CHAPTER 26
The Handler
As for [Snowden’s] communication with the outside world, yes, I am his main contact.
—ANATOLY KUCHERENA, Moscow, 2013
ON NOVEMBER 1, I still had not been able to make contact with Anatoly Kucherena, and my flight back to New York was in five days. My fixer, Zamir, had been trying to arrange an appointment for three weeks, but he had only received one callback from Kucherena’s assistant, Valentina Kvirvova. She wanted to know how I knew Oliver Stone. Zamir told her of my part in Stone’s movie. That was the last he had heard from her. Meanwhile, a Moscow-based journalist told me that she had waited eighteen months to hear back from Kucherena before giving up. I also learned from a Russian researcher that Kucherena had not given a single interview since his television interview with Sophie Shevardnadze on September 23, 2013. And no Russian journalist, or any Moscow-based foreign journalist, had ever obtained an interview with Snowden. At this point, Zamir was becoming increasingly doubtful about my getting access to either Kucherena or Snowden.
I turned to another contact in Moscow. When I had been investigating the 2006 polonium poisoning of the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, I had interviewed Andrei Lugovoy. A former KGB officer assigned to protecting the Kremlin’s top members in the 1990s, Lugovoy later opened his own security company. In 2005, he became a business associate of Litvinenko’s in gathering information and made regular trips to London to meet with him. Because he had tea with Litvinenko at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London on November 1, 2006, the day Litvinenko was poisoned, he became the main suspect in the British investigation. He could not be extradited, however. After reconstructing the chronology of the crime, I established that Litvinenko had been contaminated with polonium at a Japanese restaurant some four hours before his tea with Lugovoy. I therefore wrote that the crime scene might not have been at the Pine Bar, a finding that he said he greatly appreciated.
Lugovoy was elected to the Duma in 2007 and also hosted a twenty-four-part television series on espionage for which Putin personally decorated him. He was also now reputed to be in the inner circle of power in Moscow. So I called him.
We arranged to meet in the bar of the Hotel National. A short but well-built man with a bullet-style haircut, Lugovoy showed up promptly at 1:00 p.m. After discussing some of the subsequent developments in the still-lingering polonium investigation, I asked him if he knew Kucherena.
“I don’t know him, but I know someone who does,” he answered. “Why are you interested in seeing Kucherena?”
I told him that I wanted to speak to him about Snowden but I had been unable to arrange a meeting.
“That’s no problem,” he said, raising his cell phone (which never left his hand). He hit a number on the speed dial and spoke rapidly in Russian (which I do not understand). He cupped his hand over the phone and asked how long I would be in Moscow. After I told him that I was leaving that Friday, he spoke again in Russian to the person on the other end. “You will have an appointment on Thursday,” he said.
Later that afternoon, Valentina, Kucherena’s assistant, called to say that Kucherena would be happy to see me at his office at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday. I didn’t ask Lugovoy whom he had called. Whomever Lugovoy called obviously had the power to arrange the meeting.
When I arrived at Kucherena’s office, I was with my translator Zamir. (Kucherena did not speak English.) I arrived ten minutes early, and a receptionist showed me into a well-lit square room with an elegant table in the center. There was a sumptuous basket of exotic fruits on the table and large portraits of racehorses on the walls. Another door opened, and a tall, graceful woman came into the room and introduced herself as Valentina. She was wearing a well-fitting black dress, a striking jade necklace, and high heels. When she asked whether we would like anything to drink, it seemed more like the prelude to an elegant dinner party than an interview about Snowden.
Valentina spoke very good English. She apologized for the delay in responding to my requests, explaining that she received “thousands of requests” for interviews and did not have time to answer them. When I asked how many were answered, she shrugged and said, “Not many.”
At that moment, Kucherena entered with a jaunty step, a cherubic face, and untamed white hair. He was wearing gray slacks, a partially buttoned cashmere polo sweater, and a fully engaging smile.
As I had learned from his entry in Wikipedia, he was born in a small village in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia in 1960 and had obtained his law degree from the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute in 1991. He opened his own law firm in Moscow in 1995. Kucherena’s well-known friendship with Putin had evidently not hurt his law practice. His clients had included such well-connected defendants as Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine overthrown in 2014; Grigory Leps, a Russian singer blacklisted by the United States for allegedly acting as a money courier for a Eurasian criminal organization; Valentine Kovalev, a former Russian minister of justice charged with corruption; and Suleyman Kerimov, a civil servant from Dagestan who had amassed an estimated fortune of $7.1 billion. Kerimov had recently been charged for manipulating the price of potash in Belarus. Most of these clients were reputed to be part of Putin’s inner circle.
To break the ice, I asked Kucherena about Oliver Stone. I knew he had a small role in Stone’s forthcoming movie, in which he plays Snowden’s lawyer in Moscow.
“I was impressed by how few takes he needed to shoot my scene,” he answered.
“How did you come to be Snowden’s lawyer?” I asked.
“Snowden picked me from a roster of fifteen lawyers with which he had been provided.”
Because Snowden did not speak or read Russian, I asked Kucherena about how Snowden had come to pick him from the roster. Could he have known about his connections?
“I suppose it was because of my record in defending human rights,” Kucherena replied with a broad smile.
Kucherena went to Sheremetyevo International Airport to meet his new client on the morning of Friday, July 12, 2013. At that point, he said that Snowden had been held virtually incommunicado for twenty days. Other than Russian officials, the only person he had been allowed to see during this period was Assange’s aide, Sarah Harrison.
“Where in the airport did you meet him?” I asked. “Was it in a VIP lounge?”
“It was in the transit zone,” he replied coyly. “That is all I can say.”
They spoke through a translator. By this time, Harrison had sent twenty-one countries petitions for asylum that were signed by Snowden. Whatever their purpose, Kucherena did not consider them helpful.
“I told him that if he wanted to get sanctuary in Russia, he would have to immediately withdraw all the petitions in which he had asked other countries for asylum.” Kucherena said that otherwise he could not represent him. Snowden agreed to that condition.
Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Kucherena accompanied Snowden, who was wearing an open-neck blue shirt and a badly creased jacket, to area G9 in the transit zone, where they emerged from a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” A number of officials in dark suits, who Kucherena assumed were from the “special services” to protect Snowden, were already in the room. Snowden and Harrison seated themselves at a table. A Russian translator was also seated at the table. At this point, thirteen invitees were ushered into the room to witness Snowden’s first public appearance in Russia. It was rare if not unprecedented for an American intelligence worker to seek asylum in Russia.
These invitees included some of Putin’s close associates, pro-government activists, and representatives of both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. “It was totally bizarre,” said Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch, who attended. “Although it was billed as a press conference,” she recalled, “there was no press or photographers allowed in the room.” Nor was anyone allowed to photograph or record the event.
Snowden read from a prepared statement accusing t
he U.S. government of violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, saying he was a victim of political persecution, and concluding, “I will be submitting my request to Russia today [for asylum], and hope it will be accepted favorably.” After answering a few questions posed by the audience, he left the room with Kucherena and Harrison by the same door they had entered.
In discussing this meeting, Kucherena told me that Snowden had not intended to seek asylum in Russia when he arrived on June 23. Because he also said he had not met Snowden prior to the day of the conference, I asked how he knew Snowden’s intentions.
“When I accepted the case, I received Snowden’s dossier,” he answered. “I was able to see all his interviews.”
Presumably, Snowden’s dossier included his interviews with the FSB, the SVR, and other Russian security services. If so, it would explain how Kucherena could be so certain that Snowden had brought “material” with him to Russia that he had not provided to journalists in Hong Kong. Before meeting with Kucherena, I had met with Sophie Shevardnadze, who told me that Kucherena had personally approved the translation of their interview into English. So I asked Kucherena about the interview. It will be recalled that in response to a question about whether Snowden had secret material with him in Russia, Kucherena had said “certainly.” Was this exchange accurate?
“It was accurate,” he answered.
Snowden, as we know, had said in Hong Kong that he had only given journalists some of the state secrets he had stolen and that he deemed others too sensitive for journalists. So I wanted to find out from Kucherena which documents Snowden had taken to Russia. I went about it in a roundabout way. When Shevardnadze asked him about the secret material Snowden might reveal in Russia, Kucherena pointedly called her attention to Snowden’s CIA service, suggesting that he might possess CIA files. I also knew that in Kucherena’s roman à clef, he had Joshua Frost, the thinly veiled Snowden-based character, steal a vast number of CIA documents that could do great damage to U.S. intelligence. By retaining them, Frost made himself a prime target of the CIA.
So I asked, “Is Joshua Frost fact or fiction?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “If I said he was Snowden, it would violate the attorney-client privilege.”
“I understand,” I said. “But did Snowden do what Frost did in your book?”
“That is for you to decide,” he answered with a sly smile. “It’s my first novel.”
When I asked if he could arrange for me to see Snowden, he said that first I would have to submit my questions to Ben Wizner, Snowden’s American lawyer at the ACLU. He made it clear to me that the exposure of Snowden to journalists, or at least the vetting of journalists, had been outsourced to Wizner. Kucherena was handling Snowden’s liaisons with the Russian authorities while Wizner was handling the Snowden narrative, including selecting the media outlets. Presumably, Wizner had handpicked Snowden’s past interviewers in Moscow, including Barton Gellmna, James Bamford, Brian Williams, John Oliver, Alan Rusbridger, and Katrina vanden Heuvel.
“After that, the final decision is up to Snowden,” he said. That seemed to conclude the interview, but as I got up to leave, he added, “His legal defense is fairly expensive.”
Snowden had said in a BBC interview in 2015, as previously mentioned, that he had brought enough cash to Hong Kong and Russia to cover all of his expenses. So I asked Kucherena if Snowden had brought his own funds.
“He was penniless when he arrived,” he replied. I found that answer plausible because the FBI reportedly had not found a large cash withdrawal from his account before his departure and it seemed to me too risky for him to carry a large sum of undeclared cash through three airports. Because large sums of cash must be declared, the detection of the money could compromise his plan to deliver his NSA documents. Snowden might have told the BBC he had brought cash to allay suspicions about who was financing his stay in Moscow.
I was intrigued by this remark. Snowden, as far as I knew, didn’t need a legal defense, because he was not charged with a crime in Russia and the United States had no extradition treaty with Russia.
While Kucherena unfortunately did not arrange an interview with Snowden, he did something I considered more important. He confirmed the accuracy of his September 2013 assertion that Snowden had brought secret material to Russia, material he had not given to journalists in Hong Kong. After what I had learned from Cherkashin about the lengths that Russian intelligence would go to obtain U.S. communications intelligence secrets, I viewed Snowden’s access to this material to be a crucially important part of the mystery.
That day, I immediately sent my questions to Ben Wizner, and I offered to fly back to Moscow if Snowden would grant me an interview. In March 2016, Wizner answered that Snowden had “respectfully declined.”
PART FIVE
CONCLUSIONS: WALKING THE CAT BACK
In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, A Study in Scarlet
CHAPTER 27
Snowden’s Choices
It is the choices we make that show who we truly are.
—J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES had the opportunity to thoroughly debrief Snowden as to his motive for stealing state secrets, whereas U.S. authorities did not. It cannot be assumed that he had a single consistent motive in 2013. Snowden has shown, if nothing else, that he was adaptable to changing circumstances. He might have begun taking documents for one reason and found other reasons as he proceeded in his quest. Many of the reported circumstances of his activities, including his probes, contacts, theft, and escape, are disputed by his supporters. Many of his other activities are shrouded by the secrecy of the NSA. We do know, though, that Snowden made four extraordinary choices during the nine-month period in 2013. If, as is said, actions speak louder than words, Snowden’s four choices illuminate the underlying concerns guiding his acts. In the case of a classified intelligence breach, as in the post-action analysis of a masterful chess game, the sequence of moves a player makes provides an important clue to his strategy. Let us review what we have already learned about these decisions.
The First Decision
The initial move that Snowden made in preparation for the Level 3 breach was switching jobs on March 15. Snowden chose to leave his job as a system administrator at Dell to take one at Booz Allen as an analyst in training. His motive could not have been money, because it was a lower-paying position. At the time he made this choice, he had already set up an encrypted channel with Laura Poitras for the purpose of sending her secret material. But he did not have to change jobs to send her important secrets. So what was his purpose in making this fateful choice?
The job change was not necessary to expose NSA domestic activities. If he had only wanted to be a whistle-blower, there were ample documents about the NSA’s activities already available to him on the NSANet. He also had access at Dell to the administrative file that contained the FISA court orders issued every three months to Verizon. In addition, as the NSA’s damage assessment established, before switching jobs, Snowden had already taken most of the documents pertaining to the NSA’s domestic operations that he could have supplied to Poitras and Greenwald for whistle-blowing purposes. Indeed, while still at Dell, he had told Poitras he had a copy of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a document in which President Obama authorized the NSA to tap into fiber cables crossing the United States. Snowden described it to her as “a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House.” True, he took a more recently issued FISA order and PRISM presentation in April after switching jobs, but he could just as easily have taken the January 2013 version of the FISA order from the administrative file of Dell. It would have had the same explosive effect in the media.
Nor did he switch jobs to lessen the risk of getting caught. Actually, the change put him in far greater jeopardy. At Dell, he was relatively safe from apprehension beca
use he could take documents, such as the Presidential Policy Directive 20, from access points at the NSA shared by many of his peers, making it difficult to trace the theft. Indeed, if he just wanted to expose the NSA’s domestic operations, he could have done the entire operation at Dell. He could even have sent Poitras documents anonymously over his own Tor software and server. And he could have remained in his self-described “paradise” in Hawaii with his girlfriend.
When he chose to move to Booz Allen, the risk of exposure greatly increased because of its auditing system. Any documents he took without authorization could be traced back to him (though not in real time). As he later told Greenwald and Poitras, he knew that stealing documents at the Booz Allen job meant that he would either go to prison or escape from America. He didn’t want to face prison time, so the job change required an escape plan. As part of that plan, soon after he started work at the Booz Allen–managed facility, he submitted a request for a medical leave of absence.
We can safely assume that the reason he made this risky switch in employment was that he wanted something beyond the whistle-blowing documents. He wanted documents that were not available at the Dell job. One such document he took was the top secret Congressional Budget Justification book for fiscal year 2013. This “black budget,” as it is called in Congress, contained the entire intelligence community’s priorities for, among other things, monitoring the activities of potential adversaries and terrorist organizations. It specified the money requested not only by the NSA but by the CIA, the DIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other intelligence services. Snowden could not have objected to the budget’s being somehow secret or illegitimate, because it was duly approved by both houses of Congress and the president. If it was not for purposes of whistle-blowing, presumably he had another purpose for taking such a document. It certainly held value to other actors. “For our enemies, having it [the black budget] is like having the playbook of the opposing NFL team,” said the former CIA deputy director Morell in 2015. “I guarantee you that the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, would have paid millions of dollars for such a document.” If unlike Ames, Hanssen, and Pelton, Snowden was not after acquiring money, he must have seen another value in taking it.
How America Lost Its Secrets Page 29