ulture,” exemplified by largely unrestricted entry to the NSANet by civilian contractors,” fit the culture of the young civilians on the “geek squads” who now ran the NSA’s computer networks.

  It was remarkable that even in such “open culture “Snowden’s crypto party, TOR station, and other anti-NSA activities could go unnoticed. After all, ten or so NSA workers attended the first party it is not unlikely that many of them recognized him as their co-worker.  If so, they knew (as did Sandvik and Mills) that the TOR advocate “Cincinnatus” was Snowden.  He had also not been shy in contacting via email notable enemies of the NSA, such as Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins and Asher Wolf on behalf of the “Oahu Crypto Party.” If anyone, including the security staff of the NSA, had been on the lookout for dissident intelligence workers, this well-advertised gathering, and its organizer, might have been of interest.  In 2014, I asked a former top NSA executive whether such activities on behalf of TOR by a NSA employee would arouse the attention of the NSA’s own “Q” counterespionage unit.  He answered, “Snowden was not a NSA employee.”  As a contract employee of Dell residing in the United States, the NSA could not legally monitor his private activities or intercept his communication.  To do so, would require a FBI request approved by the FISA court.  So Snowden/Cincinnatus was free to operate openly in recruiting NSA workers, hacktavists and computer buffs for his events. Ironically, adversary intelligence services searching for disgruntled intelligence workers had no such constraints.       


CHAPTER NINE
The String-Puller

“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere.” 

            --Edward Snowden in Moscow, 2013



Downloading NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three weeks after the Crypto party, Snowden began anonymously contacting a high-profile journalist, He used the same alias “Cincinnatus” that he used with Sandvik, and to advertise the Oahu Crypto Party.  The journalist to whom he wrote On December 1, 2012, was Glenn Greenwald, the previously-mentioned Rio-based columnist for the Guardian.
   Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. Up until 2004, Greenwald was a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, and Rosen & Katz.   He was also an entrepreneur owning part of Master Notions, a company which, among other things, had a fifty percent financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym which originally stood for “Hairy Jock.”)   All did not go well with this enterprise.  In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious law suit with his other associates in HJ.  As a result, he had a number of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien by the IRS.  

   After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet magazine Salon.  He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against US government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal privacy The extent of his bitter antagonism to the activities of the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of his 2007 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.  His position on surveillance was unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote.      When Barack Obama became President in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.”   Because of his opposition to President Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money.

  In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including Snowden), from Salon to the Guardian. The British newspaper also had a powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published the Wikileaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Private Bradley Manning and published by Assange in 2010.

    Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist.  Like Poitras, he joined the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.  The foundation, which eventually Runa Sandvik and Micah Lee would join, had been set up expressly to funnel money to both Assange’s Wikileaks site and the defense fund for Bradley Manning after he was arrested.  Such a money laundry was necessary because, as will be recalled, American credit card companies were blocking money transfers to these two causes.  This “blockade” was taking its toll on Wikileaks.   According to Assange, “WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances.” So the Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Barlow, one of the song writers for the Grateful Dead band, was one of its chief financial backers. “The first serious info war is now engaged, Barlow declared. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks.” He served with Greenwald and Poitras on its Board in December 2012.  

Snowden was an avid reader of Greenwald’s screeds against the government. If he was to assume the role of a modern-day Prometheus, delivering forbidden secrets of the NSA to the public, Greenwald would be a logical candidate to break the story. Snowden could safely assume that Greenwald would be sympathetic to exposing NSA surveillance from his many blogs, tweets and YouTube comments on the subject.  For example, on November 13 2012, just 18 days before Snowden contacted him, Greenwald had written a blog in Guardian asserting that the United States was “a surveillance state run amok.” In it, echoing very closely what Snowden said at his Crypto party, Greenwald wrote that “any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.”  Citing a story in the Washington Post, he continued: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."      As a result, Greenwald called for action in his  blog on November 13, 2012, writing:  “The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that, in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment, monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do.” That same week Snowden invited Runa Sandvik to co-host his crypto party.

One problem for Snowden was reaching out to Greenwald was Greenwald's lack of any encryption for his e-mails. Communicating with a journalist like Greenwald who famously attacked the very organization for which he worked was itself a risky undertaking, especially if he wanted to pass classified NSA documents to him.  If his emails were intercepted by the NSA in Brazil (where Greenwald lived) and where the NSA was not restricted by US law, he could lose his job or even be arrested.  Under his alias Cincinnatus, he told Greenwald that he needed to immediately encrypt his computer.  To make his point, he cited Greenwald’s own November 12, 2012 blog. In it, Greenwald noted that General David Petraeus, then the CIA director, had been caught in a minor sex scandal because his personal emails had been intercepted, Snowden wrote Greenwald that Petraeus would not have been exposed if he had used encryption.  Snowden also sent Greenwald instruction on how to install the necessary encryption software and a link to a 12-minute video on encryption (which might have been the same video he used at his Crypto party a few weeks earlier.)  

    Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however. Snowden, unwilling to deal with Greenwald through an unencrypted channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013.  Even so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise.  He sought an intermediary who used encryption.

The alternative route to Greenwald that Snowden chose was Laura Poitras.   He knew she had am association with him.  They both were founding board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Greenwald had also written about her extensively.  For example, he wrote an entire blog about her confrontation with the US government and her plans to make a documentary about the “U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding covert domestic NSA activities”

    Since 2011, Poitras had been filming the construction of a massive NSA repository for data in Bluffdale, Utah.  In the anti-surveillance culture, the structure had become symbolic of the powers of the NSA. In fact, was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins photographed from a blimp in the fall of 2013 and post on the Internet.    Just six months earlier in August 2012, Poitras had released her documentary about the NSA’s use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying, 

 Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other impressive credentials.   Born in 1964 in Boston, She came from a wealthy family that donated large sums of money to philanthropic causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After graduating from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996, she pursued a career as an activist film-maker. Her focus quickly became exposing NSA’s surveillance.  One of her short documentaries about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the New York Times website and attracted enormous attention in 2012.  As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she participated in public events with William Binney, the now famous ex-NSA whistle-blower, and Jacob Appelbaum.   In April 2012, for example, she made a presentation at the Whitney Museum in New York with Binney and Appelbaum.  She became such a leading activist against the NSA by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, interspersed clips from her short film in his keynote address at the Computer Chaos Club convention of hacktavists in Berlin in December 2012.  Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply googling Poitras’ name in January 2013, he would have learned about her connections with Greenwald, Appelbaum, Binney, Assange and other leading figures in the anti-surveillance camp. When asked later Snowden why he had chosen her to help him, He replied “I didn’t. You chose yourself.”  The problem for Snowden was anonymously drawing her in to his enterprise. 

Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vulnerable to NSA surveillance. To get to her through an encrypted channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January 11, 2013, he wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California.  Unlike Greenwald and Poitras, Lee resided in America.  This U.S. residence meant, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally barred from monitoring his communications.  He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras who, it will be recalled was a founding Board member of that small foundation. Lee also was well-connected to others with whom Snowden had contacted for his crypto party. Lee had been an associate of Runa Sandvik’s at TOR and was a prominent member of Noisebridge, an eclectic anti-government hackers’ commune based in Northern California, of which Appelbaum was also a member.     

To contact Lee, Snowden chose the alias Anon108.  Anon was an alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune of hacktavists.   “I’m a friend.” Snowden wrote Lee. “I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email/gpg key for her.”  The “gpg” encryption key he asked for, more commonly called a PGP key, was the so-called public key for an encryption system called Pretty Good Privacy, or, for short, PGP.  This encryption system required both a public and private key.  Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, since Poitras had the latter one.  Lee wrote Poitras about “anon108.” The next day, with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’ public key to Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108. 

  With it, Snowden now contacted Poitras directly.  He asked her as a first step to open an anonymous email account using TOR software.  He was now in contact with three members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—Greenwald, Lee, and Poitras. (Sandvik would join the foundation in 2013.) 

Poitras later wrote about this initial contact:   “I was at that point filming with several people who were all being targeted by the [US] government.” The people she was filming included Appelbaum, Assange, and two former NSA employees, William Binney and Thomas Drake. It was in the midst of this project when she received the email from Anon108 aka Edward Snowden.  

 He next asked Poitras her take out a new enciphering key to use exclusively for her liaison with him.  It provided them both with an extra layer of protection from any surveillance by law enforcement.   Presumably, she accommodated his requests because she anticipated that the anonymous person would use this encrypted channel to send her highly-sensitive material. 

   On January 23, 2013 Snowden wrote Poitras under yet another alias.  This time he called himself “Citizen Four.” He wrote: “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.”   She had no way of knowing at this “stage” that, despite giving her his “word,” he was not who he claimed to be.  He was not a  “government employee, “ he was not a “senior” official and he was a member of the “intelligence  community” (which is composed of the intelligence services of the U.S. government .)  He would later also claim to her that he had been “a senior adviser to the CIA” and “a senior adviser to the DIA.”   In fact, he had never held such position at either intelligence service. In January 2013, he was merely a contract employee of Dell working as a computer technician at the NSA base in Hawaii.

Snowden told her in his initial email that he was well-acquainted with her career as an anti-surveillance activist.  He said that he had read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which Greenwald detailed the 40 times in which Poitras was searched by US authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed that she was on a special watch-list and under constant US government surveillance.  She had come under such scrutiny by US authorities, it turned out, because of her documentary about American military abuses of civilians in Iraq in 2005 entitled “The Oath”.  While filming it she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of US troops in Iraq.  Her presence at the ambush site led Army intelligence officers to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge and the government never substantiated it.  Even so, because of this incident, she was kept on a list that caused authorities to search her at airports.  As a result, she took elaborate counter-measures to evade any possible surveillance of her communications.   

Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described them in a great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Greenwald.) “Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work, “Greenwald wrote:    “She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.”  She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.”

 Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about government surveillance.  She fully subscribed to his view that that government surveillance was ubiquitous.  Indeed, he later described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.”  He meant it as a compliment.     Such functional paranoia or, “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precautions that she took, dove-tailed with Snowden’s growing conviction that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other journalists.        

It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot.  He played on her well-known concern about government surveillance.  He wrote, for example, “The surveillance you’ve experienced means you have been ‘selected’—a term which will mean more to you as you learn how the modern SIGINT system works.” Just as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, according to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because of her work.   The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signal intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite her long-time concerns about being watched by the government. “Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies,” he continued.  “I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a waste of your time.”  Further heightening her concern that she was under surveillance, he asked her to confirm to him “that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase.”  Such precautions were necessary because “your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.”  That “adversary” was, as she knew from her previous film, the NSA.  At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. 

  To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to her that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial set of mind. “If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications,” he explained. “If you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated.”  If her correspondent could be “immediately implicated,” it meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets.  So Poitras knew, as early as January 2013 that she was creating an encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets and who would be incriminated by providing them to her.    

   The key source for Poitras’ previously-referred to short video was William Binney.  Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets.  Binney had been a NSA technical director until he had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’ film was called “Stellar Wind.” It indeed led to a major expose of domestic spying by the New York Times in December 2005. After President Bush’s own Justice Department then held that such surveillance was illegal, Congress passed a revision of the Patriot Act in 2007 that effectively legalize the “Stellar Wind” surveillance program on condition that the NSA obtain a FISA warrant for it that would be periodically reviewed by the Department of Justice.

     Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made about Stellar Wind.  He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, US anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was not a law breaker.      But her new source, Snowden, was willing to do what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do.  He was offering in these emails to provide her with secret government documents even though it would implicate him as an outlaw.  To further whet her appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still relevant to her cause.  “What you know as Stellar Wind has grown” he wrote her. In fact, as Snowden knew from the draft Inspector-General report he stole in 2012 that Stellar Wind been terminated in 2011 by the NSA for budgetary reasons. He continued:     “The expanded special source operations that took over Stellar Wind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States.” As a result, he wrote.  “The amount of US communications ingested by the NSA is still increasing.” 

    He further offered to substantiate her worst fears about the growth of NSA surveillance’ “I know the location of most domestic interception points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.”  He even proffered, evidence implicating President Barak Obama in illegal surveillance. “There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House. It’s called presidential policy 20,” he wrote her.  It was an 18-page directive that Obama had signed four months earlier in October 2012. Snowden was offering to reveal to her the up-to-date evidence of a surveillance state in America presided over by the President himself.  It was what she had been searching for three years.  How could she, as an activist film-maker, resist such a sensational offer?  

He further explained to her that he had placed great trust in his discretion.  “No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions,” he said.  

 Poitras must have found it flattering that a total stranger was willing to disclose to her in emails what he would not tell even his “most trusted confidante” about his intentions to commit an illicit breach of U.S. national security.  It was an extraordinary risk he was taking. After all, “Citizen 4” had no way of knowing who she else she told about him.  She had long been concerned, with good reason that the U.S. government was out to get her.  An unknown person offering to supply her with secret documents could be attempting to entrap her.  So he could not preclude she would not consult with others about the offer he was making her.  Since her current documentary project included interviews with Assange, Appelbaum and three ex-NSA executives, intelligence services with sophisticated surveillance capabilities might also have taken a professional interest in her communications, as Poitras herself had suspected.  Even if Snowden was somehow able to use his position as a system administrator at Dell to ascertain that the NSA did not have Poitras under surveillance, he could not be sure that other agencies, such as the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, were not be monitoring his communications with Poitras.  It was, however, a chance Snowden evidently was willing to take. 

Snowden, in any case, did not intend to conceal his identity for more than a few months.  He told Poitras he had a specific purpose in allowing her to name him in her film.  Indeed, he said it was essential in his plan to prevent others, including presumably his “most trusted confidante,” from being suspected by law enforcement of helping him in his enterprise.  He prevailed on her to accommodate his plan, saying:  “You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.”  His choice of the imagery of crucifixion suggested that, like Jesus Christ, he was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.

In keeping with their operational security regime, he said that he would first send her an encrypted file of documents that she would not be able to read.  Only after his conditions were met and “everything else is done,” he said “The key will follow.” He was now pulling the strings.  To get that key, she had to follow his instructions.

 One of his conditions was that she helps him recruit Greenwald and other outlets for his disclosures. “The material provided and the investigative effort required will be too much for any one person,” he wrote Poitras. He next directed her to contact Greenwald.   “I recommend that at the very minimum you involve Greenwald. I believe you know him.”  (Snowden apparently did not tell her that he had unsuccessfully attempted to reach out to Greenwald before he had contacted her.)

     His continued interest in Greenwald was understandable.   Aside from Greenwald’s opposition to what he called the “Surveillance State,” he was a gateway to the Guardian.   The Guardian had become an important player in the business of disclosing government by publishing a large part of the US documents supplied to Wikileaks. By breaking whistle-blowing stories about US intelligence, it had also greatly increased the circulation of its website.  As an establishment newspaper, it also gave these Wikileaks stories credibility with the media.  So despite Greenwald’s inability to create an encrypted channel, Snowden still needed him. He had no reason to believe that Greenwald would turn down the opportunity for a whistle-blowing scoop for the Guardian.  After all, the classified documents Snowden would provide him would also give credence to both Greenwald’s book and his many blogs denouncing of US government surveillance.

Aside from Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden sought an outlet inside the American establishment.  So he had Poitras write Barton Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post.  Born in 1960, Gellman graduated from Princeton in 1981, and became an award-winning investigative reporter from the Miami Herald, Washington Post and Time magazine. He was also the author of the 2008 book Angler: the Cheney Vice-Presidency, which been made into an HBO mini-series.    If Gellman could be drawn into the enterprise, he could provide Snowden with a gateway to the Washington Post, the prestigious American paper credited with bringing down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. 

     Poitras, as the go-between for Snowden, immediately contacted Gellman.  She already knew him from meetings they both attended at NYU’s Center on Law and Security.  After telling him she was involved in a story about NSA surveillance, she suggested that they meet in New York City.    

    For their rendezvous, Poitras took a number of precautions to evade anyone attempting to follow her.   She had Gellman first meet her in one coffee shop in lower Manhattan.  When he arrived, she had him follow her on foot to another coffee shop following her anti-surveillance tradecraft.  Once assured no one was watching them, she ordered coffee for herself and Gellman.   Over coffee, she told Gellman about Snowden, who she described as her anonymous source.  She said that he was willing to supply Gellman with documents that would expose domestic surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a story on it for the Washington Post.  Even though Gellman had left the staff of the Washington Post in 2010, he had previously written several stories on that subject for the newspaper.  He was also highly-regarded by the editors there.  He was therefore interested in Poitras’ offer (although he would consult a friend at the Justice Department about the legality of publishing NSA documents.  

     Snowden now had laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets; one an establishment newspaper in Washington DC, the Washington Post; and a well-respected international newspaper, the Guardian.  

 Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan.  Like Snowden, she did not trust writing him in unencrypted emails and, since Greenwald lived in Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him. 

That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to New York to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers, N.Y. sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a pro-Moslem civil rights and anti-Zionist organization.   He had delivered the keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California on November 22, 2012, where his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State” in America received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its east coast chapter.

Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying.  When Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation.  She told him to go back to his room to get rid of the phone. When he returned, phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times.  Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as Greenwald later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.” 

After they finally found a secure table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald emails she had received from Snowden under the alias Citizen 4.   Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection to the “long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the alias Cincinnatus.  Reading the emails to Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous correspondent. 

When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen 4’s mission statement in which he said his motive was to end the US “surveillance state.” Greenwald was further impressed with the source.  After all, the surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012.  Of course, the close proximity of the phrasing may not have been entirely coincidental.  Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote Greenwald on December 1, 2012.  Snowden the emails identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly expressed including defending American privacy from government intrusions. 

  Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results.  He asserted in his email that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause.   “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote.  In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen 4’s bona fides.  He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break the story in the Guardian. 

 After he said he was onboard the project, Poitras revealed to Greenwald that Citizen 4 would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks.  According to this timetable, the Greenwald’s scoop, and the “shock” Citizen 4 promised, would come in early to mid June 2013.

    At this point in late April, Snowden was in full control.  Although his day job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely-meaningless encrypted numbers in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location or where he precisely where he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (which, as they only later would find out, was untrue.)  For his part, Greenwald speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief.  Yet by his anonymous emails, and by tugging at their strings, he had lined up three journalists to break his story.   

Despite the fact they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted like almost any other ambitious reporter would act if they were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the government. In addition, the information was in line with what they had previously investigated or written about.  None of these journalists had any reason to doubt at this point that their anonymous source was anything but the sincere whistle-blower that he claimed to be.  They could not have known from his anonymous emails that, aside from the whistle-blowing documents he promised them, he was in the process of stealing a large number of documents from the NSA’s National Threat Operations Center that concerned the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign countries. These documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence with them, had little, if anything at all, to do with domestic spying on American citizens.   









CHAPTER TEN
Raider of the Inner Sanctum

“They think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically.”

     —Edward Snowden in Moscow



    The nightmare of the NSA is a penetration.  As the CIA, FBI and NSA found out in the 1990s, No intelligence service is invulnerable to it.  Any employee of a large intelligence organization can turn, or be turned, against it.   Among the more than 10,000 intelligence workers employed by the NSA, it is a near certainty that over time one or more of them will become dissatisfied with their work.  He or she may have a personal grievance about their pay, lack of promotion or their treatment by their superiors.  Disenchantment with the NSA may also proceed from idealistic objections. After all, the NSA is in the business of secretly intercepting messages, and an insider could find its spying activities at odds with his or her own beliefs about the violation of privacy.  For any of these reasons, a disgruntled insider could go rogue. He or she then might attempt to right a perceived wrong by disclosing the NSA secrets to another party. That party might then induce or blackmail the rogue employee into disclosing further secrets.  To guard against it, the NSA has developed a well-organized system for stratifying its data so that obtaining critical secrets would require a rogue employee to burrow into its heavily protected inner sanctum.  As part of this system, the NSA divides its data into different tiers depending on the importance of the secrets to its operations.  The first tier, Level 1, is mainly administrative material. This data would include FISA court orders and other directives it employees might need to check on to carry out their tasks.   Level 2 contains data from which the secret sources have been removed.  This tier, available to other intelligence services and policy-makers, includes reports and analysis that can be shared.  The third tier, Levels 3, contains documents that cannot be shared outside of a small group of authorized individuals because they disclose the secret sources through which the NSA surreptitiously obtained the information.   This third tier includes, for example, compiled list of the sources in China, Russia, Iran and other adversary countries. It also disclosed the exotic methods the NSA uses to get some of this data. Level 3 documents also include reports on specific NSA, CIA and Pentagon operations unknown to adversaries. These Level 3 documents are described by NSA executives as “the Keys to the Kingdom” because they could invalidate America’s entire intelligence enterprise if they fell into the hands of an adversary.  And, as far as is known, prior to 2013, there had been no successful theft of any Level 3 documents.
  Because of their extreme sensitivity, Level 3 documents were not handled by most of the private firms providing independent contractors.  At Dell, Snowden had access mainly to Level 1 and Level 2 data (which he could, and did, download from shared sites on the NSA Net.)   These lower level documents had whistle-blowing potential since they concerned NSA operations in the US.  They did not reveal, however, sources that the NSA used in intercepting the military and civilian activities of foreign adversaries.  Consequently, at Dell, while Snowden could find documents of great interest to journalists, he did not have the opportunity to steal far more valuable data, such as the Level 3 lists of the NSA’s sources abroad.

Snowden quit his job at Dell as a system administrator on March 15, 2013 to take another job working the NSA in Hawaii at Booz Allen Hamilton.    Unlike other outside contractors that serviced the NSA, the firm he choose, Booz Allen specialized in handling the NSA’s Level 3 data. 

When Snowden applied to Booz Allen earlier in March 2013, the company had no opening for a system administrator at the National Threat Operations Center, an NSA unit in which it dealt with Level 3 data. It did have an opening for an infrastructure analyst, a lower-paying job involving maintaining the computer technology necessary to monitor threats.  Despite the cut in pay, Snowden took that job.  Snowden made no secret of one of his reason for this move.  He subsequently told the South China Morning Post, as will be recalled, that he took it to “get access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA had hacked.”    If so, he was after the keys to the NSA’s kingdom of global surveillance. And Booz Allen held those keys.   "He targeted my company because we enjoy more access than other companies," Booz Allen Vice Chairman Michael McConnell said with the benefit of hindsight.  As a result of the theft, he appraised “an entire generation of intelligence was lost.”  McConnell, a former NSA director before taking the   job at Booz Allen, was in a position to know.

Snowden’s sudden career change had both advantages and disadvantages for the enterprise he was planning. The main advantage was that the job, he would have proximity to the computers in which the “lists” he sought of NSA global sources were kept.  The main disadvantage, aside from a cut in salary, was that he would no longer be a system administrator.  This change meant he would not have a system administrator’s privileges to bypass password restrictions or temporarily transfer data.   Instead, as an infrastructure analyst, he would not have password access, at least during the two-month long training period, to the computers that he had not been specifically “read into,” which did not include those computers that stored the Level 3 lists.  Access to these tightly-controlled compartments was limited to only a handful of analysts at the center who had a need-to-know.

    Nevertheless Snowden applied for the job.    Since it handled higher level secret documents, Booz Allen had stricter requirements for applicants than Dell.  To slip by them, Snowden engaged in a minor subterfuge. He wrote on his application that he was expecting a master’s degree from the online division of Liverpool University in England.  In fact, he had not completed a single course at Liverpool, and would not be receiving any sort of a degree from it. Booz Allen, not fully taking into account the discrepancy in his application, agreed to hire him as a trainee-analyst (and it did not change that decision even after it found out about his subterfuge.).  According to Admiral McConnell, Snowden never actually worked in the Booz Allen offices, which are housed in a skyscraper in downtown Honolulu.  Instead, he was immediately assigned to work at the NSA’s highly-sensitive National Operations Threat Center in the tunnel at the Kunia base. 

 Before he could begin working there, however, he needed to fly to Maryland to take a mandatory orientation course at the NSA. The course was given in an 11 story building, with a sheer wall of black glass, on the NSA’s 350 acre campus at Fort Meade in Maryland.  He arrived there from Hawaii on April 1, 2013.    Like every other Booz Allen contractors who work at the NSA’s Center, Snowden was required to sign the “Sensitive Compartmented Information Non-Disclosure Agreement.”  In this document, Snowden acknowledged that he had been granted access to sensitive compartmented information, called SCI, as part of his work and that he understood that any disclosure of that information to an unauthorized person would violate federal criminal law.  He was also told, as were all new contract employees a Booz Allen that its disclosure could damage the interest of the United States and benefit its enemies.  In signing it, he swore an oath not to divulge any of this information without first receiving written approval from US authorities.   So less than two months before he downloaded Sensitive Compartmented Information, he was fully aware of what would be the consequences of divulging this information.  By this time, as discussed in the previous chapter, he had agreed to deliver classified data to three journalists.

     On April 5, 2013, while still in the training facility in Maryland, he apparently sought to establish a paper trail for himself. He wrote a letter to NSA’s General Counsel Office asking whether or not NSA directives take precedence over acts of Congress. A lawyer from the Office of General Counsel responded three days later, addressing Snowden as “Dear Ed.” The lawyer said, agreeing with Snowden, that acts of Congress take precedence over NSA directives.  He also suggested that “Ed” phone him if he needed any further clarification.  Presumably, Snowden had written the letter to elicit a response that he could later use to bolster his claim to be a whistle-blower.  Instead, the “Dear Ed” response was of little use to Snowden, as it did not dispute his point that NSA directives must lawfully conform to the acts of Congress.  The NSA lawyer did not ever hear back from “Ed.” 


   Snowden completed his orientation course at Fort Meade on Friday April 12, 2013. While he was in Maryland Snowden, he took time off to pay visits to both of his divorced parents. It would be the last time he would see either of them in the United States.


  He returned on April 13th to Hawaii, One domestic task he to attend to was helping Mills pack up their possessions, which they stored in boxes in the garage.  The lease on their house was up on April 30, 2013, so he found a temporary rental for them just a few blocks away. 

     On Monday April 15th, Snowden began on-the-job training as an analyst at the National Threat Operations Center—a training that he would not complete.  The same week he began the training, he prepared his exit by writing Booz Allen that he needed a brief medical leave in May to undergo medical treatment for his putative epilepsy symptoms.  Even though he had no planned any treatments, and, as far as is known did not suffer from epilepsy, Booz Allen required a minimum of one month’s notice for foreign travel.  By making the request, he lessened the likelihood that it would arouse undue suspicion when he departed Hong Kong with stolen documents on May 18, 2013.  This brief window left him some four weeks to take the lists that he coveted.

  Snowden carried out the heist with precision reminiscent of a “Mission Impossible” movie caper.   First, he needed to get passwords to up to 24 compartments at the National Threat Operation Center that he had not been “read into.”  Even in the “open culture” of the NSA this was not an easy challenge since he no longer had a plausible pretext for asking other experienced threat analysts had their passwords, as he did when he was a system administrator at Dell.  He would now be asking them to break strict NSA rules that prohibited intelligence workers from disclosing their passwords to an unauthorized party.  In addition, they were supposed to report anyone who asked to use their passwords. 

He may have obtained some passwords through deception, such as tricking them into typing in their passwords in a device that captured them. As the NSA informed Congress in 2014, three of his fellow workers told the FBI that Snowden may have deceived them to gain access their passwords. He may have also have used electronic means to have stolen the remaining passwords. In any case, however he accomplished this incredible feat, he gained access to 24 compartments containing the NSA’s most closely guarded secrets in a matter of a few weeks. 

    Next, he had to find the lists he was seeking in a vast sea of data.  He used for this task pre-programmed robotic devices, called “spiders” to crawl through the data and find the files he was after.  Snowden deployed these spiders soon after he began working at the Center, raising the possibility that Snowden had prepared in advance the operation. According to the subsequent NSA damage assessment, Snowden’s spiders indexed well over one million documents. Many of those that he copied and moved were from Level 3 “Sensitive Compartmented Information” according to the NSA analysis.    The spiders also made his penetration relatively safe. As previously mentioned, the Hawaii base did not have a real time auditing system. So alarm bells would go off in the security office when he indexed documents.

    Finally, Snowden had to find a way to transfer this data to a computer with an opened USB port. Most of the computers at the center had had their ports sealed shut to prevent unauthorized downloads. Making the transfer even more difficult, he was working as an analyst-in-training in an open-plan office with security CCTV camera. 

    To be sure, there were also service computers with open ports used by the system administrators.  They, after all, had to perform maintenance and back-up work.  Even though Snowden was no longer a system administrator, he might still have been able to steal or borrow a service computer.    Yet, despite all the NSA’s and Booz Allen’s security measures, he managed to download hundreds of thousands of level 3 documents to an unsealed computer.     

He also took some less-sensitive documents from the administrative file (which contained mainly Level 1 documents) at the end of April. These late acquisitions included the now famous warrant from the FISA court issued on April 25 2013.  

He completed the operation on Friday May 17, 2013, the last day he would ever enter the NSA facility.  He transferred the data he had amassed on the service computer, including the lists of the computers in Russia and China that the NSA had succeeded in penetrating, onto thumb drives.  Finally, he coolly walked past the security guards at the exit, who only seldom performed random checks on NSA employees.

    He had carried out the entire operation with such brilliant stealth he left few, if any clues behind to how obtained 24 of his colleagues’ passwords, moved  the data from many different supposedly-sealed computers  to an opened service machine or how he downloaded these documents to multiple thumb drives without arousing suspicion.  In fact, the theft would not be discovered by the NSA for fifteen days.

His escape was also well-prepared.  Lindsay Mills had departed that morning for a planned two week visit to the outer islands.  This trip allowed him to pack his belongings without saying anything to her that might be difficult to explain to the authorities. He simply left a note she would see on her return, and could show to authorities saying that he was away on a “business trip.” He also called to say good-bye to his mother and sister, who had been planning to visit him in Hawaii that month.           






CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Escape Artist

“I’m not self-destructive. I don’t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we can’t win.”  

          --Snowden in Moscow



    The next evening Snowden drove to Honolulu International Airport.  He left his leased car in the parking lot.  He took with him only carry-on baggage, including a back-pack and a laptop with a TOR sticker on it. “I took everything I had on my back,” he said.  Before leaving he also packed in his luggage the cash that would pay for his fugitive life.  Along with the cash, he took the thumb drives containing the NSA’s keys to the kingdom.  
   At this point, Snowden was still a free man.  He was not wanted by the authorities.  He had provided his employer and the NSA with a medical excuse for his absence from work so he would not be immediately missed. He also had a valid passport, a credit card, and ID.  He had he yet made arrangements to meet the journalists. Snowden’s destination was Hong Kong.     After crossing the International Date Line, Snowden waited three hours in the transit zone of Narita.  Here he was reportedly captured by the airports CCTV cameras sitting alone. He then boarded a plane to Hong Kong.   After the four-hour long flight from Narita, he arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning on May 20th.

He had visited Hong Kong at least once before with Lindsay Mills when he was stationed in Japan.  He had also made some arrangements.  According to Albert Ho, his Hong Kong Lawyer, Snowden stayed at a residence arranged for him in advance by a party whom Snowden knew prior to his arrival. This “carer,” Ho said, had assisted Snowden with his logistics.   For the next ten days, Snowden did not use his credit card or leave any paper trail to his location. Wherever he was, “his first priority,” as he told Greenwald, was to find a place safe from US countermeasures.  He brought with him a large number of electronic copies of NSA documents marked “TS/SCI/ NOFORN, which stood for Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information and No Foreign Distribution.  According to government rules, data carrying these labels could not be removed from a government-approved “SCI facility.”  Yet Snowden, who brought them with him into this semi-autonomous zone in China, intended to break these rules.

   At this venue, Snowden apparently believed he was relatively safe. “That whole period was very carefully planned and orchestrated,” Snowden later told the Guardian in Moscow. Here, for the first time, Snowden communicated directly with first Gellman and then Greenwald.

   He emailed Gellman under the alias “Verax



.”   Already, via Poitras, he had provided this Washington Post journalist with power point slides from a NSA presentation about a joint FBI-NSA-CIA operation codenamed PRISM.  He believed it qualified as whistle-blowing because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting emails, tweets, postings and other Web interactions about foreign terrorists, incidentally also picked up data about Americans.  According to the rules imposed on the NSA  by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever information accidently picked up about Americans was supposed to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers rechecked the data ever 90 says to assure that directive was being carried.  Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA.
   Snowden proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong.   In attempting to persuade him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote him that he had reason to believe that “omniscient State powers” imperiled “our freedom and way of life.”  He noted, with a touch of modesty, “Perhaps I am naïve.” He added dramatically “I have risked my life and family.”  Even so, Gellman declined coming to Hong Kong.  (According to Greenwald, Gellman could not make the trip because lawyers for the Washington Post were uneasy with having a reporter receive classified documents in a part of China.)

     Next, on May 24, 2013, Snowden attempted to apply more pressure on Gellman by telling him that the story about the PRISM program had to be published by the Post within 72 hours.  Gellman could not accede to such a condition because the decision of when to publish a story was made not by him but by the editors of the newspaper. He told Snowden that the earliest the story could be published was June 6, 2013, which was well past Snowden’s deadline.

        Snowden next turned to Greenwald. Both Poitras and Micah Lee had made great efforts to tutor Greenwald on encryption protocols, with Lee, who was in Berkeley, California, sending Greenwald by Fedex a DVD that would allow him to receive both encrypted messages and phone calls. Even then, Greenwald was unable to fully install it.  As a result, Greenwald still had not met Snowden’s requisites on encrypting his computer. 

In addition, possibly because of a lost message, Snowden believed that Greenwald was reluctant to fly to the place that he designated for a meeting.   With Gellman uncertain, Greenwald was now essential to his plan. If he was to have any newspaper outlet, he needed to persuade Greenwald to come to Hong Kong.   At this point, he took matters in to his own hands.    On May 25, 2013, Snowden somewhat aggressively emailed Greenwald “You recently had to decline short-term travel to meet with me.”  He added pointedly “You need to be involved in this story."  To further convince him, he suggested that they immediately speak on the phone via a website that encrypts conversations.  The subsequent conversation lasted, according to Greenwald, two hours. 

    Snowden began the encrypted call by complaining, “I don’t like how this is developing.”  He made it clear that he, not the journalist he had selected, was pulling the strings.  If Greenwald wanted the scoop, he had to follow Snowden’s instructions, which included dividing the scoops between the Guardian and the Washington Post.  According to his plan, Gellman would break the PRISM story in the Washington Post and Greenwald would break the “mass domestic spying” story in the Guardian.  In addition, he insisted that the Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside its story.  As he envisioned it, the media event would also include a video component in which Greenwald would interview him.

Once Greenwald agreed to this micro-managing, Snowden would send him what he called a “welcome package” of documents to demonstrate his good faith.  His plan also required a face-to-face meeting. When Greenwald said he was aboard the project, Snowden told him “the first order of business is to get you to Hong Kong.”

    Snowden next sent him 20 classified NSA documents labeled “TOP SECRET.” He also included in the package his personal manifesto, which asserted that the NSA was part of an international conspiracy of intelligence agencies that were working to “inflict upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.”    

  Meanwhile, Snowden told Poitras, he was sending her a number of NSA documents including a recent FISA warrant.  It had been issued less than a month earlier.  He wanted that FISA warrant to serve as the basis of Greenwald’s scoop.  It was perfect whistle-blowing material for the Guardian because it ordered Verizon to turn over all its billing records for 90 days to the NSA.  It was as close to a smoking gun as anything he had copied at the NSA. It would also get attention since James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, had stated before Congress just two months earlier that the NSA did not collect phone data in America. This warrant would allow the Guardian, in the best tradition of “Gotcha” journalism, to catch Clapper in an apparent lie.

  Continuing his string-pulling, he instructed Poitras not to show the FISA warrant to Greenwald until they were safely aboard the plane. That measure would prevent Greenwald from releasing the story without coming to Hong Kong.  He also sent Poitras an entire encrypted file of NSA documents, saying it would “include my true name and details for the record, though it will be your decision as to whether or how to declare my involvement.”  He did not send her the key to decipher the file, saying “The key will follow when everything else is done.”   He further told her that he preferred that her film focus on him as the sole perpetrator of the leak so that no one else at the NSA would be suspected.     He instructed her “Your destination is Hong Kong.”  

   Poitras and Gellman were not the only journalists involved in the news event.  Poitras also asked the hacktavist Jacob Appelbaum to help her interview Snowden about the NSA’s operations.  She later said that she needed someone with technical expertise in government surveillance to test the bona fides of Citizen 4.  She believed that Appelbaum, who had participated in her anti-NSA presentations in 2012, qualified for the position.

  As it turns out, Appelbaum was already known to Snowden.  Appelbaum had communicated with Snowden under his Oahu Crypto party alias about an obscure piece of software just a few after Snowden had met with Runa Sandvik in Hawaii in 2012.  Appelbaum, after all, was Sandvik’s long-time ally in developing the use of TOR software.   However he learned about him, Snowden allowed Appelbaum to put to him detailed questions to concerning the secret operations of the NSA before he met with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. Indeed, Poitras joined him in asking Snowden via encrypted emails, such questions as:  “What are some of the big surveillance programs that are active today and how do international partners aid the NSA?” “Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” and “Do private companies help the NSA?”  Snowden answered them all to the satisfaction of Appelbaum and Poitras. (The interview was published on June16, 2013 with Snowden’s approval on the website of Der Spiegel, the German weekly, which had also published the Wikileaks documents.)   

   Even though the days were ticking away while Snowden was waiting for him in Hong Kong, Greenwald still had to overcome a final hurdle at the Guardian. He needed to get a green light to go to Hong Kong from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who was based in New York. Under Gibson’s leadership, the Guardian’s website effectively “gone into the business of publishing government secrets,” as Guardian columnist Michael Wolff pointed out.  Most of these secrets had been supplied by Manning via Wikileaks.   Few, if any of these previous documents the Guardian published were highly-classified and none were SCI top secret documents.  The NSA documents Greenwald had received from Citizen 4 were another matter.  They contained the sort of SCI communications intelligence data that no major newspaper had ever published before.  Their disclosure could even result in journalists being imprisoned since both U.S. and British law criminalized the disclosure by anyone of communications intelligence.  As a lawyer, Greenwald recognized this danger. On the other hand, the NSA documents were far more explosive than the Wikileaks material, and promised an even greater spike in circulation.  So Greenwald assumed that Gibson would be willing to authorize the publication of the documents—and provide the expenses for his trip to Hong Kong to meet the source.  

He flew from Rio to New York on May 30, 2013 to meet in person with Gibson, who had concerns about publishing what purported to be top secret documents that came from an anonymous source.  For one thing, she was also not willing to go along with Citizen 4’s demand that the Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside the documents.  Aside from its shrill and alarming tone, it sounded, as she told Greenwald, “a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish.” She was referring to Ted Kaczinski, the deranged mathematician who had maimed or killed 23 people with anonymous mail bombs between 1978 and 1995. Like Citizen 4/Snowden, Kaczynski had demanded that newspapers publish his personal manifesto.  She explained to Greenwald, “It is going to sound crazy to some people.”  Her concern was that it would detract from the credibility of the rest of the story.   Snowden had also written Greenwald a letter explain his position. “Even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it,” Snowden asserted, and paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson, he continued. “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.”   Snowden, showing his cult-like faith in encryption, had “cryptography” for Jefferson’s word “constitution.  Despite his Jeffersonian rhetoric, she decided against publishing it or the Manifesto.  The stolen NSA documents were another matter.  They were an enormous scoop that could have a greater impact than the Wikileaks scoop.   .She was not about to miss publishing it.

  She authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the condition that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had confidence.  He was Scottish-born Ewen MacAskill, a 61-year old veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for the Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the mystery source in Hong Kong for Gibson.  Greenwald accepted her terms.   Poitras, who would be accompanying them, would be paying her own way.

  Snowden, for his part, had a contingency plan in place in case the Guardian failed to publish the story. While Greenwald was negotiating with Gibson, he arranged for Micah Lee, Poitras’ associate at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to build a personal website for him. Writing Lee from Hong Kong under both his alias Anon108 and his real name, Snowden said that he planned to post on it his “anti-surveillance manifesto.” He would also use it to post “a global petition against surveillance. (A year earlier his girlfriend Mills had also asked her followers on her “super hero” blog to sign a petition against government interference with the Internet.)  Snowden had Lee name the site “Supportonlinerights.com.”  According to Lee, the website would be build with a “dead man’s switch,” which would automatically trigger the release of NSA documents if he was arrested.   It was not clear whether Lee was doing this work as a freelancer or in his capacity as the chief technology officer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. After Lee built the website for Snowden It proved unnecessary to activate it since Poitras emailed Snowden that the Guardian had approved the trip, and she and Greenwald were booked on a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong.  They would arrive on June 2, 2013,

    In his preparation to go public in Hong Kong, Snowden showed himself fully capable of orchestrating what would become a major news story. He not only picked the journalists who would break it, but he instructed each of them as to the timing, sequence, and content of their initial disclosures.  In the security of his residence in Hong Kong, he also worked to carefully separate the purloined NSA documents into two very different caches.  "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed,” Snowden explained to the Guardian journalists in early June 2013.   The documents in this first cache were selected to serve what he termed the “public interest.”  In the hands of journalists, these selected documents, and the story he fashioned to accompany them, would burnish his image in the public consciousness as a whistle blower. He did not turn over the second cache, telling Greenwald, “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over.”  

   By the time he received the message from Poitras on June 1st, Snowden had finished his preparations for the journalists. With selected documents copied on a thumb drive, he moved from the residence where he had been staying for ten days to a venue for meeting the reporters.  The place he chose was the five-star, $330 a day, Mira hotel in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong.  He checked into room 1014 under his own name and provided the front desk with his own credit card.  He next emailed Poitras his name and the address of the Mira hotel.  There was no longer any reason to hide his true identity because the rendezvous with journalists would make him famous in a matter of days.    



CHAPTER TWELVE
Whistle-blower

“They elected me. The overseers...  The [American] system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

                               --Edward Snowden in Moscow



    While Snowden was attempting to reel in the journalists in Hong Kong, Lindsay Mills received a jarring surprise in Hawaii.  When she returned to Honolulu from her “island-hopping” trip, she found Snowden was still away and the rented house partially flooded from a leak. The brief note Snowden left her indicated that her eight year relationship with Snowden had, at least temporarily, been put on hold by him.  “I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation,” she wrote in her journal on June 2nd (which would be June 3rd across the international time line in Hong Kong.)  “I've nearly lost my mind, family, and house over the past few weeks.” She also noted that she her SIM card containing her personal data was gone.  She wrote in her on-line journal” “Oh and I physically lost my memory card with nearly all my adventure photos.”  The loss would make it difficult to reconstruct her past activities with Snowden.   
 In Hong Kong, if Snowden was following Lindsay’s online journal, he would have read that his girl friend had returned home, lost her data and needed a “reprieve” from the situation in which he had put her.  But since they were exchanging private text messages by then, he would not have needed to consult her public journal.  Snowden was certainly aware that he would soon be the object of a manhunt that could involve those with whom he was acquainted. He instructed Poitras to mask their email communications in cyber space “so we don’t have a clue or record of your true name in your file communication chain.”  Such precautions were necessary, he explained to her because “every trick in the book is likely to be used in looking into this.”

   The journalists arrived late in the evening of June 2nd, 2013.  Snowden’s message was waiting. Snowden’s instructions were themselves an exercise in control.  Snowden had written them: “On timing, regarding meeting up in Hong Kong, the first rendezvous attempt will be at 10 A.M. local time. We will meet in the hallway outside of the restaurant in the Mira Hotel. I will be working on a Rubik’s cube so that you can identify me. Approach me and ask if I know the hours of the restaurant. I’ll respond by stating that I’m not sure and suggest you try the lounge instead. I’ll offer to show you where it is, and at that point we’re good. You simply need to follow naturally.”  Even though such tradecraft was unnecessary since Snowden was registered at the hotel under his true name, he had provided the journalists with the atmospherics of “an international spy thriller,” as Greenwald subsequently described the instructions.



MacAskill had stayed at the W Hotel when Poitras and Greenwald Poitras went to the Mira Hotel.  Poitras did not want to bring along an uninvited guest to the first meeting with Citizen Four.  As instructed, at 10 AM on June 3rd, she and Greenwald went to the Mira restaurant.  They gave the recognition signal, twice.  After a few minutes, a young man walked over to them, holding a Rubik cube.  Greenwald noted: “The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik’s cube twirling in the man’s left hand.”  The man said “Hello” and introduced himself as "Ed Snowden."       Greenwald was particularly surprised by Snowden’s boyish looks. “The initial impression was one of extreme confusion,” Greenwald wrote in his book.  “I was expecting to meet somebody in his sixties or seventies, someone very senior in the agency, because I knew almost nothing about him prior to our arrival in Hong Kong.”   His initial confusion was understandable.  Snowden, it will be recalled, had falsely identified himself to them in an email as a senior member of the intelligence community. 
    Snowden led Greenwald and Poitras through various corridors of the hotel to his room, 1014.  It was in a single room mainly occupied by a king-sized bed.  Its other furniture included a sleek writing desk in the corner, a modernistic chair and a tall lamp.  The bathroom was behind a glass partition, which could be closed off by a black louver blind.  There was also a small refrigerator in the minibar in which Snowden asked them to stow their cell phones,  

    Snowden had already told Poitras that he wanted her to make a documentary of the meeting. She therefore wasted no time in mounting her camera on a tripod. “Minutes after meeting, I set up the camera.”  Snowden had told her, as she later recalled, “when you are involved in an action which is likely to get you indicted, you typically don’t have a camera rolling in the room.”  Nevertheless, he allowed her to film his actions for the next eight days.  One possible reason is that he had no intention of standing trial.  In any case, as Poitras found out, Snowden was anything but camera shy.  Over the next week, she would shoot over 20 hours of Snowden’s activities in that small room.  It was essentially a one man show, a presentation of him, by himself, for the appreciation of a global public. Poitras knew virtually nothing about her subject until ten minutes before she began filming him.  She had not even googled him, since she was concerned that her Internet search might alert the NSA and law enforcement authorities        

In an extraordinary waiver of his own privacy, he allowed her to film him washing in the bathroom, preening his hair in the mirror, napping on his bed, getting dressed, and packing his bag.  He even permitted her to film a private computer exchange between him and Mills (who was in Honolulu.)  Mills now informed Snowden that two government investigators had come to their home in Hawaii. Mills reported that they were asking her about Snowden’s whereabouts.  Evidently when he had failed to show up for work on June 1st, it set off alarm bells at Booz Allen and the NSA.  Snowden expressed anger to the journalists in the room at the NSA intrusion on the privacy of his girlfriend (although he had left her in the lurch by telling her in the note he was away on a brief business trip.)  

   Snowden also performed his security procedures on camera, including stuffing bed pillows under the door to block any eaves-droppers, throwing a red blanket over his head, which he called jokingly his “magical cloak of power.”  He explained to Greenwald that his donned his “cloak” when he turned on his laptop to prevent any hidden cameras in the room from spotting his password.  He also checked the hotel phone for bugs. It was not without irony that he went through these security rituals to protect his data as he allowed Poitras to film NSA data on his computer screen.  Since he planned to use these journalists as his outlets to go public in a few days, the security measures he did while on camera would only serve a temporary purpose.

   The centerpiece of the planned video would take the form of an interview with Greenwald.  Snowden himself provided the talking points.  The filming would eventually provide Poitras with a feature-length movie, CitizenFour, which would be commercially released in October 2014 and win an Academy Award for her.

          The next day, Wednesday June 4th, Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian editor, joined Poitras and Greenwald in Snowden’s room.  Snowden insisted that he also go through the ritual of stowing his cell phone in the mini-bar refrigerator.  Not without irony, Snowden’s own phone can be seen on his bed recharging. Although MacAskill was sent by Gibson to the event to verify the source’s bona fides, he apparently had not been well briefed.  The questioning went as follows:

 MacAskill:    Sorry, I don’t know anything about you.


Snowden: OK, I work for—

MacAskill: Sorry, I don’t know even your name.

Snowden: Oh, sorry, my name is Edward Snowden. I go by Ed

MacAskill went on to ask him to enumerate the various positions he held during his career in intelligence.  Snowden was not entirely truthful in describing himself.  He said that he had been a senior adviser to the CIA, when he had been just a telecommunications support officer in the CIA. He also said he had been a senior adviser at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) even though, according to that intelligence service, he was not actually ever employed there. (He merely spoke at an interagency counterintelligence course the DIA had sponsored.)  He said he had a $200,000 a year salary from Booz Allen when, according to Booz Allen, it was $133,000.  It is understandable that he wanted to impress these Guardian journalists in light of his young age and boyish appearance, even to the extent of meretriciously claiming in the video that he personally had been given the “authority” at the NSA to intercept President Obama’s private communications, which, according to a NSA spokeswoman, was not true. No NSA employee, and certainly not a civilian contract worker, was given the authority to soy on the President of the United States, she insisted. Such career enhancements suggest that Snowden altered factual reality when it suits his purpose with journalists.
Even though Snowden had greatly exaggerated the positions he held with the CIA and DIA, no effort was made to check them by the team of journalists. Instead, MacAskill wrote Janine Gibson in New York “The Guinness is good.”   It was a pre-arranged code by which MacAskill certified Snowden’s credibility for the Guardian.  Gibson told Greenwald to proceed with the story. 

     Greenwald wrote his first story about NSA transgression based almost entirely on the FISA warrant that Snowden had copied from the administrative file.  Before the story could be published, however, the Guardian policy required relevant American government officials be allowed to respond. Gibson made the requisite, if pro forma, call to the White House National Security spokesman, Caitlin Hayden, who arranged a conference call with FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis and Robert Litt, the legal officer for the Office of National Intelligence.  After duly taking into account the response of these three officials, which included the admonition by Litt “no serious news organization would publish this,” Gibson gave the green light to publish the story.  It was, after all, an incredible scoop.

    The story finally broke finally on June 5, 2013.  “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers,” proclaimed the Guardian headline.  Under  Greenwald’s byline, it said: “Exclusive: Top Secret Court Order Requesting Verizon To Hand Over Call Data Shows The Scale of Domestic Surveillance Under Obama.”   Along with it was the FISA warrant to Verizon. The PRISM story broke hours later in the Washington Post.   Written by Gellman and Poitras, it claimed that the NSA and FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S, Internet companies which were knowingly participating on the operation.   The latter allegation turned out to be not entirely true, since all the Internet companies cited in the story denied that they had knowingly participated.   But the damage had been done. The back-to-back publication of these two stories by the Guardian and Washington Post provided the explosive “shock,” at least in the global media, that Snowden had predicted.

       Snowden’s identity had not been revealed in either the Guardian or Washington Post stories on June 5th.  Snowden, however, insisted on outing himself.  He explained to Greenwald that he needed to “define himself” before the US Government “demonized” him as a spy.   That self-definition would be accomplished by the 12 minute video, entitled “Whistleblower.” For it, Poitras extracted from the 20 hours she had shot much of the material for the video.  In the filmed interview, Snowden voiced many of the same statements he had made in his manifesto. So he no longer needed to post the manifesto on the Internet.  Instead, he used the video to broadcast his views. When he insisted on the immediate airing of the video, Greenwald told him that by going public in this way he was saying “fuck you” to the American government.   Snowden replied, “I want to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures.” 

   On June 9th, the video was posted on the Guardian website with  the Freedom of the Press Foundation getting an on-screen credit. “My name is Ed Snowden,” the extraordinary disclosure began.  He then described how the NSA was watching U.S. citizens.  Even though the NSA subsequently disputed some his more dramatic claims, such as his assertion that he had the authority at the NSA “to wiretap anyone, even the President,” the press largely accepted his claims as established facts. As for American surveillance, he declared “I don’t want to live in a society that does those sorts of things.”

    He had succeeded in defining himself for the public.  The Guardian story accompanying the video carried the headline, “EDWARD SNOWDEN: THE WHISTLE BLOWER BEHIND THE NSA SURVEILLANCE REVELATIONS.”  Snowden’s identity as a whistle-blower was now established in the media. Overnight, Snowden became a global celebrity and, to much of the world, a hero. 
     Snowden, in fact, did not sacrifice him.  He vanished from public view after the release of the video. He provided Poitras and Greenwald with thumb drives on which he had loaded the documents he wanted them to use.  The next morning he packed his belongings into a backpack and moved, without notifying the front desk, to the room Poitras had rented at the Mira.    
   Complicated schemes, especially when they involve transferring state secrets to unauthorized parties in a foreign country, do not necessarily go as planned.  On the morning of June 10th, 2013, Snowden’s escape plan apparently ran into a problem. Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Mann, the lawyers who, along with Albert Ho, had been retained for Snowden by an unidentified party, received an emergency phone call early in the morning telling them to help Snowden move to a safe location. Although Tibbo would not identify the person who had called, the message had been relayed to Mann and him through Ho’s office.   He told Tibbo over the phone,   “I can make myself unrecognizable”

Tibbo and Mann immediately proceeded to the mall adjacent to the Mira hotel, where they met Snowden.  After he signed a document appointing Ho’s law firm as his “legal adviser,” they slipped out of via the mall exit.

     As his credit card had been frozen, it is not clear who paid his $3,300 hotel bill.  According to hotel records, it was paid by another credit card.  Poitras, who taken a room at the hotel may have used her credit card or Snowden may have had another benefactor in Hong Kong. In any case, the lawyers escorted Snowden to a pre-arranged residence.

  “I am in a safe house for now,” Snowden wrote Greenwald on June 11th.  The situation may not have been totally under his control, since he added: “But I have no idea how safe it is.”     

     Greenwald flew back to Brazil that day.  Soon afterward, he would resign from the Guardian and in February 2014 become the co-founding editor of The Intercept, an online publication dedicated to adversarial journalism which was backed by Internet billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

  Poitras remained in Hong Kong, where she moved, along with Guardian reporter MacAskill, to the five-star Sheraton Hong Kong Tower, which, like the Mira hotel, was on Nathan Road in Kowloon.  Her next task was to set up what was to be Snowden’s final interview in Hong Kong.  It was scheduled for June 12th. 

   The journalist chosen was Lana Lam, a young Australian reporter working for the South China Morning Post.  Tibbo had suggested Lam to Snowden. She had served as Tibbo’s outlet on previous news stories, and, as he told me, he found her to be a totally reliable journalist. He brought her to Poitras’ suite at the Sheraton in Kowloon (about eight blocks down Nathan Road from the Mira.)  First, Lam had to agree to the conditions of the interview, which included submitting the story to Poitras for Snowden’s approval. Next, as Lam put it, Poitras “confiscated” her cell phone.  Finally, after a ten minute wait, Poitras took her to another room and sat her before a black laptop.  The laptop, which had a TOR sticker on it, had on its screen an on-line chat room where she was connected by Poitras to Snowden.

    “Hi Lana, thanks for coming for this,” Snowden said from his safe house.  He told her that the NSA had intercepted data from at least 61,000 different computers in Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere. To expose what he called America’s “hypocrisy” in accusing China of cyber-espionage, he supplied her NSA documents for the South China Morning Post.  “Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer,” he said. "The United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the People’s Republic of China as well."  Under Poitras’ close supervision, Lam was allowed to ask Snowden further questions about the NSA’s interception of communications in Hong Kong and China.  He told her “I have had many opportunities to flee Hong Kong, but I would rather stay and fight the US government in the courts.”

As mentioned earlier, Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill did not concern themselves with the issue of the mechanics of the largest theft of top secret documents in the history of the United States.  In entire filmed interview at the Mira Hotel, they did not ask their source how he managed to get access to the documents. Unlike those interviews, Lam asked him about how he widened his access.  She cut to the core of the matter by asking him a crucial question. “Why he had switched jobs from Dell SecureWorks to Booz Allen Hamilton in March 2013?  His answer provided her with a real scoop He replied that, “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked."   Snowden told her that he deliberately went to Booz Allen Hamilton to get access to the “lists” revealing the NSA’s sources in foreign countries.  This admission could gravely complicate his legal situation in Hong Kong since it suggested that he meant to steal documents even before he had known their content.  In fact, to protect himself, he restricted Lam from publishing this part of the interview until after he had departed Hong Kong. (It was published until June 24, 2013 a day after he arrived in Russia.)  This condition indicated to Lam that as early as June 12th, if not before that, he was planning on leaving Hong Kong (although he did not tell her his next destination.)

     His interview with Lam went only so far.  He didn’t reveal how he had learned about these “lists” before taking the job.  Nor did he reveal to her how he planned to dispose of these lists.  He made it clear to her, however, that he had not yet disposed of all his secret documents.  “If I have time to go through this information,” he said,  “I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of U.S. network operations against their people should be published.” So as late as June 14th,  Snowden was  still reading and assessing the files he had stolen from the NSA four weeks earlier.     

Poitras vetted the Lam interview.  Soon afterwards she suspected that she was being followed. That was likely since by this June 14th all the intelligence services in Hong Kong knew that she was in contact with Snowden.    “I was being tailed,” she recalled in an interview with a Vogue reporter in Berlin in 2014.  “The risks became very great,” she said in describing her situation in Hong Kong. So, on June 15th, she left Hong Kong and flew back to Berlin, where she began editing her footage of the Snowden interview.

  Meanwhile, Snowden was organizing his own exit from Hong Kong. He placed a call to Julian Assange.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Enter Assange

“Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains free.” – Julian Assange

       Born on July 3, 1971 in Queensland, Australia, Julian Assange had made a brilliant career of trafficking in state, military and corporate secrets.  While still a teen-ager, using the alias “Mendax” (the untruthful one), he had hacked into the computers of the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy, NASA, Citibank, Lockheed-Martin and Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission. At the age of 25, pleaded guilty to 25 charges of hacking in Australia, but was released on a good behavior bond.  In 2006, with the spread of TOR software, he co-founded Wikileaks, a website in which secret documents could anonymously be sent and posted. The site received little public attention until Bradley Manning sent it several hundred thousand lowly-classified U.S. military and State Department documents in April 2010.  With these stolen documents, Wikileaks became a media sensation and Assange, the runner-up for Time’s Man-of-the Year for 2010, became a leading figure, along with Appelbaum, in the global hacktavist underground.  In November 2010, however, he also ran into a legal problem.  A judge in Stockholm, Sweden ordered his detention on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.  He denied the charges but he was arrested in London on a European arrest warrant for him.  In December, he was released on a $312,700 bail deposit (supplied by his supporters) and confined to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England. While awaiting the outcome of the extradition proceedings, he lived there with Sarah Harrison, his 28- year deputy at Wikileaks. A graduate of the elite Sevenoaks School in Kent, she also served as Assange’s liaison with the outside world.  Although she officially was given the title “investigative editor” of Wikileaks, she worked so closely with Assange during this period that the British press carried stories saying she was his paramour.  During this period, Harrison also worked on a Wiki leak’s documentary entitled “Mediastan/” The film concerned Wikileaks’ exposure of US secret operations in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.  It was also a project which took her to Russia and provided her with a multi-entry Russian visa.

In June 2012, after the extradition order was upheld, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuador embassy in London. For the next year, his only visible means of income was a weekly program from the embassy. It was sponsored by RT Television, a Moscow-based English-language news channel funded by the Russian government, which would also finance and release “Mediastan.”

   Snowden telephoned Assange at his refuge at the Ecuador embassy on June 10, 2013. According to Assange, Snowden needed his help for his exit plan.  He wanted Assange to use Wikileaks’ “resources” to get him out of Hong Kong.  Assange considered it a surprising request since Snowden had not given any of the stolen documents to Wikileaks.   In their discussion, according to Assange, Snowden claimed that one reason he decided to take the secret NSA documents was the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning after he was arrested in 2010 by the US government. “Snowden told me they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his decision to become a whistleblower,” Assange said in an interview in 2015.    If Manning’s mistreatment was Snowden’s motive, it was a sharp departure from the position that Snowden had taken in his postings on the Ars Technica site in January 2009. He complained in a post on Ars Technica about the detrimental consequences to U.S. intelligence of leakers revealing “classified shit” to the New York Times, and he suggested as punishment “those people should be shot in the balls.”   Either he either had a change of heart about punishment or he was telling Assange what he believed he wanted to hear.

    Assange did not suggest that Snowden go to Ecuador to seek asylum.  He counseled him to go directly to Russia. “My advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences,” he told the (London) Times in 2015. He found “Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia.” Assange had another way for Snowden to defuse the “PR consequences” of Snowden landing in Moscow. A story would be released, coinciding with his departure, asserting that Snowden was “bound for the republic of Ecuador via a safe route.”

When Snowden asked how he would carry out the plan, Assange told Snowden that he would immediately dispatch one of his senior staff members to help him engineer his escape to Russia.     That senior staff member was Sarah Harrison,

 After speaking to Snowden, Assange called Harrison, who was in Melbourne, Australia.  She had gone there a month earlier to help organize Assange’s somewhat quixotic election campaign for President of Australia,     Assange now told her to forget the campaign and go to Hong Kong. Her mission there was to use Wikileaks resources to save Snowden from “a life time in prison.”  Presumably, he also told her that he advised Snowden to proceed to Russia, where Harrison had a visa since part of her work on the Mediastan film was done in Moscow.

    Harrison did not hesitate in following Assange’s instructions.  She later said that she didn’t even bother to pack her clothing.   She caught the next plane out of Australia. 

After an eight hour flight, she arrived in Hong Kong on June 11th—the same day that Snowden texted Greenwald he was in a safe house.  Harrison had her own connections in Hong Kong.  Both her two younger sisters, Kate and Alexandra Harrison, who had also attended Sevenoaks, lived there and were part of the expatriate community.  She also had an older brother, Simon Harrison, who headed Avro, a ship brokerage and commodity trading company. Although headquartered in Singapore, Avro also operated out of Hong Kong, and he frequently travelled there.  

Like Poitras, Harrison took great care to shield her movements.  She did not even have a Twitter, Facebook or any other social media account.  She made it a point not to own a cell phone for fear of being tracked by an intelligence service.  When she travelled, she bought “burner” phones locally and disposed of them before any calls could be traced back to her. A precaution she took that June was not to meet Snowden face-to-face out of concern about the surveillance of American intelligence in Hong Kong.  Instead, for her first 13 days in Hong Kong, she worked behind the scenes, through intermediaries.  Her task was not only to arrange his escape route but also to create diversions to camouflage his real destination.  Under Assange’s tutelage, she had made deceptive ploys an integral parts of her trade craft.  “We were working very hard to lay as many false trails as possible,” she later told an interviewer in Berlin. According to Assange, she booked decoy flights for Snowden to Beijing, China and New Delhi, India. She also used Snowden’s credit card numbers to pay for the flight to India, She knew that since the card was blocked, there was a high probability that it would come to the attention of US intelligence.  In all, according to Harrison, she booked no fewer than dozen such decoy tickets to confuse Snowden’s pursuers in US and British intelligence.  The only actual tickets she bought for Snowden, according to an Aeroflot official, was a one-way ticket to Moscow.  She paid for it at the last minute.  She also bought a ticket for self on the same flight leaving on June 23, 2013.

The source of the money for the Assange-Harrison operation was unclear.  Subsequently, Harrison said she was setting up secret bank accounts to help organize escape, but in Hong Kong in 2013, Assange says she was using “Wikileaks’ resources.” Harrison said the “Wikileaks team” helped fund Snowden’s flight to Russia from Hong Kong, as well as her own flight there.  But Wikileaks in June 2013 was not an organization with spare cash.  Assange had forfeited his own bail by fleeing the embassy of Ecuador, offending many of his financial supporters in Britain.  He also all but exhausted his bank account.  Aside from money that dribbled in from Poitras’ five-month old Freedom of the Press Foundation, the only visible source of funds for Wikileaks was the previously-mentioned payments Assange received from RT Television. British intelligence officers who reportedly subsequently examined Wikileaks’ bank finances in London found no transfers to the “Wikileaks team” in Hong Kong.       

   While Harrison was organizing Snowden’s escape, she remained in the deep background. Meanwhile, mounting pressure was brought on the Hong Kong government to take action by the U.S.  On June 16th, the U.S. government informed the Hong Kong authorities that it had filed a criminal complaint against Snowden and would be seeking his extradition.    Since Hong Kong had a vigorously enforced extradition agreement with the United States, the Hong Kong authority would be expected by the US to take Snowden into custody.  But Hong Kong was not entirely independent in national security issues.  China had the final say in any extradition decision.  In fact, China had explicitly been given the right of vetoing any extraditions for any reason in the formal 1999 agreement between Hong Kong and the U.S.   Since its President had just met with President Obama in California, China also had an interest in avoiding embarrassing public demonstrations on behalf of Snowden.  After he had held his press event, it wanted him out of Hong Kong. According to a well-placed official in Hong Kong, it told the Hong Kong Authority in no uncertain terms that Snowden had to be out of Hong Kong by the end of the week, or June 23rd.  

On June 19th, Snowden had a meeting with Tibbo, the barrister who would handle the court case, and Mann and Ho, the Hong Kong solicitors who had been retained for him.  It took place in a small apartment where, according to Ho, they ate pizza while they discussed Snowden’s options. 

     Tibbo had a strategy for Snowden.  It required that Snowden remain in Hong Kong, allow himself to be arrested, seek bail and fight extradition in court.  Tibbo said he planned to mount a powerful legal defense against extradition by using a provision in Hong Kong’s extradition treaty with the United States that protects fugitives from persecution on political grounds.  After he told Snowden that it would entail a long court battle, Snowden asked him if he could avoid even being arrested.

    Tibbo explained that Hong Kong courts, which closely follow British law, would certainly issue an arrest warrant for him immediately after the US formally filed charges against him.  Those charges could come within hours, he reckoned.  Soon afterwards, Snowden would be temporarily jailed and his computers, electronic gear and thumb drives would be seized and placed in the custody of the court.  Tibbo would immediately seek his release on bail but could not guarantee an outcome since Snowden, who had fled U.S. jurisdiction, might be considered a flight risk.  If so, Snowden could remain incarcerated during the long court battle.   Even so, during the litigation, Snowden would have a platform to make his case against US surveillance. Indeed, Tibbo’s strategy involved building massive public support for Snowden’s cause.

Once the US government filed charges, he could further expect it would invalidate his passport to go anywhere except for his return to the US and Interpol would issue a red alert to all its members. Since the case involved national security secrets, the Hong Kong court might also deny him any use of the Internet until the case was settled.  If Snowden wanted to leave Hong Kong, he had to act swiftly.

Tibbo, although evasive on the point when I interviewed him, may not have known about the escape Harrison was planning  As far as he could see, Snowden’s other alternatives were not good.  He had no money and his credit card had been blocked.  He had no visas to go any other country and Interpol would issue its own “red notice” as soon as the US filed formal charges against him. At that point, Hong Kong airport authorities would be officially notified and could prevent him from leaving the city.   Even if he somehow got out, he would be an international fugitive. Tibbo counseled Snowden to seek redress in the Hong Kong courts.  

 But Snowden had no intention of allowing himself to be arrested.  Despite what he told Lana Lam only one week earlier, at least for publication, about his determination to seek justice in the Hong Kong courts, he had not planned to use Hong Kong as anything more than a temporary stop over on his escape route. Two later months later and safely in Moscow, he made this point clear in a lengthily interview with Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian.  He told him that it never had been part of his plan to use Hong Kong to escape the legal consequences of his act. “The purpose of my mission [to Hong Kong] was to get the information to journalists.”  If so, he had been merely using Tibbo, Mann and Ho to provide him with temporary cover while, following the instructions of Assange, Harrison laid down the smokescreen for his escape to Moscow.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fugitive

  “If I end up in chains in Guantanamo, I can live with that.”

                  •  —Edward Snowden, Hong Kong