The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

7 THE PLANET’S MOST WANTED MAN

It had been around 3am local time when the Guardian broke the first of Snowden’s NSA stories. Returning to his Hong Kong hotel room early the next morning, the three reporters found the whistleblower ecstatic.

His revelation was there, running on CNN at the top of the news. Snowden turned the sound up on his hotel TV. Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s anchor, was sitting with a panel of three pundits: they were discussing the possible identity of the Guardian’s mysterious source. Who was the leaker? Someone in the White House, perhaps? A disaffected general? A KGB super-mole? It was a moment of some irony. ‘It was funny watching them speculate who might have leaked it when you are sitting beside that person,’ MacAskill said.

The public response surprised even Snowden. Posts on the internet were massively supportive; already a grassroots movement, Restore the Fourth Amendment, was springing up. The rapid publication was good for his relations with the Guardian: it demonstrated to Snowden that the paper was acting in good faith. All along his goal had been to spark a debate; he felt that the Verizon story was achieving that, making a big splash.

MacAskill wondered if the leaker was going to be smug, thrilled or proprietary to find himself at the centre of world events. Remarkably, he was totally impassive; he listened to CNN intently. He seemed to understand the enormity of what had happened. From this moment there was no way back. If he flew home to Hawaii now, arrest and incarceration would follow. Snowden’s life was never going to be the same again.

So what next specifically? The most likely scenario for him, as Snowden sketched it, was that the Chinese police would arrest him in Hong Kong. There would be a legal tussle. Possibly for a few months. Maybe even a year. At the end of this he would be sent back to the US. And then… well, decades and decades in jail.

Snowden had turned over an enormous quantity of material on portable drives. This included not only the NSA’s internal files, but also British material emanating from GCHQ and apparently trustingly handed over by the Brits to their US colleagues.

‘How many British documents are on these?’ MacAskill asked.

Snowden said, ‘About 50,000 to 60,000.’

He had given months of thought to his planned dealings with the media. He was fastidious. He wanted a series of strict conditions for handling secret material. He was insistent that NSA/GCHQ documents disclosing spying should go to the respective subjects of surveillance. He felt Hong Kong media should have information relating to spying on Hong Kong, the Brazilian material to Brazilian media and so on. He was categorical on this point. If, on the other hand, the material fell into the hands of third-party adversaries such as the Russians or the Chinese, this would lay him open to the damaging charge that he was little more than a defector or foreign agent – which he wasn’t.

Snowden was alert to the possibility that foreign intelligence services would seek his files, and was determined to prevent this. As a spy, one of his jobs had been to defend American secrets from Chinese attack. He knew the capabilities of America’s foes. Snowden made clear repeatedly that he didn’t want to damage US intelligence operations abroad.

‘I had access to full rosters of anybody working at the NSA. The entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world. The locations of every station we have, all of their missions… If I just wanted to damage the US I could have shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. That was never my intention,’ he said.

He put it in even more vivid terms, when subsequently accused of ‘treachery’: ‘Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace, petting a phoenix, by now.’

During the days of debriefing in Hong Kong, Snowden said citizens in countries that recognised whistleblowing and public-interest reporting had a right to know what was going on. He wanted the Guardian and other media partners to filter out anything that was operational and might damage legitimate intelligence activities. These were his conditions. All agreed.

Technical precautions were taken. The files were on memory cards. They were strongly encrypted with multiple passwords. No one person knew all the passwords to access a file.

The US freelance journalists approached by Snowden now had in their possession a large treasure trove of classified material. The WikiLeaks disclosures, published by the Guardian in London in 2010, were of US diplomatic cables and war-logs from Afghanistan and Iraq leaked by the US private Chelsea Manning. A few – just 6 per cent – were classified at the relatively modest level of ‘secret’. The Snowden files were in a different league. They were ‘top secret’ and above. There had once been a melodramatic defection of Cambridge-educated spies to Soviet Moscow – Burgess, Maclean and Philby. But there had never been a mass documentary leak at this vertiginous altitude before.

Snowden generally wore just a casual T-shirt in his room, but on Thursday 6 June, Greenwald organised a switch. Snowden put on a grey, ironed shirt. He moved from his regular perch on the hotel bed to a chair: behind him a mirror was positioned. It made the room seem less tiny and cramped.

Snowden was about to record his first public interview. It would be the moment when he would introduce himself to the world and would confess – or, rather, proudly own up – to being the source behind the NSA leaks. He told Greenwald: ‘I have no intention of hiding who I am, because I know I have done nothing wrong.’

It was a bold and counterintuitive move, and one that Snowden had contemplated for a long time. His reasons impressed his journalist partners as sound. First, he told MacAskill, he had seen close up the disastrous impact on colleagues of leak inquiries pursuing anonymous sources. He had witnessed the ‘terrible consequences for people under suspicion’. He said he didn’t want to put his colleagues through such an ordeal.

Second, he was aware of the NSA’s ferocious technical capacities; it was only a matter of time before they tracked him down. His plan all along had been that after the first few stories, he would make himself known. This didn’t mean, however, that Snowden wished to emulate Chelsea Manning, whose arrest in 2010 and harsh jail treatment he had followed closely. Snowden said: ‘Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good.’ As a result, Manning was due to face a court martial in Fort Meade, next door to the NSA’s headquarters – one that was shortly to sentence the young soldier to 35 years in prison.

Snowden intimated that Manning had proved the point that it was impossible for a whistleblower to get a fair trial in the US. A long spell in jail would also stymie the public debate Snowden wanted.

Poitras had been filming Snowden from the first encounter; her camera had had a freezing effect on their early interactions, but now Snowden agreed to talk directly into her lens. He was, as he put it, a ‘virgin source’. Snowden had previously shunned all contact with reporters and the media. He had even avoided showing his face in his girlfriend’s blog. But he was also acutely aware of how much was at stake. What was ultimately important, Snowden accepted, was the public’s verdict. In this context, an interview would help shape perceptions.

Greenwald sat opposite Snowden. He asked the questions. As a lawyer and experienced broadcaster, Greenwald was comfortable with televised interviews. But Snowden’s own on-screen manner would be an unknown quantity.

Snowden, however, gave a remarkable performance for a media newbie, with fluent answers and a cogent account of what had motivated him to take such a radical step. Most importantly, he appeared eminently sane.

Asked why he had decided to become a whistleblower, Snowden said he had struggled inside the system, before finally concluding he had no alternative but to go outside it: ‘When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for these sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee.’

What he seen had ‘disturbed’ him deeply. ‘Even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded,’ he told the Guardian. ‘The storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point… you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.’

He added, by way of explaining his own decision to blow the whistle, with all the foreseeable consequences for the rest of his life: ‘You realise that that’s the world you helped create and it’s gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression.’

MacAskill, who watched, gripped, as Poitras filmed, felt Snowden came across even better on camera than in person.

For the three journalists, those Hong Kong nights and days blurred into one another: a succession of gruelling work periods, fuelled by excitement, adrenaline and paranoia.

At the Mira, Poitras was soon able to show her video edit to the other two. She had turned Snowden’s interview into a 17-minute film, beautifully framed and with a set-up shot at the beginning showing Hong Kong harbour and a velvety sky. Its title said simply: ‘PRISM Whistleblower’. They discussed possible cuts, with Poitras eventually crunching the interview down to 12-and-a-half minutes, and releasing a second interview later.

‘I felt as if he had been thrust into the middle of a spy movie,’ MacAskill says. How on earth were they safely to ship the key material over to New York and London?

Talking to the Guardian’s editor via encrypted chat, MacAskill said the group needed technical help. David Blishen, the Guardian’s systems editor, was a man who had skills that few working journalists possessed. He also understood how the editorial process functioned. During the WikiLeaks investigation, Blishen helped co-ordinate the redaction of names of sources who had talked to US diplomats and might be at risk if exposed in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Belarus. (This was an important but ultimately futile exercise; in the summer of 2011, six months after the first stories appeared based on US diplomatic cables, Julian Assange released the entire un-redacted cache of documents.)

Blishen was summoned, headed for the airport, and arrived in Hong Kong the next day. For him, too, the trip was nostalgic. He was born in the then colony in 1972; his father, a British official, had been stationed there. When MacAskill joined him at breakfast the two talked about Scottish newspapers where they had both worked. ‘I was none the wiser why I was really there,’ Blishen says. ‘Ewen gave nothing away.’ Afterwards, MacAskill told Blishen to leave his mobile at the hotel reception, and proposed a walk. Once they were outside, MacAskill gave him a memory card; a small, flat, square chip. The SD card didn’t look much. Though it was pretty large – 32 gigabytes.

Blishen needed to transmit Snowden’s video back to Guardian US in New York. Blishen watched the video first, and he was impressed: ‘He [Snowden] is articulate. He seemed principled. With Assange and Manning, people can question if they are rational. Ed seemed completely normal and plausible.’ Taking the edited version, he anxiously jumped into a taxi to get back to his own hotel in Central.

The cabbie asked Blishen in sing-song English: ‘Do you want to go and see girls? They cheap. Very pretty. Do you like Asian girls?’

Blishen needed to get to his room fast. He made clear his lack of interest. The cabbie thought for a moment. His face brightened: ‘Oh, you like boys! Boys! Like me?’ Blishen replied wearily: ‘I’m very boring. I just want to go to my hotel.’ The cabbie persisted: ‘What do you want to do at your hotel?’ Even though it was only 7.30pm, Blishen told the driver he wanted to sleep. ‘I was his worst, dullest passenger ever.’

Back at the Lan Kwai Fong Hotel, Blishen crypto-messaged the Guardian’s James Ball, in New York. He uploaded the video file via a secure connection in an encrypted folder. He sent over the password separately. Disaster ensued. The Guardian US team proved unable to open the file. Time was running out. In the end, the video file had to go again unencrypted, and potentially hackable by the NSA, though still via secure connection. To everyone’s relief, it arrived unmolested.

All along, Snowden had made clear that he planned to reveal himself. In New York, the record of Snowden actually speaking was nevertheless cathartic. And reassuring. ‘We were completely blown away. We thought he was cool and plausible. Everything about him seemed credible,’ Millar says. When the moment arrived, with the video ready to go live, the atmosphere in the newsroom was deeply emotional. ‘It was a terrifying moment,’ Gibson adds. The editorial question remained: was this the right thing to do? Once again Snowden was making his own strategic choices – playing his increasingly limited hand of cards his own way.

Five people, including Rusbridger, were in the office. The video went up around 3pm local time. ‘It was like a bomb going off,’ says Rusbridger. ‘There are a silent few seconds after a bomb explodes when nothing happens.’ The TV monitors were set to different channels; for almost an hour they carried pre-recorded Sunday news. Then at 4pm, the top of the hour, the story erupted. Each network carried Snowden’s image. CNN aired the entire 12-minute video.

It was 3am in Hong Kong when the video was posted online. Twitter instantly exploded. It was to become the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history.

‘It’s a rare thing for a source to come out in public like that. So we knew this video was going to be big,’ MacAskill recalls. ‘The choreography of several huge stories followed by the video was terrific.’

One moment, Snowden was known only to his friends and family, and a few colleagues. Then suddenly he became a global phenomenon, no longer just an individual but a lightning rod for all sorts of conflicting views about the state, the boundaries of privacy and security, and even the entire modern condition.

Snowden took all of this with sangfroid and humour. Sitting in room 1014 he chatted online with Greenwald and MacAskill, and joked wryly about his appearance, and the online comments it provoked. It was the first time he had seen the video. (Poitras had sent it to him before but he had had problems with his internet connection and couldn’t access it.) There was one inescapable corollary: now Snowden’s identity was out, he had just become the most hunted man on the planet.

The chase was already on. Greenwald, in one of his many TV interviews, had been captioned by CNN as ‘Glenn Greenwald, Hong Kong’ – a pretty big clue to everyone watching as to the location of the Guardian’s source. The local Chinese media and international journalists now studied every frame of the video for clues. They were initially thrown off by Poitras’s opening shot, filmed from the W Hotel. They assumed Snowden was there too. But one enterprising hack then used Twitter to identify the Mira from its lamps.

By Monday 10 June, Snowden was packing his belongings to leave the hotel, as Poitras filmed him for the last time. She felt protective towards him. She had known him the longest, and had believed in him from the beginning. She gave him a hug. ‘I don’t know what he planned for that moment. I had no idea what his next move was,’ she says.

Snowden vanished.

At the W Hotel, MacAskill popped out to get a cup of coffee, and to buy himself a suit and a shirt. He had brought enough clothes for a two-day assignment. A crew from CNN doorstepped him. When he returned from Marks and Spencer he found a scene of chaos. TV crews and reporters had staked out the lobby. Not only that but the management said the hotel was now ‘full’ and asked them to leave. They slipped out via a service lift to a waiting taxi and moved into the Sheraton. By the evening, the hacks had found them again. Before going to sleep, MacAskill piled chairs in front of his door. This might give him some warning if someone came for him, he reasoned.

Two days passed. Greenwald, MacAskill and Poitras marked the end of their trip with wine and cheese in Poitras’s room, overlooking the harbour. MacAskill crashed out, exhausted. In the early hours, Poitras rang with alarming news. Snowden had sent a message saying he was in danger. He hinted that he was about to be arrested, and signed off ominously. MacAskill phoned Snowden’s Hong Kong lawyers, who were now dealing with his case. No response. He called the police station. Recorded message. Two hours later one of the lawyers phoned back to say Snowden was OK. The details were hazy but it appeared Snowden had survived a close call.

How much longer could he hold out until the US grabbed him?