Dark Mirror

by Barton Gellman

  Verax had sent us another package, larger than the first. Much, much larger. Three digital vaults, each with a separate passphrase, nested one inside another like matryoshka dolls. The outer vault was labeled “Pandora.” Inside it was another, labeled “Verax.” And inside that, one more: “Journodrop.” I typed the final passphrase and a status window popped open, text flying up and off the screen too fast to read as the encrypted archive unpacked. The operation took a long time. When it stopped, there were eight gigabytes of new files. I had done the math for a story once: one gigabyte could hold tens of thousands of pages, more if fancy graphics were kept to a minimum.

  I clicked experimentally on a folder called “fisa,” short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Inside it were two more folders. I clicked the top one and found eleven more folders inside. I began to drill down, opening the first folder listed at each new level. There were six of them at the next, fourteen after that, and then twenty-one—folders inside folders inside folders. A quick scan of file names showed Word memos, plain text files, PowerPoint decks, Adobe portable document files, Excel spreadsheets, and photographs.

  I had no words. Nothing in my experience prepared me to cope with this volume. How would I vet it, protect it from theft, write stories across so wide a span? I knew how to chase down facts with old-school investigative methods. I drew on open literature and background interviews for context. I circled hard targets from the outside in, interviewing sources on the periphery before approaching the big shots at the center. Afterward, I started around the circle again. Those methods worked, but they did not scale. I could not authenticate classified documents in batches, dozens or hundreds at a time. And there was no way I would put the archive online to crowdsource the analysis, an effective tool in some cases but not when there were unknown risks to public safety. Even if Verax wanted that—and he emphatically did not, describing the idea as “reckless”—I would have had no part in it.

  The size of the archive itself, on the other hand, helped validate it. Over the years, I had seen forgeries, some of them fairly convincing, from hoaxers or people with something to gain. But who could possibly fabricate so many? What benefit could justify the prodigious labor involved? In theory, a few doctored papers could be hidden among real ones. I would have to watch for that. Even so, I was increasingly confident in Verax. Poitras was committed to an afternoon flight. We did not have much time to talk. She kept a copy of Pandora. She gave me the original, and I took it home.

  This was the Hollywood version of a “leak”: an unknown source emerging from nowhere, bearing a stupendous scoop. In the real life of a newsroom, this happened so seldom that it was tantamount to myth. Typically, I got my best stories in small pieces from people I had cultivated for years or discovered through a common web of trust, each contributing part of a whole that none would tell me directly.

  I could not get past the size of the archive. How many documents did it hold? The number did not matter much, but looking for it became a calming distraction. The job was unexpectedly difficult. I found no point-and-click method to count the combined contents of all those hundreds of folders. Eventually, I resorted to the command line. I opened a Terminal window and tried to remember the syntax. I garbled it, googled it, and finally typed this:

  find . -type f | wc –l

  In the economical language of Unix, I asked the computer to take an inventory. Look inside the current volume. Find only user files. Instead of listing the file names, count them. I tapped Enter and stood, unable to stay still. Seconds ticked away. Nothing happened. As I reached for the keyboard to see what was wrong, the Terminal window scrolled up a line and displayed a response.

  51662

  I sat back down. Whoa. Well, I sure messed up that command. This was my “air-gapped” computer, disconnected permanently from the internet, so I switched to another laptop and browsed for a more accurate counting method. I tried five variations, adding options to filter out invisible files, temporary directories, and other system junk. The results stayed north of fifty thousand every time.

  Agitation sent me on tangents. I reached straight for the cliché, grabbing a package of cheap printer stock from a shelf. What would the archive look like on paper? All right, it’s a standard ream, five hundred pages, call it two inches thick. Suppose every document is one page long. Can’t be true, but keep it simple. To print fifty thousand pages I’ll need a hundred reams. Multiply by two inches, divide by twelve, and, let’s see, the stack is seventeen feet tall. I would have to stand on my own head twice to reach the top. And of course these were not one-page documents, by and large. The first five I opened had page counts of 57, 4, 188, 16, and 356.

  I should be more prepared for this. Why so overwhelmed? I had written about classified matters plenty of times. That was hard to avoid as a military and diplomatic correspondent. My master’s thesis, long before, had parsed the political theory of “Secrecy, Security, and the Right to Know.” I had twice taught a Princeton course on the subject and debated it in faculty seminars at the U.S. Naval Academy and Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Until now, I had never possessed the full text of a contemporary, codeword-classified document, still less a library. Nobody had. Not in my business. Not on this scale. This was not the most voluminous U.S. classified leak in history, I knew. WikiLeaks had published a quarter million diplomatic cables three years before. But those were classified Confidential or Secret. Nearly everything in this archive had Top Secret markings, most were “sensitive compartmented information,” or SCI, and many had cover names, handling caveats, and access controls that signified additional restrictions.

  There was nothing systematic about my work in those first few hours. I clicked on files as they caught my eye and skimmed. I found a lot of technical material: network diagrams, data tables, status reports. Also legal opinions, operational briefs, target lists, budgets, and productivity figures for scores of collection sites identified by cover name. Most of the jargon and cryptonyms meant nothing to me. Then I came across a document bearing the following stamps:

  TOP SECRET//STLW//COMINT//ORCON//NOFORN

  The last three labels were somewhat generic, as close-hold information goes. The document discussed communications intelligence sources and methods; the NSA, as “originating” agency, controlled distribution; no foreign national should have access. It was the second label, the cryptonym, that leaped off the page. STLW! This one I knew. It stood for STELLARWIND, the warrantless domestic surveillance program created by Dick Cheney in late 2001. He and his chief counsel conceived it, enlisted the NSA director, Michael V. Hayden, to build it, found a Justice Department lawyer to bless it, and packaged the program for sign-off by President Bush. STELLARWIND had filled two chapters in my last book, Angler, but I never discovered exactly how it worked. Just the year before, in 2012, I had written to Poitras about her short film on the former NSA official Bill Binney, who spoke of STELLARWIND as a grave threat to privacy. “Wish I knew the underlying details that could support what he’s saying,” I wrote. “This story has driven me nuts—spent a long time trying to find out what the program actually did and does, and broke my sword on it.”

  If ever I had a white whale, this was it. I had told a tale of historic battles inside the Bush administration, fought to the brink of a mass resignation, but I never had a clear view of the beast itself. And now, out of the blue, it had washed up on the screen of my laptop. The contours were clear, innards laid open to view. There would be a big, important story in that, and I saw a handful of others the first day. I also ran across information that I knew I would not publish. Some of it I almost—not quite—wished I had not seen: ongoing operations against plainly dangerous adversaries, photographs of clandestine personnel in the field.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. I needed a lawyer. I needed a security upgrade. I needed a newsroom at my back. I needed a safe way to reach other experts and sources. I needed advice from my partner Dafna Linzer, a great jou
rnalist and the love of my life, but I did not know what I could say without waiving attorney-client privilege. I stewed in our apartment, conspicuously agitated and unable to explain.

  Pandora’s name in the Greek myth meant “all-gifted.” Her box, once opened, could never be resealed. Verax intended his gift, like hers, to be irrevocable. In the ancient story, Pandora’s box unleashed every evil that befell humankind. What remained in the otherwise empty box was hope. Verax hoped to make public enough information to start an unstoppable debate. By nature and profession, I believed his “Pandora” would do more good than harm, but nothing quite like it had raised its lid before.

  * * *

  —

  Some people, when unboxing a complicated gift, have the sense to look for a user guide. My first pass through Pandora skipped right past it. That was no fault of Verax, who left a pair of text files in the top directory, with names in emphatic capital letters: “README_FIRST” and “README_SECOND.” Eventually, I took notice.

  The second file gave a high-level tour of the subjects covered and the organization of folders. The first, a 1,041-word introduction and manifesto, began like a conversation in progress: “It will be retroactively changed to damage my credibility, I had a good record and was well liked.” It was a tense and jumbled opening, with little of the polish I had come to expect from Verax. Years later he told me he composed both cover notes in haste as he reached the brink of departure from his home in Hawaii. He had not yet boarded the flight that would leave his whole world behind, but it was too late to change his mind. He had committed himself with one final breach of NSA defenses, the one he saved for last. Auditing systems were sure to flag it, and soon. Behind the grandiloquence of his note was a young man, alone, under extraordinary stress.

  I led a comfortable and privileged life, a life engineered by the power structure to be difficult to give up. As I advanced and learned the dangerous truth behind the U.S. policies that seek to develop secret, irresistable [sic] powers and concentrate them in the hands of an unaccountable few, human weakness haunted me. As I worked in secret to resist them, selfish fear questioned if the stone thrown by a single man could justify the loss of everything he loves. I have come to my answer.

  My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge. They protect their domestic systems from the oversight of citizenry through classification and lies, and shield themselves from outrage in the event of leaks by overemphasizing limited protections they choose to grant the governed. I tell you from experience that these protections can be stripped away in an instant.

  He closed with a breathtaking act of trust, placing himself entirely in our hands. The timing was his own, as always, but he gave me what I needed when I needed it. “Verax” left the room. His alter ego stepped out from behind the curtain.

  EDWARD JOSEPH SNOWDEN, SSN: ███-███-███

  CIA ALIAS “DAVE M. CHURCHYARD”

  AGENCY IDENTIFICATION NUMBER: 2339176

  FORMER SENIOR ADVISOR | UNITED STATES NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, UNDER CORPORATE COVER

  FORMER FIELD OFFICER | UNITED STATES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, UNDER DIPLOMATIC COVER

  FORMER LECTURER | UNITED STATES DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, UNDER CORPORATE COVER

  He had a name now. There were so many questions left. What kind of man could assume such risks? Who would take decisions of this consequence upon himself? How could he, how could anyone, walk off undetected with the patrimony of a global surveillance establishment?

  TWO

  HEARTBEAT

  Not just anyone could do it, but it doesn’t take super villain levels of capability to make it happen. All it would take is paying attention to how the system works, which is your job.

  —Edward Snowden to author, December 2013

  Windows down, radio up, Edward Snowden steered his new Integra north on Highway 750 to a subterranean fortress. The gateway resembled a mine shaft sunk in a suburban parking lot. In Waipahu, Hawaii, locals called it “the Hole.” NSA workers, who traversed to the spaces below, favored “the Tunnel.” It was March 2012 when Snowden reported for duty at the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center, half an hour’s drive from the Baskin-Robbins where President Obama learned to sling ice cream as a teen. Months would pass before Snowden approached news reporters, but he had reached the staging point.

  Snowden locked his mobile phone in the car, waved his credentials at the guard shack, and passed through a nuclear blast door that had long since stuck on its hinges, unable to close if Armageddon called. The whole facility had grown shabby with age. In the early 1940s, fearing another Pearl Harbor, military engineers had carved out huge underground bays for aircraft assembly. The war moved on and production never began. The Kunia site became an unloved hand-me-down. Successive tenants acquired and discarded it as a Navy armory, an Air Force bunker, an Army field station, and a backup command center for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. In 1993, the NSA moved in and refashioned Kunia as the agency’s ears and eyes on Asia. It was meant to be temporary space, but builders did not break ground for its replacement until 2007. When Snowden arrived five years later, according to a contemporary there, the transition was still “Charlie Foxtrot”—a cluster fuck, ever incomplete.

  A quarter-mile slope led Snowden down to a man trap, a double turnstile designed to lock him inside until he scanned his green contractor’s badge and punched the correct PIN on a keypad. The scale of the structure on the other side was immense. Snowden emerged from the Tunnel that morning into a cavernous expanse of cubicle farms, server racks, cipher-locked offices, and row after row of long, shared tables laid out in an open plan. Three levels, each the size of a football field, stacked thousands of workers under miles of fluorescent bulbs. “It’s like a Bond villain’s lair, only with crappier lighting,” Snowden told me. “There are a lot more people in there than you’d think, too. I remember being amazed when there was a fire drill.”

  Disaffection came gradually. Snowden’s rebellion against the chain of command did not begin or end at Kunia. His riskiest intrusions into NSA files took place the following year at the agency’s new Captain Joseph J. Rochefort command center, five miles to the northeast. Snowden’s shift of allegiance from the government to the public at large, as he conceived its interests, was years in the making. By the time he left the CIA, fantasies of rebellion had taken on the character of planning.

  Long before that, in his teens and early twenties, Snowden acquired the skills, values, and implacable sense of self that amounted to an origin story for the global public figure he became. He walked away from high school for a self-set curriculum in computer networking, graphic design, kung fu, and the imaginative worlds of anime, costume play, and electronic gaming. Collectively, they fostered a drive for mastery and black-and-white moral views that emphasized personal virtue and prowess. After discovering a shortcut to the U.S. Army Special Forces, he traded his joystick for a rucksack and rifle, pushing himself until his body broke. He accumulated credentials as an engineer by passing certification tests without always bothering to sit through the courses. All those things preceded his arrival at Kunia, but it was here in the Tunnel that Verax was born, among other noms de code, and here that Snowden began to probe the NSA’s defenses.

  “I was starting to operationalize,” Snowden recalled, dropping his guard briefly near the end of a nine-hour interview on a hot summer night in Moscow.

  “You seem to mean that in two ways,” I said carefully, recalling the many times he had refused to speak of it. “One is where you actually start, past the point of no return, in terms of gathering material, extracting it from systems. And the other is communi
cating to journalists.”

  “Well, really it’s all part of the whole thing,” Snowden replied. “It’s when you move from the idea of ‘something needs to be done’ to ‘I’m going to do something about it.’”

  I ventured another step. Snowden slammed the door.

  “You’re asking me to confirm or deny operative aspects of acts the government alleges to be criminal,” he said in an email later. On another occasion he blamed “tabloid values” for my questions about how he got away with so many files. “Obviously there is a personal interest. There is human curiosity. But you’ve got to be restrained in how you approach those things. When you talk about weighing benefits and harm, what is the benefit in knowing that?”

  Even so, he permitted himself a note of pride.

  “I’m not sure anybody will ever talk about how all this stuff happened,” he said. “But it was tremendously complex. I’m talking about things that needed to be handled with care and precision in a really constrained environment.”

  * * *

  —

  The transfer to Hawaii was a concession to Snowden’s health, saving his intelligence career just long enough for him to end it with finality. A series of small blackouts over several months preceded a serious epileptic seizure in the middle of a phone call with his boss at Dell Advanced Solutions Group, a U.S. intelligence contractor. Snowden’s new diagnosis left him unable to drive lawfully from Maryland to his job as a CIA technical adviser in Langley, Virginia. Dell found him a position half a world away, where he could, in theory, commute by bicycle. Snowden intended to pedal to work from the ranch house he rented in Waipahu, but locals warned him that the blind curves north of Plantation Road were death on wheels. He surveyed the route and decided he could manage it safely by car, despite a state law requiring six seizure-free months before driving. As always, he planned for contingencies and valued his own judgment over the rules. If he felt a seizure coming on, he could ditch on the east side of the road, where no one’s life but his own would be at risk. Snowden was no stranger to moving. Previous jobs had cycled him twice through Langley, to Switzerland as a CIA technical officer, and to Japan on a Dell contract for the NSA. The Kunia job was meant, in part, to dial down the stress.