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

6 SCOOP!

For over a decade, 33-year-old Spencer Ackerman had been covering the US national security beat. He had been building contacts, schmoozing senators and tracking the post 9/11 policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. This could be frustrating. True, in 2005 the New York Times had revealed the existence of an aspect of President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, codenamed STELLAR WIND. But this leak was highly unusual, a ray of light chinking out from an otherwise impenetrable secret world. (The Times had sat on the story for a year. It had eventually published, but only after its hand was forced when Times reporter James Risen planned to write about it in a book.)

A rambunctious character, prone to performing push-ups during moments of high stress, Ackerman came from New York. He was nearby in New Jersey at college – aged 21 – when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. ‘It was the big story,’ he says, explaining his interest in national security. Working first for The New Republic, and then for WIRED magazine, and its national security blog ‘Danger Room’, he had devoted much of his energies to probing the NSA’s surveillance programs. There were clues. But few facts. And the NSA was silent about its work, as remote as an order of mute Carthusian monks.

In 2011, Ackerman got a call from the office of Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and a leading critic of government surveillance. Speaking obliquely during an interview in the senator’s office – he couldn’t disclose classified information, after all – Wyden said he was deeply concerned about the Patriot Act, which Congress was about to reauthorise. More specifically, the senator said the executive branch had come up with a legal interpretation drastically at odds with what the act actually said. Conveniently, the government had classified its own interpretation. So nobody could challenge it. But, Wyden hinted, the White House was using casuistic means to conceal the scale of its data-gathering programs.

What was going on? In a post for WIRED, Ackerman speculated that the government was hoovering up massive amounts of information on private citizens. But the NSA flatly rejected suggestions it spied on Americans. In 2012, General Alexander made an unlikely appearance at a Las Vegas hacker convention. It was the first time the US’s top spy boss had visited the DefCon event. Swapping his crisply ironed general’s uniform for a crumpled T-shirt and down-with-the-kidz jeans, Alexander took incongruously to the stage. He assured his audience that the agency ‘absolutely’ didn’t keep ‘files’ or ‘dossiers’ on ‘millions or hundreds of millions’ of Americans.

Was this a barefaced lie? Or a semantic evasion in which ‘files’ meant something different from, say, bulk collection of telephone records? For Ackerman, and other national security journalists, these were tantalising pieces of a large puzzle. The post-9/11 Patriot Act gave the edges. But the overall design remained unclear. Officials might well be using a mixture of secret courts, obfuscation and classification to fend off legitimate requests for information. But there was no proof. And since hardly anyone ever leaked from the NSA, there seemed little prospect the true extent of government surveillance would be revealed any time soon.

In late May, Ackerman, a prolific tweeter, quit his job at WIRED. An opportunity came up with a new operation, to become US national security editor at the Guardian. The job would be based at the paper’s DC office in Farragut Square, a mere three blocks away from the White House. US editor Janine Gibson asked Ackerman to come first to New York. She told him she would like him to spend a week undergoing ‘orientation’. It wasn’t entirely clear what ‘orientation’ meant. Nonetheless, keen to impress and brimming with ideas, Ackerman travelled to NYC to report for duty.

His start date, Monday 3 June 2013, turned out to be exceptionally fortuitous.

Ackerman reported to the sixth floor at 536 Broadway. Compared to, say, the New York Times, the Guardian US’s SoHo office is small and low-key – an open-plan room shaped like an inverted L; with some computers, meeting areas and a kitchen containing PG Tips tea, biscuits and a coffee machine. On the wall are black and white portraits by the world-famous Observer photographer, Jane Bown. A picture of a young Rupert Murdoch also once hung in the editor’s office; the ironic Rupe was later to disappear to make way for framed Guardian front pages of its NSA scoops.

Below is the hubbub of Broadway: boutiques, cafes, tourists. Five minutes’ walk away down Spring Street is Mother’s Ruin, a favoured bar, with a stuccoed cream-coloured ceiling.

Guardian US is, perhaps, a vision of how media might look once print newspapers have gone the way of the dinosaurs. It is an exclusively digital operation, run with 31 editorial staff and a shoestring $5 million budget. (The NYT, by contrast, has 1,150 news-department employees.) About half of its journalists are Americans, mostly young and digitally native. Many have half-sleeve tattoos, one bold soul the full arm. The mission, as Gibson puts it, is to be an entirely US version of the London Guardian, offering a dissenting voice about the world.

Since its July 2011 start-up, the US audience had grown. Even so, the Brit interlopers seemed way too low down the Washington food chain to compete with news giants like the NYT, the Post or the Wall Street Journal. (The in-house joke was that at the annual 2012 White House press dinner, Guardian US had been allocated just two tickets, next to the toilets and the dumb waiter.)

As the week’s events would dramatically illustrate, not being part of the Washington club had its advantages. Gibson put it frankly: ‘Nobody takes our calls anyway. So we have literally nothing to lose in terms of access.’

The Guardian was the third-largest newspaper website in the world, well before Edward Snowden came along. But seemingly the White House had little idea what the title was – a newspaper, a free sheet, a blog? – or about the nature of its innovative British editor, Janine Gibson.

Ackerman never got the ‘orientation’ Gibson promised him. He watched for several hours as Gibson and her Scottish deputy Stuart Millar sat closeted inside her office. The door remained firmly closed. Occasionally she would emerge, heading briskly across the newsroom, before vanishing again behind frosted glass. As Millar, a 41-year-old who moved from London to NYC in 2011, put it: ‘Every time we came out to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water it was like meerkats popping up at desks, nodding to each other and sending out alarm signals.’ Clearly a big story was in the offing.

At lunch, Gibson finally asked Ackerman to join her and Millar: the three walked round the corner to Ed’s Lobster Bar in Lafayette Street. The restaurant was full; the three jammed up against other diners and ordered lobster rolls. Ackerman launched into chit-chat, only for the two Brits to cut him off. The editor then dropped her bombshell. She told him: ‘There is no orientation. We’ve got a good story that we need you to be involved in.’ Gibson laid out what was really going on – a whistleblower, in an unidentified third country. The whistleblower was working with Greenwald and MacAskill. They were preparing stories on… NSA surveillance. Holy shit!

Ackerman was stunned. ‘I went silent for a little while,’ he says. He adds: ‘I had been reporting on this stuff, on warrantless surveillance programs, for seven years. I got so deep into the weeds on this.’

Gibson briefed him on the PRISM slides, and the secret court order compelling Verizon to hand over the phone records of all of its US customers. Ackerman grasped his head in his hands and began rocking up and down, muttering, ‘Oh fuck! Oh fuck!’ before recovering his composure.

He was excited that his long-held suspicions were correct: the Obama administration was secretly continuing and even expanding Bush-era surveillance practices. Ackerman asked Gibson if the words STELLAR WIND meant anything to her. It did. ‘Birds sang. Butterflies fluttered,’ he recalls dreamily. ‘It was everything I had been trying to find for seven years.’ He went on: ‘I thought this white whale was coming to the tip of my harpoon. It turned out there was a pod of stories.’

The implications were massive. The Verizon secret court order was dated 25 April 2013. It forced one of the US’s largest telecoms providers to hand over to the NSA the telephone records of millions of its US customers. Verizon was passing on private details on an ‘ongoing, daily basis’. It was giving the NSA information on all calls in its systems, both inside the US and between the US and other countries. It was sensational apparent proof that the NSA was a dragnet collecting the records of millions of US citizens, regardless of whether they had committed any crime or been involved in terrorism.

The document was from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] court. Signed by Judge Roger Vinson, it gave the US administration unlimited authority to suck up telephone metadata for a 90-day period. The period ended on 19 July. ‘It was the most exciting thing I have ever seen. No one who is not authorised has seen a FISA court order,’ Ackerman says. ‘In my most fevered and conspiratorial imaginings I didn’t think they [the government] would be doing something like this.’ Was the three-month request a one-off? Were there other similar orders? There was no answer to that. Snowden had provided one recent document. But the suspicion was that the NSA compelled other major mobile phone networks to share their data in the same way.

At the New York office, Gibson drew up a careful plan. It had three basic components: seek legal advice; work out a strategy for approaching the White House; get draft copy from the reporters in Hong Kong. The NSA seemed so far unaware of the tsunami about to engulf it. Ironically, the Guardian was itself beginning to operate like a classic intelligence agency – working in secrecy, with compartmentalised cells and furtive encrypted communications. Email and conversations on open lines were out. Gibson wrote a tentative schedule on a whiteboard. (It was later titled ‘The Legend of the Phoenix’, in foot-tapping homage to the summer’s hit by the French electro duo Daft Punk.)

Those with knowledge of the Snowden project were a tiny group, burrowing into the heart of US secrecy. Newspaper people are, by their natures, incorrigible gossips. On this occasion all information was as tightly controlled as in a Leninist cell. Most staff were quite unaware their colleagues were strapping into a journalistic roller-coaster.

The paper intended to publish the Verizon story first. Of all the thousands of documents, these were the most comprehensible. ‘It was unequivocal, crystal-clear,’ Millar says. Next would come a story about the internet project codenamed PRISM. Then the revelation that the US was actively engaged in cyber-warfare. Last, if the paper made it that far, the truth behind a covername, BOUNDLESS INFORMANT.

The task was made fraught by the fact that the journalists working on the scoop were strung across the world – in Hong Kong, in the US, in Britain. Ackerman was sent back to Washington DC. He was told to get ready to contact Verizon. And, when the moment came, to liaise with the White House. In London, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, headed for the airport with diplomatic editor Julian Borger, for the next available New York flight.

For Janine Gibson, formerly the online editor of guardian.co.uk, the paper’s website, this would certainly be a white-knuckle ride. Could a mistake blow everything? There were multiple problems. ‘Nobody had ever seen these documents before. The FISA court documents were so secret there was nothing to compare them with,’ she says. She was wondering uneasily whether the text of the court order was too good to be true – a possible hoax.

One of the biggest problems was the US Espionage Act. The US regulatory regime was looser than its British counterpart. Back at the Guardian’s UK base, the British government could simply go for a court injunction – a gag order to stop publication. But even in the US, home of the first amendment, the potential ramifications of publishing super-sensitive classified NSA material were grave. This was the biggest intelligence leak ever.

It seemed highly possible that the US government might seek a subpoena. And assemble a grand jury. The aim would be to force the Guardian to disclose the identity of its source. Millar and Gibson met with two leading media lawyers – initially David Korzenick and later David Schulz. The pair helped sketch a way forward.

The Espionage Act was a curious piece of legislation written during the first world war. It made it a crime to ‘furnish, transmit or communicate’ US intelligence material to a foreign government. The statute was rather vague. It was unclear, for example, whether the law did or didn’t apply to journalists who might publish national security items. Case law wasn’t much help, either: there were very few precedents for a prosecution of this kind.

There were some grounds for optimism. First, during its 96 years, the Espionage Act had never been used against a news organisation. It seemed unlikely this administration would want to be the first. Second, the political context was propitious. The White House had found itself at the centre of a firestorm over what critics said was its repeated persecution of investigative journalists. The Justice Department had obtained telephone records from reporters working for the Associated Press, who had written about a failed al-Qaida plot – an astonishing intrusion into a news-gathering operation. In another leaked inquiry it had targeted a reporter from Fox News. Following an outcry, attorney general Eric Holder told Congress his department would not prosecute journalists for engaging in journalism.

Nonetheless, it was important for the Guardian to demonstrate that it was behaving responsibly. The paper had to show it was taking every reasonable step to avoid hurting US national security. And that it published only material which revealed the broad outlines of the government’s surveillance policies, rather than damaging operational details. The test was: does the public have a genuine right to know under the first amendment? The paper’s sole aim was to enable the debate that Snowden and persistent critics in the Senate such as Wyden, and his Senate intelligence committee colleague Mark Udall, had long wanted.

Events were moving at speed. The Guardian’s MacAskill had tapped out a four-word text from Hong Kong. It said: ‘The Guinness is good.’ This code phrase meant that he was now convinced Snowden was genuine. Gibson decided to give the NSA a four-hour window to comment, so the agency had an opportunity to disavow it. By British standards the deadline was fair – long enough to make a few calls, agree a line. But viewed from Washington, where journalist–administration relations were cosy and sometimes resembled a country club, this was nothing short of outrageous even considering briefing spokesmen on complicated material.

In DC on Wednesday, Ackerman’s official first day began in the Washington office. He said hello to his new colleague Dan Roberts, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, but could disclose nothing of his surreal mission. At around 1pm he put a call in to Verizon. He then rang the White House’s Caitlin Hayden. Hayden was chief spokesperson for the National Security Council (NSC), the powerful body in charge of co-ordinating US national security and foreign policy strategy, chaired by the president. Hayden didn’t pick up.

Ackerman sent an urgent email. It had the subject: ‘need to talk ASAP’:

Hayden was busy. It was, coincidentally, the day the White House announced Ambassador Susan Rice would become Obama’s national security adviser, director of the National Security Council. Hayden emailed to say she would come back to him in an hour. Mid-afternoon, she did call. Ackerman told her what the Guardian had – a secret FISA court document – and what it intended to do – publish it, the same day, at 4.30pm. ‘Caitlin was extremely upset,’ Ackerman says.

After her initial shock, Hayden professionally noted down the details. She promised to ‘take this to her people’. Those people’s mood must have been one of confusion – what precisely was the Guardian and where the hell had these pesky Brits got the leak from?

At 4pm, Hayden emailed and said the White House would like him to speak ‘as soon as possible’ to the relevant agencies, the Department of Justice and the NSA. Ackerman called the DoJ and spoke to NSA press officer Judy Emmel. Emmel betrayed no reaction. ‘My heart was racing,’ Ackerman says.

At Gibson’s instruction, Ackerman now emailed Hayden to say his editor had authorised him to push the deadline back ‘until 5.15pm’.

Hayden then called Gibson herself, direct from the White House. She had a proposal – a 5.15pm conference call. The White House was sending in its top guns. The team included FBI deputy director Sean M Joyce, a Boston native with an action-man resumé – investigator against Columbian narcotics, counter-terrorism officer, legal attaché in Prague. Joyce was responsible for the FBI’s 75 overseas and domestic missions fighting crime and threats to national security. He was now the FBI’s lead on intelligence.

Also patched in was Chris Inglis, the NSA’s deputy director. Inglis was a man who interacted with journalists so rarely he was considered by many to be a mythical entity, like the unicorn. Inglis’s career was illustrious. He had degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science, and had climbed rapidly through the NSA. Before becoming General Alexander’s civilian number two, he was posted between 2003 and 2006 to London as senior US liaison officer (SUSLO), the US’s top-ranking intelligence official liaising with GCHQ and British intelligence. Presumably during his London stint he would have seen the Guardian.

Then there was Robert S Litt – known as Bob – the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A Harvard and Yale graduate, Litt knew how the FISA court worked from his six years in the mid and late 1990s at the Department of Justice. Litt was clever, likeable, voluble, dramatic, lawyerly and prone to rhetorical flourishes. ‘He knows what he’s doing. Smart. The smartest of the bunch,’ in Ackerman’s judgement.

On the Guardian side were Gibson and Millar, two British journalists, sitting in Gibson’s small office, with its cheap sofa and unimpressive view of Broadway. Ackerman was routed in as well from DC. But it seemed poor odds – a couple of out-of-towners ranged against a Washington behemoth.

By fielding heavyweights, the White House had perhaps reckoned it could flatter – and if necessary bully – the Guardian into delaying publication of the Verizon story, certainly for a few days, and possibly forever. The strategy was a rational one. But it made a few presumptions. It assumed the White House was in control of the situation. And it perhaps underestimated Gibson. ‘It’s in these moments you see what your editors are made of,’ Ackerman observes.

The general theme of the official representations – all ‘on background’, of course – was that their Verizon story was far from impartial. It was misleading and inaccurate. But the administration high-ups were willing to sit down and explain the bigger picture. The offer, in essence, was that Gibson would be invited for a chat in the White House.

This sort of gambit had worked with US publications in the past, most notably with the New York Times back in 2004 when the paper first discovered President Bush’s warrantless surveillance programs. After ‘the chat’, it was made clear the Guardian might feel less enthusiastic about publishing. The subtext was: you don’t really understand how things work around here. ‘I think they thought they could flannel through me,’ Gibson says.

Her agenda was different. As she saw it, this encounter was a reasonable opportunity for government to raise ‘specific’ national security concerns. She told Bob and co she believed there was an overwhelming public interest in revealing the secret court order. The order, she said, was very general, with no operational detail, facts or findings. It was hard to see a prima facie case where it might cause damage. But she was open to listening to their concerns.

The men were used to getting their own way and seemed nonplussed by Gibson’s manner. Even in moments of high stress such as this, the editor’s tone was convivial and breezy – a disarming mix. In her previous incarnation as the Guardian’s media editor, Gibson had dealt with many other people who tried to throw their weight about. They included the noisy CNN anchor Piers Morgan and the UK Prime Minister David Cameron – back then a mere public relations man for Carlton, a none-too-distinguished TV channel.

As the pressure was piled on, Gibson felt her accent growing more and more starchily British. ‘I began to sound like Mary Poppins,’ she jokes. Millar, meanwhile, Googled ‘DNI’, ‘Bob Litt’, ‘Chris Inglis’, ‘Sean Joyce’. What exactly were their backgrounds? Sitting over in DC, Ackerman was impressed by Gibson’s performance; he sent words of cheery encouragement by G-chat.

After 20 minutes the White House was frustrated. The conversation was going in circles. Litt and Inglis refused to raise any specific concerns on the grounds that even ‘discussing’ the secret Verizon document on the telephone amounted to a felony. Finally one of the team could take no more. Losing his temper, and growling in a thick accent, as if the star of a cop show, he shouted: ‘You don’t need to publish this! No serious news organisation would publish this!’

Gibson stiffened; the earlier grace and lightness of touch disappeared. She replied icily: ‘With the greatest respect, we will take the decisions about what we publish.’

‘It was: “How dare you talk to us like this?”’ Millar says. He adds: ‘It was clear that the administration wasn’t going to offer anything of substance. We were going to publish. It was game on.’

The White House team indicated they might escalate the issue. Gibson replied that the editor-in-chief – half way across the Atlantic – was unavailable. She said: ‘I’m the final decision maker.’ A deflated group wrapped up the conference call: ‘We seem to have reached an impasse we can’t get past.’

Gibson had resisted the administration’s attempts to cajole her, keeping her cool while sticking to the legal playbook. Ackerman says: ‘She didn’t budge. She was ramrod.’ He adds: ‘It took the Obama administration a long time to acclimate to the fact that they were not the ones in control, that she was… How often do they interact with people who are not part of their club?’

The encounter demonstrated the difference between newspaper cultures on either side of the pond. In the US, three big newspapers enjoy a virtual monopoly. With little competition, they are free to pursue leads at a leisurely, even gentlemanly, pace. The political culture is different too, with the press generally deferential towards the president. If anyone asked Obama a tough or embarrassing question, this was itself news.

In what used to be Fleet Street, by contrast, the media landscape was very different. In London, there were 12 UK national titles locked in a permanent, exhausting battle for survival, a Darwinian struggle to the death. The rivalry had grown more intense as print newspaper circulations declined. If you had a scoop, you published. If you didn’t, someone else would. It was dog-eat-dog, then grind up its bones.

The US authorities now tried to exert pressure in the UK. The British security service MI5 called Nick Hopkins, the paper’s security editor at the Guardian’s London headquarters; the FBI’s people similarly called the paper’s no. 2, the deputy editor Paul Johnson. (Deputy director Joyce began: ‘Hello Paul, are you having a good day? We’ve been talking to Ms Gibson. We don’t feel we’ve been making progress…’) Attempts to reach Rusbridger personally were unsuccessful. The editor-in-chief was still on a plane. He had made it clear this was Gibson’s call.

The federal officials now acted sad rather than angry. But in DC, Ackerman was getting nervous. He was wondering whether guys with guns and wraparound shades might be standing outside his apartment in Dupont Circle, ready to whisk him away and interrogate him in a dark cell. He reasoned: ‘We had got off the phone with three extremely powerful and extremely displeased men, one of whom was the deputy head of the FBI.’

Over in Hong Kong, Snowden and Greenwald were restless; they were sceptical that the Guardian would have the sheer finger-in-your-eye chutzpah to publish. Greenwald signalled that he was ready and willing to self-publish or take the scoop elsewhere if the Guardian hesitated. Time was running out. And Snowden could be uncovered at any minute.

Just after 7pm, Guardian US went ahead and ran the story. It was, by any standards, an extraordinary scoop, but it was to be just the first one of many.

The article, with Greenwald’s byline on it, began: ‘The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top-secret court order issued in April.’

Despite the failure of their conference call, the White House must never have really believed that the Guardian would have the audacity to publish the secret order. A few minutes after the story went live, Hayden sent a note to Ackerman, asking: ‘Are you guys going ahead?’

Being behind the curve in this way was to characterise the White House’s interactions in the days ahead. Senior officials were incredulous at the breakneck speed of publication. The NSA must have been chasing down the leak but was unaware the Guardian didn’t just have one top-secret document, but thousands. Gibson says: ‘We were absolutely moving at speed. We knew we had a really limited window to get stories out before it became a manhunt.’

Snowden had maintained the Verizon revelations would set off a public storm. Gibson and Millar were less persuaded; it was a good story, for sure, but how big would it go? The day’s tasks finished, Ackerman met his wife Mandy for dinner, sat down in a Korean restaurant, and ordered a large, calming beer. He pulled up the newly published Verizon piece on his iPhone. He showed Mandy. ‘Holy shit,’ she exclaimed. Ackerman looked at Twitter: the Guardian revelation was suddenly everywhere. ‘It was rapidly becoming a thunderclap,’ he says. He looked around. Could the two men sitting at the next table be FBI?

The paranoia was understandable. From now on the Guardian found itself the target of intense NSA scrutiny. Suddenly the world felt different. Jitteriness set in. It was unclear on what legal basis the NSA was spying on journalists going about their job and protected by the first amendment. But it was evident that whatever electronic privacy they had once enjoyed had now vanished. At 7.50pm Millar ran out of the office, got on the subway and returned to his home in Brooklyn; his twins were celebrating their fifth birthday, and he wanted to see them before they went to bed. (Millar told his daughter: ‘I didn’t want to miss you on your birthday, darling.’ She replied: ‘You’ve already missed my birthday, Daddy.’)

Millar headed off back to work a mere 20 minutes later, to discover that diggers had mysteriously arrived at 536 Broadway. They were tearing up the pavement immediately in front of the Guardian’s office, a strange activity for a Wednesday evening. With smooth efficiency, they replaced it. More diggers arrived outside Gibson’s home in Brooklyn. Construction crews also began very loud work outside the Guardian’s Washington bureau. Soon, every member of the Snowden team was able to recount similar unusual moments – ‘taxi drivers’ who didn’t know the way and forgot to ask for money, ‘window cleaners’ who lingered and re-lingered next to the editor’s office.

In the coming days the Guardian’s laptops repeatedly stopped working. Gibson was especially unlucky. Her mere presence had a disastrous effect on technology. Often her encrypted chats with Greenwald and others would collapse, raising fears of possible hacking. She stuck a Post-it note on one compromised machine. It read: ‘Middlemanned! Do not use.’ Having glimpsed Snowden’s documents, it was clear the NSA could ‘middleman’ practically anything, in other words insert itself in the middle of a conversation between two parties and siphon off private data. All the players involved in the Snowden story went from being encryption novices to encryption mavens. ‘Very quickly, we had to get better at spycraft,’ Gibson says.

That evening, the bleary-eyed journalists began pulling into shape the next exclusive on PRISM. At midnight Rusbridger and Borger walked in; on the plane over, Rusbridger had been mugging up on US law and the Espionage Act. The following morning on the subway to Spring Street station, the nearest to the New York office, the pair had overshot their stop. They ran up the stairs, and dived into a train heading in the opposite direction. ‘That will shake them off,’ Rusbridger joked. The mood was jubilant as Rusbridger read through the draft of the next story, about PRISM.

That story, too, was remarkable. The NSA was claiming it had secret direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. Under the program, previously undisclosed, analysts were able to collect email content, search histories, live chats and file transfers. The Guardian had a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, classified as top secret and not to be shown to foreign allies. It was apparently used to train analysts. The document claimed ‘collection directly from the servers’ of major US service providers. Silicon Valley would vehemently deny this.

As the team reassembled the next morning there were still difficult editorial decisions to make. How many of the slides, if any, should the Guardian publish? Several gave details of previously undisclosed intelligence operations abroad. There was no public interest in betraying them. It was also important – legally, and in the interests of fairness – to approach the US tech companies for reaction. Dominic Rushe, the Guardian’s US business reporter, was assigned the task. And then there was the White House. PRISM was an even bigger secret than Verizon. How much warning should the White House get ahead of publication?

Gibson picked up the phone for another difficult conversation. On the other end of the line was Bob Litt and the director of national intelligence’s press spokesman Shawn Turner; other security agencies were patched in. Gibson explained this was another opportunity for the White House to raise specific national security concerns. She was asked, in tones of friendly banter: ‘Could you send us a copy of your story and we’ll take a look at it for you?’ It was maybe worth a shot. Gibson replied: ‘We’re not going to do that.’

There were issues with many of the slides. The problem was that the White House’s and the Guardian’s slide-decks didn’t quite match up; the colours were different. At one point Gibson said: ‘I’m really sorry. It’s just inherently comedic when you say the words purple box.’ From the Guardian side laughter, from the White House bemusement. It was another moment of cross-cultural confusion.

The NSA, not surprisingly, was against publication of any of the slides; the agency’s bad week was morphing into full-blown disaster. Gibson, however, was insistent the Guardian should disclose the dates when Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants had apparently signed up to the aggressive PRISM program; it was a key slide. ‘We need to publish this. That’s my bottom line,’ she said, stressing: ‘We’ve taken out anything operational.’

The Obama team had apparently still not entirely grasped that they had lost control irrevocably of a large cache of top-secret NSA material. As Gibson put it, reflecting on the non-existent leverage available to the US authorities: ‘I could not understand what the “or else” in this was.’ The Guardian decided it would publish only three out of the 41 slides, a conservative approach. The White House had been told the story would go live at 6pm. A few minutes earlier, the Washington Post, which had been sitting on some similar material, published its own version of the PRISM story. The immediate suspicion was that someone inside the administration had tipped off the Post. The Post article, however, lacked one crucial element: howling denials from Facebook and others that they were complicit in NSA surveillance.

In mid-afternoon, Gibson, Rusbridger and the others gathered in the large meeting room at the end of the office. The area had been jokingly dubbed the ‘Cronut’. The reference was to GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped headquarters in England, and to the latest SoHo craze for ‘cronuts’, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut. Several young interns had been liquidising cronuts at a nearby desk; they were writing a feature. Cronut was, perhaps, not the funniest pun in the world. But in these febrile times it stuck.

The mood was lightening – two massive stories, Snowden still in play, an engagement process of sorts with the White House. After a succession of long days merging into muggy nights, the working environment resembled an unkempt student dormitory. Cardboard rectangles of grubby pizza boxes littered the tables; there were take-away cups and other detritus. Someone knocked over a cappuccino. This was Rusbridger’s cue. He reached down for the nearest newspaper, began theatrically mopping up the coffee, and declared: ‘We are literally wiping the floor with the New York Times.’

The Snowden revelations were becoming a deluge. On Friday morning the Guardian published an 18-page presidential policy directive, dated October 2012 – the document Snowden had revealed to Poitras. It showed that Obama had ordered officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for offensive US cyber-attacks. Like other top-secret programs, the policy had its own acronym – OCEO – or Offensive Cyber Effects Operations. The directive promised ‘unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target.’ The potential effects, it boasted, ranged ‘from subtle to severely damaging’.

The story was a double embarrassment for the White House. First, the US had complained persistently about invasive and damaging cyber-attacks from Beijing, directed against American military infrastructure, the Pentagon and other targets. These complaints now looked distinctly hypocritical; the US was doing exactly the same. Second, and more piquantly, Obama was due later that day to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California. Beijing had already hit back at US criticism. Senior officials claimed to have ‘mountains’ of evidence of US cyber-attacks, every bit as serious as the ones allegedly carried out by rampant Chinese hackers.

As the day unfolded it became clear that the leaks had got the president’s attention. The NSA programs helped defend America against terrorist attacks, Obama said. He added that it was impossible to have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy: ‘We have struck the right balance.’

Rusbridger and Gibson watched Obama on the TV monitor: the immensity of what the Guardian had initiated was sinking in. Gibson says: ‘Suddenly he was talking about us. We felt: “Oh shit. There’s no going back.”’

Gibson called Hayden again to warn her that another story was coming down the runway, this time on BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The top-secret program allows the NSA to map country by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. Using the NSA’s own metadata, the tool gives a portrait of where the agency’s ubiquitous spying activities are concentrated – chiefly, Iran, Pakistan and Jordan. This came from a ‘global heat map’ slide leaked by Snowden. It revealed that in March 2013 the agency collected a staggering 97 billion intelligence data points from computer networks worldwide.

Gibson launched into her legalistic script, inviting the White House to air its latest concerns. ‘I’m just going to say my thing,’ she told Hayden brightly. Hayden replied: ‘Please don’t.’ From the NSC, there was, perhaps, a grudging acceptance that the Guardian had behaved responsibly. The tone was cordial. That evening, Inglis himself rang. The subject was BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The NSA deputy chief’s response to Gibson was a half-hour lecture on how the internet worked – a patronising tutorial. Still, Gibson notes: ‘They had moved into a place where they were trying to engage with us.’

Like most of the Snowden files, the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT documents were highly specialised, and not easy to parse. The plan had been to publish later on Friday. With journalists gathered round, Rusbridger read the draft story out aloud, line by line.

He stopped several times. ‘I don’t quite get that,’ Millar said.

Very quickly it emerged that more work was needed. In Hong Kong, Greenwald went off to search for more documents that might help. He found several, and the story was then re-written and posted the following morning. Gibson told her non-Snowden staff that they were free to take the weekend off. But practically all journalists came in. They wanted to witness the extraordinary denouement to an extraordinary week.

For Snowden himself now declared his intention to go public. He proposed, he said, to reveal his own identity to the world.