Soltani pulled out screenshots of their messages, which he had saved: “excuse my brazen demeanor but i find you incredibley cute and interesting,” one of them wrote. “let’s meet up?”
Then, on the day they set, she proposed to get together at his place: “it’s gloomy out. makes me want to cuddle,” she wrote.
“She was the one who wanted to hook up, like straight away,” Soltani said. “The fact that two girls in a row were making themselves available on the first date, I was like, what the fuck? Am I being, what—there’s a word for that—”
“Honey trapped,” I said. “I’m glad I wasn’t single for this story.”
“Yeah, honey trapped. I do okay, but it usually involves going out on a couple dates or whatever. These are the only times that both girls advanced on me on the first night. I don’t think I’m a bad-looking guy, but I’m not the kind of guy women message out of the blue and invite me to cuddle.”
Soltani suspected an intelligence agency setup—“the Chinese government trying to get up on me” in an effort to elicit information about the NSA documents, or to steal the digital files. The two of us talked through a well-known information security scenario known as the evil maid attack, which relies on brief physical access to a computer to steal its encryption credentials. The Snowden files, as it happened, were at that time locked in a Washington Post vault room and kept separate from their keys, but outsiders would not know that. And if Soltani was sufficiently motivated, an attractive spy might assume, anything was possible.
Soon after these interactions, Soltani returned to OkCupid to document them in more detail. He searched for the women who had reached out to him. Their online profiles no longer existed.
Soltani wound up going out with a third woman who reached out to him around the same time, “but for the longest time I would not bring her back to my house,” he said. “I wasn’t comfortable. I remember that feeling. I would never leave my phone when I went to the bathroom. It’s weird to have opsec when you’re dating.”
Did he have grounds to live this way? He did. Were they valid in any given case? No way to know.
By the time we had this conversation, in the late fall of 2015, Soltani and I had stopped writing stories for the Post. I was reporting for this book. Soltani had moved on. He had retired his old laptop, returned an encryption key fob to me, and shed his last connection to classified materials. “When we were wrapping up, it felt really good that I didn’t have to carry this burden anymore,” he told me. “I mean from the perspective of the duty to protect this stuff. There’s still stuff in there that I think should absolutely never see the light of day.”
He kicked a question back to me. “You still constantly have to be diligent. You’ve been doing it for, like, three years. How do you do on vacation?”
Well, about that. Preoccupation with surveillance had distorted my professional and personal lives. I had balked at the main gate of Disney World when I realized I would have to scan a fingerprint and wear a radio-tagged wristband everywhere in the park. Dafna, standing with our seven-year-old son, dared me with her eyes to refuse. I caved, of course. With very specific exceptions, I brought my laptop everywhere I went, even on beach and hiking trips. I refused to set my bag down at coat checks at parties. Precautions for my electronics inconvenienced my friends and embarrassed my family. “You’re moving further and further into a world that I’m not a part of, and that I don’t understand, and I don’t want to be a part of,” Dafna told me one night. I had not come to terms, until that moment, with how abnormal my behavior had become. I was absorbed with risk, and I never felt safe enough.
In the back of my mind was an episode of involuntary entanglement in the intelligence world. In December 2003 I had been traveling in Iraq, interviewing weapons scientists and engineers to reconstruct their history with WMD. One day I paid a call at the University of Baghdad campus, looking for a biologist accused by American officials of working on designer pathogens. My interpreter asked directions, listened to the answer, and then turned to me gravely. It isn’t safe for you here, he said. Another man had been to campus before me, identifying himself as “Barton Gellman,” and asking questions as though he were a reporter. Either that man was from the CIA, my interpreter said, passing along what he heard, or you are. U.S. intelligence policy discourages the use of journalistic cover, but there is a loophole for “extraordinary circumstances.” When I confronted a CIA spokesman, he could not give me a categorical answer on whether the agency had made an exception here. The impostor, of course, could have come from anywhere.
I built ever-thicker walls of electronic and physical self-defense, and I had access to world-class expertise, but I had not been formally trained in operational security. Put less gently, I was an amateur playing against professionals. Twice I left my keys in the front door overnight. Once I met a source for a drink and agreed to a second round, then a third, a rarity for me. In the morning I could not find my laptop bag anywhere. Frantically I canvassed the possibilities. The bar had nothing in its lost and found. Could my source have slipped away with the backpack? No chance, I decided. I played and replayed the memory of my exit from the subway the night before. I had nearly missed my stop, and I distinctly remembered the way the bag slapped against my shoulders as I slid through the closing doors. So where had it gone? Fully aware of the irony, I persuaded the superintendent of my apartment building to let me review the lobby camera video. (I hear you, dear reader. Surveillance is good for you.) There I was on the little black-and-white monitor, strolling to the elevator with nothing on my shoulder. I had come home bagless. Finally I remembered the hot slice with mushrooms that I stopped to eat on the short walk home from the subway. I raced out the lobby and around the corner. Humiliated, I found my bag behind the counter at the neighborhood pizza joint.
Other lapses, though rare, continued to mortify. I had firmly requested a separate, locked room at the Post for use by the reporters who worked with the Snowden documents. On a subsequent visit, a facilities staff member proudly showed me the new space in a place of honor beside the company president’s office. The room had one feature I had specifically asked to avoid: a wall full of windows. If you craned your neck you could catch a glimpse of the Beaux-Arts mansion half a block to the west. The Russian ambassador’s residence in Washington. “You have to be kidding me,” Ashkan said. Crestfallen, I asked for a change of venue to a windowless space. The Post dutifully found one, installed a high-security lock, put a video camera in the hall outside, and brought in a huge safe that must have weighed four hundred pounds.
I acquired a big, heavy safe in New York as well. I will not enumerate every step I took to keep my work secure, but they were many and varied and sometimes self-befuddling. The computers we used for the NSA archive were specially locked down. Ashkan and I cracked open a pair of laptops, removed the wi-fi and Bluetooth hardware, and disconnected the batteries. If a stranger appeared at the door, we merely had to tug on the quick-release power cables to switch off and reencrypt the machines instantly. We stored the laptops in the vault and kept encryption keys on hardware, itself encrypted, that we took away with us each time we left the room, even for bathroom breaks. We sealed the USB ports. I disconnected and locked up the internet router switch in my New York office every night. I dabbed epoxy and glitter on the case-bottom screws of all my machines to help detect tampering in my absence. (The glitter dries in random, unique patterns.) Detection of compromise was as important as prevention, security expert Nicholas Weaver told me, so I experimented with ultraviolet powder on the dial of the New York safe. Photographing dust patterns under a UV flashlight beam turned out to be messy. I kept my notes on multiple encrypted volumes, arranging the files in such a way that I had to type five long passphrases just to start work every day. I hardly ever typed all the passphrases right the first time. I forgot the passphrase to one seldom-used PGP key and lost access to a few of my files forever. I annoyed the
hell out of newsroom colleagues who wanted to communicate about the story in anything that resembled a normal way.
At a farewell party for Anne Kornblut, who oversaw the Snowden coverage, my newsroom colleagues put on a skit that purported to depict our story meetings. Reporter Carol Leonnig, playing the role of Anne, pulled out blindfolds for everyone in the pretend meeting. They had to cover their eyes, she explained, before Bart could speak. Funny and fair, I had to admit. I was a giant pain in the ass.
I never imagined that any single barrier was impassable. My old summer camp bunkmate, Larry Schwalb, who runs a lock and safe company, told me that few commercial vaults take an expert more than twenty minutes to crack by one means or another. Intelligence agencies have whole departments for stealthy circumvention of barriers and seals. Special antennas can read the emanations of a computer monitor through walls. All I could do was layer on defenses and make myself a less appealing target. Less appealing, if I put it honestly, than other journalists who possessed the Snowden files. Greenwald, I knew from his colleagues, took fewer precautions than I did, at least for the first several months. One colleague went to visit him and reported that he had no password on his home wi-fi router. That was not an especially honorable way to think about my problem, but it did occur to me. I did not want any theft of the files en masse to be my fault. In any case, if I could not stop a supervillain I could stop the average burglar and maybe some of the more capable ones. I had an obligation to try. I layered on so many defenses that navigating through them became a chronic drain on my time, mental energy, and emotional equilibrium.
Richard Ledgett, who oversaw the NSA’s media leaks task force and went on to become the agency’s deputy director, told me matter-of-factly, years later, to assume that my defenses were breached. “My take is, whatever you guys had was pretty immediately in the hands of any foreign intelligence service that wanted it,” he said over lunch in suburban Maryland. “Whether it was Russians, Chinese, French, the Israelis, the Brits. Between you, Poitras, and Greenwald, pretty sure you guys can’t stand up to a full-fledged nation-state attempt to exploit your IT. To include not just remote stuff, but hands on, sneak-into-your-house-at-night kind of stuff. That’s my guess. I don’t have any specific information on that.” In reference to Russia and China, he added, “I’m sure there’s a nice dossier on you in both countries, as one of his three principal interlocutors.”
I asked: Weren’t you watching? Or wasn’t the FBI? Did you not keep an eye out for foreign spies on the hunt against American reporters? I did not much like the idea, but I realized as we spoke that I made that assumption.
“No. That would be reverse targeting,” he said—unlawful surveillance of an American in the guise of watching foreigners. That was true as a legal matter, but only if there had been no judicial warrant. Proof or not, Ledgett said he saw little room for doubt.
“If some of those services want you, they’re going to get you. As an individual person, you’re not going to be able to do much about that.”
* * *
—
Neil MacBride, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, spotted me from the far side of a long gallery. We were bound to cross paths at this conference. Both of us were on the speakers list. Would he approach? He would. MacBride held my gaze for a beat, then ambled across the room. It felt like a metaphor. He wanted me to see him coming. MacBride was the lead prosecutor in United States v. Edward J. Snowden. Thus far, he had charged my source with theft of government property and two counts of espionage. Snowden, MacBride alleged, had given “classified communications intelligence information” to an unauthorized person or persons. The names of those persons were held under seal, but mine had to be one of them. The other two, Poitras and Greenwald, remained overseas on advice of counsel. If the government wanted to tag someone, I was in easy reach.
MacBride had made himself notorious in my line of work. By then he had spent the better part of three years trying to jail James Risen of the New York Times for refusing to testify against his source in another classified leak. Risen had recently lost his final appeal. “It’s nothing personal, only business,” MacBride had told me years before, when I accused him of excessive zeal against Risen. The way I heard it, MacBride used that line from The Godfather with every new prosecutor in his office. Assistant U.S. attorneys came in two types, he would say, like the brothers in the film. Sonny Corleone’s hot head got him killed. MacBride preferred Michael, the thinking man’s assassin.
If I faced legal trouble, the Post lawyers said, it would probably look a lot like Risen’s. A federal grand jury would command me to present myself and my notes in Alexandria, Virginia. Nothing good would come of it when I declined. MacBride’s office, according to subsequent news accounts, had also monitored Risen’s email and telephone conversations and obtained his credit and banking records.
Surely MacBride would not discuss the Snowden case here. For certain I would not. What did he have in mind? MacBride, who is taller than I am, smiled mischievously and stepped close enough that I had to raise my chin.
“I was just wondering if you’d sign my copy of Angler,” he said. My Cheney book, he meant. He had nothing in his hands.
It seemed only polite to let him deliver the punch line.
“Sure,” I said.
“Unfortunately, I forgot to bring it,” MacBride deadpanned.
The exchange had nothing but subtext. I wondered what message, exactly, he meant to send. There was no sensible way to ask. (Pro tip for reporters: if your source has been charged with a federal crime, don’t chat about the case with his prosecutor.) As best I could guess, MacBride had just reprised the point he made to me years before. Nothing personal, if we meet in court. Only business.
Soon after this encounter, NSA director Keith Alexander appeared on a peculiar broadcast produced for the Defense Department’s internal television network. I did not understand its import until later. The broadcast, titled “I Spy, No Lie,” had an unexpectedly amateurish look. Watching it was almost a voyeuristic experience. Aides and support staff wandered in and out of the frame through the darkened exhibition spaces of the National Cryptologic Museum, adjacent to Fort Meade, after hours. Duct tape and a bright yellow extension cord threaded across the camera shot and underneath Alexander’s plain wooden chair. This was a man with a message, too impatient to wait for a professional media relations crew.
Alexander did his best to look and sound casual. He wore his four stars on an informal black zipper jacket, his white uniform shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Periodically he would ask the interviewer a rhetorical question, such as “Would that make sense to you?” The screen would fade to large block letters: “Yes sir, it does make sense.” Patriotic music played softly in the background. I showed Dafna the interview and she said it looked like a Saturday Night Live “Wayne’s World” skit set in Pyongyang.
For all the effort at folksy charm, Alexander struggled to master his emotions. Anyone in his position would be troubled by the steady stream of revelations from reporters who possessed the Snowden documents. Alexander appeared to be at his wit’s end. Speaking of the journalists, not Snowden, he said, “When people die, those that are responsible for leaking it are the ones that should be held accountable.” Alexander saw no legitimate debate to be had about the costs and benefits of NSA surveillance programs. “We’re taking this beating in the press because of what these reporters are putting out,” he said, but “nobody would ever want us to stop protecting this country against terrorists.” By analogy he said the public was not qualified to disagree. “Do you have children?” he asked his interviewer. Would you let them refuse to wear seat belts? The NSA’s work was a kind of seat belt, too. “You see, we’ve learned that lesson on how we take care of our people. These programs help us take care of our people. And we wouldn’t stop, we shouldn’t stop, doing them.”
Alexander complained, as other officials had
, that reporters were writing about things we did not understand. “It’s absurd,” he said. “They get it wrong. . . . The reporters who got this see this data and quickly run to the wrong conclusion.” But his more urgent complaint had to do with accurate disclosures. And here came the striking departure: he called for active measures to put a halt to our work.
“What they’re doing will do grave harm to our country and our allies,” Alexander said. “So we gotta figure out how to fix that. . . . I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents, fifty thousand or whatever they have, and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense. We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that, that’s more of the courts and the policymakers, but from my perspective it’s wrong. And to allow this to go on is wrong.”
I did not focus closely enough on these words at the time. A way of stopping it. Could Alexander mean that literally? I learned later that he did. In meetings that fall, Alexander asked more than once about staging raids to seize control of unpublished Snowden documents in the hands of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and me. He saw no reason for the government to sit back and watch as its precious secrets were spilled. It was only common sense. These were classified documents. Why in heavens should the government not take them back?
Whatever the spy novels may say, this kind of direct action is not within the NSA’s bailiwick. If Alexander had prevailed, however, it might have been within the FBI’s. I had feared exactly this prospect when I first understood how big and valuable the Snowden archive was. That fear drove me to devise backups that would be hard to find, seize, or destroy. It brought me nearly to tears of relief when Marty Baron agreed to safeguard a copy at the Washington Post. The Nixon administration had tried to halt publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, an act of prior restraint that the Supreme Court rejected, but even Richard Nixon did not dispatch the FBI to toss a newsroom.
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