all journalists combined: Based on reporting I am unable to disclose, I am confident that I know what Snowden gave each of the four journalists he worked with—Poitras, Greenwald, the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill (for documents originating from the UK’s General Communications Headquarters), and myself.
“have blown up any logs”: Snowden, interview with author, July 1, 2015, Moscow.
“help me get this right”: Snowden, encrypted chat with author, February 13, 2014.
the U.S. intelligence community: There are seventeen agencies and organizations in all, including the NSA. See “Intelligence Community,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, www.dni.gov/index.php.
“a rat’s nest”: Snowden, interview with author, July 1, 2015, Moscow.
The NSA was paying Dell: In an email exchange on February 26, 2014, Dell’s director of corporate media, David Frink, wrote, “We don’t discuss specifics regarding any individual’s role. We won’t have additional comment, on, or off the record.”
“It’s not an exaggeration”: Snowden, chat with author, February 13, 2014.
“If you had a guy”: Greenberg, “NSA Coworker Remembers the Real Edward Snowden.”
published an automated notice: The lists were published as self-updating RSS feeds, an acronym for “really simple syndication.”
crawl around digital networks: The best-known spider on the open internet is Google’s constantly updating search index. For a general explanation, see Google, “Crawling & Indexing,” Inside Search, https://goo.gl/k2vFw1. The first public mention of spiders in connection with Snowden came in Sanger and Schmitt, “Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best N.S.A.” Officials quoted in that story expressed bafflement that he could automate so many downloads, apparently unaware of the Heartbeat project.
wget and rsync: The rsync utility, in use for decades, synchronizes files and directories across different networks. It is built into Unix operating systems and available on others. See https://rsync.samba.org/. The wget utility downloads the content of web pages or websites, including the pages hyperlinked from their original target.
“admitted to FBI Special Agents”: The brief account for Congress, unclassified to permit public release, came in Ethan Bauman, NSA director of legislative affairs, “Memorandum for Staff Director and Minority Staff Director, House Committee on the Judiciary,” February 10, 2014, on file with author and available at https://fas.org/irp/news/2014/02/nsa-021014.pdf.
The command may look opaque: According to two sources with firsthand technical knowledge, this is the correct form of the command that Snowden entered. For simplicity, I assume the name of the manager’s certificate was “bosskey” and that it was stored in the Terminal’s current working directory. After this, one more command would move the certificate to the Heartbeat Digital Identity Store.
“At the very beginning”: Snowden, interview with author, July 1, 2015, Moscow.
“I read your journal.nsa entry”: Snowden to NSA intern, internal NSA email, January 24, 2013. Their exchange, on file with author, continued into January 25.
“What I was actually doing”: Snowden, interview with author, July 1, 2015, Moscow.
The then FBI director: Robert Mueller, interview with author, March 11, 2011.
stole the answers: McConnell was quoted in King, “Ex-NSA Chief Details Snowden’s Hiring at Agency, Booz Allen.”
“Let’s look at it this way”: Snowden, chat with author, February 13, 2014.
a double rainbow overhead: The photograph accompanied an NSA press release, “NSA/CSS Unveils New Hawaii Center,” January 6, 2012, www.nsa.gov/news-features/press-room/press-releases/2012/a4-hawaii-final.shtml and archived at https://archive.is/vScSE.
Roach Fort: Two confidential sources who worked at Rochefort independently mentioned the nickname to author.
“I’m much more interested”: Snowden, interview with author, July 1, 2015, Moscow.
he had sought out the contract: Lana Lam, “Snowden Sought Booz Allen Job to Gather Evidence on NSA Surveillance,” South China Morning Post, June 24, 2013, https://archive.is/VLzcT.
“The idea was that NTOC analysts”: Confidential source, interview with author, 2014.
Ned NTOC: Course syllabus for “OVSC 1400—Dual Authorities: SIGINT/IA,” March 2012, classified SECRET//COMINT//REL TO USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL, on file with author.
“You believe it is”: Ibid., 72–73.
“with the assistance”: See Public Law 110-261, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, https://archive.is/4YMNx. See also www.law.cornell.edu/topn/fisa_amendments_act_of_2008.
He could “task”: NSA instruction materials, “Entering New FAA-Authorized DNI Tasking in the Unified Targeting Tool (UTT)/Gamut,” March 30, 2010, classified S//SI//REL, on file with author.
CAPTAINCRUNCH: Confidential source, interview with author, 2015.
In his first filmed interview: Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, “NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I Don’t Want to Live in a Society That Does These Sort of Things,’” Guardian, June 9, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video.
boarded a flight to Tokyo: Most accounts have reported erroneously that Snowden took a direct flight from Honolulu to Hong Kong. He told me in Moscow in 2015 that his itinerary passed through Tokyo.
CHAPTER THREE: HOMECOMING
Seven Pulitzers?: The count was indeed seven for Leen as reporter or supervising editor, first at the Miami Herald and then at the Post. The following year, 2014, he shared in an eighth when the paper split the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the Guardian.
three executive editors: Leen joined the paper in 1997 under the executive editor, Leonard Downie, who was succeeded by Marcus Brauchli in 2008 and Marty Baron at the end of 2012. The publisher, Don Graham, meanwhile, relinquished that job to focus on the larger Washington Post Company, giving way to Boisfeuillet Jones Jr. in 2000 and then to Graham’s niece Katharine Weymouth in 2008.
series about Vice President Dick Cheney: The four-part series, available at http://wapo.st/1PbY0us, began with Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, “A Different Understanding with the President,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007, https://wapo.st/1nOzs4j.
an awkward conversation: I have reconstructed this conversation with notes I took after the fact, drawing equally on Leen’s recollections. The call was memorable for us both, but it is not rendered verbatim. The two of us believe it is close. Jeff Leen, interview with author, March 16, 2016.
“a faint note of fear”: Ibid. Leen gave a similar account in Roy J. Harris Jr., Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), excerpted at www.pulitzer.org/article/14085: “‘So I was completely not in work mode,’ Leen recalls. ‘I was surprised to hear from him, and frankly a little annoyed. He was very secretive and cryptic.’ Then came the conditions Gellman said the Post would have to accept. . . . ‘My mind was reeling a bit at all the demands.’ But he knew Gellman. ‘It’s like E. F. Hutton: You listen,’ Leen says.”
Katharine Graham’s memoir: Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Attorney General John Mitchell, who later notoriously said Graham would “get her tit caught in a big fat wringer” if the Post printed a different story, threatened criminal charges against the Washington Post Company in the Pentagon Papers case. I take up the implications in the next note.
she risked losing the company: Profitable local television stations accounted for a substantial fraction of the Washington Post Company’s revenue. Felons are barred from owning a broadcast license. Graham was counting on an infusion of funds from an initial public stock offering, which could also have been jeopardized by a criminal suit. See ibid., 448–50.
Graham hired a new lawyer and published: Among many accounts of that moment, along wit
h her own fine chapter in ibid., is Donald Graham, “Ben Bradlee, a Hero to the Post Newsroom,” Washington Post, October 21, 2014, http://wapo.st/1UlWk94. The change of lawyers brought in Edward Bennett Williams, whose firm, Williams & Connolly, would help shepherd the NSA stories of 2013.
History vindicated the Post and the New York Times, which had the story first, as well as their source, Daniel Ellsberg, who provided them with the Pentagon Papers. The previously classified history of the Vietnam War, unredacted, is now available from the National Archives as Vietnam Task Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/. Nixon’s solicitor general, who told the Supreme Court in 1971 that publication would cause grave damage, acknowledged later, “I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication.” Erwin Griswold, “Secrets Not Worth Keeping: The Courts and Classified Information,” Washington Post, February 15, 1989, http://wapo.st/25ssi86.
fought the case to the Supreme Court: The New York Times Co. v. United States, 43 U.S. 713, June 30, 1971, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/403/713, said the government had not met its high burden for prior restraint of publication. More than one justice noted, however, that they had made no holding on whether the papers could be prosecuted after the fact. The government did not bring criminal charges.
rescind my credentials: The State Department episode is recounted briefly in chapter 1. In 1997, Israel’s Government Press Office threatened to revoke my status as an accredited foreign correspondent after I published the name of the director of the Shin Bet internal security service, Carmi Gillon. His identity was an official secret but widely known. (Even directory assistance operators knew his name. I once called to ask for Gillon’s home phone number, just to see what would happen. After a long pause, the operator replied, “You know I can’t tell you that.”) I was ordered to begin submitting my stories to the government censor. I declined, as did Post correspondents before and since. The press office eventually dropped the matter.
a memorably profane call: The prime minister was enraged by my interview with his ultra-Orthodox interior minister, who said Israel would stop recognizing Jews converted by Reform and Conservative rabbis overseas. Netanyahu was about to travel to New York, where the “Who is a Jew?” debate was a minefield. He accused me of deliberately sabotaging his trip and demonstrated a fluent command of idiomatic American swear words. I later learned that senior aides, standing alongside him in the prime minister’s office, had urged him to cool off before making the call.
took me to the woodshed: Fortunately for me, Len Downie never began a conversation with “This is going to be an important meeting for you.” That was said to be the executive editor’s opening line in his second-to-last meeting with an employee whose job was on the line.
“salon dinners”: The story broke in Michael Calderone and Mike Allen, “WaPo Cancels Lobbyist Event,” Politico, July 2, 2009, http://politi.co/1RrrENG. When the paper equivocated about it for days, I took the unusual step of calling the publisher, Katharine Weymouth. I urged her to let the full story out instead of hoping the scandal would go away. The paper’s central mission demanded it. “I don’t know why any company would do that to itself,” she told me. I liked Weymouth, and she did not flinch from the risks of the Snowden story when I returned in 2013, but I found that reply disappointing. I made the same phone call, on the same day, to the executive editor, Marcus Brauchli. He took no position on full disclosure, save that his position was complicated. Later, he was obliged to acknowledge that he made false claims in an interview about the scandal with the New York Times. See Jad Mouawad, “Newspaper Apologizes for Seeming to Sell Access,” New York Times, July 5, 2009, http://nyti.ms/1RoL1do; and “NYT Accuses Washington Post Editor Marcus Brauchli of Lying to NYT Reporter About ‘Off the Record’ Dinners,” NYTPicker, October 17, 2009, www.nytpick.com/2009/10/nyt-accuses-washington-post-editor.html.
Patriot militias: Barton Gellman, “The Secret World of Extreme Militias,” Time, September 30, 2010, http://ti.me/1XR17hv. For the story on Romney’s political childhood, see Barton Gellman, “Dreams from His Mother,” Time, June 4, 2012, http://ti.me/1ZxUaDo.
“I’ve got a line on a document”: Duffy and Calabresi, encrypted chat with author, May 7, 2013.
“Circumstances not encouraging”: Calabresi, encrypted chat with author, May 14, 2013.
close to a hundred magazines: See Time Inc., Our Iconic Brands, www.timeinc.com/brands/.
Cappuccio, a conservative powerhouse: See Peter Lattman, “Time Warner’s Don ‘Pooch’: Part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?,” Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2006, http://on.wsj.com/1RLE7fe, citing Edward P. Lazarus, Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court (New York: Times Books, 1998).
call Baruch Weiss: Weiss served as acting deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2006. See partner profile, Arnold & Porter, www.arnoldporter.com/en/people/w/weiss-baruch; and LinkedIn profile, “Baruch Weiss,” www.linkedin.com/in/baruch-weiss-2156491b.
joined me around a speakerphone: I reconstruct this scene from contemporary notes and additional notes and memories from Duffy and Calabresi. Mike Duffy and Massimo Calabresi, interviews with author, April 5, 2016.
aggressive legal tools: Josh Gerstein, “Holder Walks Fine Line on Prosecuting Journalists,” Politico, May 13, 2013, http://politi.co/1N0zlit; Tom McCarthy, “Eric Holder: Justice Department Will Not Prosecute Reporters Doing Their Job,” Guardian, June 6, 2013. In July 2013, a month after the first Snowden leaks, Holder announced rules narrowing the circumstances under which law enforcement could obtain journalists’ records. See Charlie Savage, “Holder Tightens Rules on Getting Reporters’ Data,” New York Times, July 12, 2013, http://nyti.ms/1SBOOSY.
held back publication for more than a year: The Times had the main facts of the story by the late fall of 2004. It did not publish the story until the end of 2005. See James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005, http://nyti.ms/1y8izFc. Also see Margaret Sullivan, “Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux,” New York Times, November 9, 2013, http://nyti.ms/1VT9Q60; and Eric Lichtblau, “The Education of a 9/11 Reporter,” Slate, March 26, 2008, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/03/the-inside-drama-behind-the-warrantless-wiretapping-story.html.
I doubted that cowardice explained: The delay was harshly criticized by commentators on the left, many of whom insisted the scoop could have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. See, for example, Lawrence Velvel, “The NYT’s Unconscionable Decision to Sit on the NSA Story for a Year,” CounterPunch, January 7, 2006, www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/07/the-nyt-s-unconscionable-decision-to-sit-on-the-nsa-story-for-a-year/.
men and women with badges: Although I never thought it probable, the risk of a raid was not trivial. I suspected, and later confirmed, that there were high-ranking U.S. government advocates of an operation to seize the files from me, Poitras, and Greenwald. I take this up in chapter 7.
the Espionage Act: 18 U.S.C. § 793, “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.” Most pertinent for my purposes are sections (b), (c), and (e), at www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793. For a commentary, see Stephen Vladeck, “The Espionage Act and National Security Whistleblowing After Garcetti,” American University Law Review, June 2008, http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=aulr.
A narrower and more recent statute: 18 U.S.C. § 798, “Disclosure of classified information,” specifically forbids anyone to “publish” classified information about “the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government.” For the text of the statute, see www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798.
no lawful course for me: Retaining or distributing information “connected with the national defense” (whatever
that means), whether or not classified, is a ten-year felony under the Espionage Act. Snowden had not yet been charged with a crime, but even so erasing or discarding the files could arguably constitute destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice.
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