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

9 YOU’VE HAD YOUR FUN

Up on the otherwise silent third floor of Kings Place, a late-night cleaner steered his Hoover around the group clustered at a computer. He was busy chatting in Spanish on his mobile as he passed, and did not seem to register their unease at the sight of him.

Under the eye of deputy editor Paul Johnson, a painfully slow assembly and formatting process was taking place through the night, not to the normal online Guardian network, but on to a big orange LaCie external hard drive – one of the few unused items on the premises capable of holding scores of gigabytes. The stuff was Snowden’s – thousands of highly classified leaked documents in a heavily encrypted form.

It included more than 50,000 files belonging to British intelligence. GCHQ had apparently exported them over to the US, and allowed them to fall into the hands of this junior US private contractor. But one of the reasons for Johnson’s nervousness was that possession of these documents back in Britain presented special – and scary – legal problems.

The Guardian’s current sleek glass-walled London offices give little hint of the paper’s nonconformist Manchester origins back in 1821. But the lobby does have a bust of a formidable bearded figure; this is CP Scott, legendary editor for 57 and a half years. His famous dictum ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’ is still the Guardian’s animating principle.

Inspired by CP Scott’s tough-mindedness, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger had handled some big leaks in the past, of which WikiLeaks had been the most recent and famous. But this one was without precedent.

British journalists do not enjoy the constitutional free speech protection of their US counterparts. There is also a strong cultural understanding in the US that journalism has a key function in society. Although this can lead to establishment-minded behaviour sometimes, it has also made possible a tradition of investigative reporting in the spirit of Watergate, when two young Washington Post journalists brought down President Nixon in the 1970s.

Britain, by contrast, has a repressive culture of state secrecy. At the very moment Woodward and Bernstein were being fêted in Washington for their Watergate disclosures, some young journalists in Britain wrote an article called ‘The Eavesdroppers’. It revealed for the first time the mere existence of GCHQ as a British radio spying agency. They were promptly had up and convicted at the Old Bailey under the Official Secrets Act. One, a US citizen named Mark Hosenball, was deported without a right to trial as a purported ‘threat to British national security’.

Against this history, the challenge of publishing top-secret GCHQ documents in a British paper was a sizeable one.

The Official Secrets Act, passed amid fears of German espionage in 1911 and updated in 1989, makes it a crime for British officials to leak intelligence information. But it also has clauses that potentially criminalise journalists. While there is no specific public interest defence so the Guardian’s editor could be caught by provisions that make it an offence to publish intelligence information, such a disclosure has to be deemed damaging. The only arguable defence would be that the published article was not in fact damaging or, at any rate, not intentionally so. Police moves could therefore be just round the corner.

Mere possession of the Snowden files in London could also lead to a civil gag order, if the British government got to hear about their presence. The files were undoubtedly highly confidential and, while unlikely to identify James Bond-style undercover secret agents, they were certainly the property of the government. National security was at stake.

Under the UK’s law of confidence, a judge could quite possibly be persuaded to grant a government request for an immediate injunction banning all publication of such material, and demanding the files’ return. The paper could challenge this through the courts, by arguing there was a public interest in what it was disclosing. But at best, the case could embroil Rusbridger in a lengthy, uncertain and costly legal battle. In the meantime the paper would be unable to report on any of the documents’ contents. An injunction would therefore be a journalistic disaster.

Hunkered down the next day with prominent media QC Gavin Millar, Rusbridger considered his legal options. The 100 per cent safe course was to destroy all the UK files at once. Another safe alternative was to hand the files to a security-cleared politician and call for an inquiry into their contents – the obvious recipient was former Conservative foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind. He now chaired the notoriously weak parliamentary intelligence and security committee which was supposed to oversee bodies such as GCHQ. Rifkind would probably hand the files straight back to the spies themselves, unread.

Millar’s advice was one thing. But Rusbridger also had to take into consideration his obligations towards Snowden. Snowden ‘had risked his life to get hold of this stuff’, the editor felt. Furthermore, Snowden had given the material to the Guardian because he believed Congress couldn’t be trusted. The special US courts that dealt with intelligence matters met in secret. Only a newspaper could begin the debate he wanted. And it couldn’t take place if the public remained clueless as to the extent of the state’s suspicion-less surveillance.

‘Of all the journalist ethical dilemmas you have to face in life, it was a fairly big one,’ Rusbridger says.

He decided to ask some trusted staff to make a detailed study of the files. The data-set was unwieldy. A few documents were obviously sensitive. But the majority were confusing and corporate: PowerPoints, training slides, management reports, diagrams of data-mining programs. Much was unclear, although it was evident that GCHQ’s technical capacities and sheer ambition were very great. And that GCHQ’s ‘special relationship’ with its sister organisation the NSA went surprisingly deep.

The Guardian team set up a small ‘war room’ and were tough about security. A guard was posted 24 hours a day on the corridor to check IDs against a highly limited list. All phones were banned: a row of BlackBerrys and smartphones sat on a table outside with their owners’ names on yellow Post-it notes. The windows of the bunker were papered over. All the computers were new. None had ever been connected to the internet or any other network – a precaution against hacking or phishing attacks. They were to remain ‘air-gapped’ throughout.

Multiple passwords were needed to log in; no staff member knew more than one password. Work was written and saved on USB sticks; nothing went on the network. In the corner an air-conditioning unit gave off a low hum. There was also a shredder.

Without natural light and strictly off-limits to cleaners, the bunker soon became frowsty. ‘It smells like a teenage boy’s bedroom in here,’ said one visitor.

Posted onto a whiteboard was a memo from Rusbridger: ‘Edward Snowden approached the Guardian because he says people have no idea of the extent of what he regards as the surveillance state. He argues that technology has run ahead of the law or the ability of anyone – citizens, courts, press or Congress – to have meaningful oversight of what is happening. This is why we have the documents.’

The memo added: ‘We should search for material relevant to these concerns which are of high public importance. We are not engaged in a general fishing expedition.’

The team interrogating Snowden’s material was made up of trusted senior journalists. It included Nick Hopkins, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, data editor James Ball, veteran Nick Davies and Julian Borger, who shuttled between London and New York. Greenwald in Brazil was lead reporter. MacAskill operated out of the US.

Having the material was one thing, making sense of it another. At first the reporters had no idea what ‘strap one’ and ‘strap two’ meant. It was only later they realised these were classifications beyond top secret. Greenwald had given MacAskill one helpful clue – look for a program called TEMPORA. On day one the team stayed until midnight, returning the next day at 8am. The process became easier when TEMPORA led them to GCHQ’s internal ‘Wiki’, which Snowden had uploaded. Mostly, it was written in plain English.

Soon the board was covered in the codenames of NSA/GCHQ programs – SAMUEL PEPYS, BIG PIGGY, BAD WOLF. The early stages of document analysis were heavy-going. ‘The documents were seriously technical, fantastically dull and utterly brilliant,’ Hopkins says. Hopkins would shout: ‘What does QFD mean?’ Someone would answer: ‘Query-focused database.’ And what’s a ‘10gps Bearer’? Or MUTANT BROTH? MUSCULAR? EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE? And so on.

One of the first shocks revealed was that GCHQ had bugged foreign leaders at two G20 summit meetings hosted in London in 2009. Labour premier Gordon Brown and foreign secretary David Miliband apparently authorised this spying.

The agency had set up fake local internet cafes equipped with key-logging software. This allowed GCHQ to hack delegates’ passwords, which could be exploited later. GCHQ also penetrated their BlackBerrys to monitor email messages and phone calls. A team of 45 analysts kept a real-time log of who phoned whom during the summit. Turkey’s finance minister and 15 other members of his delegation were among the targets. This had, of course, nothing whatever to do with terrorism.

The timing of the Guardian’s discovery was piquant. David Cameron was about to host another international summit for G8 countries on the picturesque banks of Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. Presidents Obama and Putin would be dropping in, and other heads of state. Would GCHQ bug them too?

Fearing an injunction any moment, Paul Johnson decided to rush a print edition on to the British streets. On Sunday 16 June, he rolled 200 special copies off the press in the early evening. Another 30,000 copies were printed at 9.15pm. This made it harder for any late-night judge to order ‘Stop the presses!’ and prevent distribution. They would be too late.

That evening Rusbridger’s phone rang. Retired Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance was on the line. Vallance ran the uniquely British ‘D-Notice’ system, under which the government discreetly discourages the media from publishing stories said to endanger national security.

In 1993, as part of a tentative move towards glasnost, they were rebranded Defence Advisory (DA) notices. This change was meant to reflect the fact that it was voluntary whether or not to seek government advice.

Whether ‘voluntary’ or not, DA notices could be generally relied on to dampen media coverage. Vallance had already issued a ‘private and confidential’ notice not only to the Guardian itself but to the BBC, Sky and other UK broadcasters and newspapers. On behalf of GCHQ it discouraged them from following up Guardian US’s original PRISM scoops. British media largely complied and barely covered the story. Now, he made clear his concern that the Guardian had failed to consult him in advance before telling the world of the G20 snooping.

This was the beginning of a struggle between the British government and the Guardian. Since David Cameron became Conservative prime minister in 2010, Rusbridger had barely spent half an hour with him. ‘It wasn’t a warm or constructive relationship,’ he says. But the following day, while Cameron was hosting the G8 leaders at Lough Erne, his press officer Craig Oliver slipped out and called Rusbridger. With Oliver, a former BBC editor, was Sir Kim Darroch, a senior diplomat and the government’s national security adviser.

Sniffing – he was suffering from hay fever – Oliver said the Guardian’s G20 story risked ‘inadvertent damage’ to national security. He said officials were unhappy with the G20 revelations, and some of them wanted to chuck Rusbridger in jail. ‘But we are not going to do that.’

Rusbridger said that the Guardian was handling Snowden’s leaked material in a responsible manner. Its focus wasn’t operations or names, but the boundaries between security and privacy. The paper was willing to engage with Downing Street on future stories, he added, and to listen to any specific security concerns.

Coming down the pipeline was the TEMPORA article, about Britain’s feats of ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation’. This, as Rusbridger knew, might provoke even more trouble from Britain’s spymasters.

He offered Oliver a conference call in which the Guardian would lay out key details of the TEMPORA story in advance. The aim was to avoid genuine national security damage – and an injunction. Gibson had used the same approach in the US in her dealings with the White House, and Rusbridger had a similar dialogue with the US State Department in 2010, in advance of publishing some of its WikiLeaks cables. Oliver agreed the government wanted a ‘sensible conversation’. But, asked about possible injunctions, he refused to give any assurances, saying vaguely: ‘Well, if the story is mega…’

The Guardian went ahead and told Sir Kim Darroch, the national security adviser, about TEMPORA. Two days later, the government came up with a formal response. Oliver said, apologetically: ‘Things move at a very slow pace.’ He said the prime minister had only recently been briefed on Snowden after Putin and the other guests had gone. And he was ‘concerned’. Oliver added: ‘We are working on the assumption you have got rather a lot of stuff.’

The upshot was a personal visit from Cameron’s most lofty emissary, the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. This top official had advised three prime ministers and three chancellors. Assured, urbane and intelligent, Oxford- and Harvard-educated Heywood was used to having his own way.

In a 2012 profile, the Mirror had dubbed Heywood ‘the most powerful unelected figure in Britain… and you will never have heard of him.’ Heywood lived in some style in Clapham, south London, it reported (he was building a wine cellar and a gym). Nick Pearce, the former head of Downing Street’s policy unit, told the Mirror jokingly: ‘If we had a written constitution in this country, it would have to say something like, “Not withstanding the fact that Jeremy Heywood will always be at the centre of power, we are free and equal citizens.”’

There was an unhappy precedent for using cabinet secretaries on these sorts of missions. In 1986, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched Sir Robert Armstrong all the way to Australia, in a vain legal attempt to quell intelligence agency leaks. MI5 were seeking to halt the publication of Spycatcher, a memoir by disgruntled former MI5 officer Peter Wright. In it, Wright alleged that MI5’s former director general Sir Roger Hollis had been a Soviet spy, and that MI5 had ‘bugged and burgled’ its way across London, and eavesdropped on Commonwealth conferences. There were echoes here of GCHQ’s bugging of the G20.

Thatcher’s move was a debacle. Armstrong was ridiculed in the witness box, not least for his smug phrase that civil servants were sometimes ‘economical with the truth’. Wright’s memoir sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide on the back of the publicity.

At 8.30am on Friday 21 June, Heywood arrived at the Guardian’s Kings Place office. ‘He was clearly quite irritated,’ Johnson says. The prime minister, the deputy PM Nick Clegg, the foreign secretary William Hague, the attorney general and ‘others in government’ were all ‘deeply concerned’, said Sir Jeremy. (The reference to attorney general Dominic Grieve was deliberate; it was he who would decide any Official Secrets Act prosecution.)

Heywood wanted reassurances that locations of troops in Afghanistan wouldn’t be revealed, or ‘our agents undercover’. ‘Absolutely,’ Rusbridger agreed. The government was ‘grateful’ to the Guardian for the reasonable way it had behaved so far, Heywood conceded. But further publication could help paedophiles and endanger MI5 agents.

The editor said the Guardian’s surveillance revelations were dominating the news agenda in the US and had sparked a huge debate. Everyone was concerned, from Al Gore to Glenn Beck; from Mitt Romney to the American Civil Liberties Union. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the internet, and Jim Sensenbrenner, the congressman who drew up the Patriot Act, were also supportive. Even President Obama had said he welcomed the debate.

‘We are hoping you will take the same view as Obama. It’s a good debate,’ said Rusbridger.

Heywood responded: ‘You have had your debate. Debate is raging. You don’t need to publish any more articles. We can’t have a drip drip drip of this material into the public domain.’

He left the threat of legal action against the Guardian open. He said it was now up to the attorney general and the police to decide whether to take things ‘further’. ‘You are in possession of stolen property,’ he emphasised.

Rusbridger explained that British action would be futile. Snowden’s material now existed in several non-British jurisdictions. Had he heard of Glenn Greenwald? Greenwald lived in Brazil. If the Guardian were restrained, Greenwald would certainly resign and carry on publishing. Heywood: ‘The PM worries a lot more about the Guardian than an American blogger. You should be flattered the PM thinks you are important.’

The Guardian was now a target for foreign powers, he went on. It might be penetrated by Chinese agents. Or Russians. ‘Do you know how many Chinese agents are on your staff?’ He gestured at the modern flats visible from the window across muggy Regent’s Canal. The Guardian sits at a busy crossroads: in one direction King’s Cross and St Pancras stations, between them an old goods yard, soon to be Google’s new European HQ. On the canal are barges, coots and moorhens. Heywood pointed at the flats opposite and remarked, ‘I wonder where our guys are?’ It was impossible to tell if he was joking.

Behind the scenes, a lot of people were apparently furious with the Guardian. And willing to take extreme steps. ‘What do you know about Snowden anyway? A lot of people in government believe you should be closed down, and that the Chinese are behind this.’

Rusbridger responded that this top-secret GCHQ material was already shared with… well, thousands of Americans. It wasn’t, after all, the Guardian that had sprung a leak but GCHQ’s transatlantic partners. Heywood rolled his eyes, signalling ‘Tell me about it.’ But he insisted that the UK’s own vetting procedures were rigorous. ‘It isn’t in the public interest to be writing about this. All this stuff is scrutinised by parliament. We are asking you to curb your enthusiasms.’

Rusbridger reminded Sir Jeremy politely of the basic principles of press freedom. He pointed out that 40 years earlier similar arguments had raged over the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers. US officials asserted it was the job of Congress to debate the conduct of the Vietnam war, not the Fourth Estate. The Times had published anyway. ‘Do you think now it was wrong to publish?’ Rusbridger asked the mandarin.

The encounter was inconclusive. For the government, it proved that the Guardian was obdurate. For the Guardian, it showed that the government was willing to bully behind the scenes, to try and shut down debate. Heywood’s charges – you are helping paedophiles and so on – were by their nature unprovable. And as was later to become plain, the British government was not in fact at all keen to use its draconian legal powers. The reason, presumably, was simple: they feared Snowden and Greenwald had some kind of nuclear insurance policy. If HMG called in the police, maybe every single sensitive document would be spilled out online, WikiLeaks-style.

Oliver Robbins later hinted at the government’s thinking in a witness statement, saying ‘so long as the newspaper showed cooperation, engagement was the best strategy.’ In return for the Guardian having a dialogue about a forthcoming story, the two men offered a high-level briefing. After that briefing, the Guardian published the TEMPORA story with a few modifications.

It went live on the Guardian’s website at 5.28pm. The reaction was instant. There was a rolling wave of public indignation. One comment read: ‘Who gave them [GCHQ] permission to spy on us and hand our private information to a foreign power without our consent?’

Nick Hopkins, the Guardian’s investigations editor, had liaison with the intelligence agencies as one of his regular tasks. After the TEMPORA disclosures, Hopkins suggested a peace meeting with a GCHQ official to clear the air. He replied: ‘I would rather gouge my eyes out than be seen with you.’ Hopkins responded: ‘If you do that you won’t be able to read our next scoop.’ Another GCHQ staffer suggested – with tongue in cheek – that he should consider emigration to Australia.

The journalists feared that their paper’s continued reporting might come under some serious legal strain. ‘I thought at some point this story is going to get impossible for us,’ Rusbridger says. Some footwork was required.

In 2010 the Guardian had successfully partnered with the New York Times, and other international titles including Germany’s Der Spiegel, to report on the WikiLeaks leak of classified US diplomatic cables and war-logs.

There were similar advantages to collaboration now, particularly with US partners. The Guardian could take advantage of first-amendment protection. And, if necessary, offshore its entire reporting operation to New York where most stories were already being written under Gibson’s deft stewardship.

Rusbridger got in touch with Paul Steiger, founder of the independent news website ProPublica. It was a good fit. The non-profit ProPublica had a reputation for rigour; its newsroom had won two Pulitzers. A small selection of edited documents was sent off to him, heavily encrypted, via FedEx. This simple low-tech method proved inconspicuous, and perfectly safe. ProPublica’s technology reporter Jeff Larson joined the bunker in London. A computer science graduate, Larson knew his stuff. Using diagrams, he could explain the NSA’s complex data-mining programs – no mean feat.

Rusbridger had been in dialogue with Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times. Rusbriger had known her predecessor Bill Keller, and was on friendly terms with Abramson. The conversation was a strange one. In theory the Times and the Guardian were rivals. The Guardian had, in effect, just carried out a major US land-grab, raiding deep into traditional Times territory by publishing a series of high-profile national security scoops. To its credit, the Times had followed up the NSA story and produced some notable work of its own.

Would the Times be prepared to partner with the Guardian on the Snowden files? Rusbridger told Abramson bluntly that this was extremely hot material. There were no guarantees the Times would ever be able to look at it. There would be strict conditions around their use. ‘The temperature [here in the UK] is rising,’ he said. As with the collaboration over Wikileaks, both sides could benefit from the deal: the Times got the thumb drive; the Guardian got the first amendment. Abramson agreed.

What would Snowden make of this arrangement? It was unlikely he would be pleased. Snowden had repeatedly inveighed against the New York Times. The paper, he felt, was perfidious, too close to US power.

The alternative, however, was worse. The Guardian was in a tight spot; at any moment police could charge up the stairs and seize Snowden’s material. Inevitably, experts would then carry out detailed forensic tests on the hard drive. The result could conceivably strengthen the ongoing US criminal investigation against Snowden, their source.

Two weeks passed, with the Guardian continuing to publish. For those in the bunker it was a demanding and stressful period. They couldn’t talk to friends or colleagues, only to those in the circle of trust. Then on Friday 12 July, Heywood reappeared, accompanied by Craig Oliver, who was wearing a pink striped shirt. Their message was that the Guardian must hand the GCHQ files back; the mood in government seemed to be hardening, although scarcely more well-informed. ‘We are pretty aware of what you have got,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘We believe you have about 30 to 40 documents. We are worried about their security.’

Rusbridger said: ‘You do realise there is a copy [of the documents] in America?’ Heywood: ‘We can do this nicely or we can go to law.’ Then Rusbridger suggested an apparent compromise: that GCHQ could send technical experts to the Guardian to advise staff how the material could be handled securely. And possibly, in due course, destroyed. He made it clear that the Guardian didn’t intend to hand the files over. ‘We are still working on them,’ he said. Heywood and Oliver said they would think about this over the weekend, but they wanted Rusbridger to reconsider his refusal to hand the stuff back.

Three evenings later, Rusbridger was having a quiet beer in the Crown, a Victorian pub in nearby Islington. A text arrived from Oliver, the premier’s press secretary. Had the editor set up a meeting with Oliver Robbins, Cameron’s deputy national security adviser?

‘JH [Heywood] is concerned you have not agreed the meeting he suggested.’

Rusbridger was nonplussed. He texted back: ‘About security measures?’

Oliver: ‘About handing the material back.’

Rusbridger: ‘I thought he suggested meeting about security measures?’

Oliver: ‘No. He is very clear. The meeting is about getting the material back.’

It appeared that over the weekend something had changed. Rusbridger told the press secretary there hadn’t been a deal to return the Snowden files.

Oliver was blunt: ‘You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to hand the files back.’

Rusbridger replied: ‘We are obviously talking about different meetings. That’s not what we agreed. If you’ve changed your mind that’s fine.’

Oliver then went for the big stick: ‘If you won’t return it we will have to talk to “other people” this evening…’

The conversation left Rusbridger amazed. Since the first Snowden story six weeks earlier Downing Street had treated the leak non-urgently – often taking days to respond. It was bureaucratic delay verging on sloth. Now it wanted a resolution within hours. ‘We just sat up and thought “Oh my God”,’ one insider said. It was possible the security services had detected an imminent threat from an enemy power. Or the securocrats had grown exasperated. Or Cameron had given a languid order to deal with it.

The next morning, Robbins called. Aged 38, Robbins had enjoyed a sharp vertical rise – Oxford, the Treasury, principal private secretary to Tony Blair, director of intelligence in the Cabinet Office. Robbins announced it ‘was all over’. Ministers needed urgent assurances Snowden’s files had been ‘destroyed’. He said GCHQ technicians also wanted to inspect the files to ascertain their ‘journey’: to see if a third party had intercepted them.

Rusbridger repeated: ‘This doesn’t make sense. It’s in US hands. We will go on reporting from the US. You are going to lose any sense of control over the conditions. You’re not going to have this chat with US news organisations.’

Rusbridger then asked, ‘Are you saying explicitly, if we don’t do this you will close us down?’

‘I’m saying this,’ Robbins agreed.

That afternoon, Jill Abramson of the New York Times and her managing editor, Dean Baquet, slipped into the Guardian’s London office.

The Guardian had 14 conditions, set out on a sheet of A4, for the collaboration.

They stipulated that both papers would work together on the material. Rusbridger knew the Times newsroom included reporters with deep expert knowledge of national security matters. ‘This guy is our source. I think you should treat him as your source,’ Rusbridger said. He added that neither Snowden nor Greenwald were exactly fans of the Times. British journalists would move in and work alongside their Times colleagues.

Abramson gave him a wry smile. She agreed to the conditions.

Later Abramson and Baquet arrived at Heathrow airport to fly home. Security officers pulled them to one side. Was this a random stop? Or were they looking for the GCHQ files? They didn’t find them. The documents had already been spirited across the Atlantic.

Rusbridger himself was due to go off to his regular summer ‘piano camp’ in the Lot Valley in central France. He had recently published a book entitled Play it Again, an account of how he had combined demanding editing duties and the WikiLeaks story with learning Chopin’s most exacting work, ‘Ballade No. 1’. After consulting with Johnson, Rusbridger decided he might as well still go, despite all the dramas. He boarded the Eurostar train bound for Bordeaux. At first it was hard to concentrate on music. Soon, however, he immersed himself completely in Debussy.

As he worked on his piano technique, events in London now moved towards what Rusbridger would later describe as one of the strangest episodes in the Guardian’s long history. Robbins reappeared. ‘He was punctiliously polite, very well-mannered. There was no obvious aggression,’ Johnson says. But the official said the government wanted to seize the Guardian’s computers and subject them to forensic analysis. Johnson refused. He cited a duty to Snowden and to Guardian journalists. The deputy editor offered another way forward: to avoid being closed down, the Guardian would bash up its own ‘war room’ computers under GCHQ’s tutelage. Robbins agreed.

It was a parody of Luddism: men were sent in to smash the machines.

On Friday 19 July two men from GCHQ paid a visit to the Guardian. Their names were ‘Ian’ and ‘Chris’. They met with Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons. The Kremlin was apparently capable of techniques straight from the pages of James Bond, Ian told her: ‘You have got plastic cups on your table. Plastic cups can be turned into microphones. The Russians can send a laser beam through your window and turn them into a listening device.’ The Guardian nicknamed the pair the hobbits.

Two days later the hobbits came back, this time with Robbins and a formidable civil servant called Kata. Ian, the senior of the two, was short, bubbly and dressed in shirt and chinos. His accent hinted at south Wales. Chris was taller and more taciturn. They carried a large and mysterious rucksack. Neither had previously spent any time with journalists; this was a new experience for them. In normal circumstances fraternising with the media was forbidden.

Ian explained how he would have broken into the Guardian’s secret war room: ‘I would have given the guard £5k and got him to install a dummy keyboard. Black ops would have got it back. We would have seen everything you did.’ (The plan made several wildly optimistic assumptions.) At this Kata shook her head: apparently Ian’s Boy’s Own contribution was unwelcome.

Ian then asked: ‘Can we have a look at the documents?’ Johnson said he couldn’t.

Next, the GCHQ team opened up their rucksack. Inside was what looked like a large microwave oven. This strange object was a degausser. Its purpose is to destroy magnetic fields, thereby erasing hard drives and data. The electronics company Thales made it. (Degaussers were named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, who gave his name to the Gauss unit of magnetism.)

The pair were not so much good cop/bad cop – more bad cop/silent cop.

Ian: ‘You’ll need one of these.’

Johnson: ‘We’ll buy our own degausser, thanks.’

Ian: ‘No you won’t. It costs £30,000.’

Johnson: ‘OK, we probably won’t then.’

The Guardian did agree to purchase everything else the government spy agency recommended: angle-grinders, Dremels – a drill with a revolving bit, masks. ‘There will be a lot of smoke and fire,’ Ian warned, adding, with grim relish: ‘We can call off the black helicopters now…’

At midday the next day, Saturday 20 July, the hobbits came back again. They joined Johnson, Blishen and Fitzsimons in a windowless concrete basement three floors down. The room was unoccupied, but crowded with relics from a bygone newspaper age: linotype machines used for setting pages in the 1970s, and giant letters spelling ‘The Guardian’ which had once adorned the paper’s old office in the Farringdon Road.

Dressed in jeans and T-shirts and directed by Ian, the three Guardian staff took it in turns to smash up bits of computer: black squares, circuit boards, chips. It was sweaty work. Soon there were sparks and flames. And a lot of dust.

Ian lamented that because of the GCHQ revelations he would no longer be able to tell his favourite joke. Ian used to go to graduate recruitment fairs looking to attract bright candidates to a career in government spying. He wrapped up his speech by saying: ‘If you want to take it further, telephone your mum and tell her. We will do the rest!’ Now, he complained, the spy agency’s press office had forbidden the gag.

As the bashing and deconstruction continued, Ian revealed he was a mathematician – and a pretty exceptional one. He said that 700 people had applied the year he joined GCHQ, 100 had been interviewed, and just three hired. ‘You must be quite clever,’ Fitzsimons observed. ‘Some people say so,’ Ian answered. Chris rolled his eyes. The two GCHQ men took photos with their iPhones. When the smashing was finally completed, the journalists fed the pieces into the degausser, like small children posting shapes into a box. Everyone stood back. Ian bent forward and watched. Nothing happened. And still nothing. Then finally a loud pop.

It had taken three hours. The data was destroyed, beyond the reach of Russian spies with trigonometric lasers. The hobbits were pleased. Blishen felt wistful. ‘There was this thing we had been protecting. It had been completely trashed,’ he says. The spooks and the Guardian team shook hands; Ian dashed off. (He said he was in a bit of a rush, because he had a wedding the next day.) The hobbits obviously didn’t come down to London often. They left carrying bags of shopping: presents for their families.

‘It was an extremely bizarre situation,’ Johnson says. The British government had compelled a major newspaper to smash up its own computers. This extraordinary moment was half pantomime, half-Stasi. But it was not yet the high tide of British official heavy-handedness. That was still to come.