For this purpose the Internet provided a near perfect realm for false flags. Since it is a place where true identities cannot easily be verified, intelligence services could employ a protean kit of disguises to assume false identities to entice potential dissidents into communicating with them.  The KGB’s earlier efforts to use hacktavist groups in Germany had produced little, if any, intelligence because of the “stove-piping” the NSA used to isolate its computers from networks that could be hacked into from the outside. It will be recalled that the NSA threat officer had cited these failures in his 1996 report on NSA vulnerability.  He also said that efforts of the Russian Intelligence Services to use false flag recruitments provided the KGB with “a learning experience.”  The KGB had learned that hacking by itself could not breech the NSA’s protective stove-piping.  He predicted that its next logical move would be to “target insider computer personnel.” These false flag recruitment would aim at, in his view, system administrators, computer engineers and cyber service workers who were either already inside the NSA or who had a secrecy clearance that would facilitate getting jobs with NSA contractors.

Even with an appropriate false flag, the task of finding such a “Prometheus” was daunting.  There were some five thousand civilian technicians at the NSA of all political stripes. Finding the one who met its espionage requisites was the equivalent of seeking the sharpest needle in the proverbial giant haystack.  For espionage purposes, however, recruiters did not have to find the sharpest needle, or any particular one; they just needed to find any needle in a position to cooperate.  They could hone a willing recruit over time to do the job at hand.

  The size of the haystack could also be reduced to more manageable proportions by hacking into the personnel records of the intelligence workers seeking to renew their security clearance.  The Internet provided the SVR with just this opportunity.  As discussed in the previous chapter, holes in the security of the computer networks of the US Office of the Office of Personal Management, USIS and the websites of the companies supplying the NSA with independent contractors had made the background checks on American intelligence workers available to the Chinese and presumably other adversary intelligence service hackers since 2011.  If the SVR had access to this personnel data, the research for a candidate would be greatly facilitated. From the 127-page standard form 86 each applicant for a security clearance submits, the SVR could filter out intelligence workers employed by the NSA by their educational background, employment history, affiliations and foreign contacts. It could then search this data for candidates with a possible hacktavist profile, 

This data could next be crossed with a list of individuals SVR in contact with high-profile activists who are part of the anti-surveillance movements. This would include core participants in the TOR project, Wikileaks, Noisebridge, Crypto Parties, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Electronic Freedom Foundation. (Snowden, for example, had been in touch with members all these groups in 2012 and 2013.) 

The SVR would have little problem monitoring even encrypted communications with leading figures in the Anti-surveillance world.   These activists, despite secrecy rituals such as putting their cell phones in refrigerators, remain visible to a sophisticated intelligence service such as the SVR.  Consider, for example, the defensive tactics of Laura Poitras, including PGP encryption, TOR software, and air-gapped computers which are computers that have never been connected to the Internet. She also famously changes her tables at restaurants to evade surveillance.  With all these precautions, she did not keep secrets about her sources entirely to herself. Snowden, at a time when he was stealing NSA secrets in February 2013, went to great lengths to impress on Poitras the need for operational security about his contacts with her, but that injunction did not prevent her from telling at least five people about her source, including Micah Lee, the Berkeley-based technology operative for the Freedom of the Press Foundation; Jacob Appelbaum, the TOR proselytizer; Ben Wizner, the ACLU lawyer; Barton Gellman; and Glenn Greenwald.   “It is not me that can’t keep a secret, “Abraham Lincoln joked. “It’s the people I tell it that can’t.”    In the same vein, Poitras could hardly rely on these five confidants not to tell her (and Snowden’s) to others.  Hours after he was told, Greenwald told his lover David Miranda about the source in great detail. He even asked him to evaluate the source’s bona fides for him. Gellman, for his part, raised the matter with a former high official at the Justice Department. 

    Moreover, as the intelligence world knew, Poitras was herself a veritable lightning rod for attracting ex-NSA employees who objected to some of its surveillance programs. In 2012, her filming of NSA insiders, including Binney and Drake, would make her communications of interest to any intelligence services that wanted to keep tabs on possible NSA dissidents.

   Nor was Snowden himself overly discreet.  It will be recalled that he had also advertised his TOR-sponsored crypto party activities over the Internet, and supplied Runa Sandvik, who worked with Appelbaum, his true name and address in Hawaii. Sandvik had no reason not to share the identity of her co-presenter with others in the TOR movement. Snowden also had his girl friend make a video of his presentation, as will be recalled.  He also bragged about operating the largest TOR outlets in Hawaii.  Even if his TOR software provided him a measure of anonymity, it was not beyond the ability of the world-class cyber services to crack it.

Under Putin, Russia had built one of the leading cyber espionage services in the world. According to a 2009 NSA analysis of Russian capabilities, which was obtained by the New York Times in 2013, Russia’s highly-sophisticated tools for cyber-espionage were superior to those of China or any other adversary nation.  For example, investigators from FireEye, a well-regarded Silicon Valley security firm, found that in 2007, Russian hackers had developed a highly- sophisticated virus that could bypass the security measures of the servers of both the US government and its private contractors. According to one computer security expert, the virus had made protected Internet websites “sitting ducks” for these Russian sophisticated hackers. The cryptographer Bruce Schneier, a leading specialist in computer security, explained, “It is next to impossible to maintain privacy and anonymity against a well-funded government adversary.”

Nor has the Russian cyber service has made a secret out of the fact that it targets TOR software. It even offered a cash prize to anyone in the hacking community who could break TOR.   Prior to 2013, according to cyber security experts, it spent over a decade building cyber tools aimed at unraveling the TOR networks used by hacktavists, criminal enterprises, political dissidents and rival intelligence operatives.  To this end, it reportedly attempted to map out computers that served as major TOR exit nodes (such as the one Snowden operated in 2012 near a NSA regional base in Hawaii.) It also reportedly attached the equivalent of “electronic ink” to messages which would allow it to trace the path of messages that passed through them. Through this technology, it could tag and follow TOR users as their communications travelled across the Internet. It could even borrow their Internet identities.  To be sure, .the NSA also had such a capability. The Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht discovered to his distress that his TOR software did not make his computer server in Iceland invisible.  According to a former top official in the Justice Department, the NSA was able to locate it by cracking the TOR software, (Ulbricht is currently serving a life prison sentence for his Silk Road activities.).  Unlike adversary services, however, the NSA needs a warrant to investigate US citizens who use TOR. 

 Even the NSA is not immune from an attack of its own computers.  CIA deputy director Morell, who served on the committee evaluating the NSA’s vulnerability in the Snowden affair after retiring from the CIA in 2013, wrote in his 2015 book “The Great War of our Times,” that many financial institutions have “better cyber security than the NSA.”    If nothing else, the Internet helped make the activities of US intelligence workers visible to the SVR.

Even if the SVR theoretically had opportunities, it still had to find at least one disgruntled civilian contractor inside in the NSA who had access to the sealed-off computer networks. Did it find its man? If so, was it before or after Snowden arrived in Hong Kong with the Level 3 NSA files?






CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Chinese Puzzle

“The first [false assumption] is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not.”

                  •  Edward Snowden in Hong Kong  

     On August 11, 2014, in the Atlantic Ocean, an even took place of enormous concern to U.S. intelligence.   A Chinese Jin Class Submarine launched an Intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile released 12 independently-targeted re-entry vehicles, each simulating a nuclear warhead.  Some 4400 miles away, in China’s test range in the Xinjiang desert, each of the 12 simulated nuclear warheads then hit their targets within a 12 inch radius.    The test firing, which was closely monitored by the NSA, was a strategic game changer.  It meant that a single Jin Class submarine, which carried 12 such missiles and 144 nuclear warheads, could destroy every city of strategic importance in the United States.  U.S intelligence further reported at China would soon fully stealth its newer submarines against detection, “giving China its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent” against an American attack.
   By 2015, as its test in the Atlantic had foreshadowed, China had armed its land-based as well as sea-based missiles with multiple independently targeted warheads. Combined with the state--of-the-art technology it had licensed from Russia, its systematic use of espionage made it possible for China to even build its own stealth fighters. 

 Unlike the U.S, China did not achieve this remarkable capability to launch independently-targeted miniaturized nuclear weapons and stealth them by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in developing them.  It obtained this technology mainly through espionage.  The history of this enterprise, though unsung, is stunning. The Chinese intelligence service stole a large part, if not all of America’s secret technology for weaponizing nuclear bombs during the 1980s and 1990s. The theft was so massive that in 1998 the House of Representatives of the US Congress set up a special bipartisan investigative unit called the “Select Committee on National Security and Military and Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China.”   Based on the intelligence amassed by the NSA, CIA and other intelligence services, it concluded in its report that the Chinese intelligence service had obtained both by electronic and conventional spying the warhead design of America’s seven most advance thermonuclear weapons. Moreover, it found that China’s espionage successes allowed China to so accelerate the design, development and testing of its own nuclear weapons that the new generation of Chinese weapons would be “comparable in effectiveness to the weapons used by the United States.”  Further, it found that these thefts of nuclear secrets had not been isolated or opportunistic incidents.  The Committee reported to Congress that they were the “results of decades of intelligence operations against U.S. weapons laboratories.”  The Chinese intelligence service further obtained from private US defense contractors through cyber espionage important elements of the stealth technology used in both advanced planes and submarines.  China shared (or exchanged) the fruits of its espionage on nuclear warhead design with North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Russia. 

Despite its formidable intelligence coups in the US, the Chinese intelligence service managed to remain among the most elusive of America’s intelligence adversaries. Its espionage organizations are hidden behind layers of bureaucracy in the Ministry of State Security, Chinese Communist party structures, and the second, third and fourth department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.  Much of its cyber espionage units are concealed on the campuses of its universities.   Its hierarchy, or order of battle, is also obscure. Few traces have been uncovered of any conventional espionage networks in the United States and no major Chinese spy has ever been arrested.  Part of the reason that Chinese espionage has proved so elusive to the eyes of western counter-intelligence, was that, unlike Russia, it did not ordinarily rely on intelligence officers in its embassies to recruit penetration agents to steal secrets.  It did not even have an embassy in the United States during most of the Cold War.  Instead, its services specialize it assembly mosaics of intelligence assembled from a wide variety of sources including non-classified documents, returning graduate students, scientific conferences, exchanges with allies, and a vast operation of  hacking into computers, or cyber- espionage.     

Cyber-espionage is indeed a vast enterprise in China.  Graduating over 150,000 computer science engineers, it had no shortage of personnel.  It also had developed the cyber tool kit to gain access to the computer networks of US government contractors and consultants in the private sector and government agencies, planting “sleeper" bugs in net-worked computers.  Like human “sleeper” agents, these hidden programs can be activated when needed for operational purposes.  Chinese controllers can retrieve emails, documents and turn on the cameras and microphones of personal computers, tablets and smart phones.  By 2007, Paul Strassmann, a top US defense expert on cyber-espionage, reported that China had inserted “zombie” programs in some 700,000 computers in the US which could be used to mount cyber attack to retrieve emails from other computers.  The Chinese service also reportedly penetrated companies that provide Internet services, including Google Yahoo, Symantec, and Adobe, which allowed it to track emails and enclosures of individuals.  With such an invisible army of zombie computers, it is not entirely surprising that China finds little need to employ human: sleeper” agents.

  Chinese cyber-specialists used this capability to hack into computers of outside contractors, including Booz Allen and other companies that supplied technologists to the NSA.  It also had notable successes in obtaining the dossiers of US employees and independent contractors at the NSA, CIA and other intelligence services. Its intrusions, as previously noted, into computer network at the Office of Personnel Management traced back to 2009.  Eventually, by 2015, according to US estimates, the cyber attack had harvested over twenty million personnel files of past and present Federal government employees. In addition, it reaped in over 14 million background checks of intelligence workers done by the Federal Investigative Service. All the intelligence workers with a SCI clearance, such as Snowden, were required to provide in these forms information about all their foreign acquaintance, including any non-U.S. officials that the applicant knew or had relationships with in the past. They also had to list their foreign travel, family members, police encounters, mental health, and credit history.  For good measure, Chinese hackers obtained the confidential medical histories of government employees by hacking into the computers of Anthem and other giant heath care companies.   If the Chinese intelligence services consolidated the fruits of these hacking attacks it would have a searchable database of almost everyone working in the American defense and intelligence complex.   From this database, it could track individuals with high security clearances vulnerable to being bribed, blackmailed or tricked into cooperating.   No one doubted that the Chinese would use their cyber capabilities to take advantage of weaknesses in foreign computer systems. General Hayden said of the massive theft of intelligence personnel records: “those records are a legitimate foreign intelligence target.”  He added, “If I, as director of the NSA or CIA would have had the opportunity to grab the equivalent in the Chinese system, I would not have thought twice.”  If that opportunity did not arise for the NSA or CIA during Hayden’s tenure, it may have been because no insider in the Chinese intelligence services provided US intelligence with a road map to it.  

     Cyber espionage was not the Chinese Intelligence Service only powerful resource in the intelligence war.  To get both electronic intelligence and human intelligence about the United States, China also had a highly-productive intelligence sharing treaty with Russia.   It was signed in 1992 after the Soviet Union was dissolved.  Although the terms of this exchange remain secret, defectors from the Russian KGB and SVR reported that Chinese intelligence received from Russia a continuous stream of communication intelligence about the US in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  Russia’s intelligence resources during this period were formidable.  They included geo-synchronous satellites, listening stations in Cuba, sleeper agents and embassy-based spy networks. Presumably, this relationship further deepened under President Putin’s regime.  Putin asserted in his speeches in 2014 that Russia and China continue to share a key strategic objective: countering the United States’ domination of international relations, or what Putin terms, “a unipolar world order.”   China’s President Xi Jinping expressed a very similar view, saying in 2014 in a thinly-veiled reference to the United States, stating that any American attempt to “monopolize” international affairs will not succeed.


 Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been the major supplier of almost all of China’s modern weaponry.  It licenses for manufacture in China avionics, air defense systems, missile launchers, stealth technology, and submarine warfare equipment.  To make these arms effective, it also provides China with up-to-date intelligence about the ability of the United States and its allies to counter them.  While such intelligence cooperation may be limited by the reality that China and Russia still compete in some areas, there is no reason to assume that they do not share the fruits of their cyber and conventional espionage against the NSA.  After all, the NSA works to intercept the military and political secrets of both these allies.   Moreover, NSA secrets might are a form of currency in the global intelligence war. 

Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong in May 2013 made the Chinese intelligence service, willy-nilly, a potential player in game.  Hong Kong is a part of China, even if independently administrated, and, as such, China has full responsibility for its national security and foreign affairs. This mandate includes monitoring foreign intelligence operatives. The Chinese intelligence service accordingly runs much of the local intelligence apparatus in Hong Kong.  For this purpose, it maintains its largest intelligence base outside of mainland China in Hong Kong.  Its officers are stationed officially in the Prince of Wales skyscraper in central Hong Kong and unofficially maintain informers in Hong Kong’s police, governing authority, airport administration and at other levers of power in Hong Kong.  It checks the computerized visitors entering Hong Kong, and has the capability to ferret names that match those in the immense date base its global cyber espionage has amassed. When it detects the entry of any person of possible intelligence interest, it has the opportunity of using its sophisticated array of cyber tools to remotely steal data from those individuals.  Such remote surveillance was so effective in 2013 that the US State Department had instructed all its personnel in Hong Kong to avoid using their Iphones, Androids, Blackberries and smart phones when travelling to Hong Kong or China.  Instead, it has supplied them with specially-altered phones that disable location tracking and have a remotely-activated switch to completely cut off power to it circuitry. No one in the intelligence community doubts the prudence of taking such precautions in the realm of China. 

Once Hong Kong had served as a window into China for Western intelligence, but in the first decade of the 21st century, the Chinese intelligence service had achieved such a pervasive presence in Hong Kong, and such ubiquitous electronic coverage of diplomats and other foreigners even suspected of involvement in foreign intelligence work, that the CIA and British intelligence found it almost as difficult to operate in Hong Kong as in mainland China.  The CIA as well as the DIA kept a few officers there, but, as a former CIA station chief told me in September 2013, that for the purposes of intelligence operations, the CIA “regards Hong Kong as hostile territory.”

   Snowden apparently knew the limits of CIA operations in Hong Kong. It indeed provided him with an envelope of protection.  He told Greenwald, as will be recalled, that he was counting on the Chinese presence in Hong Kong to deter the CIA from intruding on their meetings. 

    Snowden also must have realized that he was entering the Chinese sphere of influence when he flew to Hong Kong in May 2013.  Yet, he took with him level 3 NSA secrets which he could assume would be of great interest to China.  In fact, he advertised this fact in his interview with the South China Post, a newspaper controlled in 2013 by mainland China.   Whatever he may have assumed about the inability of the CIA to stop him in Hong Kong, he had no reason to assume that Chinese intelligence service would relegate itself to purely passive role, especially when secret NSA’s documents were in a hotel room in Hong Kong.   Snowden may have esteemed himself to be an independent actor playing Prometheus on a global stage provided by YouTube, but the Chinese may have viewed him as nothing more as another pawn in the Game of Nations.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Pawn in the Game

“The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.”
                                          --Edward Snowden in Moscow, 2014 


    When Snowden arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013 he became a person on interest to any parties who knew, or later learned, about his coup.  How could they not be interested this intelligence defector?  He had brought with him enough US government secrets to, as he put it, make NSA “sources go dark that were previously productive”.     Snowden also fully realized the lethal situation that his possession of NSA documents put him.  He was after his arrival in Hong Kong, as he put it, the NSA’s “single point” of a potential catastrophic intelligence failure.  He also stated the consequences if caught, telling Poitras:   “The US Intel community will certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure.”
The reason that Snowden considered himself of such importance to be the “single point of failure” was the pay load of secrets he was carrying.  He possessed thumb drives full of files so critical to the NSA that in the wrong hands they could cause, in his view, many of the key sources of the entire US communication intelligence service to “go dark.” Not only was he carrying these files, but he had willingly bought them inside the territory of China; a place in which America’s main adversaries, China and Russia, could operate freely.  Whoever he sought to deal with in Hong Kong, or whatever idealistic axe he intended to grind there, he could not expect his position as a “single point of failure”—a position he advertised in his email correspondence—would not attract the attention of other players in the game of nations.  
The enormous power of the NSA rested on a frail thread: its ability to keep secret from its foes its sources and methods.  General Alexander could call the NSA’s communication intelligence “the queen on the chessboard,” but, like the queen in a chess game, it could be captured by a well-placed pawn. In this case, the pawn, which had it in his power to expose the NSA’s critical sources and methods, would also be considered fair game for capture by an adversary.  And both the Chinese and Russian cyber services, whether working alone or together, had the technological means in China to tap into Snowden’s computer.  They also had an interest in learning how the NSA was listening in on their secret communications.  If any further incentive was needed, an intelligence service could barter them to other countries whose signals were also intercepted by the NSA.  Michael Morell, the CIA’s  Deputy Director at the time, said in his book “The Great War of Our Times” that just a few selected parts of Snowden’s cache could be traded to the intelligence services of Iran and North Korea. 
Snowden, realizing that he now represented that weak link in the architecture of America’s intelligence system, made a move from the U.S. that greatly increased the stakes.  He entered what he knew to be hostile intelligence territory with his stash of stolen secrets.  He did so, as he explained to Greenwald in Hong Kong, to reduce the possibility of an American countermove against him or his associates in the media. But while succeeding in limiting the reach of the CIA, FBI, NSA and their allies, he willy-nilly put himself under the protection of America’s adversary, the Chinese security services.  In light of the counterintelligence training he had received at the CIA, he could not be unaware his move into Chinese-controlled territory would not prevent adversary services, which also had the home court advantage, from stepping in.   He also gave adversaries an ample, if not wholly irresistible reason, to enter the game by saying that he had access to NSA’s sources in China.
How could they resist such a prize?

As confidant as Snowden may have been that he was in control, the CIA believed that confidence was misinformed. CIA Deputy Director Morell said, after reviewing the case on a panel appointed by President Obama:  “Snowden thinks he is smart, but he was never in a position in his previous jobs to fully understand the immense capabilities of our Russian and Chinese counterparts.”  He could adopt a self-confident tone in his post-mortem conversations with journalists in Moscow, but he had no means to block the efforts of the Chinese or Russian services in Hong Kong.    These intelligence services had no restrictions on their actions. For example, the Chinese intelligence service could have spotted him on his arrival in Hong Kong simply by cross- checking its aforementioned database of US intelligence workers who had applied for a renewed security clearance in the past three years.  It could have pinpointed his whereabouts through its informant network in the Hong Kong Police and the security staffs of hotels.  Snowden’s mysterious “carer” would not be immune from detection by that network.     Russia, China’s longtime intelligence ally, would not even need to go to such lengths since, as Putin gloatingly confirmed, he contacted its diplomats in Hong Kong. The Russian intelligence service would them swing into action while Russian “diplomats” entered into talks with him. The Russians would also glean from Snowden’s request for asylum that Hong Kong was only a temporary stopover for him, 
“The purpose of my [Hong Kong} mission was to get the information to journalists,” he would tell the Guardian after he was safely ensconced in Moscow.  After that brief mission, he was “done” in Hong Kong. Where he planned to go next, mainland China was only a taxi ride away and there was a direct flight to Moscow.

     Snowden does not say how many days he planned to be in Hong Kong, but he indicated that he was working under a tight clock. The time pressure resulted in him emailing Gellman at the Washington Post an ultimatum on May 24, 2013: either Gellman publish the selected documents in the Washington Post within 72 hours or he would lose the exclusive scoop.  He wanted the story to break on May 27, 2013 without his true identity (which Gellman did not know). Hid identity would be known to a foreign mission in Hong Kong if Gellman acceded to his demands.  Since as previously mentioned, Gellman’s story would enclose an encoded signal he planned to use as proof of his bona fides.  So even before the Guardian reporters had agreed to come to Hong Kong, he had plans to deal with a foreign mission.  But he planned to keep his name out of it.  Instead, he insisted Gellman include in it a coded signal in it.  When the Washington Post turned down his ultimatum, he needed a different plan.
     Time was running out if he was to break the story and leave Hong Kong before the NSA realized he was missing.   At best, he was safe until June 3rd.  That was when he was supposed to return from his two-week medical leave for getting treatment for epilepsy. But if he failed to show up in Hawaii on June 3rd, alarm bells at the NSA would go off.  It would not take long to find him. Airline record would show that he had flown to Hong Kong.   The NSA security staff would ask questions, as Snowden explained from Moscow: “This guy isn’t where he says he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be getting medical treatment. Why the hell is he in Hong Kong?”   It would then determine he had lied about his medical treatment, and it would immediate go after him with the full power of the U.S. government. 
 The day after his attempt to pressure the Washington Post, he asked Greenwald to drop everything he was doing and immediately fly to Hong Kong.   He had, it will be recalled, already sent Poitras an enciphered file, and told her she would get the key once she and Greenwald followed his instructions. Presumably, he wanted Greenwald’s story and the video done in Hong Kong before he became a suspect.  If they had immediately flown to Hong Kong that May, it still might have left Snowden an escape window. 

As Snowden found out, when dealing with journalists, things do not always go as planned. Greenwald, although agreeing to come to Hong Kong, waited in New York for two days while the Guardian editors completed their due diligence.  Poitras waited with him.   As a result of this delay, Snowden’s clock ran out.  Greenwald and Poitras did not arrive at his hotel in Hong Kong until June 3rd.  It would be only hours before he became a prime suspect. “It was a nervous period,” Snowden recalled. Although he bravely told the Guardian, “there was no risk of compromise/” That claim was, at best, wishful thinking on his part.

By this time, he was no longer invisible.  Not only had he registered at the hotel under his true name and provided his credit card, but he was he in contact with three high-profile journalists, two well-known hacktavists and, as he suggested to Gellman, a foreign diplomatic mission.  Even if Snowden had failed to persuade the Washington Post to publish a coded identifier, the mission’s interest would likely be piqued when the newspaper published it first story on June 5th.  Even if adversary intelligence services had missed Snowden and his archive of NSA documents earlier in May,  they would not neglect the availability of such a prize after the NSA stories broke in the Guardian and Washington Post on June 5th. Greenwald even went on TV in Hong Kong, revealing to every interested intelligence service, in the unlikely event that that they did not already know, that a defector from the NSA was in Hong Kong.


     Now there was no point in keeping his identity a secret.  On June 9th  Poitras released the famous video showing Snowden a secret  NSA documents,  At this point, Snowden shone so brightly as a beacon that every player in the in the intelligence game would realize that Snowden was a pawn to be captured. 


     Snowden still was able to fog over his travel plans, at least in the media, by telling reporters that he intended to remain in Hong Kong and fight extradition in court, but certainly the Russian officials whom he contacted knew he had other plans.  They had even relayed his request to go to Russia to Putin. His movements were also no secret to sophisticated intelligence services.  In an era in Hong Kong ii which cell phones emit their GPS location every 3 seconds and CCTV cameras scan many street intersections, it is not easy to conceal one’s whereabouts.  In Snowden’s case, his photograph was constantly on television, posters and giant billboards.  Even if he threw away his own phone, his retinue of lawyers and helpers could be tracked with ease.


  China, who’s President, Xi Jinping was meeting President Obama for the first time in Rancho Mirage, California on June 9th, would have certainly been keenly interested in the unfolding Snowden affair.  After all, Obama had publically put on his agenda that week calling Xi to task for Chinese cyber espionage.  Such a charge was undermined by Snowden’s globally-publicized accusation that the United States was engaged in massive cyber espionage.  In any event, as US intelligence verified, China had, almost immediately after the release of the video, instituted a full court press of Snowden in Hong Kong.  Its security apparatus presumably had the means to monitor his room as well as those of Poitras and Greenwald.   From that moment on, it is not likely that any communication or movement, Snowden made during his next 18 days in Hong Kong would escape its scrutiny.  

The U.Ss also had the ability to track Snowden’s movements via the cell phones of his lawyers and other confederates after he surfaced.    This tracking could all be done by the NSA.  What the U.S. lacked was any practical means to capture a high-profile intelligence defector in a city that was part of China.  By this time, US intelligence had established that Chinese and Hong Kong security services were monitoring Snowden’s every move.  This left few options in the game for the U.S.  “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” President Obama said on June 27, 2013.



  The real prize, in any case, was not Snowden himself but the NSA’s secrets documents that he had with him in Hong Kong.  When Snowden was observed entering the Russian consulate, the game was all but over.  US diplomats could protest over back channels to Moscow, as they did, but, with a trove of NSA secrets at stake, there was little expectation that they stop the Russians.  Two days later, the ”single point of failure,” as Snowden described himself, was on his way to Russia, where he would be subject to Moscow’s rules.

When a victory is obtained in a major sports event, such as the world cup, it is celebrated with victory dances, parties and ticker-tape parades. The opposite is true in the Game of Nation. An intelligence victory involving secret documents, even if it cannot be entirely hidden, is kept veiled, as far as is possible, to increase the value of the coup.     “The final move in any sophisticated intelligence game,” Angleton told me in relation to espionage intelligence coup, is “obscuring a success.”


Following Angleton’s precept the Russian or Chinese intelligence services, if they had a role in acquiring the product of the self-described “single point of failure,” would work to cover their tracks in the affair even before the Aeroflot plane carrying Snowden touched down at Sheremetyevo International Airport on June 23, 2013.    If any false flag operations had been used to trick, mislead, or otherwise induce Snowden to come to Hong Kong, they would be disbanded.  If any safe housed had been used to quarter Snowden in his first 11 days in Hong Kong, they would be shut down.  If any operatives had been used in Hawaii to guide or assist Snowden, they would be put back into the sleep mode.  If any tell-tale traces had been left in chat rooms or social media, they would be systematically deleted.    Even more important to the ultimate success of such a communications intelligence coup, measures would be taken to conceal the extent of the damage done by the “single point of failure” by not precipitously closing down compromised sources.   Snowden might believe that the power of the information he held was so great that, if disclosed by him, all the NSA’s sources would immediately go dark in Russia and China, but Russia might not wish to provide such clarity to its adversaries. An intelligence service need not close down channels it discovers are compromised by an adversary.  Instead it can elect to continue to use them and furnish through them bits of sensitive information to advance its own national interest. The real danger here was not that the NSA’s “lights” would dramatically be extinguished but that all the future messages illuminated by those lights would be less reliable sources of intelligence.   The Game of Nations is, after all, merely a competition among adversaries to gain advantages by the surreptitious exchange of both twisted and straight information.  When the NSA asserted in the summer of 2013 that over one million documents, it was recognizing the most massive failure in its 60 year history. Not only NSA secrets, but secret files from the CIA, the British GCHQ, and America’s cyber military commands, had been compromised.  It was, as Sir David Omand, the head of the British GCHQ described it, a "huge, strategic setback" for the West. The genie could not be put back in the bottle as there is not a reset button in this game. The best that the NSA could do now was damage control while its adversaries took full advantage of the setback.  Several hundred  US and British intelligence officers worked around the clock in Washington DC, Fort Meade, Maryland and Cheltenham, England for months on end to determine if which parts could be still salvaged from what had been until the Snowden breach the most powerful communications intelligence system in the world.


Adding insult to injury, Snowden, speaking from his new perch in Moscow, told applauding audience that the entire purpose of the U.S. exercise, including deliberately “trapping” him in Moscow, was to “demonize” him.  For Russia, it was a textbook move. By providing Snowden with this platform to rail against the surveillance practices of his adversaries, Putin laid claim to the moral high ground in the Game of Nations.


What remains missing from this picture is Snowden's motive in requesting documents from other foreign intelligence services, such as the GCHQ, and copying lists of NSA sources.  It is difficult to believe that his motive was conventional whistle-blowing since these documents were not among those l he gave to journalists in Hong Kong.  It will be recalled that his legal representative in Moscow, Anatoly Kucherena, said that he taken to Russia, and had access to, NSA documents that he had not given to journalists.  He had gone effort in his final weeks at the NSA to take documents that any adversary service would prize. Copying them was, as we have seen, part of his well-calculated plan.  Did he use them, as he used the documents he gave to Poitras, Greenwald and Gellman, as leverage in his transformation?  Since the role that Moscow may have played in Snowden’s remarkable defection, while less visible than that of the movie-makers, journalists and activist, cannot be ignored in this puzzle.  Since it requires a closer examination of the machinations that brought Snowden to Russia, I made arrangements to visit Moscow in October 2015.











             PART FIVE


 WALKING THE CAT BACK




Deception is a state of mind—and the mind of the state
               --James Jesus Angleton






 Chronology 3
Snowden in Russia

               2013

June 23         Snowden arrives from Hong Kong at Sheremetyevo International                                           Airport on Aeroflot flight SU213 at 5:15 PM local time.

                     Sarah Harrison arrives from Hong Kong at Sheremetyevo International                                           Airport on Aeroflot flight SU213 at 5:15 PM local time.

 July 12            Snowden, in his first public appearance in Russia, holds press                                             conference at Sheremetyevo International Airport,

July 14             Snowden first meets Anatoly Kucherena, his lawyer-to-be

August 1          Snowden’s application for asylum is granted for one year.

September 23 Kucherena states Snowden has access to NSA documents in Russia

October 2         Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, Coleen Rowley and

Jesselyn Radack meets with Snowden and Harrison.

October 10      Snowden aided by ACLU legal team put together by Ben Wizner

October 16      Snowden interviewed, via Internet, by James Risen (NY Times)

November 1     Snowden joins the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation

November 3     Sarah Harrison departs from Moscow.

December 21   Snowden meets with Gellman; his first in person interview in Moscow.

2014

January 2         Snowden meets in Moscow ACLU lawyers Ben Wizner and Anthony Romero 

August 1           Snowden’s residence permit is renewed for three years





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dinner with Oliver Stone

“I had to ‘tune to [Snowden’s] wavelength’ and try to balance between the rational and intuitive perception of his world. Having experienced these incredible sensations, I realized that I had to write about them, but only in the form of a novel that would not claim any sophisticated philosophical conclusions."

           —Anatoly Kucherena




Before flying to Moscow, I arranged to have dinner with Oliver Stone at Parma, an Italian restaurant on the upper east side of New York.  I had greatly respected Stone ability as a film director after watching him work in Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, a film in which I had a cameo role.  I also had debated Stone about the historic accuracy of his 1990 movie JFK at Town Hall in New York.
  When we dined, he had just written, produced, written and directed “Snowden,” an independently-financed film depicting Snowden, as put, as “one of the great heroes of the 21st century.”  In preparing for it, he had not only seen Snowden in 2013 and 2014, but he had had a six-hour meeting with Putin.  

The reason I wanted to talk to him was not to learn about the film but to find about how he had made to gain access to Snowden in Moscow.   I already knew from the documents taken from Sony Pictures Entertainment allegedly by North Korea that Stone had paid the Guardian $700,000 for the film rights to “The Snowden File,” a book written by Luke Harding.  This was not a surprising sum since it provided a basis for movie which describes Snowden’s coup. But these documents also revealed that Stone had paid Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s legal representative in Moscow, $1 million dollars, supposedly for the rights to his novel Time of the Octopus.   Even by Hollywood standards one million dollars was an extraordinary sum to pay for a yet-to-be published work of Russian fiction, and it was especially striking since Stone was making a fact-based movie using the actual names of the characters.   “Is your script based on Kucherena’s “Time of the Octopus?” I asked.

“No,” Stone replied, “I haven’t used it.”  He said that the payment was for what he termed “total access.”  He explained that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the producers of the James Bond franchise, had optioned Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide”  to make into a movie about Snowden for Sony.  Stone said that the million dollar deal with Kucherena effectively guaranteed that any competing project would not have access to Snowden. Sony consequently put the competing film on hold.   

 To be sure, it is not unusual for a lawyer to negotiate a deal on behalf of a client, but a lawyer ordinarily does not have the power to block a competing film access to their client.  Clearly, Kucherena was no ordinary lawyer.  Among other positions, he was on the public board of the FSB security service.    In light of such connections, Stone said Kucherena might be acting as an intermediary for other parties who did control access to Snowden in Russia but that were not his concern.  Kucherena delivered the exclusive access to Snowden.

 Aside from being a skilled director, Stone is a shrewd producer who knew how to close a deal.  He assessed, correctly as it turned out, that the payment to Kucherena would effectively block Sony’s competing project.  Where the money went was far less clear. 

     Towards the end of our dinner, Stone told me that he did not know I was writing a book about until a few weeks earlier.  He learned of my book from Snowden.  He said Snowden had expressed concern to him about the direction of the book I was writing.  “What was it about?” Stone asked me.     

    I was taken aback.  I had no idea that Snowden was aware of my book project, as I had not tried to contact him.    I told Stone that I considered Snowden to be extraordinary man who had changed history.  Although I was intentionally vague in my description, Stone seemed to be reassured.    

    That Snowden was aware that I was investigating him presented an opportunity.  I asked Stone about the possibility of my seeing Snowden in Moscow.

   Stone did not offer to arrange such a meeting.  He said only that I “might want to speak to Anatoly [Kucherena].”  This conversation suggested to me that Kucherena was Snowden’s gate-keeper.

    In his two years in Moscow, Snowden, or his handlers, had granted only a handful of face-to face interviews.  One was with James Bamford, who was writing an article on Snowden for Wired magazine in 2014.  But it took nearly nine months to arrange the meeting.  “I have been trying to set up an interview with him [Snowden]—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. “ he recounted in Wired. After my dinner with Stone, I hoped to find a quicker route.

First, I was advised that I needed a Moscow “fixer,” the curious term that journalists commonly use to describe a local intermediary who arranges appointments in foreign countries.  I retained Zamir Gotta, a highly respected TV producer in Moscow, who I was told had helped “fix” the Bamford interview with Snowden.
“There is only one door to Snowden,” Zamir wrote me. “His name is Kucherena.”  Since Zamir said Kucherena rarely saw journalists he that he had a contact in his office.  He further told me Kucherena required that any journalist seeking an interview with Snowden to submit his questions to him two weeks in advance and, if approved, sign a document stating I would not deviate from the questions.  Next, my questions had to be translated from English to Russian (even though Snowden does not speak Russian) and then vetted by Kucherena’s staff.   Zamir also suggested I stay at the National hotel in Red Square because Snowden has gone there for previous meetings with Bamford. So I sent Kucherena, via Zamir, ten questions that might interest Snowden (if they ever reached him.)

   I next obtained a multi-entry Russian visa from the Russian consulate in New York, booked myself a room in the National hotel with a view of the Kremlin   and used all my remaining frequent travel miles to book a direct flight on Aeroflot to Moscow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Vanishing Act

“They talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s great.”—Snowden Moscow, 2015

My night flight from New York to Moscow took less than eight hours.  It landed at 7:40 AM on October 29, 2015 at terminal D a Sheremetyevo International Airport.  I did not immediately proceed through passport control, not just because I wanted to avoid the killer bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but because I wanted to explore the transit zone in which Snowden was supposedly trapped in for six weeks.

   Sheremetyevo Two, where all international flights land, was built in the waning days of the Cold War for international passengers arriving for the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics.  It was modernized in 2010, including opening a walkway that connects Terminal D, E and F for transit passengers.

 Snowden had vanished, at least from public view, in this complex of terminals for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013.  His explanation, as will be recalled, was two-part.  First, he had planned to board the next fight to Cuba, and from there proceed to Ecuador. But he was unable to board this flight because his passport had been invalidated while he was flying to Russia by the U.S. Government.  Second, after discovering his passport had been revoked, he stayed in a capsule hotel in the transit zone for the next 38 days.

  To better understand the plausibility of his version of those events, I proceeded through the transit passage to Terminal F where Snowden’s plane from Hong Kong had landed at 5:15 PM Moscow time on June 23, 2013.  

    Snowden did not o through passport control on June 23rd.  Before any of the other passengers were  allowed to disembark from the plane, Russian plainclothes officers from the Special Services boarded the plane and asked both Snowden and Sarah Harrison, his Wiki leak’s supplied “ninja,” to accompany them to a waiting car that whisked them away.  Assange and Harrison had organized a number of decoy flights.  They may have confused U.S and British intelligence services, as they were intended to do, but they evidently did not fool the Russian intelligence services.  According to the account in Izvestia, “a special operation was conducted for his reception and evacuation.” It further said:  “Snowden flight to Moscow was coordinated with the Russian authorities and intelligence services.”  What was less clear is whether Snowden had voluntarily participated in this “special operation” that effectively took him into custody.    Wherever Snowden and Harrison were next taken-- the “transit zone” extends beyond the airport to medical and other facilities— he was not brought to Terminal E, where the next Aeroflot flight to Cuba departed at 1:40 PM on June 24th 2013. 

Yet, if not for the “special operation”, he could have easily gone by foot to Terminal E. It was, as I found, only a nine minute walk through the transit passageway in which one does not have to show a passport.   But that raises the question: Was Snowden’s plan really to go to Ecuador?

Consider Snowden’s putative motivation in seeking sanctuary in Ecuador: his safety.  Yet, Snowden assessed that he would be vulnerable to capture by the U.S. government in Ecuador. “If they [the U.S. Government] really wanted to capture me, they would’ve allowed me to travel to Latin America, because the CIA can operate with impunity down there,” he explained in a recorded interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, in 2014, He had previously discussed the likelihood of his being captured in Ecuador with Julian Assange in Hong Kong in June 2013 before his departure for Moscow. He also told Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, that he considered that he was at risk in Latin America.  This vulnerability was no minor matter to Snowden. He told Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong, before arranging to fly to Moscow, that his “first priority” was his own “physical safety.”  Since he did not believe Ecuador was a safe place for him, why would he leave the comparative safety of Russia and risk being kidnapped by American forces in Latin America? 

Nor was a U.S. passport a prerequisite for U.S. citizens flying to Havana in 2013.  Since the State Department did not sanction travel to Cuba for the general public, the vast majority of Americans going to Cuba obtained a travel document from a Cuban consulate so the Cuban entry stamp would not be marked in their passport.)   So Snowden, if he really had intended to fly to Cuba, only needed this document.  He had over a month to obtain it from the Cuban consulate in Hong Kong.  But he did not.  He could also have obtained a visa to Ecuador at its consulate in Hong Kong.  But he did not.  According to his lawyer Kucherena, who closely examined his passport in July 2013, Snowden had no visas at all.  Unlike his words, Snowden’s actions were with any plan to go to any place in Latin America.

     Shortly after the “special operation,” a tip was placed on a publicly-accessible Russian website saying that Snowden was booked on the Aeroflot flight SU-150 to Cuba on June 24th.  In response to this anonymous tip, Russian and foreign news organization in Moscow ordered their reporters to buy tickets on that flight With their tickets, reporters swarmed into the departure area of the airport in such numbers that the police had to set up cordons.  They checked all the VIP lounges, restaurants, rest rooms and boarding area for the next seven hours, but Snowden was nowhere to be found. A Russia Today reporter later said “It was a total madhouse. Everyone was screaming ‘Snowden’ at the airport ground staff.” Over a hundred reporters actually boarded the plane.

  In fact, Snowden had never checked in for that flight and, as far as is known, was never seen in terminal E.     Only after the plane took off did the journalists realize Snowden was not aboard it.    All they could do was photograph two of the unoccupied seats, 17A and 17 C, which they reported in tweets were Snowden’s and Harrison empty seats.   By the time the plane landed in Cuba Aeroflot denied that anyone named Snowden had ever been booked on any of its flight to Cuba, a denial it continued to repeat to every reporter who queried the airline for the next six weeks.  

The first news that Snowden was even in Russia came on July 1, 2013.  A statement posted on n the Wikileaks web site and signed “Edward Snowden,” after thanking “friends new and old” for his “continued liberty,” accused President Obama of pressuring “leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions. It added: “This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression.”    Since the Aeroflot flight to Cuba was the only means of getting directly from Moscow to Latin America, Russian reporters, encouraged by the Wikileaks post, continued taking the daily 11 hour flight to Cuba until August 1, 2013, The charade only ended when Kucherena said in a press conference at the airport that Snowden would be taking up residency at an undisclosed location in Moscow, and walked out of the airport with Snowden. 

The question remained: where had Snowden been staying for those 39 days?  Sarah Harrison, his companion on the plane, told Vogue that she and Snowden had shared a windowless room in the transit zone, where they watched TV, washed their clothes in a sink basin and ate meals from the nearby Burger King.  The only hotel with windowless rooms in the transit zone in 2013 was the Vozdushny V-Express Capsule Hotel, located next to a newly-opened Burger King restaurant. 
   I next went there. The polite V-express desk clerk, who spoke English, showed me the standard windowless double-room.  It was approximately 24 square feet, the size of a large shipping container.  Most of the floor space was taken up by twin bed. Across from the bed, behind a plastic curtain, was a stall with a shower, a toilet and sink.  Not only was it very cramped quarters for two people to share but it was fairly expensive.  It cost 850 rubles an hour (about $18 in 2013.)  For 39 days that hourly charge would add up to $16,600.   Even though Snowden claimed that he brought a large cache of cash to Russia, such a long stay was not allowed, according to the desk clerk.  The maximum stay allowed by the hotel was 24 hours.  So either the rule was waived for Snowden or he moved to another facility not available to the public. 

I learned from a former KGB officer, there are a number of VIP quarters beyond the confines of the airport, including suites at the 400-room Novotel hotel, which is located about seven miles from the airport, that are used for debriefing  and other purposes by the security services.  According to him, the security services are not restricted from entering and leaving the transit zone.    

The possibility that he was staying elsewhere would help explain the futile search for him by of a large number of reporters over those 39 days.  When they learned from tweets that Snowden was not aboard plane to Havana on June 24th, they aggressively questioned every restaurant employees, security guards and airport personnel for weeks they could find. Some reporters even took rooms in the V-Express Capsule Hotel and “tipped” maids and other hotel employees. They also bought business-class tickets on flights to gain access to all the public VIP lounges in the transit zones.  Despite this intensive search, none of them found anyone who had seen Snowden although his image was constantly shown on airport TV screens. Egor Piscunov, a Russian journalist who checked into the capsule hotel for 4 hours told me, “It was a total vanishing act.” 



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Through the Looking Glass

 “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there”

                —Edward Snowden in Moscow 

     While waiting to hear back from Kucherena’s office, I arranged to meet with Victor Ivanovich Cherkashin, who gad been one of the most successful KGB spy handlers in the Cold War. Cherkashin, born in 1932, had served in the KGB’s espionage branch from 1952 until 1991. He now operated a private security firm in Moscow.  I was particularly interested in his recruitment of three top American intelligence officers; Aldrich Ames in the CIA, Robert Hanssen in the FBI and Ronald Pelton in the NSA.  I hoped that seeing these intelligence coups through the eyes, and mind-set, of their KGB handler might provide some historical context for the Snowden defection.   So I invited Cherkashin to lunch at Gusto, a quiet Italian restaurant, located near the Chekov Theater in central Moscow,

    Cherkashin, a tall thin man with silver hair, showed up promptly at 1 pm.  Wearing an elegant grey suit and dark tie, he walked with a spry step.  Since he had served in counterintelligence in the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C.  for nearly a decade, he spoke flawless English, 

    I began the interview with one of the more celebrated cases he handled: the KGB recruitment of Aldrich Ames.  Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, had worked as a Russian mole between April 1985 and January 1994.   In those nine years, he rose, or was maneuvered by the KGB, into a top position in the CIA's highly-sensitive Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, which allowed him to deliver hundreds of top secrets to the KGB.  In return, according to Cherkashin, Ames received in cash between $20,000 and $50,000 for each delivery, which amounted to $4.6 million over the nine years.

    I asked Cherkashin about the weakness the KGB looked for in an American intelligence worker that might lead him to copy and steal top secret documents.  How did he spot a potential Ames? Was it a financial problem?  Was it a sexual vulnerability? Was it an ideological leaning?

  “Nothing so dramatic,” he answered.  What he looked for when assessing Ames’s potential was an intelligence officer who is both dissatisfied and antagonistic to the service for which he works.”

   “The classic disgruntle employee,” I interjected.

   “Any intelligence officer who strongly feels that his superiors are not listening to him, and that they are doing stupid things, is a candidate,” he continued.  He said he had found that the flaw in a prospect that could be most dependably exploited was not his greed, lust, or deviant behavior but his resentment over the way he was being treated.

    “Is that how you spotted Ames?”

“Actually he approached us, not vice versa.”  It was his job in the CIA to approach opposition KGB officers. “But yes we saw the potential,” he said. 

   Since Ames had been initially paid by Cherkashin $50,000 in cash for his first delivery, I asked whether he fit into the category of a disgruntled employee. “Wasn’t he a mercenary/” 

   “I knew from our intelligence reports that he needed money for debts stemming from his divorce,” he answered. “But he was also angry at the stupidity and paranoia of those running the CIA. Ames told me at our first secret meeting that they were misleading Congress by exaggerating the Soviet threat.” Cherkashin evaluated Ames as a man who felt not only slighted by his superiors but “helpless to do anything about it” within the bureaucracy of the CIA.  “The money we gave, even if he could spend only a small portion of it, gave him a sense of worth.”  He explained that the KGB had an entire team of psychologists in Moscow that worked on further exploiting Ames’s resentment at his superiors.

   The search for an adversary intelligence officer who resents his service was not limited to KGB recruiters.  It was also the “classic attitude” that the CIA sought to exploit in its adversaries, according to its former deputy director.  “You find someone working for the other side and tell him that he is not receiving the proper recognition, pay and honors due him,” Michael Morell said, pointing out that the same “psychological dynamic” could be used to motivate someone to “act alone” in gathering espionage material. 

      I next turned to an even more important KGB coup:  his Robert Hanssen case. Hanssen was the FBI counterintelligence officer who worked as a KGB mole for 22 years between 1979 and 2002 and had delivered even more documents to the Russian intelligence services than Hanssen. “Did Hanssen’s dissatisfaction with the FBI, or his objections to its policies, play a role in his recruitment?” I asked.

    “I didn’t recruit Hanssen,” Cherkashin replied, “He recruited himself.  I never even knew his name or where he worked.”  He added: “So I knew nothing about his motivation other than that he wanted cash.”

     “So he was mercenary,” I suggested.

     “All we knew was that he delivered valuable documents to us and asked for cash in return.” he said.  “We didn’t control him, he controlled us.”

An uncontrolled mole that provided secrets to the KGB and SVR for 22 years was very different from fictional moles in the spy movies.  I asked whether it would have been better if the KGB had him under its control.

    “Possibly,” Cherkashin answered, “but as it turned out Hanssen was our most valuable penetration in the Cold War.”

Unlike Ames, whose nine-year career as a mole could be managed by the KGB, Hanssen decided what secret documents to steal and when to make contact or a delivery.  He refused to even allow the KGB to suggest a site. All the communications with him were by letter or to a phone number in a used car ad Except for putting money into a dead drop, the KGB played only a passive role in the espionage.  “Could Hanssen really be called a mole?” I asked.

   “A mole is a term used in spy fiction,” he said.  “We prefer to the more general term ‘espionage source.” 

   “So anyone who delivers state secrets to the KGB, for whatever reason, is an espionage source?” I asked.

 “Certainly, if the information is valuable to us,” Cherkashin answered. “Hanssen delivered secrets exposing American human and electronic operations against Russia.  He was our most valuable espionage source.  It is the delivery of secrets, not the methods used, that counts.”

“If some unknown person simply delivered a trove of top-secret communications secrets to the doorstep of Russia would they it be accepted?” I asked with Snowden in mind.

    “I can’t say what the SVR would do today.  I am long retired” he said, with a nostalgic shake of his head. “But in my day, we needed some reason to believe to believe the gift was genuine.”

   “Would you need to vet the person delivering it?” 

   “With Hanssen we did not have that opportunity,” he said. “If we believed the documents were genuine, we would of course grab them.”

   The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton,  the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979.  Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the KGB.  On January 14, 1980, he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington DC and asked to see an intelligence officer.  After he was ushered into secure debriefing room, he said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but he wanted money in return.   What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton even though he was no longer working at the NSA, and Pelton no longer had access to the NSA.  In addition, since the FBI had 24 hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed entering it and also possibly had been recorded asking for an intelligence officer by electronic bugs that the KGB suspected that NSA had planted in the embassy.  What did the KGB do in a situation in which ex-civilian employee at the NSA possessed no documents?

Despite the risks involved, Cherkashin decided Pelton had to be debriefed by communications intelligence specialists. So he had him disguised as a utility worker and smuggled out in a van to the residential compound of the Ambassador in Georgetown. A few days later, he was dropped off at a shopping mall, “Why did you go to such effort if Pelton had neither documents nor access to the NSA?” I asked.

   “It was the information in his head that we wanted.”  Cherkashin said that as KGB rarely got access to any NSA officer, it was worth the risk.  So he was given $5,000 in cash and a plane ticket to Vienna, where he was domiciled at the residence of the Soviet ambassador to Austria.  A KGB’s electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for 15 days, were from 8 AM to 6 PM.  In them, Pelton managed to recall  Project A, a joint NSA-CIA-Navy operation in which submarines  surreptitiously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected a to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.  Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB.  

   “Did the information in his head proved valuable?” I asked.

   “As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was compromised by Pelton, we could use the cable to send to the NSA the information we wanted it to intercept.”   He said while actual NSA documents would have proved more useful than someone’s memories, “Our job is to take advantage of whatever we can get.”

   Two years later, Pelton was again flown to Vienna for a follow-up debriefing to see if he could recall any further details. Finally, in 1985, Pelton was arrested by the FBI and, like Ames and Hanssen, sentenced to life imprisonment.

    Looking at his watch, Cherkashin politely excused himself, saying he had work to do.  On parting, I signed a copy of my book on Angleton for him and thanked him for his insights.

  Through the eyes of the KGB, a penetration of American intelligence was clearly opportunistic.  If these practices continued, they put the Snowden case in a new light for me.  If Russian intelligence considered it worthwhile to send an ex-civilian worker at the NSA, such as Ronald Pelton, from Washington D.C. 2,000 miles to Austria so that its specialists could debrief him on the secrets he held in his head, it would have an even greater interest in exfiltrating Snowden from Hong Kong to get, aside from his documents, whatever secrets he held in his head.  If Russian intelligence was willing to opportunistically accept the delivery of U.S. secrets from an unknown espionage source that it neither recruited nor controlled, such as Hanssen, it would have little hesitancy in acquiring the secrets that Snowden had stolen on his own volition, even if Snowden acted for idealistic reasons.  If Russian intelligence focused its search pattern on disgruntled American intelligence workers, such as Ames, it is plausible that it spotted Snowden through his Internet rants against U.S. surveillance.   Even if it had missed Snowden in Hawaii, a disgruntled ex-civilian employee at the NSA would have received its full attention after he contacted Russian officials in Hong Kong.  While the tactics of the SVR may have changed since Cherkashin retired, its objectives remained the same. And the NSA remained its principal target.  Nor is there any reason to doubt that it still measures success in its ability to obtain, by whatever means, the secret sources and methods of its adversaries. Snowden was in a position, both with the documents he had taken and the knowledge he had in his head, to deliver the KGB such a coup. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Handler

As for his [Snowden’s] communication with the outside world, yes, I am his main contact

                 --Anatoly Kucherena, September 23, 2013

      Time was rapidly running out for me in Moscow.  On November 1st, I still had not been able to make contact with Anatoly Kucherena, and my flight back to New York was in five days. My fixer, Zamir, had been trying to arrange an appointment for three weeks but he had only received one call back from Kucherena’s assistant, Valentina Vladimirovna Kvirvova. She wanted to know how I knew Oliver Stone.  He told her of my part in Stone’s movie Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. That was the last he had heard from her.  Meanwhile a Moscow based journalist told me that she had waited 18 months to hear back from him giving up.  I also learned from a Russian researcher that Kucherena had not given a single interview to any journalist since his television interview with Sophie Shevardnadze on September 23, 2013.  And no Russian journalist, or any Moscow-based foreign journalist, had ever obtained an interview with Snowden.   At this point, Zamir was becoming increasingly doubtful about getting my access to either Kucherena or Snowden. 

    But I had another contact in Moscow.  When I had been investigating the 2006 Polonium poisoning of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, I had interviewed a number of people in Moscow, including Andrei Lugovoy.  A former KGB officer assigned to protecting the Kremlin’s top members in the 1990s, Lugovoy later opened his own security company. In 2005, he became a business associate of Litvinenko’s in gathering information, and made regular trips to London to meet with him.   Since he had tea with Litvinenko at the Millennium hotel in London on November 1, 2006, the day Litvinenko was poisoned, he became the main suspect in the British investigation. He could not be extradited, however.  After reconstructing the chronology of the crime, I established that Litvinenko had been contaminated with Polonium at a Japanese restaurant some four hours before his tea with Lugovoy.  I therefore wrote that Lugovoy could not have poisoned Litvinenko in the Millennium hotel, a finding that he said he greatly appreciated.

Lugovoy was elected to the Duma in 2008, and also hosted a 24 part television series espionage for which he was personally decorated by Putin. He was also now reputed to be in the inner circle of power in Moscow.  So I called him.

   We arranged to meet in the lobby bar of the National Hotel.  A short but well-built man with a bullet-style haircut, Lugovoy showed up promptly at 1 PM. After discussing some of the subsequent developments in the still-lingering Polonium investigation, I asked him if he knew Kucherena.

         “I don’t know him, but I know someone who does,” he answered. “Why are you interested in seeing Kucherena?”

      I told him that I wanted to speak to him about Snowden but that I had been unable to arrange a meeting.   

    “That’s no problem,” he said, raising his cell phone (which never left his hand.) He hit a number the speed dial, and spoke rapidly in Russian (which I do not understand.)  He cupped his hand over the phone and asked how long I would be in Moscow.

    After I told him that I was leaving on Friday, he spoke again in to the person on the other end. “You will have an appointment on Thursday,” he said. 

     Later that afternoon Valentina, Kucherena’s assistant, called to say that Kucherena would be happy to see me at his office at 6 PM on Thursday.  I didn’t ask Lugovoy who he had called or how this had happened. Clearly, whoever Lugovoy called had the power to arrange the meeting. Power evidently works in unseen ways in Putin’s Russia. 

Kucherena’s office was only two subway stops from the National hotel, and I arrived ten minutes early.  A receptionist showed me into a well-lit square room with an elegant table in the center.  There was a sumptuous basket of exotic fruit on the table and large portraits of racehorses on the walls.  Another door opened, and a tall, graceful woman came into the room and introduced herself as “Valentina.”   She was wearing a well-fitting black dress, striking jade necklace and high heels.  When she asked whether I would like anything to drink, it seemed more like the prelude to an elegant dinner party than an interview about Snowden.

As Kucherena did not speak English, I brought Zamir along to translate for the conversation, but Valentina also spoke very good English.  She apologized for the delay in responding to my requests, explaining that she received “thousands of requests” for interviews and did not have time to answer them.  When I asked how many were answered, she shrugged and said “not many.”

 At that moment, Kucherena entered with a jaunty step, a cherubic face and an untamed white hair. He was wearing grey slacks, a partially buttoned cashmere polo sweater and a fully engaging smile.

As I had learned from his entry in Wikipedia, he was born in a small village in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia in 1960, and he had obtained his law degree from the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute in 1991.   He opened his own law firm in Moscow in 1995.  Kucherena’s well-known friendship with Putin evidently had not hurt his law practice.  His clients had included such well-connected defendants as Viktor Yanukovych, the overthrown president of Ukraine in 2014; Grigory Leps, a Russian singer blacklisted by the U.S. for allegedly acting as a money courier for a Eurasian criminal organization; Valentin Kovalev, a former Russian Minister of Justice charged with corruption; and Suleyman Kerimov, a civil servant from Dagestan, who had amassed an estimated fortune of $7.1 billion.  Kerimov recently had been charged for manipulating a Potash cartel case in Belarus.  Most of these clients were reputed to be part of Putin’s inner circle.   

To break the ice, I asked him about Oliver Stone. I knew he had a small role in Oliver Stone’s forthcoming movie “Snowden.” in which he plays Snowden’s lawyer in Moscow.

   “I was impressed by how few takes he needed to shoot my scene,” he answered.  

   “How did you come to be Snowden’s lawyer?” I asked.

   “Snowden picked me from a roster of 15 lawyers with which he had been given.”  He then went to Sheremetyevo International Airport to meet his new client.  They met on the morning of Friday July 12, 2013.  At that point, he said that Snowden had been held virtually incommunicado for 20 days.  Other than Russian officials, the only person he had been allowed to see during this period was Assange’s aide, Sarah Harrison.

   “Where in the airport did you meet him?” I asked. Was it in a VIP lounge?”

   “It was in the transit zone,” he replied coyly. “That is all I can say.”  They spoke through a translator, as Snowden did not speak Russian.  By this time, Sarah Harrison had sent 21 countries petitions for asylum that were signed by Snowden.  Whatever their purpose, Kucherena did not consider them helpful.   “I told him that if he wanted to get sanctuary in Russia, he would have to immediately withdraw all the petitions in which he had asked other countries for asylum.”  Kucherena said that otherwise he could not represent him. Snowden agreed to that condition. 

  Later that afternoon Kucherena accompanied Snowden to area G9 in the transit zone where they emerged from a door marked “authorized personnel only” shortly before 5 PM.  The room was packed with representatives of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Wikileaks and other Moscow-based activist groups. They had been invited the previous  day by an emails signed “Edward Snowden”  instructing then to go  to Terminal F at Sheremetyevo International Airport where they would be met by airport personnel carrying a “G9.”  It was a rare, if not unprecedented, event, for an American citizen to defect to Russia. 

Wearing an open-neck blue shirt and badly-creased jacket, Snowden read a prepared statement that accused the United States government of violating the universal declaration of human rights and described himself as a victim of political persecution.      He then formally announced that he was “requesting asylum in Russia.”  

In discussing this meeting, Kucherena told me that Snowden had not intended to seek asylum in Russia when he arrived on June 23.  Since he also said he had not met Snowden prior to July 12th, I asked how he knew Snowden’s intentions.

     “When I accepted the case, I received Snowden’s dossier.” He answered. “I was able to see all his interviews.”

    Presumably Snowden’s dossier included his interviews with the FSB, SVR and other Russian security services.  If so, it would explain how Kucherena could be so certain that Snowden had brought “material” with him to Russia that he had not provided to journalists in Hong Kong.  Before meeting with Kucherena, I had met with Sophie Shevardnadze, the previously-mentioned grand-daughter of Politburo member Edward Shevardnadze and widely-followe3d television journalist.  She told me that Kucherena had personally approved the translation of the interview into English.  So I asked Kucherena about his 2013 interview with her, which was the last interview he had given about Snowden.  It will be recalled that in response to a question about whether Snowden had secret material with him in Russia, Kucherena had said “certainly.”  Was this exchange accurate?

   “It was accurate,” he answered.

Snowden himself had said in Hong Kong that he had only given journalists some of the state secrets he had stolen and that he deemed others too sensitive for journalists.    So I sought to find out from Kucherena which documents Snowden had taken to Russia.  I went about it in a roundabout way.    When Shevardnadze asked him about the secret material Snowden had might reveal in Russia, Kucherena pointedly called her attention to Snowden’s CIA service, suggesting that he might possess CIA files.  I also knew that in his roman a clef novel which Oliver Stone had optioned for $1 million, he had Joshua Frost, the thinly veiled Snowden-based character, steal a vast number of CIA documents that could do great damage to U.S. intelligence.  By retaining them, Frost made himself a prime target of the CIA.  So I asked “Is Joshua Frost fact or fiction?”    

 “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “If I said he was Snowden it would violate the attorney client privilege.”
    “I understand,” I persisted, “But did Snowden do what Frost did in your book.”
     “That is for you to decide,” he answered with a sly smile.  “It’s my first novel.”

When I asked if he could arrange for me to see Snowden, he said that first I would have to first submit my questions to Ben Wizner, Snowden’s American lawyer.  He made it clear to me that the exposure of Snowden to journalists, or at least the vetting of journalists, had been outsourced to Wizner, “After that the final decision is up to Snowden,” he said.  That seemed to conclude the interview but, as I got up to leave, he added, “His legal defense is fairly expensive and Snowden is running out of money.”
    I was intrigued by this parting remark.  Snowden, as far as I knew, didn’t need a legal defense because he was not charged with a crime in Russia and the United States had no extradition treaty with Russia.  But I asked, “Could I make a contribution to his defense fund?”
             “It would be greatly appreciated,” he said, “We will supply you with instructions to wire the money to our bank.”
             “How much should I send?”
             “That’s up to you,” he said, getting up to walk me to the door. “I should add for the record that the contribution will not influence Snowden's decision to see you.”
             “I will send the wiring instructions” Valentina said as I left. “I hope you come back to Moscow.”

While Kucherena did not arrange an interview with Snowden, as I had hoped, he did something I considered more important.  He confirmed the accuracy of his September 2013c assertion that Snowden had brought secret material to Russia; material he had not given to journalists in Hong Kong.   After what I learned from Cherkashin about the lengths that Russian intelligence would go to obtain U.S. communications intelligence secrets, I viewed Snowden’s access to this material to be a crucially important part of the mystery.
    As for Snowden, I would send my questions to Ben Wizner and, if he and Snowden approved them, I would fly back to Moscow.  But I decided that I was not going to send money to Kucherena— or to Snowden.

                                     PART SIX

                                  CONCLUSIONS





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Snowden’s Choices


“It is the choices we make that show who we truly are”

                          J.K Rowling, the Philosopher’s Stone


     Whereas Russian authorities had the opportunity to thoroughly debrief Snowden as to his motive for stealing state secrets, US authorities did not have that opportunity (and it seems unlikely that they will have it in the foreseeable future.)  So Snowden’s motive is a missing part of the puzzle. It also cannot even be assumed that he had a single consistent motive during the nine-month course of his illicit copying of documents.  Snowden has shown, if nothing else, that he is adaptable.   He may have began taking documents for one reason and found other reasons as he proceeded in his quest. Many of the circumstances of his probes, contacts, theft and escape remain disputed by his supporters and shrouded by the secrecy of the NSA.  What we do know is that Snowden made four extraordinary choices during the nine month period in 2013 that speak to the concerns that may have guided his actions.    In the case of a classified intelligence breach, as in a chess game, the sequence of moves a player makes provides an important clue to his strategy.


    The first move that Snowden made in preparation of the Level 3 breach was switching jobs on March 15th 2013.  Snowden chose to leave his job as a system administrator at Dell SecureWorks to take job at Booz Allen as an analyst-in-training. His motive was not money, as it was a lower-paying position.  At the time, he made this choice he had already set up an encrypted channel with Laura Poitras for the purpose of sending her secret material.  But he did not have to change jobs to send her secrets. So what was his purpose in making this fateful choice?


The job change was not necessary to expose NSA domestic activities. If he had only wanted to be a whistle-blower, there were ample documents about the NSA’s activities already available to him on the NSANet.  He also had access at Dell to the administrative file which contained the FISA court orders issued every three months to Verizon.  In addition, as the NSA’s damage assessment established, before switching jobs Snowden had already taken most of the documents pertaining to the NSA’s domestic operations that he could have supplied to Poitras and Greenwald for whistle-blowing purposes.  Indeed, while still at Dell, it will be recalled, he had he had told Poitras he had a copy of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a document in which President Obama authorized the NSA to tap into fiber cables crossing the United States.   Snowden described it to her as “a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House.” True, he took a more recently-issued FISA warrant and PRISM presentation in April after switching jobs, but he could have just as easily taken the January 2013 version of the FISA warrant from the administrative file of Dell.  It would have had the same explosive effect in the media. 




Nor did he switch jobs to lessen the risk of getting caught. He actually put himself in far greater jeopardy by switching jobs. At Dell he was relatively safe from apprehension since he could take documents, such as the above-mentioned Presidential Policy Directive 20, from access points at the NSA shared by many of his peers. Since these shared access points provided the equivalent of a common reading room at a library, it would be difficult to trace the theft of any documents taken from them to a particular user. Indeed, if he just wanted to expose the NSA’s domestic operations, he could have done the entire operation at Dell.  He even could have sent Poitras documents anonymously over his own TOR software and server.  And he could have remained in his self-described “paradise” in Hawaii with his girl friend. 
     Yet he chose to move to Booz Allen he also greatly increased the risk of exposure because the auditing system at Booz Allen could trace back unauthorized copying (though not in real time.)  Presumably he knew, as he later told Greenwald and Poitras, that stealing documents at the Booz Allen job meant that he would either go to prison or escape from America.  He didn’t want to face prison time, so the job change required an escape plan.  In keeping with the latter option, only about a week after he started work at the Booz Allen-managed facility, he submitted a request for a medical leave of absence.

   We can safely assume that the reason for him to make this risky switch in employment was because he wanted something beyond the whistle-blowing documents.  He wanted now to get documents that were not available at the Dell job.  One such document he took was the top-secret Congressional Budget Justification Book for Fiscal Year 2013. This “black budget,” as it is called in Congress, contained the entire Intelligence Community’s priorities for, among other things, monitoring the activities of potential adversaries and terrorist organizations. It specified the money requested by not only the NSA, but the CIA, DIA, National Reconnaissance Office and other intelligence services.  Snowden could not have considered the budget illegitimate, since is duly approved by both houses of Congress and the President.  Nor could he objected to its secrecy since he himself had sworn oaths to protect all classified documents to which he was privy for the past eight years.  If it was not for purposes of whistle-blowing, presumably he had another purpose for taking such a document.  It certainly held value to other actors.  “For our enemies, having it is like having the playbook of the opposing NFL team,” said CIA Deputy Director Morell in 2015. “I guarantee you that the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, would have paid millions of dollars for such a document.”   Unlike Ames, Hanssen and Pelton, Snowden was not after money.  He sought documents that enhanced his power and importance.


  He made no secret of this part of his motive after he got safely to Hong Kong. As will be recalled in answer to a question from the journalist Lana Lam about his motive for changing jobs, he answered that he took the Booz Allen job to get access to secret lists that were not available to him by working for Dell.  These documents certainly increases his value to other nations since they included Level 3 lists revealing the NSA’s sources in Russia, China and other foreign countries.  


    Snowden also wanted more than NSA secrets.  He used his new position, and widened access at Booz Allen, to go after secret documents from the intelligence services of Britain, Australia. New Zealand and Israel He revealed this operation only after receiving sanctuary in Russia.  He told an interviewer that by moving to his new Booz Allen job as an infrastructure analyst he gained the ability to pry secrets out of the allied of the NSA. “I had a special level of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac’,” he said.  This “priv ac” status, he further explained, allowed him to request files from other services cooperating with U.S. intelligence.  By way of example, he described one file from the British GCHQ cipher service that he copied, stole and provided to other parties.  It exposed  a legally-authorized British operation to collect electronic data on terrorist matters in Pakistan by tapping into Cisco routers used by telecom companies in Asia.  This GCHQ operation, as he himself recognized, violated neither British nor American law.  He told a BBC interviewer in regard to that file:”What's scariest is not what the government is doing that's unlawful, but what they're doing that is completely lawful.” So his criteria for taking such documents were not their illegality.  Nor did the fact they were lawful actions stop him from taking highly-sensitive GCHQ documents referring to them.  In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job,   he also used this same newly-acquired “Priv Ac” at the NSA to steal files from the Israeli, Canadian and Australian intelligence services.


      Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the purpose of penetrating other/r western intelligence services is not the conventional mission of a whistle-blowing.  In the parlance of intelligence operations, an employee of an intelligence service who changes his jobs\ solely to steal the more valuable secrets of services is called an “expanding penetration.”  


    It is not possible to believe that Snowden did not know the damage that the highly-sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its allies.  Even if they did not reveal any unlawful American activities, could do immense damage to Western intelligence.  Indeed, he said as much once he got to Moscow.  In respect to China alone, he  told James Risen, the New York Times’ national security reporter, in October 2013 that he had had “access to every [NSA] target, every [NSA] active operation” that could turn out the NSA’s “lights” in China.  He no doubt assumed that he had the same power to close down the NSA’s operations in Russia.  


His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began working at Booz Allen.  .  It was a carefully calculated move.  As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance that by switching to the job at Booz Allen he would gain the opportunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’ secretive National Threat Operations Center’s  chief business was, as its name suggests, countering direct threats from China, Russia and other adversary states, and that, to deal with these threats, the NSA had used sophisticated methods to hack into the computers of adversaries.  The NSA was even able to remotely gain entry to adversary computers that were not hooked into a network.  “It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” Snowden later said from Moscow.  He had a planned target: getting the lists of the enemy computers that the NSA hacked into. 


    He also knew he was undertaking s a dangerous enterprise.  He would tell Poitras in Hong Kong that the NSA would literally “kill” to protect their secrets.  He also said he could be seized in a rendition operation by the CIA in Hong Kong. He even foresaw the probability that he “would be in an orange jumpsuit, super-max prison in isolation or Guantanamo.”  


     He knowingly chose this course, despite the possibility of assassination or imprisonment, presumably because he believed the value of the secrets he would obtain by switching jobs outweighed the risk of imprisonment. Part of his calculus might have been the belief that the NSA lists, GCHQ documents and other material in his possession could give him great leverage, if he chose to exert it, in his future dealings with intelligence services (including the NSA.)  If so, his choice to widen his access was also a choice to empower himself. 


      The second choice of consequence that Snowden made was to make Hong Kong his first stop.   He had many other options.  He could have remained in America, as almost all previous whistle-blowers in the past had chosen to do.  If he did that, he would have to make his case in court (and, in that case, the level 3 documents he took might have been retrieved before they fell into unauthorized hands.)  He could have also chosen to make a cross-border escape to a country that did not have an active extradition treaty with the United States.  He could have, for example, taken a direct flight to Brazil, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.  Brazil also had the advantage of being the home country of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who he wanted to break the whistle-blowing story.  As Greenwald seemed (at least to Snowden) hesitant to travel 12 times zones away to meet an anonymous source, Brazil also would have been a more certain place to meet Greenwald.   If some consideration by Snowden precluded Brazil as a destination, Snowden could have also gone to Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, Iceland, or Venezuela, which are also countries that do not have active extradition treaties with the United States.        Yet, instead of proceeding to a country from which he could not have been extradited, he flew to Hong Kong, which had a vigorously enforced extradition agreement.


     His reason for choosing was not to keep a previously arranged rendezvous with a journalist.  As previously mentioned, when he left Hong Kong not a single journalist had agreed to meet him in Hong Kong.  Indeed, Gellman considered Hong Kong, as he put it, “in the jurisdiction of a country that’s unfriendly to the United States,” and notified Snowden that he would not be able to journey to Hong Kong.    Yet, even without any appointments with journalists, he chose to fly to Hong Kong.  So his choice was not based on either evading extradition or on accommodating journalists.

       He chose Hong Kong for another reason. He told Greenwald Hong Kong, as a part of China, could provide him protection from any countermeasures by U.S. intelligence agencies. He made that consideration clear, saying that that Snowden’s “first priority was to ensure his physical safety from US interference.” Hong Kong “was part of China’s territories, he [Snowden] reasoned, and American agents would find it harder to operate there than other places,” according to Greenwald.   Snowden further reckoned that China’s control over Hong Kong prevented “American agents from breaking down the door” of the hotel room and from seizing him.   Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA station chief, told me that Snowden was correct in his assessment of that Hong Kong advantage. Drumheller said that Hong Kong was “home court” for the Chinese intelligence services. It played a: dominant role” in running the police, airport passport control and security regime there. According to Drumheller, this reality limited the role that American and British intelligence operatives could play there and Snowden would be protected in Hong Kong against an intrusion by America. “Snowden obviously knew this from his training at the CIA,” Drumheller said.

      As the Chinese service was under no such restrictions, Snowden had gained protection at a price.   While no US or British intelligence operatives would be in a position to retrieve the NSA files he had brought with him to Hong Kong, Chinese operatives, and their allies in the intelligence war, would have a free hand in Hong Kong.  Yet, Snowden chose to put his physical safety in the hands of China.
       One reason why Snowden may not have been overly concerned about Hong Kong’s extradition treaty with the U.S. was that he had never intended to test it by staying in Hong Kong after his media events.  Snowden told the editor of the Guardian from the safety of Moscow, Hong Kong was only a temporary stop over.  He added in the interview that allowing himself to become part of an extradition proceeding in the Hong Kong court was not part of his plan. If so, the Hong Kong lawyers, who believed they had been retained pro bono to battle against extradition, were part of a charade.  Hong Kong merely was a protected stopover. The stopover may have provided him with a further advantage.  If he had gone directly to his next destination, Moscow, and he provided the same journalists with the same documents at a press conference in Moscow, his status as a whistle-blower might have been viewed with less sympathy in the media.  Even the Guardian, for example, might have been reluctant to publish a Moscow-based story revealing British and American communications intelligence secrets,  

   The third choice Snowden made, and the choice that most effectively defined him to the public, was to reveal himself as the man behind the leak in a video in Hong Kong.   He not only  identified himself as the person who stole the government documents published by the Guardian and Washington Post, but he incriminated himself further on camera by allowing Poitras to film him actually disclosing  NSA’s secret operations to Greenwald.  By disclosing classified data to Greenwald, an unauthorized person, he intentionally burned his bridges.