The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (34 page)

Lobban replied with his favourite analogy – the haystack. He said: ‘We don’t use our time listening to the telephone calls or reading the emails of the vast majority.’ Instead, GCHQ was engaged in ‘detective work’. It needed access to ‘an enormous haystack’ – the communications on the internet – in ‘order to draw out the needles’. The GCHQ boss offered a defence of his staff. They were, he said, patriotic and motivated by finding terrorists and serious criminals.

‘If they were asked to snoop, I wouldn’t have the workforce. They would leave the building,’ Lobban said.

There would be a gradual but inexorable darkening of GCHQ’s knowledge of its targets, Lobban added. Over the previous five months potential terrorists had chatted on an almost daily basis about how to adapt their methods of communication, he said. (Clearly, though, GCHQ could still listen in on them.)

It was left to Sawers, the real M, to attack the evil-doers of the moment: the global media. In a confident and suave performance, Sawers said the Snowden revelations had been ‘very damaging … They have put our operations at risk. It is clear our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaida is lapping it up.’ He offered no details.

Some ISC members did gently press the three chiefs. Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary, asked if it
were credible that legislation passed in 2000 was ‘fit for purpose in the modern world’, given that the agencies’ capabilities had ‘developed so hugely’ in the meantime. Sawers and Lobban said they were prepared to accept changes to their legal framework, but that it was up to politicians to propose them.

Overall, the hearing was cosy.

An American or European visitor would have been struck by what the committee didn’t ask. It barely touched on the substantive issues raised by the Snowden documents, and skated over any serious questioning about mass surveillance, civil liberties and privacy. There were no questions about GCHQ’s reported role in tapping British traffic between Google’s own data servers. There was nothing on the bugging of Chancellor Merkel’s phone, or spying on friendly world leaders. Nothing either on the reliance on corporate telecoms partners who offered help ‘well beyond’ what they were compelled to do.

The previous week Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the man who invented the internet – had described the UK–USA’s secret efforts to weaken internet encryption as ‘appalling and foolish’. Nobody asked about this either.

It was left to Rusbridger to point out the obvious to his critics. Snowden – luckily – had entrusted his files to journalists. They had worked conscientiously (in consultation with governments and agencies), disclosing only a small proportion of what he had leaked. It was the media that had, paradoxically, saved the intelligence agencies from a much greater catastrophe.

If governments, officials and spy chiefs wanted to kick newspapers, that was their prerogative. But they should consider what the next leaker might do in the absence of professional journalist outlets. He or she might just dump everything out on the uncensorable worldwide web. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ the editor warned.

There was a coda to all this. In early December 2013, the action shifted back to parliament. The home affairs select committee – chaired by a plummy-voiced Labour MP, Keith Vaz – summoned Rusbridger to explain himself. This, in itself, was an odd request: in mature democracies newspaper editors didn’t usually have to account for editorial decision-making before legislators; that was, after all, what freedom of the press meant.

Nonetheless, Vaz suddenly asked Rusbridger: ‘Do you love this country?’ The chair’s intention may have been helpful rather than hostile. But the question had an unmistakably McCarthyite hue about it. Rusbridger replied in the affirmative, saying that he was ‘slightly surprised to be asked this question’, then adding: ‘But yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press.’

The editor gave a calm account of the
Guardian
’s journalistic processes over the previous six months – the responsible way it had handled Snowden’s files, its 100-plus interactions with government, and the enormous public-interest dimension that drove publication. The Tory MPs on the committee had another angry agenda, however. It was to toss Rusbridger in jail.

The most bizarre line of questioning came from Conservative MP Michael Ellis. As part of its coverage, the
Guardian
had reported that GCHQ had a branch of the gay pride organisation Stonewall; this information was on Stonewall’s website. Evidently furious, Ellis accused Rusbridger of transmitting stolen material and revealing the ‘sexual orientation’ of persons working at GCHQ.

‘You’ve completely lost me, Mr Ellis. There are gay members of GCHQ. Is that a surprise?’ Rusbridger said. Ellis replied: ‘It’s not amusing, Mr Rusbridger.’ He bafflingly accused the paper of betraying further secrets by reporting that GCHQ staff with their families had visited Disneyland Paris.

These contributions from the
Guardian
’s political enemies may have been wild and not a little silly. But the British criminal investigation into the Snowden affair was real enough. Speaking to the same committee, Cressida Dick, assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, confirmed that detectives were investigating whether ‘some people’ had broken the law. Specifically section 58a of the Terrorism Act. This said it was an offence to communicate any information about intelligence staff ‘likely to be of use to terrorists’. Not just secret info but anything at all: photos, addresses, even the name of their cat.

Dick said: ‘We need to establish whether they [some people] have or haven’t. That involves a huge amount of scoping of material.’

The journalists who published the Snowden revelations had been involved in the most thrilling story of their careers. It was in the public interest. Now, it seemed, they were suspects.

For nine weeks Edward Snowden was mostly invisible. There was the odd photo – of a young man pushing a shopping trolley across a Moscow street. (Surely a fake? The man looked nothing like him!) Another leaked image was more convincing. It showed Snowden on a tourist boat cruising along the Moscow River. It’s summer. He’s wearing a cap, and has a beard. In the distance, a bridge and the golden domes of Christ the Saviour cathedral, blown up by Stalin and rebuilt by Yeltsin. Just out of shot are the high walls of the Kremlin.

These leaks to the Russian media were designed to give the impression Snowden was leading a ‘normal’ life. Given his circumstances, that seemed unlikely. Clues pointed in the opposite direction. The news agency that got the Snowden picture,
Lifenews.ru
, is known for its ties to Russia’s security agencies. Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, meanwhile, said his client was settling in, learning Russian and had got a new job with a large
internet firm. But VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, and others said this wasn’t so.

It was in October that Snowden definitively re-emerged. Four Americans travelled to Moscow to meet him. All were fellow whistleblowers who had spent their careers in US national security and intelligence. They were Thomas Drake, the former NSA executive whose case Snowden had followed, one-time CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, who worked in the Justice Department, and Coleen Rowley, ex-FBI.

It was an unusual trip. Before setting off from Washington DC the four hired a lawyer in case they had problems re-entering the US. They also left behind their electronics. As Radack noted, the US might geolocate their whereabouts from mobile phones or laptops, and thus find out Snowden’s hiding place. The authorities could search and confiscate their devices when they flew back.

In Moscow, the four were driven in a van with darkened windows to a secret location. There was Snowden. WikiLeaks released a video. The oil paintings, chandelier and pastel colours in the background suggest an upmarket hotel, of which Moscow has plenty. More probably, though, this was a government guesthouse. The Americans found him well, relaxed, good-humoured and – as McGovern put it afterwards – at peace with himself and his decision to speak out. Snowden joked darkly that he could not have been a Russian spy: he said Russia treats its spies much better than to leave them trapped in the Sheremetyevo transit zone for over a month.

The group presented him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. They also delivered a message: that in contrast to official US vitriol, many Americans back home warmly supported him, including inside the intelligence community. According to Radack, Snowden – brilliant and humble, in her words – was concerned not about himself but what might happen to Greenwald, Poitras and the young WikiLeaks activist Sarah Harrison, who had stuck with him since Hong Kong.

Snowden had been following events. Over dinner, he explained why he had done what he did. The relationship between the governing and the governed in America had come ‘increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic people’, he told his guests. He contrasted his fate for telling the truth – exile and vilification – with that of Clapper, who had received no punishment whatsoever.

And he returned to his chief theme: that the programs of NSA mass surveillance he exposed ‘don’t make us safe’. In his words: ‘They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and to live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely … There’s a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement where it’s targeted, based on reasonable, individualised suspicion and warranted action, and a sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of an eye that sees everything, even when it’s not needed.’

His father Lon Snowden flew to Moscow at the same time. They had a private reunion.

Three weeks later Snowden had another public visitor. This time it was Hans-Christian Ströbele, a flamboyant Green member of Germany’s parliament and radical lawyer, now aged 74. Over in Germany, the Merkel bugging affair had shaken the political class. Ströbele bore an invitation: for Snowden to testify before a parliamentary committee of the Bundestag investigating US spying. Ströbele sat with Snowden and Harrison around a table; there was discussion, moments of laughter, and a group photo.

Snowden gave Ströbele a typed letter to deliver to Frau Merkel and the German parliament. In it he said he felt ‘a moral duty to act’ after witnessing ‘systematic violations of law by my government’. As a result of reporting these concerns, he had faced ‘a severe and sustained campaign of persecution’. Snowden also wrote that ‘my act of political expression’, as he termed it, had led to a heartening response around the world, including ‘many new laws’ and a growing knowledge for society.

In Snowden’s view, the White House’s campaign to criminalise his behaviour and pile on felony charges was an injustice. He was prepared to say as much before the US Congress – if it would let him. ‘Speaking the truth is not a crime.’

One paragraph caught the eye. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, it seemed Snowden hoped to leave Russia at some future point. He signed off: ‘I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us.

‘With my best regards

‘Edward Snowden’

Days later, Harrison said goodbye to Snowden and flew to Berlin. She had been with him in Moscow for four months. On what was said to be legal advice, she declined to return to the UK. The German capital and East Berlin in particular was now a hub for a growing number of Snowden exiles: Poitras, journalist Jacob Appelbaum and Harrison. For anyone with a sense of history this was ironic. Stasiland had become an island of media freedom.

Greenwald, meanwhile, announced his resignation from the
Guardian
to join a new media venture backed by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

What were Snowden’s prospects of exiting Moscow for a new life in western Europe? Left-leaning politicians, intellectuals and writers called on the German government to grant him asylum. There was even a campaign to rename a Berlin street next to the US embassy ‘Snowden Strasse’. (An artist erected a new street sign, and posted the video on Facebook.) But Germany’s strategic relationship with America was more important than the fate of one individual, at least in the probable view of Merkel, now chancellor for a third time.

So it was in Moscow that Snowden remained. The lawyer Kucherena gently reminded the world that if he did try and leave he would forfeit his asylum status. He was a guest of the Russian Federation, whether he liked it or not. And in some sense its captive. No one quite knew how long his exile might last. Months? Years? Decades?

The author would like to thank:

Spencer Ackerman, Richard Adams, James Ball, Douglas Birch, Jane Birch, David Blishen, Julian Borger, Rory Carroll, Sarah Churchwell, Kate Connolly, Nick Davies, Lindsay Davies, Martin Dewhirst, Miriam Elder, Peter Finn, Sheila Fitzsimons, Nora FitzGerald, Kemlin Furley, Janine Gibson, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Hassan, Bernhard Haubold, Henning Hoff, Nick Hopkins, Paul Johnson, Jeff Larson, David Leigh, Paul Lewis, Ewen MacAskill, Justin McCurry, Stuart Millar, Sara Montgomery, Richard Norton-Taylor, Philip Oltermann, Anna Pallai, Gill Phillips, Laura Poitras, Mark Rice-Oxley, Alan Rusbridger, Phoebe Taplin and Jon Watts