Document Text Content
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also by edward jay epstein
The Annals of Unsolved Crime
Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK
The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies
The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood
Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer
Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA
The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion
Cartel
Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America
Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism
News from Nowhere: Television and the News
Counterplot
Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth
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HOW AMERICA
LOST ITS SECRETS
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HOW AMERICA
LOST ITS SECRETS
Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft
Edward Jay Epstein
alfred a. knopf | new york | 2017
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this is a borzoi book
published by alfred a. knopf
Copyright © 2017 by E. J. E. Publications, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York,
and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon
are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data [to come]
Jacket photograph by TK
Jacket design by TK
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
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This book is dedicated to the memory of a wise teacher,
James Q. Wilson (1931–2012)
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There are certain persons who . . . have a perfect right
to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and . . .
the law is not for them.
—fyodor dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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Contents
Prologue Snowden’s Trail: Hong Kong, 2014 000
part one SNOWDEN’S ARC
chapter 1 Tinker 15
chapter 2 Secret Agent 22
chapter 3 Contractor 28
chapter 4 Thief 38
chapter 5 Crossing the Rubicon 44
chapter 6 Hacktivist 49
chapter 7 String Puller 59
chapter 8 Raider of the Inner Sanctum 73
chapter 9 Escape Artist 80
chapter 10 Whistle- blower 88
chapter 11 Enter Assange 98
chapter 12 Fugitive 104
part two THE INTELLIGENCE CRISIS
chapter 13 The Great Divide 113
chapter 14 The Crime Scene Investigation 133
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x | Contents
chapter 15 Did Snowden Act Alone? 146
chapter 16 The Question of When 156
chapter 17 The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing 168
chapter 18 The Unheeded Warning 185
part three THE GAME OF NATIONS
chapter 19 The Rise of the NSA 195
chapter 20 The NSA’s Back Door 207
chapter 21 The Russians Are Coming 217
chapter 22 The Chinese Puzzle 231
chapter 23 A Single Point of Failure 238
part four MOSCOW CALLING
chapter 24 Off to Moscow 247
chapter 25 Through the Looking Glass 254
chapter 26 The Handler 261
part five CONCLUSIONS: WALKING THE CAT BACK
chapter 27 Snowden’s Choices 271
chapter 28 The Espionage Source 281
chapter 29 The “War on Terror” After Snowden 287
Epilogue The Snowden Effect 295
Acknowledgments 301
Notes 303
Selected Bibliography 325
Index 329
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HOW AMERICA
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Prologue
Snowden’s Trail: Hong Kong, 2014
The national security agency, or, as it is now commonly
called, the NSA, was created on October 24, 1952, in such a tight
cocoon of secrecy that even the presidential order creating it was
classified top secret. When journalists asked questions about this
new agency, Washington officials jokingly told them that the initials
NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” The reason for this extraordinary
stealth is that the NSA is involved in a very sensitive enterprise.
Its job is to intercept, decode, and analyze foreign electronic communications
transmitted around the globe over copper wires, fiberoptic
cable, satellite, microwave relays, cell phone towers, wireless
transmissions, and the Internet for specified intelligence purposes. In
intelligence jargon, its product is called COMINT, which stands for
communications intelligence. Because this form of intelligence gathering
is most effective when the NSA’s targets are unaware of the
state- of- the- art tools the NSA uses to break into their computers
and telecommunications channels to first intercept and then decrypt
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their secret messages, the NSA goes to extraordinary lengths to keep
them secret. Draconian laws protect this secrecy.
In the first week of June 2013, the NSA learned that there had
been a massive breach. Thousands of secret files bearing on communications
intelligence had been stolen from a heavily guarded
regional base in Oahu, Hawaii.
The suspect was Edward Snowden, a twenty- nine- year- old civilian
analyst at that base, who had fled to Hong Kong before the
breach was discovered. According to a three- count criminal complaint
filed by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia,
Snowden had stolen government property and violated the
Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of
national defense information to an unauthorized person. He also
likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by entering computer
systems illicitly.
This was not a whodunit mystery. On June 9, 2013, in an extraordinary
twelve- minute video made in a cramped hotel room in Hong
Kong, Snowden identified himself as the person who had taken the
NSA documents. Watching the video, the world saw a shy, awkward,
and sympathetic- looking man wearing a rumpled shirt, rimless
glasses, and a computer- geek haircut, passionately speaking out
against what he termed the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a
shaky voice, expressing his willingness to suffer the consequences
for exposing them.
Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him,
and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA’s
alleged illegal collection of data inside the United States. But in fact,
Snowden had stolen a great deal more than documents relating to
domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the
NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher
service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their
monitoring of adversaries, which was their job.
By the time the theft had been discovered, in the first week of
June 2013, it was impossible for the FBI, a grand jury, or any other
U.S. agency to question him because he had fled the country. His
first stop, Hong Kong, the economically autonomous city of 7.2 million,
is a special administrative region of mainland China. Under the
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Prologue | 5
terms of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Great Britain, China
is responsible for Hong Kong’s defense and foreign policy, including
intelligence services. He then proceeded to Russia, which has no
extradition treaty with the United States. Russia granted him asylum,
making it unlikely that U.S. authorities would ever have the
opportunity to question him.
Snowden’s escape left in its wake an incredibly important unsolved
mystery: How had a young analyst in training at the NSA succeeded
in penetrating all the layers of NSA security to pull off the largest
theft of secret documents in the history of American intelligence?
Did he act alone? What happened to the documents? Was his arrival
in Russia part of the plan?
Because I had written several books on the vulnerability of intelligence
services, this was a mystery— a “howdunit,” if you like— that
immediately intrigued me. Even if Snowden had acted for the most
salutary of reasons, the unauthorized transfer of state secrets from
the United States to an adversary country is, by almost any definition,
a form of espionage.
I decided to begin my investigation of this case in Hong Kong,
because it was the place to which Snowden first fled after leaving
Hawaii. Snowden had planned the trip for at least four weeks,
according to the mandatory travel plan he had filed at the NSA.
When I spoke to my sources in the intelligence community, they
could not explain Snowden’s choice. It would not necessarily protect
him from the reach of U.S. law, because Hong Kong had an active
extradition treaty with the United States. Just a few months earlier,
Hong Kong had made headlines by honoring America’s request to
extradite Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted for insider trading.
Nor was Hong Kong particularly convenient to Hawaii. There
were no nonstop flights there from Honolulu in May 2013. Snowden
flew eight hours to Narita International Airport in Japan, where he
waited almost three hours. He then flew five hours to Hong Kong.
Snowden could have flown to countries that do not have extradition
treaties with America in far less time.
Adding to this mystery, at the time he departed Honolulu,
Snowden had not yet arranged for any journalists to meet him in
Hong Kong, and as far as U.S. intelligence could determine, he had
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no known appointments there. Even so, Snowden carried to Hong
Kong digital copies he had made of the top secret NSA documents.
As General Michael Hayden, who served as the head of both the
NSA and the CIA, told me, “It’s very mysterious why Snowden
chose Hong Kong.” We can assume he had a compelling enough reason
for him to take the risk that he would be arrested there by Hong
Kong police after U.S. authorities invoked the detention provision
of its extradition treaty. It was of course possible that Snowden had
traveled there to see someone he believed could protect him.
I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2014— exactly one year after
Snowden had arrived there aboard a Japan Airlines flight. I checked
in to the Mira hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon,
a ten- minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong Island, where
most of the foreign consulates are located.
I chose the Mira because it was the five- star hotel in which
Snowden had stayed and where he had made the celebrated video
admitting his role in taking the NSA documents. I asked at the front
desk for room 1014, the same one that Snowden had occupied in
2013, because I wanted easy access to the hotel’s service and security
personnel responsible for the room who might have had contact
with Snowden a year earlier. Unfortunately, that room was occupied,
but I was given a nearby room that served my purpose.
Snowden had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the
Guardian reporters he met in Hong Kong, that he had hidden out
at the Mira hotel since his arrival in Hong Kong because he feared
that the CIA might capture him. My first surprise was that Snowden
had not arrived at the Mira until eleven days after he arrived in
Hong Kong. As I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had registered
there under his real name and used his own passport and credit
card to secure the room, an odd choice if he was hiding out. He had
checked in to the hotel not on May 20, as he had told the reporters,
but on June 1, 2013. He checked out on June 10.
Wherever Snowden stayed from May 20 to June 1, he apparently
considered it a safe enough place from which to send Greenwald a
“welcome package,” as he called it, of twenty top secret NSA docu-
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ments on May 25. He had now not only downloaded documents but
also violated the oath he had signed when he took his job by providing
them to an unauthorized party. During this period, Snowden
also contacted Barton Gellman, on behalf of The Washington Post,
via e- mail. Indeed, while he was staying someplace other than the
place he claimed to be staying, he made almost all the arrangements
for his journalistic coming- out. He was in contact with at least one
foreign mission during this period, according to what he wrote to
Gellman on May 24. In that e- mail, concerning when and how his
story was to be published by The Washington Post, Snowden asked
Gellman to include some text that would help Snowden with his
dealings with this mission. But which country was he approaching?
In an effort to establish Snowden’s whereabouts during these “missing”
eleven days, which, among other things, could shed light on
why he first came to Hong Kong, I called Keith Bradsher, a prizewinning
journalist who had been the New York Times bureau chief in
Hong Kong in 2013. He had written a well- researched report about
Snowden’s arrival there. He proposed we meet at the Foreign Correspondents’
Club.
Bradsher told me that he had known Albert Ho, who had been
retained as Snowden’s lawyer, for more than a decade. He had interviewed
him many times, because he was a leader of a political movement
in Hong Kong. Bradsher said that a few days after Snowden
had revealed himself on June 9, he met with Ho and questioned him
about Snowden’s unknown whereabouts.
Ho told Bradsher that all of Snowden’s logistics had been arranged
for him by an intermediary, whom Ho called a “carer.” Ho said that
Snowden had been in contact with the “carer” prior to his arrival in
Hong Kong on May 20. According to Ho, it was this person who had
arranged accommodations for Snowden on his arrival and afterward.
If so, it seemed to me that this person might be able to shed light
on whom, if anyone, Snowden saw in his first eleven days in Hong
Kong. Even if this person might have been unaware of the reasons
for Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong when he made the arrangements
for him, he was still the best lead I had to learning why Snowden
had come to Hong Kong. Bradsher told me that he pressed Ho for
details about this mystery person over the course of several meet-
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ings but Ho would not identify him beyond saying that he was a
“well- connected resident” of Hong Kong.
I called Ho’s law office in Hong Kong. He politely declined to be
interviewed by me, saying he had said all he was going to say about
the Snowden case. I was able, though, to make an appointment with
Robert Tibbo, a Canadian- born barrister specializing in civil liberties
cases. Tibbo had worked closely with Ho on the Snowden case.
I met Tibbo in the tearoom at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on
Hong Kong Island. Tibbo, in his early fifties, was tall, with a round
face and thinning hair. He talked freely about his remarkable career.
After earning a degree in chemical engineering from McGill University
and working in Asia as an engineer for a decade, he went to law
school in New Zealand and became a barrister in Hong Kong specializing
in cases involving the legal status of refugees.
Over a leisurely tea, Tibbo made it clear that he had played a far
more active role than Ho in the Snowden case. He had even personally
escorted Snowden from the Mira hotel to a safe house on
June 10. He did not dispute what Ho had told Bradsher. When I asked
him if he could give me the name of the “carer,” he said that he was
bound by a lawyer- client privilege that prevented him from providing
me with any details that might reveal the identity of the person
who had made arrangements for Snowden. When I asked the date
that he was officially retained by Snowden, he said that Snowden
had signed an agreement hiring him and Ho’s law firm as his legal
adviser on June 10, 2013 (which was a matter of public record).
“I understand that,” I said, “but I am inquiring about something
that had happened before you became his legal adviser.” He shook
his head, as if getting rid of a pesky fly, and said that his oath precluded
him from saying anything at all that might do damage to
the credibility of his client. “Not even where he was staying in May
in Hong Kong?” I persisted. He leaned forward and, after a brief
hesitation, said, jokingly I assumed, that he would not divulge that
information, “even if you held a gun to my head.” We met two more
times, but true to his word Tibbo would not say if he even knew the
identity of the “carer.”
Meanwhile, Joyce Xu, a very resourceful Chinese journalist who
was assisting me in Hong Kong, had filed the equivalent of a Freedom
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of Information request with the Hong Kong Security Bureau asking
for information about Snowden’s movements in May. Thomas
Ng, the secretary for security, turned down the request, adding that
Hong Kong authorities do not keep records of hotel registrations. I
had run into a dead end with the Hong Kong authorities on the issue
of Snowden’s “carer” and Snowden’s whereabouts for those eleven
crucial days.
At this point, I got some much- needed help from an old friend on
the Obama White House staff. Before I had left New York, I asked
him if he could find someone at the consulate in Hong Kong who
might brief me on the Snowden case. I didn’t hear from him until
just a few days before I was due to return to New York. He put me
in touch with a former employee of the Hong Kong consulate, who
he said was “fully informed” about the efforts of the U.S. mission to
locate Snowden in Hong Kong. This person was still living in Hong
Kong, and he agreed to meet with me on condition that I did not
mention either his name or his specific job in the U.S. mission in
Hong Kong. The venue was the terrace lounge of the American Club
in Exchange Square in central Hong Kong, a posh club mainly for
expatriate Americans. It was on the forty- eighth floor, with a spectacular
view of Victoria Harbor. Once there, I had no problem finding
my source, identifying him by the description he had given me.
He was sitting alone at a discreet table in the corner.
After we ordered drinks, he told me in a soft voice about the American
reaction to Snowden’s revelations in Hong Kong. “All hell broke
loose,” he said, describing the atmosphere at the U.S. mission after
Snowden’s video was posted on The Guardian’s website on June 9.
I asked about an assertion that Snowden had made concerning the
U.S. consulate in that extraordinary video. Snowden had said that he
could be seized at any moment by a CIA rendition team based at the
U.S. consulate “just down the road” from the Mira hotel.
“Was that true?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes and said, “Snowden has a pretty wild imagination.
For one thing, the U.S. consulate is not down the road from the
Mira in Kowloon; it is here on Hong Kong Island. And there was no
CIA rendition team in Hong Kong.”
My next question concerned a second period during which
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Snowden’s whereabouts are clouded— the period between the time
he left the Mira hotel on June 10 and the day he left Hong Kong for
Russia on June 23. When I asked my consulate source whether the
U.S. mission took any action to track Snowden during these thirteen
days, he explained that the FBI had long maintained a contingent
of “legal attachés” based at the consulate to pursue many possible
violations of U.S. law including video piracy. In addition, the CIA
and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had retained a handful of
“China watchers” under diplomatic cover in Hong Kong. This group
constituted the “intelligence mission,” as he referred to it. It had
developed informal relations with the Hong Kong police that, along
with the NSA’s electronic capabilities abroad, allowed it to track
Snowden’s movements after he had outed himself on the video.
Because Snowden, his lawyers, and the journalists in his entourage
frequently used their cell phones to text one another, it was fairly
easy for the U.S. intelligence mission to follow Snowden’s trail after
he left the Mira hotel. He said that the Hong Kong police also knew
where he was during this period. My source further suggested that
the massive Chinese intelligence contingent in Hong Kong also
knew, because it had close relations with the Hong Kong police.
“So everyone knew Snowden’s whereabouts as he moved every
few days from apartment to apartment,” I interjected. He answered
that it was no secret to anyone except the media and the public. “Of
course we knew,” he said, adding that there were also photographs
of Snowden entering the office building that housed the Russian
consulate. I mentioned that there was a report in a Russian newspaper
that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate in late June in
connection with the flight he later took to Moscow. “All we know is
he entered the building,” he answered, with a shrug.
That Russian consulate visit did not come as a complete surprise
to U.S. intelligence. After Snowden left the Mira, his interactions
with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services in Hong Kong
had been closely monitored by “secret means,” a term that in that
context likely indicated electronic surveillance. A former top intelligence
executive in Washington, D.C., subsequently confirmed this
monitoring to me. All of Snowden’s stealth in exiting from the Mira
hotel, which included wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, thus
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proved ineffective in hiding him from U.S. intelligence and presumably
other intelligence services seeking the treasure trove of documents
he had taken from the NSA.
As for his next destination, I could find no evidence that Snowden
had made any arrangements during his monthlong stay in Hong
Kong to go to any Latin American country. Before he went public
on June 9, he could have easily gotten a visa in Hong Kong with his
still- valid passport to go to almost any country in the world, including
Cuba (for which a U.S. passport was not necessary), Bolivia, and
Ecuador. Yet he did not apply for visas during this time period. Even
as late as June 8, after meetings with Greenwald and Poitras, his
name had still not been revealed, no criminal complaint had been
issued against him, and there was no Interpol red alert for his detention.
He could have walked out of the Mira hotel, caught a taxi to
the Hong Kong airport, and gone on Swiss International Air Lines
via Zurich to any country in South America or to Iceland. But, as
in the oft- cited Sherlock Holmes clue of the dog that did not bark,
Snowden’s inaction in not obtaining visas during this thirty- day
period suggests that he had no plans to go anyplace but where he
went: Moscow.
However, the mystery that most concerned me was not where
Snowden was housed in the interim between when he went public
and when he went to Moscow. It was where, and in whose care,
Snowden had been before he checked into the Mira on June 1. When
I asked my source about this period, he said that as far as he knew,
neither the FBI nor the Hong Kong police could find a trace of him
during the period between May 20, when he passed through Hong
Kong customs, and June 1, when he first used his credit card and
passport to check into the Mira hotel. Other than those transactions,
they could not find any credit card charges, ATM withdrawals,
telephone calls, hotel registrations, subway pass purchases, or other
clues to Snowden’s activities. As far as a paper trail was concerned,
Snowden was a ghost during this period.
“Could an American just vanish in Hong Kong for eleven days?”
I asked.
“Apparently, he did just that,” my source replied.
Snowden’s whereabouts during these eleven days was not a mys-
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tery I was going to solve on this first trip to Hong Kong. I needed to
know more about his activities before he got there. After all, Snowden
was not, as he himself pointed out from Moscow, an “angel descending
from the heavens.” He had been working for the U.S. government
for the previous seven years. During that period, he had been
part of America’s secret intelligence regime and held a clearance for
sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. Such SCI material is
considered so sensitive that it must be handled within formal access
control systems established by the director of national intelligence.
Nor did Snowden’s breach begin with his handing over classified
documents to the Guardian reporters in Hong Kong in June 2013 or,
for that matter, in the eleven days prior to his meeting with journalists.
He had, as the NSA quickly determined, begun illicitly copying
documents in the summer of 2012. Such a dangerous enterprise is
not born of a sudden impulse. It was, as his actions suggested, nurtured
over many months. Even if he had managed to elude American
intelligence from late May to early June 2013, he could not hide all
the history that led to his decision to come to Hong Kong. There
had to be an envelope of circumstances surrounding it, including
Snowden’s motivation, associates, movements, finances, and activities
prior to his fleeing to Hong Kong. What was missing was not
just Snowden’s first eleven days in Hong Kong but the context of
the alleged crime.
I first needed to find out who Edward Snowden was.
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part one
SNOWDEN’S ARC
I woke this morning with a new name. I had had a vision.
A dream vision. A vision righteous and true. Before me I saw
Gamers, Gamers shrouded in the glory of their true names.
Step forth, and assume your name in the pantheon. It’s
always been there, your avatar’s true name. It slips through
your subconscious, reveals itself under your posts, and
flashed visibly in that moment of unrestrained spite; in the
indulgent teabag. You’ve felt it, known it, recognized it.
Now realize it.
I woke this morning with a new name. That name is
Wolfking.
Wolfking Awesomefox.
—edward snowden, Geneva, June 12, 2008
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chapter 1