum, of course, had been in contact with Snowden before he went public. He had served as Poitras’s co-interrogator of Snowden while he was still working at the NSA in May 2013. Appelbaum was also one of the leading supporters of WikiLeaks. Because he was famously an advocate of revealing government secrets, it seems unlikely that he would have delayed releasing such a bombshell about Merkel’s phone if Snowden had given him this document before he left Hong Kong in June 2013. Why would Appelbaum keep it secret for more than four months? The same pressure to publish would also apply to the journalists Snowden had dealt with in Hong Kong. If Snowden had given Poitras, Greenwald, Lam, or MacAskill the Merkel document, or even told them about it in their interviews with him in Hong Kong, The Guardian would have certainly rushed out such a scoop.
According to a source with knowledge of the Snowden investigation, there was no document referencing any spying on Merkel’s phone among the fifty-eight thousand documents on the thumb drive that Snowden had given to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. That absence would explain why Poitras had to send a text to Snowden in Moscow to ask for an explanation after the story broke.
Further confirmation of the absence of this document in the material Snowden provided journalists in Hong Kong comes from James Bamford, a well-respected expert on the NSA. In the course of researching his 2014 article on Snowden for Wired, he was given access to all the documents Snowden gave to Poitras, Greenwald, and Gellman. Bamford used a sophisticated indexing program to search through the database specifically for the Merkel material. He did not find any. He reported that no document given to journalists in Hong Kong even mentioned Merkel. It therefore appeared that the Merkel document was provided to Der Spiegel after Snowden went to Moscow. If so, some party had access to NSA documents after Snowden arrived in Russia and provided the Der Spiegel authors with the scoop. In that context, it might not have been a pure coincidence that Kucherena disclosed that Snowden had access to documents that he had not given to journalists in Hong Kong shortly before just such a document was published in Germany.
Bamford explored the possibility that there might be another person in the NSA who was stealing documents. He wrote to Poitras and asked her whether the Merkel document could have come from another person in the NSA. She declined, via a letter from her lawyer, to answer that question. But because she had not been the author of the Der Spiegel article, and had not been given the document, there is no reason to believe that she would know its provenance.
Documents continued to emerge years after Snowden arrived in Moscow that were more embarrassing to America. In June 2015, the WikiLeaks website released another putative Snowden document, two years after he had supposedly wiped his computer clean in Hong Kong. It revealed that the NSA had targeted the telephones of three consecutive presidents of France—Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and François Hollande.
According to a former NSA official, this document, like the 2013 Merkel material, was not among the data on the thumb drive given to journalists in Hong Kong, which Greenwald confirmed. Greenwald suggested to The New York Times that it might have been stolen by another penetration in the NSA, presumably one who had access to the same secret compartments as Snowden in 2013. Since Greenwald and Poitras had no way of knowing about the documents that Snowden did not give them, it is equally possible that the Russian intelligence services obtained this document from Snowden and later gave it to WikiLeaks. The release on Assange’s WikiLeaks site came in the midst of NATO war games held near the Russian border, which Putin had vehemently denounced. The accompanying article was co-authored by Assange, who now claimed to have access to Snowden’s NSA material. Because Assange had been in telephonic contact with Snowden in Hong Kong, and his deputy, Sarah Harrison, had spent five months in Moscow with Snowden in 2013, it is certainly possible Snowden was his source. But it seems difficult to believe that Assange waited two years before publishing because he has made it part of his modus operandi to publish documents immediately. Because WikiLeaks receives documents anonymously via its Tor software, any party with access to the Snowden files could have sent it. Subsequently, in July 2016, Assange released via WikiLeaks a cache of politically disruptive documents from the files of the Democratic National Committee. U.S. intelligence strongly suspected they been stolen by the Russian intelligence services and sent to WikiLeaks. If so, Russia made use of Assange and WikiLeaks to exploit selected fruits of its espionage activities
Greenwald and Poitras also released belated documents. On July 15, 2015, their web publication, The Intercept, released a Snowden document that cited an NSA intercept of an Israeli military communication concerning an Israeli raid in Syria on August 1, 2008. It revealed that a group of Israeli commandos killed General Muhammad Suleiman, a top aide to President Bashar al-Assad who had been working with North Korea to build a nuclear facility in Syria. Israel had destroyed that facility in Operation Orchard nearly a year earlier. Whatever the purpose of this new release of an NSA document (which had little if anything to do with any of the NSA’s own operations), it was not among the data that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong in 2013, according to a source with access to the investigation. Next, on January 28, 2016, The Intercept published data taken from a GHCQ (the British cipher service) file furnished by Snowden revealing military intelligence activities abroad. Specifically, it disclosed that the United States and Britain were intercepting data from Israel’s military drones in 2008. British intelligence had determined in 2013 that the material sent to Greenwald via a courier did not contain such GCHQ documents. If that is the case, then Poitras and Greenwald, like Appelbaum and Assange, were still receiving NSA documents that Snowden had allegedly stolen a long time after he went to Russia and claimed he had destroyed all his files.
The NSA reportedly determined that these belated documents, most of which concerned American allies in Germany, France, and Israel, had been among the material copied during the Snowden breach. They provided further reason to believe that someone still had access to the documents that were not distributed to journalists in Hong Kong. Kucherena’s disclosure, just before the first post–Hong Kong release, that Snowden still had access to the NSA files made it appear plausible that Snowden sent these documents to Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks, and The Intercept.
A former high-ranking KGB officer I interviewed had a very different view. He told me that in his experience an intelligence defector to Russia would not be allowed to distribute secret material to journalists without explicit approval by the security service tending him. He added that this injunction would be especially true in the case of Snowden because Putin had publicly enjoined him from releasing U.S. intelligence data. The more plausible alternative was that this material was released at the behest of the Russian intelligence service.
The mystery of the post–Hong Kong documents also intrigued members of the U.S. intelligence community with whom I discussed it. When I asked a former intelligence executive about the ultimate source for the Merkel story, he responded, “If Snowden didn’t give journalists this document in Hong Kong, we can assume an intermediary fed it to Appelbaum to publish in Der Spiegel.” According to him, the NSA investigation had determined that Snowden indeed had copied an NSA list of the cell phone numbers of foreign leaders, including the number of Merkel. This list became the basis of the Der Spiegel story.
It was also clear that Snowden gave credence to the release in Moscow. He made a major point about the hacking of Merkel’s phone in an interview with Wired in 2014. Just about two weeks before the leak, Kucherena said Snowden still had access to the documents. Clearly, someone had access. But whoever was behind it, the
release of information about the alleged bugging of Merkel’s phone resulted in badly fraying U.S. relations with Germany in the midst of developing troubles in Ukraine. As it later turned out, according to the investigation of the German federal prosecutor, which concluded in 2015, there was no evidence found in this document, or elsewhere, that Merkel’s calls were ever actually intercepted. Although they revealed little if anything that the intelligence services of Germany, France, and Israel were not already aware of, they raised a public outcry in allies against NSA surveillance, and the outcry became the event itself.
While these post–Hong Kong documents had little if any intelligence value, they provided further evidence that at least part of the stolen NSA documents was in the hands of a party hostile to the United States. If so, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that this party also had access to the far more valuable Level 3 documents revealing the NSA’s sources and methods, such as the one that Ledgett had described as a “roadmap” to U.S. electronic espionage against Russia and China.
Within the intelligence community, this concern was heightened by new countermeasures to this espionage employed by Russia and China after Snowden reached Moscow. For example, there were indications that the NSA had lost part of its capabilities to follow Russian troop movements in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials even went so far as to suggest, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, that “Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping.”
How America Lost Its Secrets Page 20