services in the world. According to a 2009 NSA analysis of Russian
capabilities, which was obtained by The New York Times in 2013,
Russia’s highly sophisticated tools for cyber espionage were superior
to those of China or any other adversary nation. For example, investigators
from FireEye, a well- regarded Silicon Valley security firm,
found that in 2007 Russian hackers had developed a highly sophisticated
virus that could bypass the security measures of the servers
of both the U.S. government and its private contractors. According
to one computer security expert, the virus had made protected Internet
websites “sitting ducks” for these sophisticated Russian hackers.
The cryptographer Bruce Schneier, a leading specialist in computer
security, explained, “It is next to impossible to maintain privacy and
anonymity against a well- funded government adversary.”
Nor has the Russian cyber service made a secret out of the fact that
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it targets Tor software. It even offered a cash prize to anyone in the
hacking community who could break Tor. Prior to 2013, according
to cyber- security experts, it spent over a decade building cyber tools
aimed at unraveling the Tor networks used by hacktivists, criminal
enterprises, political dissidents, and rival intelligence operatives. To
this end, it reportedly attempted to map out computers that served
as major Tor exit nodes (such as the one Snowden operated in 2012
near an NSA regional base in Hawaii). It also reportedly attached
the equivalent of “electronic ink” to messages, which would allow
it to trace the path of messages that passed through them. Through
this technology, it could tag and follow Tor users as their communications
traveled across the Internet. It could even borrow their
Internet identities. To be sure, the NSA also had such a capability.
The Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht, discovered to his distress that
his Tor software did not make his computer server in Iceland invisible.
According to a former top official in the Justice Department, the
NSA was able to locate it by cracking the Tor software (Ulbricht is
currently serving a life sentence for his activities). Unlike adversary
services, however, the NSA needs a warrant to investigate U.S. citizens
who use Tor.
The NSA is hardly immune from an attack on its own computers.
As the former CIA deputy director Morell wrote in his 2015 book,
The Great War of Our Time, many financial institutions have “better
cyber security than the NSA.” The Internet certainly helped make
the activities of U.S. intelligence workers visible to the SVR.
But to achieve its goals, the SVR still had to find at least one disgruntled
civilian contractor inside the NSA who had access to the
sealed- off computer networks. Did it find its man? If so, was it before
or after Snowden arrived in Hong Kong with the Level 3 NSA files?
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c h a p t e r 22
The Chinese Puzzle
The first [false assumption] is that China is an enemy of the
United States. It’s not.
— edward snowden, Hong Kong, 2013
On august 11, 2014, in the Atlantic Ocean, an event took place
of enormous concern to U.S. intelligence. A Chinese Jin- class
submarine launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile
released twelve independently targeted reentry vehicles, each simulating
a nuclear warhead. Some forty- four hundred miles away, in
China’s test range in the Xinjiang desert, each of the twelve simulated
nuclear warheads hit its target within a twelve- inch radius.
The test firing, which was closely monitored by the NSA, was a
strategic game changer. It meant that a single Jin- class submarine,
which carried twelve such missiles and 144 nuclear warheads, could
destroy every city of strategic importance in the United States. U.S.
intelligence further reported that China would soon use stealth
technology to make it more difficult to detect newer submarines and
give “China its first credible sea- based nuclear deterrent” against an
American attack.
By 2015, as its test in the Atlantic had foreshadowed, China had
armed its land- based as well as sea- based missiles with multiple
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independently targeted warheads. Combined with the state- of- theart
technology it had licensed from Russia, its systematic use of
espionage even made it possible for China to build its own stealth
fighters.
Unlike the United States, China did not achieve this remarkable
capability to launch independently targeted miniaturized nuclear
weapons and stealth them by investing hundreds of billions of dollars
in developing them. It obtained this technology mainly through
espionage. The Chinese intelligence service stole a large part, if not
all, of America’s secret technology for weaponizing nuclear bombs
during the 1980s and 1990s. The theft was so massive that in 1998
the House of Representatives set up a special bipartisan investigative
unit called the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and
Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China.
Based on the intelligence amassed by the NSA, the CIA, and other
intelligence services, it concluded in its report that the Chinese intelligence
service had obtained both by electronic and by conventional
spying the warhead design of America’s seven most advanced thermonuclear
weapons. Moreover, it found that espionage successes
allowed China to so accelerate the design, development, and testing
of its own nuclear weapons that the new generation of Chinese
weapons would be “comparable in effectiveness to the weapons used
by the United States.” Further, the committee reported that these
thefts were the “results of decades of intelligence operations against
U.S. weapons laboratories.” The Chinese intelligence service further
obtained from private U.S. defense contractors through cyber espionage
important elements of the stealth technology used in advanced
planes and submarines. China shared (or exchanged) the fruits of its
espionage on nuclear warhead design with North Korea, Pakistan,
Iran, and Russia.
Despite its formidable intelligence coups in the United States, the
Chinese intelligence service managed to remain among the most
elusive of America’s intelligence adversaries. Its espionage organizations
are hidden behind layers of bureaucracy in the Ministry of
State Security, Chinese Communist Party structures, and the second,
third, and fourth department of the General Staff of the People’s
Liberation Army. Much of its cyber- espionage units are concealed
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on the campuses of its universities. Its hierarchy is also obscure.
Few traces have been uncovered of any conventional espionage networks
in the United States, and no major Chinese spy has ever been
arrested. Part of the reason that Chinese espionage has proved so elusive
to the eyes of Western counterintelligence is that, unlike Russia,
it did not ordinarily rely on intelligence officers in its embassies to
recruit penetration agents to steal secrets. It did not even have an
embassy in the United States during most of the Cold War. Instead,
its services specialize in mosaics of intelligence assembled from a
wide variety of sources, including nonclassified documents, returning
graduate students, scientific conferences, exchanges with allies,
and a vast operation of hacking into computers, or cyber espionage.
Such espionage is indeed a vast enterprise in China. Graduating
over 150,000 computer science engineers in the 1990s, it had no
shortage of personnel. It had also developed the cyber tool kit to gain
access to the computer networks of U.S. government contractors and
consultants in the private sector and government agencies, planting
“sleeper” bugs in networked computers. Like human sleeper agents,
these hidden programs can be activated when needed for operational
purposes. Chinese controllers can often retrieve e- mails and documents
and can turn on the cameras and microphones of personal
computers, tablets, and smart phones.
By 2007, Paul Strassmann, a top U.S. defense expert on cyber
espionage, reported that China had inserted “zombie” programs in
some 700,000 computers in the United States, which could be used to
mount cyber attacks to retrieve e- mails from other computers. The
Chinese service also reportedly penetrated companies that provide
Internet services, including Google, Yahoo!, Symantec, and Adobe,
which allowed it to track e- mails and enclosures of individuals. With
such an invisible army of zombie computers, it is not entirely surprising
that China finds little need to employ human sleeper agents.
Chinese cyber specialists used this capability to hack into the
computers of outside contractors, including Booz Allen and other
companies that supplied technologists to the NSA. It also had notable
successes in obtaining the dossiers of U.S. employees and independent
contractors at the NSA, the CIA, and other intelligence
services. Its intrusions, as previously noted, into computer networks
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at the Office of Personnel Management traced back to 2009. Eventually,
by 2015, according to U.S. estimates, the cyber attack had
harvested over twenty million personnel files of past and present
federal government employees. In addition, it reaped over fourteen
million background checks of intelligence workers done by the Federal
Investigative Services.
All intelligence workers with a sensitive compartmented information
clearance, such as Snowden, were required to provide information
on these forms about all their foreign acquaintances, including
any non- U.S. officials whom the applicant knew or had had relationships
with in the past. They also had to list their foreign travel,
family members, police encounters, mental health issues, and credit
history. For good measure, Chinese hackers obtained the confidential
medical histories of government employees by hacking into the
computers of Anthem and other giant health- care companies. If
China’s intelligence services consolidated the fruits of these hacking
attacks, it would have a searchable database of almost everyone
working in the American defense and intelligence complex. From
this database, it could track individuals with high security clearances
vulnerable to being bribed, blackmailed, or tricked into cooperating.
No one doubted that the Chinese would use their cyber capabilities
to take advantage of opportunities presented in foreign computer
systems.
General Hayden said of the massive theft of intelligence personnel
records, “Those records are a legitimate foreign intelligence target.”
He added, “If I, as director of the NSA or CIA, would have
had the opportunity to grab the equivalent in the Chinese system,
I would not have thought twice.” If that opportunity did not arise
for the NSA or the CIA during Hayden’s tenure, it might have been
because no insider in the Chinese intelligence services provided U.S.
intelligence with a road map to it.
Cyber espionage was not the Chinese intelligence service’s only
powerful resource in the intelligence war. To get both electronic
intelligence and human intelligence about the United States, China
also had a highly productive intelligence- sharing treaty with Russia.
It was signed in 1992 after the Soviet Union was dissolved. Although
the terms of this exchange remain secret, defectors from the Rus-
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sian KGB and SVR reported that Chinese intelligence received from
Russia a continuous stream of communications intelligence about
the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries.
Russia’s intelligence resources during this period were formidable.
They included geosynchronous satellites, listening stations
in Cuba, sleeper agents, and embassy- based spy networks. Presumably,
this relationship further deepened under President Putin’s
regime. Putin asserted in speeches in 2014 that Russia and China
continued to share a key strategic objective: countering the United
States’ domination of international relations, or what Putin terms
“a unipolar world order.” China’s president, Xi Jinping, expressed a
very similar view, saying in 2014 in a thinly veiled reference to the
United States that any attempt to “monopolize” international affairs
will not succeed.
Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been the major supplier
of almost all of China’s modern weaponry. It licenses for manufacture
in China avionics, air defense systems, missile launchers, stealth
technology, and submarine warfare equipment. To make these arms
effective, it also provides China with up- to- date intelligence about
the ability of the United States and its allies to counter them. While
such intelligence cooperation may be limited by the reality that
China and Russia still compete in many areas, they still have reason
to share much of the fruits of their cyber and conventional espionage
against the NSA in accordance with their intelligence. After all,
the NSA works to intercept the military and political secrets of both
these allies. Moreover, as the CIA’s former deputy director Morell
points out in his book, NSA secrets are a form of currency for adversaries
in the global intelligence war, saying that part of Snowden’s
cache could be traded by a country that acquired it to the intelligence
services of Iran and North Korea.
Snowden’s stay in Hong Kong from May 20 to June 23 in 2013
made the Chinese intelligence service, willy- nilly, a potential player
in whatever game he was involved in. China’s full responsibility for
Hong Kong’s national security and foreign affairs includes monitoring
foreign intelligence operatives. Chinese intelligence main-
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tains there its largest intelligence base outside mainland China. A
large contingent of its officers are stationed officially in the Prince
of Wales skyscraper in central Hong Kong and unofficially maintain
informers in Hong Kong’s police, governing authority, airport
administration, and other levers of power. It checks the computerized
visitors entering Hong Kong and has the capability to ferret
names that match those in the immense database its global cyber
espionage has amassed. When it detects the entry of any person of
possible intelligence interest, it can use its sophisticated array of
cyber tools to attempt to remotely steal data from that individual.
Such remote surveillance was so effective in 2013 that the U.S. State
Department had instructed all its personnel in Hong Kong to avoid
using their iPhones, Androids, BlackBerry phones, and other smart
phones when traveling to Hong Kong or China. Instead, it supplied
them with specially altered phones that disable location tracking
and have a remotely activated switch to completely cut off power
to its circuitry. No one in the intelligence community doubts the
prudence of taking such precautions in China, and it is nearly inconceivable
that Snowden, whose prior position at the NSA included
teaching military personnel about Chinese capacities, could himself
be unaware of Chinese intelligence service capabilities to acquire
travelers’ data in Hong Kong.
Once Hong Kong had served as a window into China for Western
intelligence, but in the first decade of this century the Chinese
intelligence service had achieved such a pervasive presence in Hong
Kong, and such ubiquitous electronic coverage of diplomats and
other foreigners even suspected of involvement in foreign intelligence
work, that the CIA and British intelligence found it almost
as difficult to operate in Hong Kong as in mainland China. Even
though the CIA kept officers there in 2013, it was considered “hostile
territory,” according to the former CIA officer Tyler Drumheller.
Snowden apparently knew the limits of CIA operations in Hong
Kong, which provided him with an envelope of protection. He told
Greenwald that he was counting on the Chinese presence in Hong
Kong to deter the CIA from intruding on their meetings.
When he flew to Hong Kong in May 2013, he took with him
NSA secrets, which he knew would be of great interest to China.
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In fact, he advertised that he had such secrets in his interview with
the South China Morning Post. Whatever he might have assumed
about the inability of the CIA to stop him in Hong Kong, he could
not assume that Chinese intelligence services would relegate themselves
to a purely passive role when secret NSA documents were in
a hotel room in Hong Kong. Snowden might have esteemed himself
to be an independent actor playing Prometheus on a global stage
provided by YouTube, but the Chinese might have viewed him very
differently indeed.
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c h a p t e r 23
A Single Point of Failure
A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it
fails, will stop the entire system from working.
—Wikipedia
Snowden described anyone who was the sole repository of
secrets that could undo the NSA’s intelligence gathering as “the
single point of failure.” While still shielding his own identity in May
2013, he wrote to Gellman that U.S. intelligence “will most certainly
kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could
stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information.”
Such a person of course would be of even greater interest to
adversary intelligence services if they were aware of the payload of
secrets that person was carrying because they could use it to unravel
the NSA’s sources and methods.
Snowden saw himself as that “single point of failure.” We know
that while still in Hong Kong he said he had obtained access to computers
that the NSA had penetrated throughout the world and in
Moscow he added that he had had “access to every [NSA] target,
every [NSA] active operation,” against the Chinese. “Full lists of
them,” which, if he chose to share them, could make China “go
dark.” To be sure, he did not refer to Russian intelligence activity in
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any interview that he ever gave in Moscow under Russian protection,
but he had similar access to NSA operations against Russia in
his job at the NSA’s Threat Operations Center.
The enormous power of the NSA rested in its ability to keep its
sources and methods secret from its foes. A queen on the chessboard
could be captured by a lowly pawn if it was well- placed. In
this case, the person who had it in his power to expose the NSA’s
critical sources and methods would no doubt be considered fair game
by America’s adversaries, including the Chinese and Russian cyber
services. Indeed, how could they resist such a prize?
Snowden might have believed that he was in control, but the CIA
believed that confidence was misinformed. “Snowden thinks he is
smart,” Morell said, after reviewing the case on a panel appointed
by President Obama, “but he was never in a position in his previous
jobs to fully understand the immense capabilities of our Russian and
Chinese counterparts.” He could adopt a cocky tone in his postmortem
conversations with journalists in Moscow, but in truth he had
no means to block the efforts of the Chinese or Russian services in
Hong Kong. Even before Snowden contacted its diplomats in Hong
Kong, the Russian intelligence service would swing into action to
determine his intelligence value.
How many days he planned to be in Hong Kong depended on how
speedily he could arrange a meeting with journalists. “The purpose of
my [Hong Kong] mission was to get the information to journalists,”
he told the editor of The Guardian after he was safely ensconced in
Moscow. He indicates that he was working under a tight clock. The
time pressure resulted in his e- mailing an ultimatum to Gellman on
May 24: either Gellman would publish the selected documents in
The Washington Post within seventy- two hours, or he would lose
the exclusive scoop. Snowden wanted the story to break on May 27,
without his true identity (which Gellman did not know) attached to
it. His identity would be known to a foreign mission in Hong Kong if
Gellman acceded to his demands, because, as previously mentioned,
Gellman’s story would enclose an encoded signal he planned to use
as proof of his bona fides. So even before the Guardian reporters had
agreed to come to Hong Kong, Snowden had plans to deal with a
foreign mission. If the Post had accepted his terms, Snowden would
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have been in a very different position. The story would have broken
before Poitras or Greenwald even knew about Snowden’s presence
in Hong Kong, and his identity would be secret except for whatever
foreign mission he had contacted. But, as we know, the Post turned
down his ultimatum.
Time was running out if he was to break the story and leave Hong
Kong before the NSA realized he was missing. At best, he was safe
until June 3, when he was supposed to return from his medical leave.
If he failed to show up in Hawaii on June 3, alarm bells at the NSA
would go off, and it would not take long to find him. Airline records
would show that he had flown to Hong Kong. Snowden told Poitras
that NSA security would ask, “This guy isn’t where he says
he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be getting medical treatment.
Why the hell is he in Hong Kong?” It would not take long to determine
that he had lied about his medical treatment, and then the hunt
would begin.
He had, remember, already sent Poitras an enciphered file and told
her she would get the key once she followed his instructions. Greenwald
had still not committed himself to meeting Snowden. Greenwald
was, however, willing to publish the documents once Snowden
provided them. That Snowden remained in Hong Kong suggests that
his reason for going to and remaining in Hong Kong went beyond
just delivering documents to journalists, which he could have done
over the Internet. What he could not do in America, without risking
arrest, was to make and release a video.
In any event, after his attempt to pressure the Post, Snowden
asked Greenwald to fly immediately to Hong Kong. Presumably, he
still wanted Greenwald’s story and the video done in Hong Kong
before he became a suspect. If Greenwald and Poitras had immediately
flown to Hong Kong, it still might have left Snowden an escape
window.
But of course things do not always go as planned. Greenwald,
although agreeing to come to Hong Kong, waited in New York
for two days while the Guardian editors completed their due diligence.
Poitras waited with him. As a result of this delay, as we know,
Green wald and Poitras did not arrive at his hotel in Hong Kong until
June 3, only hours before Snowden became suspect at the NSA. “It
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was a nervous period,” Snowden recalled. Although he bravely told
The Guardian “there was no risk” that the information he carried
had been compromised by other parties in Hong Kong, that claim
was, at best, wishful thinking on his part.
By this time, he had registered at the hotel under his true name
and provided his credit card; he was in contact with three highprofile
journalists, two well- known hacktivists, and, as he suggested
to Gellman, a foreign diplomatic mission.
The mission’s interest would likely be piqued when the newspaper
published its first story on June 6. Greenwald then went on
TV in Hong Kong, revealing to every interested intelligence service
that a defector from the NSA was in Hong Kong providing secret
documents.
Poitras released the famous video showing Snowden and secret
NSA documents three days later. At this point, Snowden shone
brightly as a beacon to NSA secrets to every player in the intelligence
game, even if they did not know the extent of the damage he
could inflict on American intelligence.
Snowden fogged over his travel plans to the media by telling
reporters that he intended to remain in Hong Kong and fight extradition,
but certainly the Russian officials whom he contacted became
aware that he had other plans, having relayed his request to go to
Russia to their superiors in Moscow. And, unlike the media, any
sophisticated intelligence service was well aware of his movements.
In Hong Kong, cell phones emit their GPS location every three seconds;
even if Snowden disabled his own phone, lawyers and helpers
could be tracked with ease.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, who was meeting President Obama
for the first time in Rancho Mirage, California, on June 8, would
have been keenly interested in the unfolding Snowden affair. Obama
had publicly called Xi to task for Chinese cyber espionage, and now
that charge was undermined by Snowden’s accusation that the
United States was engaged in massive cyber espionage. U.S. intelligence
verified that China instituted a full- court press of Snowden
in Hong Kong immediately after the release of the video. From
that moment on, any communication or movement Snowden made
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during his next fifteen days in Hong Kong would not likely escape
China’s scrutiny.
The United States had the ability to also follow Snowden’s movements
via the cell phones of his lawyers and other confederates
after he surfaced. All tracking could be done by the NSA. What the
United States lacked was any practical means to capture a highprofile
intelligence defector in a city that was part of China. By this
time, U.S. intelligence had established that Chinese and Hong Kong
security services were monitoring Snowden’s every move. This left
few options in the game for the United States. “I’m not going to
be scrambling jets to get a twenty- nine- year- old hacker,” President
Obama said on June 27.
The real prize, in any case, was not Snowden but the NSA’s secret
documents that he had with him. When Snowden was observed
entering the Russian consulate, the game was all but over. U.S. diplomats
could protest over back channels to Moscow, as they did, but
with a trove of NSA secrets at stake there was little expectation that
would stop the Russians. Two days later, the “single point of failure,”
as Snowden described himself, was on his way to Russia, where his
hosts would be calling the shots.
When a victory is obtained in a major sports event, it is cause for
public celebrations. The opposite is true in espionage. An intelligence
victory involving secret documents, even if it cannot be entirely
hidden, is kept veiled, as far as is possible, to increase the value of
the coup. “The final move in any sophisticated intelligence game,”
Angleton told me in relation to espionage intelligence, is “obscuring
a success.”
Following Angleton’s precept, the Russian or Chinese intelligence
services, if they had a role in acquiring the product of the selfdescribed
“single point of failure,” would work to cover their tracks in
the affair even before the Aeroflot plane carrying Snowden touched
down at Sheremetyevo International Airport on June 23. If any false
flag operations had been used to trick, mislead, or otherwise induce
Snowden to come to Hong Kong, they would be disbanded. If any
safe house had been used to quarter Snowden in his first eleven days
in Hong Kong, it would be shut down. If any operatives had been
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used in Hawaii to guide or assist Snowden, they would be put back
into sleeper mode. If any telltale traces had been left in chat rooms
or social media, they would be systematically deleted. Even more
important to the ultimate success of such a communications intelligence
coup, measures would be taken to conceal the extent of the
damage done by the “single point of failure” by not precipitously
closing down compromised sources. Snowden might believe that
the power of the information he held was so great that if disclosed
by him, all the NSA’s sources would immediately go dark in Russia
and China, but Russia might not wish to provide such clarity to its
adversaries. An intelligence service need not close down channels
it discovers are compromised by an adversary. Instead, it can elect
to continue to use them and furnish through them bits of sensitive
or misleading information to advance its own national interest. The
real danger here was not that the NSA’s “lights” would dramatically
be extinguished but that all the future messages illuminated by
those lights would be less reliable sources of intelligence. The game
of nations is, after all, merely a competition among adversaries to
gain advantages by the surreptitious exchange of both twisted and
straight information.
To review: When the NSA asserted in the summer of 2013 that
over one million documents had been compromised, it was recognizing
the most massive failure in its sixty- year history. Not only
were NSA secrets taken, but secret files from the CIA, the British
GCHQ, and America’s cyber military commands had been compromised.
It was, as Sir David Omand, the former head of the British
GCHQ, described it, a “huge strategic setback” for the West. The
genie could not be put back into the bottle. There is not a reset button
in this game. The best that the NSA could do now was damage
control while its adversaries took full advantage of the setback. Several
hundred U.S. and British intelligence officers worked around the
clock in Washington, D.C., Fort Meade, Maryland, and Cheltenham,
England, for months on end to determine which parts of the most
powerful communications intelligence system in the world could be
salvaged from what had been the Snowden breach.
Adding insult to injury, Snowden, speaking from his new perch
in Moscow, told applauding audiences that the entire purpose of
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the U.S. exercise, including deliberately “trapping” him in Moscow,
was to “demonize” him. “There was no question that I was going
to be subject to a demonization campaign.” Snowden said in Moscow,
“They [Greenwald and Poitras] actually recorded me on camera
saying this before I revealed my identity.” Snowden asserted this
“demonization” was to divert attention from the government’s own
crimes. By providing Snowden with this platform to rail against the
putative machinations of the United States, Putin laid claim to the
moral high ground.
Snowden’s motive in requesting documents from other foreign
intelligence services, such as the GCHQ, and copying lists of NSA
sources remains unexplained. It is difficult to believe that his motive
was whistle- blowing, because these documents were not among
those he gave to journalists in Hong Kong. Indeed, he did not provide
the journalists with the lists of sources that were particularly
relevant to the NSA’s surveillance of Russia. His legal representative
in Moscow, Kucherena, confirmed that Snowden had taken
secret “material” to Russia and had access to NSA documents that
he had not given to journalists. Those unrevealed documents would
be prized by many an adversary service. Did he use those documents
as leverage in his transformation? The role that Moscow might have
played in Snowden’s defection clearly requires a closer examination
of the machinations that brought Snowden to Russia. That is why I
visited Moscow in October 2015.
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part four
MOSCOW CALLING
Deception is a state of mind— and the mind of the state.
— james jesus angleton
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c h a p t e r 24
Off to Moscow
They talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s
great.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2015
Before flying to Moscow, I arranged to have dinner with
Oliver Stone at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of
New York. I had greatly respected Stone’s ability as a film director
after watching him work on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a film
in which I had a cameo role. I had also debated Stone about the historical
accuracy of his 1991 movie JFK at Town Hall in New York.
When we dined, he had just written, produced, and directed
Snowden, an independently financed film depicting Snowden, as
Stone put it, as “one of the great heroes of the twenty- first century.”
In preparing for it, Stone had seen Snowden in 2013 and 2014 and
had had a six- hour meeting with Putin.
I wanted to talk to Stone not to learn about the film but to learn
how he had gained access to Snowden in Moscow. I knew from the
documents taken from Sony Pictures Entertainment— allegedly by
North Korea— that Stone had paid The Guardian $700,000 for the
film rights to The Snowden Files, a book written by Luke Harding.
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These documents also revealed that Stone had paid Anatoly Kucherena,
Snowden’s legal representative in Moscow, $1 million, supposedly
for the rights to his novel, Time of the Octopus. Even by
Hollywood standards, $1 million was an extraordinary sum to pay
for a yet- to- be- published work of Russian fiction, and it was especially
striking because Stone was making a fact- based movie using
the actual names of the characters, and he had already bought the
rights to The Snowden Files.
“Is your script based on Kucherena’s Time of the Octopus?” I
asked.
“No,” Stone replied. “I haven’t used it.”
He said that the payment was for what he termed “total access.”
He explained that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the producers
of the James Bond franchise, had optioned Greenwald’s book
No Place to Hide to make into a movie about Snowden for Sony.
Stone said that the million- dollar deal with Kucherena effectively
guaranteed that any competing project would not have access to
Snowden. Sony consequently put the competing film on hold.
Lawyers often negotiate deals on behalf of a client, but blocking a
competing film requires considerably more influence with the powers
that be in Russia. Kucherena, though, was no ordinary lawyer.
Among other influential positions, I noted earlier, he was on the public
board of the Russian federal security bureau, which had assumed
the domestic operations of the defunct KGB in April 1995. In light
of such connections, Stone said Kucherena might be acting as an
intermediary for other parties who controlled access to Snowden in
Russia. In any case, his concern was making a movie, and Kucherena
delivered the exclusive access to Snowden.
Aside from being a skilled director, Stone is a shrewd producer
who knows how to close a deal. He assessed, correctly as it turned
out, that his project coupled with the payment to Kucherena would
effectively block Sony’s competing project. Where the money went
was far less clear.
Toward the end of our dinner, Stone told me that he did not know
I was writing a book about Snowden until a few weeks earlier. He
learned of my book from Snowden himself. He said Snowden had
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expressed concern to him about the direction of the book I was writing.
“What is it about?” Stone asked me.
I was taken aback. I had no idea that Snowden was aware of my
book. (I had not tried to contact him.) I told Stone that I considered
Snowden an extraordinary man who had changed history and was
intentionally vague in my description of my book’s contents. Stone
seemed to be reassured, so I asked him about the possibility of my
seeing Snowden in Moscow. He said that I “might want to speak
to Anatoly [Kucherena].” Kucherena, it seemed to me, was clearly
Snowden’s gatekeeper.
In Snowden’s two years in Moscow, he, or his handlers, had granted
only a handful of face- to- face press interviews. Most of these were
with the journalists who had published his story, but one was with
James Bamford for his 2014 Wired piece. According to Bamford, it
took nearly nine months to arrange the meeting. “I have been trying
to set up an interview with him [Snowden]— traveling to Berlin,
Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with
the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting,” Bamford
recounted in Wired. After my dinner with Stone, I hoped to find a
quicker route.
I was advised by a Moscow- based journalist that I needed a
“fixer,” the curious term that journalists commonly use to describe a
local intermediary who arranges appointments in foreign countries.
I retained Zamir Gotta, a highly respected TV producer in Moscow,
who I was told had helped “fix” the Bamford interview with
Snowden.
“There is only one door to Snowden,” Zamir wrote to me. “His
name is Kucherena.” Zamir said Kucherena rarely saw journalists,
but he had a contact in his office. He further told me Kucherena
required any journalist seeking an interview with Snowden to
submit his questions to the lawyer two weeks in advance and, if
approved, to sign a document stating he would not deviate from the
questions. Next, my questions had to be translated from English to
Russian (even though Snowden does not speak Russian) and then
vetted by Kucherena’s staff. Zamir also suggested I stay at the Hotel
National in Red Square because Snowden had gone there for pre-
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vious meetings with Bamford. So I sent Kucherena, via Zamir, ten
questions that I wanted to ask Snowden.
I next obtained a multi- entry Russian visa from the Russian consulate
in New York and booked myself a room in the Hotel National.
My night flight from New York to Moscow took just less than
eight hours and landed at Terminal D of Sheremetyevo International
Airport at 7:40 a.m. on October 29, 2015. I did not immediately
proceed through passport control, in part because I wanted to
explore the transit zone in which Snowden was supposedly trapped
for six weeks.
Sheremetyevo Two, where all international flights land, was built
in the waning days of the Cold War for international passengers
arriving for the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics. It was modernized
in 2010, including opening a walkway that connects Terminals
D, E, and F for transit passengers.
Snowden had vanished, at least from public view, in this complex
of terminals for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013. His
explanation to journalists, as will be recalled, was two part. First, he
said he had planned to board the next fight to Cuba and from there
proceed to Ecuador. He said that he was unable to board this flight
because his passport had been invalidated by the U.S. government
while he was flying to Russia. Second, after discovering his passport
had been revoked, he stayed in a capsule hotel in the transit zone for
the next thirty- nine days. To better understand the plausibility of
his version of those events, I proceeded through the transit passage
to Terminal F, where Snowden’s plane from Hong Kong had landed
at 5:15 p.m. Moscow time on June 23, 2013.
Snowden did not go through passport control upon arrival.
Before any of the other passengers were allowed to disembark from
the plane, Russian plainclothes officers from the special services
boarded the plane and asked both Snowden and Sarah Harrison, his
WikiLeaks- supplied “ninja,” to accompany them to a waiting car
that whisked them away. According to the account in Izvestia, “A
special operation was conducted for his reception and evacuation.” It
further said, “Snowden’s flight to Moscow was coordinated with the
Russian authorities and intelligence services.”
If not for the “special operation,” he could have easily gone by foot
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to Terminal E. It is a nine- minute walk through the transit passageway.
Snowden, though, had one good reason for not going to Ecuador,
even if Russia had permitted it. He believed that he would be
vulnerable to rendition by the U.S. government in Ecuador. “If they
[the U.S. government] really wanted to capture me, they would’ve
allowed me to travel to Latin America, because the CIA can operate
with impunity down there,” he explained in the previously cited
interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, in
2014. He had already discussed the likelihood of his being captured
in Ecuador with Assange before his departure for Moscow. He later
told Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, that he considered
himself at risk in Latin America. So why would Snowden, who told
Greenwald that his “first priority” was his own “physical safety,”
leave the comparative safety of Russia to put himself in jeopardy in
Ecuador?
He had not obtained a visa to Ecuador at its consulate in Hong
Kong, as Kucherena confirmed. The Ecuador destination was, as we
have seen, a cover story put out by Assange and his associates, and it
worked with the press.
Over a hundred reporters and photographers scrambled aboard
Aeroflot Flight SU150 to Cuba the next morning in response to this
anonymous tip on a website, but Snowden was not aboard that flight
and was not seen in Terminal E. By the time the plane landed in
Cuba, Aeroflot denied that anyone named Snowden had ever been
booked on any of its flights to Cuba, a denial it continued to repeat to
every reporter who queried the airline for the next six weeks.
The first news that Snowden was still in Russia came on July 1,
2013. A statement posted on the WikiLeaks website— and signed
“Edward Snowden”— after thanking “friends new and old” for his
“continued liberty,” accused President Obama of pressuring “leaders
of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum
petitions.” It added, “This kind of deception from a world leader
is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are
the old, bad tools of political aggression.” In fact, Snowden had not
suffered a “penalty of exile,” because his passport was still valid for
returning to the United States, but that was not an option for him as
the statement made clear.
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Because the Aeroflot flight to Cuba was the only means of getting
directly from Moscow to Latin America, Russian reporters,
encouraged by WikiLeaks posts, continued taking the daily elevenhour
flight to Cuba until August 1. The charade only ended when
Kucherena said in a press conference at the airport that Snowden
would be taking up residency at an undisclosed location in Moscow
and walked out of the airport with Snowden.
Sarah Harrison, Snowden’s companion on the plane to Moscow,
told Vogue that she and Snowden for thirty- nine days had shared
a windowless room in the transit zone of the airport where they
watched TV, washed their clothes in a sink basin, and ate meals from
the nearby Burger King. The only hotel with windowless rooms
in the transit zone in 2013 was the Vozdushny V- Express Capsule
Hotel, located next to a newly opened Burger King.
The polite V- Express desk clerk, who spoke English, showed me
the standard windowless double room. It was approximately twentyfour
square feet in area. Most of the floor space was taken up by twin
beds. Across from the bed, behind a plastic curtain, was a stall with
a shower, a toilet, and a sink. It would be very cramped quarters for
two people to share for such an extended period. It cost 850 rubles an
hour (about $18 in 2013). For thirty- nine days, that hourly charge
would have added up to $16,600. Snowden claimed to the BBC that
he brought a large cache of cash to Russia, which he could have used
to pay the hotel. But such a long stay was not allowed, according to
the desk clerk. The maximum stay allowed by the hotel was twentyfour
hours. So either the rule was waived for Snowden, or Harrison
did not tell the full truth.
I learned from a former KGB officer that there are VIP quarters
beyond the confines of the airport, including suites at the fourhundred-
room Novotel hotel, which is located about seven miles
away, that are used for debriefing and other purposes by the security
services. According to him, the security services are not restricted
from entering and leaving the transit zone.
The possibility that Snowden was staying elsewhere would help
explain the futile search for him by a large number of reporters
over those thirty- nine days. When they learned from tweets that
Snowden was not aboard the plane to Havana on June 24, for weeks
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they aggressively questioned all the restaurant employees, security
guards, and airport personnel they could find. They also bought
business- class tickets on flights just to gain access to VIP lounges in
the transit zones. Despite this intensive search, none of them found
a single person who had seen Snowden, although his image was constantly
shown on airport TV screens. Egor Piskunov, a reporter for
RT television, even rented a room in the V- Express Capsule Hotel
and “tipped” hotel employees, trying, without success, to get information.
Piskunov told me, “It was a total vanishing act.”
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c h a p t e r 25
Through the Looking Glass
There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
While waiting to hear back from Kucherena’s office, I
arranged to meet with Victor Cherkashin, who had been one
of the most successful KGB spy handlers in the Cold War. Cherkashin,
born in 1932, had served in the KGB’s espionage branch
from 1952 until 1991 and now operated a private security firm in
Moscow. I was particularly interested in his recruitment of three
top American intelligence officers: Aldrich Ames of the CIA, Robert
Hanssen of the FBI, and Ronald Pelton of the NSA. I hoped that seeing
these intelligence coups through the eyes, and mind- set, of their
KGB handler might provide some historical context for the Snowden
defection. So I invited Cherkashin to lunch at Gusto, a quiet Italian
restaurant, located near the Chekhov Theater in Moscow.
Cherkashin, a tall thin man with silver hair, showed up promptly
at 1:00 p.m., wearing an elegant gray suit and dark tie. He walked
with a spry step. Because he had served in counterintelligence in the
Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., for nearly a decade, he spoke
flawless English.
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I began by asking him about one of the more celebrated cases he
had handled for the KGB, that of Ames, who had acted as a Russian
mole in the CIA between April 1985 and January 1994. In those nine
years, he rose, or was maneuvered by the KGB, into a top position
in the CIA’s highly sensitive Counterintelligence Center Analysis
Group, which allowed him to deliver hundreds of top secrets to the
KGB. In return, according to Cherkashin, Ames received between
$20,000 and $50,000 in cash for each delivery, which amounted to
$4.6 million over the nine years.
I asked Cherkashin about the weakness the KGB looked for in an
American intelligence worker that might lead him to copy and steal
top secret documents. How did he spot a potential Ames? Was it a
financial problem? Was it a sexual vulnerability? Was it an ideological
leaning?
“Nothing so dramatic,” he answered. When assessing Ames’s
biographical data, Cherkashin said he was looking for a well- placed
intelligence officer who was both dissatisfied with and antagonistic
to the service for which he worked.
“The classic disgruntled employee,” I interjected.
“Any intelligence officer who strongly feels that his superiors are
not listening to him, and that they are doing stupid things, is a candidate,”
he continued. He said he had found that the flaw in a prospect
that could be most dependably exploited was not his greed, lust,
or deviant behavior but his resentment over the way he was being
treated.
“Is that how you spotted Ames?”
“Actually, he approached us, not vice versa.” It was his job in the
CIA to approach opposition KGB officers. “But, yes, we saw the
potential,” he said.
Because Ames had been paid $50,000 in cash by Cherkashin for
his first delivery, I asked whether he fit into the category of a disgruntled
employee.
“Wasn’t he just a mercenary?” I asked.
“I knew from our intelligence reports that he needed money
for debts stemming from his divorce,” he answered. “But he was
also angry at the stupidity and paranoia of those running the CIA.
Ames told me at our first secret meeting that they were misleading
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Congress by exaggerating the Soviet threat.” Cherkashin evaluated
Ames as a man who felt not only slighted by his superiors but “helpless
to do anything about it” within the bureaucracy of the CIA.
“The money we gave, even if he could spend only a small portion
of it, gave him a sense of worth.” He explained that the KGB had
an entire team of psychologists in Moscow that worked on further
exploiting Ames’s resentment against his superiors.
The search for an adversary intelligence officer who resents his
service was not limited to KGB recruiters. It was also the “classic
attitude” that the CIA sought to exploit in its adversaries, according
to a former deputy director. “You find someone working for the
other side and tell him that he is not receiving the proper recognition,
pay, and honors due him,” Morell said, pointing out that the
same “psychological dynamic” could be used to motivate someone
to “act alone” in gathering espionage material.
I next turned to an even more important KGB coup with Cherkashin:
the Robert Hanssen case. From the KGB’s perspective, Hanssen
was an extraordinary espionage source. He was a walk- in who
never entered the Soviet embassy or met with KGB case officers, but
in working as a KGB mole between 1979 and 2001, he had delivered
even more documents to the Russian intelligence services than
Ames. Cherkashin learned of this potential spy when he received an
anonymous letter from him identifying an FBI source in the Soviet
embassy. When that tip proved to be accurate, Cherkashin got the
resources he needed from the KGB to develop this source. From the
start of his work for the KGB, Hanssen laid down his own rules.
The KGB would deliver cash from which all the fingerprints were
removed to locations, or “dead drops,” he specified. He would deliver
documents exposing FBI, CIA, and NSA sources and methods in
another dead drop. The KGB would precisely follow his instructions.
Cherkashin told me that Hanssen’s “astounding self- recruitment”
was executed in such a way that the KGB never actually controlled
him. “He was our most important mole and we didn’t ever know his
identity, where he worked, or how he had access to FBI, CIA, and
NSA files.” Even so, the KGB (and later the SVR) paid him $600,000
in cash. In return, the anonymous spy delivered twenty- seven com-
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puter disks containing hundreds of secret documents revealing the
sources and methods of American intelligence. According to Cherkashin,
it was the largest haul of top secret documents ever obtained
by the KGB (although it was only a small fraction of the number of
top secret NSA, Department of Defense, and CIA documents taken
by Snowden in 2013). Cherkashin told me the price paid by Moscow
was a great bargain because it helped compromise “the NSA’s most
advanced electronic interception technology,” including a tunnel
under the Soviet embassy.
Yet it was only after newspapers reported that Hanssen had been
arrested by the FBI in February 2001 that Cherkashin learned the
name and position of the spy he had recruited. Cherkashin told me
that what mattered to the KGB was not “control” of an agent but the
value of the secrets he or she delivered. “Control is not necessary in
espionage as long as we manage to obtain the documents.” So in the
eyes of the KGB, anyone who elected to provide it with U.S. secrets
was a spy.
“All we knew was that he delivered valuable documents to us and
asked for cash in return,” he said. “We didn’t control him; he controlled
us.”
An uncontrolled mole who provided secrets to the KGB and the
SVR for twenty- two years was very different from fictional moles
in the spy movies. I asked whether it would have been better if the
KGB had him under its control.
“Possibly,” Cherkashin answered. “But as it turned out, Hanssen
was by far our most valuable penetration in the Cold War.”
“Could Hanssen really be called a mole?” I asked.
“A ‘mole’ is a term used in spy fiction,” he said. “We prefer the
more general term ‘espionage source.’ ”
“So anyone who delivers state secrets to the KGB, for whatever
reason, is an espionage source?” I asked.
“Certainly, if the information is valuable to us,” Cherkashin
answered.
“If some unknown person simply delivered a trove of top secret
communications secrets to the doorstep of Russia, would it be
accepted?” I asked with Snowden in mind.
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“I can’t say what the SVR would do today. I am long retired,” he
said, with a nostalgic shake of his head. “But in my day, we needed
some reason to believe the gift was genuine.”
“Would you need to vet the person delivering it?”
“With Hanssen we did not have that opportunity,” he said. “If
we believed the documents were genuine, we would of course grab
them.”
The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald
Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979.
Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents
with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought
to get money from the KGB. On January 14, 1980, he walked into
the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., and asked to see an intelligence
officer. After he was ushered into a secure debriefing room, he
said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but
he wanted money in return. What interested me about the Pelton
case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton, even though
he was no longer working at the NSA and no longer had access to
the NSA. In addition, because the FBI had twenty- four- hour surveillance
on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed
entering it and had also possibly been recorded asking for
an intelligence officer by electronic bugs that the KGB suspected the
NSA had planted there. What did the KGB do in a situation in which
a former civilian employee at the NSA possessed no documents?
Despite the risks involved, Cherkashin decided Pelton had to be
debriefed by communications intelligence specialists. So he had him
disguised as a utility worker and smuggled out in a van to the residential
compound of the ambassador in Georgetown. A few days
later, he was dropped off at a shopping mall.
“Why did you go to such effort if Pelton had neither documents
nor access to the NSA?” I asked.
“It was the information in his head that we wanted.” Cherkashin
said that because the KGB rarely got access to any NSA officer, it
was worth the risk. So Pelton was given $5,000 in cash and a plane
ticket to Vienna, where he was domiciled at the residence of the
Soviet ambassador to Austria. A KGB electronic communications
expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the
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Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for fifteen
days, were from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. In them, Pelton managed to
recall Project A, a joint NSA- CIA- navy operation in which submarines
surreptitiously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea
of Okhotsk, which connected to the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s mainland
headquarters at Vladivostok. Pelton received another $30,000 from
the KGB.
“Did the information in his head prove valuable?” I asked.
“As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was compromised by
Pelton, we could use the cable to send the NSA the information we
wanted it to intercept.” He said that while actual NSA documents
would have proved more useful than someone’s memories, “Our job
is to take advantage of whatever we can get.”
Two years later, Pelton was again flown to Vienna for another
debriefing to see if he could recall any further details. According to
Cherkashin, the KGB’s job was to leave no stone unturned when
it came to the NSA’s sources. In 1985, the KGB’s task ended when
Pelton was arrested by the FBI. Like Ames and Hanssen, Pelton was
sentenced to life imprisonment.
Looking at his watch, Cherkashin politely excused himself.
I subsequently spoke to Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who had
been a foreign intelligence officer in the KGB between 1958 and
1985 and continued his intelligence work until recently as chief
counterterrorism expert of the Russian- led Collective Security
Treaty Organization. Over a leisurely coffee in the bar of the Hotel
National, he told me that many “walk- ins” who contacted Soviet
officials in his time were emotionally disturbed, but all of them had
to be assessed for possible intelligence value. “Our job was to find
espionage sources,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “The Internet
has changed the espionage business since secret documents can be
massively downloaded by an unhappy employee,” he said, “but they
still need to be assessed by a professional.”
Through the eyes of the KGB, a penetration of American intelligence
was clearly opportunistic. If these practices continued, they
put Snowden’s situation in a new light for me. If Russian intelligence
considered it worthwhile to send a former civilian worker at
the NSA, such as Ronald Pelton, two thousand miles from Washing-
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ton, D.C., to Austria so that its specialists could debrief him on the
secrets he held in his head, it would have an even greater interest in
exfiltrating Snowden from Hong Kong to get, aside from his documents,
whatever secrets he held in his head. If Russian intelligence
were willing to opportunistically accept the delivery of U.S. secrets
from an unknown espionage source that it neither recruited nor
controlled, such as Hanssen, it would obviously have little hesitancy
in acquiring the secrets that Snowden had stolen of his own volition,
even if Snowden had acted for idealistic reasons.
If Russian intelligence focused its search pattern on disgruntled
American intelligence workers, such as Ames, it is plausible that it
spotted Snowden through his Internet rants against U.S. surveillance.
Even if it had missed Snowden in Hawaii, a disgruntled former
civilian employee at the NSA would have received its full attention
after he contacted Russian officials in Hong Kong. While the tactics
of the SVR might have changed since Cherkashin retired, its objectives
remained the same. And the NSA remained its principal target.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that it still measures success in its
ability to obtain, by whatever means, the secret sources and methods
of its adversaries. Snowden was in a position, with both the documents
he had taken and the knowledge he had in his head, to deliver
the KGB such a coup.
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c h a p t e r 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
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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.
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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 wellfitting
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.
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“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
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if not unprecedented for an American intelligence worker to seek
asylum in Russia.
These invitees included some of Putin’s close associates, progovernment
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 the 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
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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
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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.”
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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
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c h a p t e r 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.
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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 because 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
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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 whistleblowing
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.
The documents he stole at Booz Allen certainly increased his
value to adversary nations, because they included lists revealing the
NSA’s sources in Russia, China, and other foreign countries.
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Snowden wanted more than just NSA secrets. He used his new
position and widened access at Booz Allen to go after secret documents
from the intelligence services of Britain, Australia, New
Zealand, and Israel. He revealed this operation only after receiving
sanctuary in Russia. He told an interviewer that by moving to his
new Booz Allen job as an infrastructure analyst, he gained the ability
to pry secrets out of the allies of the NSA. “I had a special level
of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac,’ ” he said. This “priv ac” status did not
allow him to bypass the password protection at sealed- off compartments
at the NSA, but it did allow him to request files from foreign
services cooperating with U.S. intelligence.
By way of example, he described one file from the British GCHQ
cipher service that he copied, stole, and provided to other parties. It
exposed a legally authorized British operation to collect electronic
data on terrorist matters in Pakistan by tapping into Cisco routers
used by telecom companies in Asia. This GCHQ operation, as
Snowden knew, violated neither British nor American law. He told a
BBC interviewer in regard to that file, “What’s scariest is not what
the government is doing that’s unlawful, but what they’re doing
that is completely lawful.” So his criteria for taking such documents
were not their illegality. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he
also used this same newly acquired “priv ac” at the NSA to steal files
from the Israeli, Canadian, and Australian intelligence services.
Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the
purpose of penetrating other Western intelligence services is not
the conventional mission of a whistle- blower. In the parlance of CIA
counterintelligence, the actions of an employee of an intelligence
service who changes his jobs solely to steal the more valuable secrets
of this service is called an “expanding penetration.” It is not possible
to believe that Snowden did not know the immense damage that
the highly sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its
allies could cause.
His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not
based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began
working at Booz Allen. As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance
that by switching to the job at Booz Allen, he would gain the opportunity
to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’s
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secretive National Threat Operations Center’s chief business was, as
its name suggests, countering direct threats from China, Russia, and
other adversary states and that to deal with these threats, the NSA
had used sophisticated methods to hack into the computers of adversaries.
The NSA was even able to remotely gain entry to adversary
computers that were not hooked into a network. “It’s no secret that
we hack China very aggressively,” Snowden later said from Moscow.
He had a planned target: getting the lists of the enemy computers
that the NSA had hacked into.
He also knew he was undertaking a dangerous enterprise. He even
mentioned the possibility that he would be “in an orange jumpsuit,
super- max prison in isolation or Guantánamo,” perhaps even
assassinated.
He knowingly chose this course presumably because he believed
the value of the secrets he would obtain by switching jobs outweighed
the risk of imprisonment. Or worse. Part of his calculus
might have been the belief that the NSA lists, GCHQ documents,
and other material in his possession could give him great leverage, if
he chose to exert it, in his future dealings with intelligence services
(including the NSA). His choice to widen his access was made, if not
to get rich, to empower himself.
The Second Decision
The second choice of consequence that Snowden made was to make
Hong Kong his first stop. He had many other options. He could have
remained in America, as almost all previous whistle- blowers had
chosen to do. If he did that, he would have to make his case in court
(and, in that case, the Level 3 documents he took might have been
retrieved before they fell into unauthorized hands). He could have
also chosen to make an escape to a country that did not have an active
extradition treaty with the United States. He could have, for example,
taken a direct flight to Brazil, which has no extradition treaty
with the United States. Brazil also had the advantage of being the
home country of Glenn Greenwald, whose cooperation he sought.
Snowden could have gone to many other countries without extradi-
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tion treaties with the United States. Yet, instead, he flew to Hong
Kong, which had an extradition agreement that had been enforced
throughout the past decade with Hong Kong courts ordering the
arrest of almost every fugitive charged by U.S. authorities. He could
expect that when the United States filed a criminal complaint, Hong
Kong authorities would seize him and the alleged stolen property of
the U.S. government in his possession. Even if he were released on
bail and successfully defeated extradition in a Hong Kong court, the
Hong Kong authorities would almost certainly retain all the NSA
and GCHQ files he had gone to such lengths to steal.
His reason, as he told Greenwald, was that China could provide
him with physical protection from any countermeasures by U.S.
intelligence agencies such as “American agents . . . breaking down
the door” of the hotel room and seizing him. China also had sway
over Hong Kong’s security activities.
Hong Kong was therefore merely a protected stopover en route to
his next destination. If he had gone directly to Moscow and provided
the same journalists with the same documents at a press conference
in Moscow, his status as a whistle- blower might have been viewed
with less sympathy in the media. Even The Guardian, for example,
might have been reluctant to publish a Moscow- based story revealing
British and American communications intelligence secrets.
The Third Decision
The third choice Snowden made, and the choice that most effectively
defined him to the public, was to reveal himself as the man behind
the leak in a video in Hong Kong. He not only identified himself as
the person who stole the government documents published by The
Guardian and The Washington Post but also incriminated himself
further on camera by allowing Poitras to film him actually disclosing
the NSA’s secret operations to Greenwald. By disclosing classified
data to Greenwald, an unauthorized person, he intentionally burned
his bridges.
What makes this choice intriguing is that there was no evident
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need for him to expose himself in this way. If he merely wanted to
be a whistle- blower, he could have, as Bradley Manning did, anonymously
sent the documents to journalists as “Citizen Four.” In fact,
in late May 2013, that was exactly what he did. He anonymously
sent Gellman the PRISM scoop, which the Post published on June 6.
He also sent Greenwald and Poitras documents while he was still
the anonymous Citizen Four. Neither Gellman nor Greenwald had
suggested the need for a face- to- face meeting with Snowden. Even
after he had revealed his true identity to Poitras and Greenwald on
June 3, the Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill offered him the option
of remaining an unnamed source for the stories. He said, as he later
told Vanity Fair, “You should remain anonymous; the stories are
just as good without you.” However, anonymity was not part of
Snowden’s long game.
The reason he gave Greenwald in Hong Kong for going public in
this way was to avoid having any suspicion fall on his co- workers at
the NSA. Yet in the initial stories published by Greenwald, Poitras,
and Gellman, Snowden had not allowed the reporters to identify him
by either name or position. If he did not act to deflect suspicion from
his co- workers for the initial investigation, why do it a week later?
In the intervening week, the FBI had already launched its criminal
investigation. In any case, he did not need to be the subject of a documentary
film to take sole responsibility for stealing state secrets. He
could have simply allowed Greenwald to identify him by name as
the source in the stories.
One thing that Snowden could not accomplish by anonymously
transferring the documents to journalists was a starring role in the
drama. If he had appeared digitally masked in Poitras’s video with
an altered voice, he would not achieve fame. To do that, he needed to
allow Poitras to film him committing the crime of turning over NSA
documents to Greenwald. This video was also part of his advance
planning. Indeed, one reason he chose Poitras was that she was a
prizewinning documentary filmmaker. Snowden, while he was still
working at the NSA in March 2013, made it clear how he intended
to use Poitras’s filmmaking skills. He told her, “My personal desire is
that you paint the target directly on my back.” Making himself the
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on- camera star of a twenty- hour- long reality show, edited first into
a video and then a full- length documentary, transformed him in the
public’s mind into a hero.
It would be a mistake to assume that the central role he gave
himself was simply an exercise in narcissism. After the video was
released, he was no longer a near nonentity servicing a computer
system at a backwater NSA base in Hawaii. He had emerged from
the shadowy world of electronic intelligence to become one of the
most famous whistle- blowers in modern history. It was a mantle
that would allow him to also become a leading advocate of privacy
and encryption rights, as well as the leading opponent of NSA spying.
While this remarkable transformation might not have been his
entire motive, it was certainly the result of the choice he made to go
public.
The Fourth Decision
The final choice he made was to board a nonstop flight to Moscow
on June 23. Once the U.S. criminal complaint was unsealed on June
21, he needed to leave Hong Kong; his continued presence would
have been a complication for the Chinese president, Xi, scheduled
soon to meet President Obama. His only route out of Hong Kong
went through two adversaries of the United States: China and Russia.
China, as far as is known, did not offer him sanctuary. According
to one U.S. diplomat cited by The New York Times, China might have
already obtained copies of Snowden’s NSA files and did not want the
problem of having Snowden defect to Beijing. In any case, if it had
not already acquired the files, it could assume it would receive that
intelligence data from its Russian ally in the intelligence war. Whatever
its reason, China did not use its considerable power in Hong
Kong to block Snowden’s exit.
Nor did Snowden obtain a visa to any country in Latin America or
elsewhere during his monthlong stay in Hong Kong. As in the oftcited
Sherlock Holmes clue of the dog that did not bark, Snowden’s
lack of any visas in his passport strongly suggests that he had not
made plans to go anyplace but where he actually went: Moscow. His
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actions here, including his contacts with Russian officials in Hong
Kong, speak louder than his words.
Just as he believed the Chinese intelligence service could protect
him in Hong Kong from a physical attack by agents of the United
States, he could assume that the FSB could protect him from them
in Moscow. He was not entirely naive about its capabilities. During
his service in the CIA, he had taken a monthlong training course at
the CIA’s “farm” at Fort Peary, in which counterintelligence officers
taught about the capabilities of the Russian security services. He
couldn’t have believed that Russia would allow a defector from the
NSA who claimed to have had access to the NSA’s sources in Russia
and China to leave Moscow before its security services obtained that
information.
It is not uncommon for a defector to change sides in order to find
a better life for himself in another country. Some defectors flee to
escape a repressive government or to find one in which they believe
they are more closely attuned to its values. Russia, however, is ordinarily
not the country of choice for someone such as Snowden seeking
greater civil liberties and personal freedom. So why did Snowden
choose Russia for his new life?
The four choices just discussed that Snowden made, taken together,
show that Snowden was determined to succeed where others
before him had failed. He not only wanted to take full credit for
stealing files from the NSA but also wanted to escape any American
retribution for his act. His decision suggests to me a highly intelligent,
carefully calculating man who was hell- bent on finding a new
life for himself in a foreign country. A common thread that runs
through these four choices is a willingness to do whatever was necessary
to achieve this new life, including disregarding his oath to
protect secrets and instead transporting them on thumb drives to
a foreign country. To protect himself, he was also willing to rely on
the influence of adversary intelligence services in Hong Kong and
put himself in the hands of Russian authorities in Moscow. He was
also willing to use some of his classified documents as a medium of
exchange, if not bait, with journalists to get the public attention he
sought.
These choices paid off for Snowden, the new hero of millions. In
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Moscow, he could enjoy a safe life, free from the threats of a CIA
rendition team dropping from the sky or extradition proceedings. He
was now under the protection of Putin’s Russia. The press had a field
day with the domestic surveillance documents that he gave them. As
far as Snowden was concerned, as he told Gellman on December 21,
2013, in Moscow, “The mission’s already accomplished.”
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c h a p t e r 28
The Espionage Source
The government’s investigation failed. [It] didn’t know what was
taken.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
In moscow, I had learned that Russian intelligence services use
the broad, umbrella term “espionage source” to describe moles,
volunteers, and anyone else who delivers another state’s secrets
to it. It applies not only to documents but to the secret knowledge
that such a source is able to recall and includes both controlled and
uncontrolled bearers of secrets. It is also a job description that fit
Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Unless one is willing to believe that the Putin regime acted out of
purely altruistic motives in exfiltrating this American intelligence
worker to Moscow, the only plausible explanation for its actions
in Hong Kong was that it recognized Snowden’s potential as an
espionage source. Snowden’s open disillusionment with the NSA
presented the very situation that the Russian intelligence services
specialized in exploiting. He had also revealed to reporters in Hong
Kong that he had deliberately gained access to the NSA’s sources
and methods and that he had taken highly classified documents to
Hong Kong. He further disclosed that before leaving the NSA, he
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had gained access to the lists of computers that the NSA had penetrated
in foreign countries. He even went so far as to describe to
these journalists the secrets that he had taken as a “single point of
failure” for the NSA. And aside from the documents he had copied,
he claimed that the secret knowledge in his head, if he disclosed it,
would wreak havoc on U.S. intelligence. “If I were providing information
that I know, that’s in my head, to some foreign government,
the US intelligence community would . . . see sources go dark that
were previously productive,” he told the editor of The Guardian in
Moscow.
In short, he advertised possessing priceless data that the Russian
intelligence services had been seeking, with little success, for
the past six decades. These electronic files could provide it with the
keys to unlock the NSA’s entire kingdom of electronic spying. Could
any world- class intelligence service ignore such a prize? To miss the
opportunity to get its hands on such a potential espionage source
would be nothing short of gross negligence.
In fact, this golden opportunity was not missed in Hong Kong.
Even if the Russian intelligence service had not previously had
him in its sights— which, as discussed earlier, appears to me to be
extremely unlikely— he made contact with Russian officials in Hong
Kong, and Putin personally approved allowing Snowden to come to
Russia.
This decision made it possible for Snowden, without an entry
visa to Russia, or, for that matter, any other country, to check in
and board an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. We also know that a special
operation was mounted to take Snowden off the plane once it landed
in Moscow. Such an operation could not have been executed without
advance planning. Nor would he be removed from the plane without
a plan for his stay in Russia. Once Putin approved it, there is little
reason to doubt that the plans to get Snowden to Moscow, and whatever
cover stories were deemed necessary to obscure them, had been
carried out professionally by Russia’s special services.
When an intelligence service makes such elaborate preparations
for extracting a foreign intelligence worker, it presumably also
expects to debrief him or her on arrival. Pelton, for example, who
had access to far less valuable information than had Snowden, was
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held incommunicado in Vienna for two weeks during his debriefing.
It would be inconceivable for an intelligence service to bring
a potential espionage source such as Snowden to Russia and allow
him to catch the next plane to Latin America. The false report provided
to the press that Snowden was flying there was likely nothing
more than a smoke screen to confuse foreign observers while he was
receiving his initial debriefing and evaluation.
When it comes to the esoteric enterprise of reconstructing the
work of U.S. communications intelligence, military as well as civilian
experts in cryptology, computer sciences, and communications are
necessary. Unlike in the case of Pelton, Snowden, according to Anatoly
Kucherena, had secret material in his possession. Even if Russian
intelligence had already acquired copies of the electronic files
prior to Snowden’s arrival in Moscow, Snowden’s interpretation of
them would be part of the debriefing because intelligence data needs
to be put in context.
“This debriefing could not be done overnight,” according to a former
high- ranking officer in the GRU, the Russian military intelligence
service. “There is no way that Snowden would not be fully
debriefed,” he said. He also said GRU specialists in signals intelligence
would be called in.
Putin’s approval of the Snowden operation was not without consequences.
Not only did Obama make good on his threat to cancel
the pre- Olympics summit with Putin, but also, as it turned out,
the Snowden exfiltration proved a turning point in the “reset” of
U.S.- Russian relations. Having to accept the onus of declining relations
with the Obama administration, Putin, it seems safe to assume,
attempted to get the bonus of the NSA’s communications intelligence
from Snowden. The GRU, the SVR, and other Russian intelligence
services would not stop questioning Snowden, even if it took