The Snowden Operation

Chapter Five: Our Man in Hawaii

To see the suspicious features of the story, examine the facts, as far as they are known, about Snowden’s journey into and out of the world of intelligence. After incomplete formal education, he enlisted in the US Army but left after a few months—having broken his legs in an accident, he says. After joining the NSA as a security guard, he moved to Geneva to work for the CIA there, under the cover of an attaché at the American mission to the UN. This is a remarkably successful trajectory. Nobody has yet explained whether he displayed previously hidden talents, had served somewhere else to good effect, or benefited from powerful sponsors.

Some clues about his activities exist from posts he made on the Ars Technica website and in related chatrooms, under the pseudonym TheTrueHOOHA.[74] His views seem muddled rather than treasonous. He wrote of surveillance: ‘we love that technology… helps us spy on our citizens better.’ He was furious with administration sources who leaked classified information to reporters: they ‘should be shot in the balls’, he wrote. But in February 2010 his views had changed. He wrote: ‘Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop, or was it an relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?’

All this is odd (and not only because of his triple mixed metaphor). The CIA does not encourage its officers to spend time in online forums mulling the issues of the day or chatting about their private lives. The reason is simple: it is a beacon to the other side. Intelligence officers work on their targets with what is known in the trade as MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego. Any sign of an erratic personal life, of ideological dissatisfaction, or of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ offers an opening. If the target is unhappy, wanting to behave one way but forced to do something different, his mental stress can be exploited.

Russian intelligence keeps a close eye on the staff of adversary countries’ foreign missions. They are particularly interested in junior employees, trying to spot which are just officials and which are intelligence officers. So it is highly likely that the Russian intelligence rezidentura in Geneva would have noticed the arrival of the young Snowden and would have spotted his real job, working for the CIA. They also as a routine measure would have tried to see what he did in his free time. They would have tried to monitor his use of the internet on his unclassified home computer in the hope of seeing a weakness—drugs, online sex, gambling—which might be a potential avenue of approach. It is likely they would have identified him as TheTrueHOOHA and observed his patchy work record, his erratic private behaviour, and his voluble and increasingly dissatisfied stance online. According to John Schindler, the former NSA analyst and specialist in counter-intelligence, Snowden would have presented the perfect target to the Russians: ‘intelligent, highly naïve and totally uninformed’.[75]

The next question is how they could have approached him. Clearly an overt approach would be risky and probably futile. Snowden showed no sympathy for Russia. It is therefore likely that they would have used what in spy parlance is called a ‘false flag’ operation. Russian intelligence, like the Soviet KGB before it, has a particular expertise in this. During the Cold War, they would identify disgruntled Western officials with strongly anti-communist views. These people would have access to secrets and grievances—perhaps because they were overlooked for promotion, or perhaps because they felt their governments were not vigorous enough in resisting the Soviet empire. The KGB officer would then make a delicate approach, showing no sign of any East European connection, but pretending instead to be from South Africa’s intelligence service, the Bureau of State Security. The hapless Westerner would think he was talking to a like-minded friend. Gradually he would be coaxed into handing over small secrets, and eventually big ones. Once he was past the point of no return, the case officer might identify himself as KGB. Or he might maintain the ruse. Often it was only when (or if) the breach was discovered that the Western official would realise that far from helping a friend, he had betrayed his favourite cause to the worst enemy imaginable. A similar kind of false flag operation involved approaching Jewish or pro-Israeli officials in the guise of a Mossad officer. The target would be reproached for his country’s half-hearted support for the Jewish state and believe that he was helping its security by handing over vital information.

The beauty of false flag operations is that they can be precisely tailored to fit a target’s initial vulnerability, and can then deepen and extend it. They can go through multiple stages: one intelligence officer identifies the first set of weaknesses, drawing up a detailed personality profile and a thorough picture of the target’s private life and interests. Then another begins to exploit them. A third deepens the cooperation and a fourth turns the screws hard. Only when it is far too late, if at all, does the victim realise what is going on.

If the Russians indeed spotted Snowden as a potential target for recruitment, the best false flag approach would have been in the guise of campaigners for privacy and government openness. They would have been patient; carefully massaging his ego and making him feel that he was a lone crusader for justice, whose vindication would lie outside the system, not inside it. There is no proof of this. But it would certainly help explain what happened later.

Snowden left the CIA in 2009 and moved to Dell, the computer hardware company, working as a contractor at an NSA base in Japan. Two oddities stand out. One is that he abruptly ceased posting material on Ars Technica, and contributing to its chatrooms. His last substantive contribution read as follows:

His views were getting more radical, not less. So why did he desist from sharing them? One explanation would be that he was worried about attracting the attention of his bosses or colleagues; another is that someone warned him that this could be a danger. Such a break in a pattern of activity can be a revealing clue in the counter-intelligence world. During the Cold War, Britain’s spy-catchers achieved some notable success following a tip-off about readership of the Daily Worker. This was the Communist Party newspaper (later renamed the Morning Star). People sympathetic to Communism in the 1930s tended to be readers of the Daily Worker. But if approached by Soviet intelligence officers, they would be told to stop subscribing: it would be more useful to abandon overt Communist sympathies and instead get jobs within the British establishment.

Many years later, this led to some useful breakthroughs. Diligent study of newsagents’ old records revealed people who had subscribed to the Communist paper for some time and then stopped. Some of them indeed turned out to have been active Soviet spies.

Along with Snowden’s puzzling silence is another oddity: why did he give up the CIA so quickly? Although he had long wanted to live in Japan, a glamorous job involving intelligence operations in Geneva might seem more fun than checking computers on a military base. One explanation for this could be that Snowden was worried about the CIA’s security screening. This involves repeated polygraph (lie-detector) tests and can be quite intrusive. It might reveal that he was hanging out with WikiLeaks sympathisers, for example—which would mean a speedy end to his career. Repeat screening for contractors to American intelligence (who make up an astonishing third of the 1.4m people with top-secret security clearances) is bureaucratic and onerous, but not so revealing. Another further explanation could be that he realised that being a small cog in the CIA’s station in Geneva did not give him access to the secrets that would prove his contention of widespread and sinister government misbehaviour.

The next oddity is that he left his job in Japan in September 2010 and visited India for a week, ostensibly to attend a four-day course on ethical hacking.[77] India is far friendlier territory for Russian spies wanting to talk to a source than somewhere like Japan or Switzerland. There is no proof that this happened. But the trip does not quite make sense. Anyone with a security clearance would normally have to seek permission to attend such a course; it would be unlikely to be granted. It may be that procedures for dealing with contractors at the base in Japan were sloppy: in 2011 a background check on Snowden was improperly carried out.[78] At any rate, he did not declare this trip to his employers before or afterwards. If he was indeed learning hacking skills, it would be interesting to know why: the course was not needed for his job. If he went to India to meet someone, that would be interesting too. Either way, the trip looks fishy.

Snowden moved to Hawaii, and in March 2013 took a job at an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton. His new employer was worried by his resumé. It seemed to have been padded with educational accomplishments which would have been better described as aspirations.[79] He was a systems administrator, one of the unsung people who keep machines and software working properly. The job has its drawbacks—but its boringness makes mischief possible. Supervising people who are doing boring jobs is itself boring, and is often done badly. But before gaining this job, Snowden was already stealing secrets (at least as early as April 2012, American officials believe[80]). He says he sought the Booz Allen job because it ‘granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked’.[81] He seems to have persuaded between 20 and 25 of his NSA colleagues to give him their passwords and log-ins. If true—he has denied it—this is striking. It is the behaviour of a spy, not a whistleblower. Why would someone who wanted the best for his country, and reform of his agency, entrap colleagues into a career-ruining blunder? (The people concerned have now, it seems, been dismissed.)

For Russian intelligence, sparking an association between the disgruntled Snowden and eager recipients of state secrets such as Glenn Greenwald the blogger, Jacob Appelbaum the hacker, Laura Poitras the film-maker, and others in that world of hacktivists and transparency campaigners would be a logical next step. All were associated to varying degrees with WikiLeaks, which, as I have shown above, was of great use to Russia (indeed its fugitive founder, Julian Assange, now has a show on the RT state propaganda television station).[82] The hacker milieu is full of Westerners who are highly suspicious of their own governments for tampering with what they regard as the inviolable autonomy of the internet from any legal constraints. The KGB certainly found it a fertile hunting ground in the 1980s, using German hackers to steal NATO secrets in the days when online security was still rudimentary.[83]

Such links and opportunities do not prove that any of the above-mentioned people are conscious agents of the Russian state, and I am not accusing them of that. (Snowden himself says the idea is ‘absurd’.) But they do not need to be. The example of the peace movement shows that given the right initial direction and a favourable propaganda environment, political movements in the West can serve the Kremlin’s purpose without hands-on control. It would not be hard for Russian intelligence to conceal an intelligence officer or agent of influence somewhere in the background, or for that person to broker an introduction between Snowden and his future allies.

The skimpy and confusing public accounts given so far leave plenty of room for such suspicion. One question is when Snowden first started to steal secrets. He joined Booz Allen Hamilton in March, but well before that he had offered secret files to Poitras and Greenwald. Where did he get them and when? A related puzzle is when Snowden first made contact with his future allies. As the blogger Catherine A Fitzpatrick has noted, there are no fewer than five dates given for his first contact with Greenwald.[84] It does not seem completely plausible that Snowden’s first contact came only when he started sending e-mails to Poitras in January 2013. Ostensibly, she then persuaded Greenwald to install encryption software and take the mysterious anonymous would-be source seriously (Greenwald had ignored previous e-mails from Snowden, thinking he was a crank).[85] But Appelbaum was in Hawaii in March 2013 for a hacker conference, the SBoC (Spring Break of Code). A bunch of other dedicated activists attended too, including Christine Corbett, the pseudonymous hacker Moxie Marlinspike, and others. An American academic and blogger, Craig Pirrong, conjectures that what really happened was this:

The timing of Snowden’s activities in Hawaii gives some support to that theory. Lindsey Mills, his girlfriend of five years (but now abandoned), has deleted her blog. But it is available on the internet archive via the Wayback Machine.[87] With some acute observation, Fitzpatrick notes that Mills refers to her boyfriend disappearing off on a two-week trip on April 1st (Appelbaum’s birthday is on or near April 3rd) and that she grumbles mildly about having to be a taxi-driver to a lot of people—Appelbaum’s birthday guests, perhaps.[88] (Ms Mills did not reply to an e-mail seeking comment.)

Another puzzle is about Snowden’s arrival in Hong Kong. According to the account given, he told Poitras and Greenwald to wait outside a particular restaurant at a particular time, until they saw a man carrying a Rubik’s cube. They were to ask him when the restaurant would open and he would reply that the food was bad. That sounds sensible. Snowden would know what Greenwald and Poitras looked like but they would need to know they were dealing with the right source, not a plant or decoy. The Rubik’s cube may have been signalled in a mysterious and possibly coded tweet by Christine Corbett, a hacker friend of Appelbaum’s, about a ‘Rubik’s Cube party’.[89]

The next puzzle concerns Snowden’s travels after he disappeared from work, telling his employers that he needed treatment for epilepsy. If he were truly keen to portray himself as a whistleblower, why did he fly to Hong Kong? For anyone involved in American cyber-security, China is the biggest threat—bigger even than Russia. Though autonomous in economic terms, Hong Kong is firmly under the thumb of the Chinese authorities when it comes to security. Assuming he was not in a hurry, he could have flown anywhere he liked. Heading into Chinese jurisdiction—and promptly leaking details of NSA operations against China to the South China Morning Post—looks either like a deliberate snub to his former employers, or an act of boat-burning desperation, or perhaps a quid pro quo to some other party. One report in a Russian newspaper (denied by Snowden’s American lawyer) says that once in Hong Kong, he celebrated his 30th birthday at the Russian consulate, spending two days there in all—mystifying behaviour for someone with his professed ideals and motivation.[90]

It is possible that he was simply muddled and panicked. But for someone who had years to hatch his plan, it seems odd that he would botch something as important as the escape. Another (to me more plausible) explanation was that he was bounced into seeking asylum in Moscow.

The first article based on Snowden’s material (by Greenwald) appears on June 9th. Directly after that, Snowden disappears—apparently to stay with friends in Hong Kong. But on June 11th, Putin offered him political asylum, confirmed by the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. On June 13th America opened a criminal case against Snowden, on charges of espionage, and warned other countries not to accept him. The net rapidly began to close: Iceland, a country which had been considered a likely destination, since its leftist government is sympathetic to whistleblowers and transparency causes, said it could consider asylum only if he actually arrived in the country.

America seems to have moved with deplorable slowness. It was not until June 20th that it issued an extradition request (though Hong Kong said on June 16th that it would entertain one). Snowden promptly went to the Russian consulate. On June 21st, America revoked Snowden’s passport. He flew to Russia with another travel document—apparently one issued by the government of Ecuador via its embassy in London, where the fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ekes out a claustrophobic existence.

One way of interpreting this chain of events is as the result of pure muddle. Snowden had no idea what to do. Neither did his friends. He ended up in Moscow simply by chance, because events precluded any other option. It is also possible to imagine that the Russian authorities might want him under their supervision. One reason would be to get closer access to his secrets (or to the cryptographic keys with which access to the secrets is controlled, if they are indeed not in Russia). With his public utterances controlled, it would also be easier to prevent him blurting out facts that would undermine the story of an innocent whistleblower acting purely on his own initiative.

Certainly his arrival and stay in Moscow (with a year’s temporary residence granted speedily by the authorities) did not allay suspicions. Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, is a notable public figure, and founder of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, a pro-Kremlin think-tank which aims to counter Western propaganda on human rights. He is on the ‘Public Council’ (a kind of advisory board) of the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service.

Snowden’s life in Moscow is shrouded with secrecy. He has a job, but nobody knows where. Barring a brief, staged meeting with journalists and activists at Moscow airport, he sees only his supporters. He has not given a proper press conference or opened himself to any form of scrutiny (odd behaviour, some might think, for an apostle of transparency). Nobody knows where he lives. None of this inspires confidence in the idea that he is a free agent. It supports the theory that he is a Russian one. Fitzpatrick has identified the background to one of the rare photos issued of Snowden in Moscow: on the basis of the distinctive striped pavements, the logo on a supermarket trolley he is pushing, and other visual clues it is, she believes, a shopping centre in Yasenevo, near Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service headquarters.[91]