Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

00:47 A.M._

Kold’s story was now interrupted by yet another phone call. The Lawyer apologised and picked up the phone. It was his office. His secretary informed him that she has received copies of the documents for temporary asylum. The originals were kept in the Russian Federal migration service.

“That’s a good sign,” the Lawyer told Kold. “It’s already late at night but if this – what is called a document circulation – is taking place it means that people are not sleeping but working on your case.”

“I understand nothing of Russian realities,” Kold responded. “So I can only hope that your words prove to be prophetic.”

“I would like the same. But of course it’s a bit naïve to think so.”

“I think that naivety is a sister of ignorance.” Kold said seriously. “If we go back to my story, then I can tell you that only now everybody rushed to seek the octopus’ tentacles and discover where he had flung them. Here, have a look…”

Kold passed the Lawyer a tablet with an open page showing one of the popular internet news sites. A large heading caught the eye: ‘The National Security Agency has kept Americans under its eye for half a century.’

“Interesting…” the Lawyer murmured, reading.

“The National Security Agency of the USA was invading the private lives of Americans half a century ago, carrying out not very reputable and even completely illegal actions, according to the news agency France Press. The agency refers to declassified documents published by George Washington university.

The documents reveal that in the period between 1967 and 1973 the NSA carried out the Minaret program, in which it bugged the international conversations of 1650 American citizens. Among those who happened to be under the eye were the preacher Martin Luther King, the boxer Muhammad Ali, and Art Buchwald, the famous journalist from The Washington Post.

So the NSA provided presidents Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon with information about the overseas contacts of human rights defenders and opponents of the Vietnam War.

Also, it transpires from the documents, that two influential legislators – Democrat Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Republican Howard Baker of Tennessee – were under surveillance. The first one was a Johnson supporter and voted for American intervention in Vietnam but gradually became ‘more critical’ towards American policies there.

Baker on the other hand opposed Johnson’s politics but then supported Nixon’s Vietnamese strategy, while still being wiretapped. The news agency guesses that probably Nixon wanted to know what Baker was saying about him.

Remarkably, a few years later Senator Church was actively supporting an initiative for the creation of a secret department (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), intended to control the NSA’s activity in regards to its legality.”

After waiting for the Lawyer to finish reading, Kold grumbled:

“You see, now everybody tries to become an unmasker.

The Lawyer thought he heard the notes of envy in Kold’s voice but decided it was best not to say anything.

File 009.wav

“I found out about the octopus’s existence in Pretoria. I think it was in 2008, towards the end of the year. Yes, that’s right – I ended up in South Africa at the beginning of the winter during the rainy season. To be more precise, it was winter for the US, but there, in the Southern Hemisphere, this time of the year was summer.

In our embassy in Pretoria there was a technical checkpoint, and I was sent there to check the condition of the computers and equipment installed there. Actually, I should start in the correct order, because this trip had a strong influence on me and every detail is important.

The plane landed in Pretoria, one of the three capitals of SAR. The executive powers of the country are located here, while the judicial and legislative powers are located in Cape Town and Bloemfontein.

While our Boeing was circling over the city and its suburbs, waiting for its turn for landing, I was looking through the window at the green plains and hills gradually becoming small mountains covered in forest. From the air, South Africa gave the impression if not of paradise on earth, then at least of a land no worse than California and I was already anticipating that this routine trip might turn out to be a good vacation, regardless of the rains.

Our attaché Dick Walker was meeting me at the airport. He was a pleasant black-skinned man with a dazzling smile, a native of New Orleans. He shook my hand, picked up my bag and walked me through the crowds of the main terminal of Pretoria Vander Boom to the car outside.

‘First time here?’

I nodded:

‘Yes, first time. The only thing I know about Africa is that giraffes and hippos live here.’

‘And also Americans, Mongrels, Playboys, Naughty Boys, Hard Livings, Junkie Funkies and Corner Boys…’ the smile on his face faded.

‘What are those? If those are the names of the local sports clubs it sounds a bit high school.’

‘These are the names of the black gangs, which terrorize the country. Although organised crime is not the worst evil in the SAR.

Our car left the airport territory and dashed past the green hills, attractively overgrown by clumps of trees. Long bands of clouds floated along the sky, and the sun would appear then disappear behind them again. Dick turned the car at the cross roads and I saw a city in the distance – an angular line of building silhouettes, a lot of greenery and the skyscrapers, melting in the haze.

‘Pretoria,’ Dick said. ‘The safest city in this damn country. And really its only safe business zone.’

‘Is everything really that bad here?’ I was surprised, trying to recall everything I had ever read about South Africa.

I could remember a little about the Anglo-Boer War, the separation of the white minority and the black majority under apartheid, the fighter for freedom and democracy Nelson Mandela, the revolution of 1993 and… and that’s it.

‘Do you really know nothing?’ Dick sped up.

The road crossed ploughed fields. Here and there some buildings flashed past – maybe barns or garages. A few people appeared by the roadside. They were waving their arms, shouting something. One even lay down on the asphalt across the road.

‘Do you see these boys?’ Dick asked, then without waiting for a response, closed all the windows in the car and locked the doors. ‘If I stop, they’ll break the windows, pull us out, rob us and beat us up and then steal the car.’

He swerved sharply, making a risky turn, and drove around the black lad stretched on the asphalt. Luckily for us, no cars were coming the opposite way.

‘After the apartheid system was broken, it all became chaos here,’ Dick hissed through clenched teeth, looking in front of him. ‘Now one third of the population of this country doesn’t have a job. The crime level here is the highest in the world. You’ll be told all about it during your briefing, but for now remember this: never ever leave the business district of the city. Never! And even there try not to go anywhere by yourself. Don’t talk with unknown black people!’

‘How so?’ I allowed myself to smile since Dick himself was black.

‘You can smile in the morgue!’ he snarled. ‘When your liver gets cut out on the street.’

‘What for?’ I blurted out.

‘To eat the liver of a white man means to get his luck.’

‘Are you serious?’ I felt my heart beating much faster than usual.

‘I couldn’t be more serious,’ Dick began to smoke and lowered the window. We were approaching the city. Fences and warehouses stretched along either side of the road. ‘Sorry for talking about the morgue, but newcomers need to get a bit of a cold shower or they don’t believe. Later you will also be shown videos and photos. If you have a weak stomach – I’d advise you not to have a big lunch.’

‘What on earth is going on here?!’ I raised my voice.

Dick threw the cigarette butt out of the window and wound up the window again – it looked like he was doing it all automatically.

‘The South African Republic takes first place in the world by the number of crimes and especially serious crimes per capita,’ he began in the tedious voice of a professional lecturer. ‘And there are fifty murders per day and the same number of attempted murders. Here on the streets, robbery happens like this – first you get hit on the back of your head with an iron pipe or get shot in the temple and only then do they check if you’ve got anything in your wallet or if you’ve got a wallet at all. Here for a woman, born in SAR, the probability of becoming a victim of rape is higher than the probability of learning how to read. We carried out secret research – more than a quarter of the local men admitted they had committed rape, and every second one of those admitted he had raped a few people. Half a million of rapes take place each year here, Joshua.’

‘Does it have something to do with the peculiarities of local food?’ I asked carefully.

‘It has something to do with peculiarities of local heads.’ Dick answered firmly. ‘The majority of locals are Christians of various types, but only on paper. All blacks are really pagans who believe in crazy prejudices and superstitions. I am not saying this for effect – three years ago our attaché for agriculture Mr. Bronk, who was collecting information about local cults, went truly crazy. He put on a white sheet, took a cross and headed for Alexandria. That’s one of the most dangerous districts (in a criminal sense) of the biggest city in the country, Johannesburg. Basically… basically no one has ever seen him since.’

‘Cults, pagans,’ I nodded with a knowledgeable air. ‘Voodoo…’

‘Damn voodoo!’ Dick shouted. ‘Get all that Hollywood stuff out of your head. There’s no voodoo here! Here people believe that if you copulate with a virgin, you’ll get cured from AIDS, and every fifth man here has AIDS. That is why there are so many rapes, especially of children! They rape even eight months old babies, do you understand? The most important thing is that it’s a virgin. And you’re talking about voodoo…’

We carried on for sometime in silence, then he said in a calmer voice:

‘Also people here believe that a woman’s love for another woman is an illness and that she can be cured if she receives the satisfaction of copulating with a man. That is why there is such thing as ‘corrective rape’. Have you ever heard this term?

I shook my head silently. I was beginning to feel sick from South African realities.

‘Usually it’s initiated by the relatives of the poor lesbian – grandfather, father, older brother. They hire a few people, a strong well-equipped man, and after kidnapping the victim, they rape her until she, in their opinion, doesn’t reach an orgasm. Almost always such procedures end up with damage to internal organs and maybe the death of the victim. And don’t think that it’s only relevant to the people from slums! In April, a local celebrity, the captain of the women’s national football team Eudy Simelane, a very popular woman in the country, was killed. She was killed because she was a lesbian, lived with her girlfriend as a family and fought for the rights of sexual minorities. Eudi was caught on the street, beaten up, then raped multiple times, then stabbed in the head, body and legs twenty-five time before her corpse was thrown in a brook in the outskirts of the town. A rape takes place here every twenty-six seconds. After the murder of Eudy Simelane, Dr Sonnet Ehlers has invented a ‘condom against rape’, called a ‘rapecs’. It’s a silicone inset into the vagina covered with barbs, which damage the penis at the moment of the exit…’

‘Enough!’ I begged. ‘Tell me more about why the police, government – all of them – why don’t they sort it out?’

Dick’s surprise was genuine.

‘Why would they?’ he asked. ‘Here the only things that are done are those that bring money. And when did the fight against crime and prejudice ever bring any income? It’s a troublesome and thankless job. Apart from that, the corruption in SAR is as bad as a anywhere in the world. Half of all police forces are completely bought, like in our Chicago in the thirties.’

‘And what kind of future awaits this country?’

‘Why would I care?’ Dick responded with a question again. ‘Probably SAR will become a classic corporate state. There are plenty of natural resources here. The areas of extraction and business centers will be safe zones and the rest of the country will return to its primitive state, but instead of clubs and arrows the local savages will be using pistols and machine guns. Why am I saying ‘will be’? They already use them.’

‘But wasn’t it always like this?’

‘No, the situation was different before apartheid. The black lived in Bantustans and did what their ancestors used to do for hundreds and hundreds of years – they worked the land and raised livestock. There was order in the country. This system was destroyed during Leclerc’s time. And then the chaos began…

I said quietly:

‘I think you approve of the old orders.’

‘Of course!’ Dick smiled. ‘You don’t know many things and we don’t have much time, that’s why I’ll simply say: freedom is like a drug. In small portions it’s a medicine, but in big doses – it’s poison. One should be ready for freedom, otherwise it’ll kill you.’

We stopped by the checkpoint. The policemen checked the documents, noted the car on their computers and we entered the city.

‘Here’s Pretoria,’ Dick said. ‘Do you know what this word means?’

I shrugged my shoulders, although I was happy that he had changed the subject.

‘It’s the Romans’ word for the place in a military camp where you find the tent of a commander, legate, consul or emperor. It later became the name for a concentration of power and the warriors guarding the emperor were called the Praetorian Guard. By the way, Pontius Pilate questioned Christ in the Jerusalem Pretoria. And from there he was taken to execution. But the funniest thing is,’ he chuckled, ‘that originally this city was called Pretoria Philadelphia – in other words ‘The place of the power of the brotherhood of love’. And it was named this after Martinus Wessel Pretorius, the first president of Transvaal. There’s his monument.’

We drove past the monument – the bronze founder of this odd state looked at me grimly from the height of his pedestal. He somehow resembled Churchill. Soon we pulled up at the hotel.

‘This is ‘Sheraton Pretoria Hotel,’ Dick said and gave me his business card. ‘It’s safe here but remember what I told you about. Check in, have some rest and then give me a call. I’ll come myself or send a driver to pick you up. At fourteen hours local time you have a briefing, and at fifteen a meeting with the chief.

I got out of the car, slung the bag over my shoulder, and bent down to the open door.

‘Thank you, Dick.’

He smiled.

‘Get me a drink and we’re even.’

He drove off and I was left alone by the doors of the hotel – a big Victorian building in colonial style, decorated with columns. The shaggy palm trees by the entrance looked to me like severed heads of rastafarians impaled on the curved stakes of the tree trunks.

The flight, the sleepless night, the conversation with Dick – they had all knocked me off my balance. Not that I was exceptionally tired. I could just feel a constant desire to lie down both, during the briefing, which, contrary to my fears, had not had much effect on me, and during my conversation with the chief – the head of the local department of the NSA.

Then I headed to the basement where the equipment was located. The job turned out to be not fairly simple, strictly speaking, just like it always is when it comes to servicing equipment.

I ran tests through the system, checked the versions of the programs and the protective modules – all of which took a few hours. All that time I was thinking about the residents of this unfortunate country, about how they see life, history and what future awaits them, and if everything really was really that bad – I couldn’t believe that Dick hadn’t exaggerated a bit.

Looking at the columns of numbers running across the screens, I suddenly thought that if all of our clever machinery installed here was connected to local communication lines, there is a very simple and easy way to check what is going on in this country.

I entered my access code, and got into the database, where the records of the telephone conversations of individuals under surveillance were located. They were all listed under pseudonyms and numbers. I put the headphones on and randomly clicked on one of the files recorded last year.

The interlocutors were speaking English in a strong local accent and used many words I didn’t know but I got the gist of the conversation. Someone called Ngodila was reporting to an unnamed superior about negotiations with Russians about a purchase of helicopters. I was astonished that the local bandits – and what else could Ngodila and his boss be? – are so rich they can use helicopters as a means of transport, and I won’t even mention the unscrupulousness of Russians, prepared to trade with all kind of scum.

After doing all I had to do in the embassy, I asked the secretary about Dick – I still owed him a drink – but it turned out he had gone away on business. So I went back to the hotel in the company of a taciturn driver, a boy with a square jaw and transparent eyes.

It began to rain. When I got to my room, I headed for a shower straight away, then lay in bed and turned on the TV to see the local news. It was a way of learning more about the country, its inhabitants and seeing the truth of what Dick had told me.

I didn’t pay much attention to the international news, just continuous chatter about economic crisis. But then the news of the South African Republic began – the chronicles of political life, the president’s speech on some national occasion, and preparation for the upcoming football world cup.

Right at the end the broadcaster, a pleasant black woman, announced in a boring voice that the Ministry of Transport of the republic had signed a contract with the American Sikorsky Aircraft corporation for the supply of helicopters to replace the outdated French-made choppers. The delay with the signing of the contract, already discussed a year ago, was linked to former minister Ngodila who used to lobby interests in third world countries to the prejudice of the economic interests of the republic. Ngodila had been dismissed and a criminal case had been opened against him.

A few Sea Kings painted in camouflage colors flew across the screen, then the credits came and an advertisement began.

My sleepiness had vanished. I stood up and saw in the mirror, hanging opposite me, the reflection of a very surprised man…

The second day failed to bring the answers I was looking for. On the contrary, there were even more questions. No, I did spend half a day fiddling with the servers, but curiosity gnawed at me from the inside, like the larvae of the parasitoid wasp eats the caterpillar. I brewed myself some coffee and got into the databases – for the first time ever using my level of access for something that was not work.

I got really interested in the whole story of the helicopters. If I understood it all correctly, there was an ugly scheme showing up. It seemed the agency had been tracking private information about a specific commercial deal in order to use it in the interests of a large American company.

I won’t say my guesses were confirmed one hundred per cent, but after studying the tagged documents it became clear that the NSA doesn’t only work on issues of national security but regularly acquires purely commercial information – in other words commercial espionage.

At the same time, I discovered that our programs are constantly holding at gunpoint the governments of a number of states and this surveillance has been taking place for decades.

Among the countries in which leaders, politicians, ministers, establishments and even ordinary citizens were under permanent wiretapping were Brazil, India, and the UAE, not to mention America’s bugbear countries Russia, China and Iran.

The agency also spied on allies of the United States, including the UK and Germany and Saudi Arabia and Israel. This has come as a shocking revelation for many European politicians, but I remember that back then it didn’t touch me in the least – since nobody had repealed the principle of ‘trust but verify’.

In the case of Russia and China, though not everything was going entirely smoothly. Here in cyberspace, real battles were booming soundlessly. Our programmers had managed, for example, to listen in on the temporary Russian president when he was at the G20 summit in London, while the transcripts of telephone calls and files of electronic correspondence of the Chinese prime minister occupied an archive of folders to a total volume of thirty-six gigabytes.

I tried to look at the contents of some files. At that moment I was motivated purely by curiosity. I was simply interested, for example, in what information the leaders of India and Iran exchanged on 11^th September 2001. But a bitter disappointment awaited me. All I could see was a general catalogue. To gain access to the documents themselves or to the media, I had to send a request to the main office in Fort Meade. The data was collated on the server in Pretoria, each quarter was archived and sent to the central database.

This bureaucratised system had one very important up-side, that it completely eliminated the possibility of data leaks – unless of course the members of the head office wanted to organise this leak themselves.

After spending a few hours digging into the databases, I eventually gave up and started the program for cleaning the registry, sat in the armchair and dozed off to the barely audible humming of the cooling systems for the server.

The octopus came to me in my dream. It was huge, faceless and almighty. Its invisible tentacles were spreading across the world, entering every house, every room. They were no thicker than a thread, but inside those threads powerful streams of data were pulsating, feeding this horrible creature.

The octopus never moved, but from time to time new tentacles emerged from the disgusting bag, replacing its head and body, and crawled out along the surface of the planet in search of prey. In utter silence, it slithered into another house in which there was a computer connected to the Internet, another person who had just bought a mobile phone or a tablet. It would attach itself to the gadget and soon start pulsating, draining out gigabytes of data. From that moment, the person didn’t belong to himself anymore, but had become part of a huge information organism, a food source which can be completely sucked out to leave only an empty skin.

I woke with a stiff neck and a feeling of brokenness through my whole body, I went through a few unpleasant minutes of psychological self-flagellation, After all I had just committed an official misconduct and maybe even a crime by exceeding my official duties and sticking my nose somewhere I should not have. Apart from that, the helicopter case clearly showed me that the NSA treats such concepts as ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ quite freely, which was a direct contradiction to the Baseball player’s belief.

But then the bright sun outside the window, the singing of African birds, the rustling of the trees and the aroma of freshly baked bread, which came up through the slightly opened window from the café on the ground floor, reconciled me with reality.

‘Josh, people don’t come to the baseball field with their own rules’ I told myself. In the grand scheme of things, the supply of our helicopters to SAR in itself is quite a positive fact. The Russians were left holding the bag – there’s nothing so special about it, it’s business!

And then, direct assault is not always the best way to take over a fortress. If you remember Iraq, a donkey loaded with gold breaks the gates much more effectively, more cheaply and more safely.

‘Do what you must – and come what may,’ I said out loud.

And the wheel of my service went on rolling.”