With Snowden now in possession of 1,500,000 secret American files, how can he get them in the public eye? Which journalists will he choose to help him? And why does he choose to hole himself up in a hotel room in Hong Kong? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera discuss just how Snowden and the journalists he was working with plan to publish one of the most consequential stories of the 21st century. Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://incogni.com/restisclassified Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restisclassified It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, via this link. ------------------- Email: [email protected] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did Snowden choose Hong Kong for his revelations?
I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops, secure communications, normal communications at Decoy, and an air gap, a computer that had never gone and would never go online. I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad, on which I scribbled in pen, got called away for work, I love you.
I signed it with my call letter nickname, Echo. Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20th arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me. Okay. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.
And that, unfortunately, dear listeners, was yet another reading from Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record. And we are now, for those who have been listening to this wonderful series about... Edward Snowden.
We are now at a really a critical kind of turning point in this story because Edward Snowden is taking the plunge and he is going to finally reach out to journalists to get his information out to the world. And I think it's probably worth a little bit of How did we get here? Yep. Snowden, up to this point, he's been a CIA officer, technical officer. He's been a contractor for the NSA.
He has taken really via bulk downloads and some kind of fairly ingenious methods of sneaking information out of his NSA office in Hawaii, this bunker beneath the pineapple field. He's taken out... a trove of about 1.5 million documents, a variety of internal databases. And he's now at a point where he is figuring out how does he get this information out to the world?
That's right. He's decided he doesn't want to publish it himself. He wants to go through journalists. who we think can kind of work through it and make the most of it and decide what to publish. So who's he going to try?
I mean, he actually is wary of one obvious place, which is the New York Times, because he feels that in the past they were leaned on by the government to not publish certain stories about government surveillance and had held back. So instead he wants to look for figures who he thinks I think will be more sympathetic, who he's going to reach out to initially anonymously
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Chapter 2: How did Snowden plan his escape with classified documents?
to try and persuade them to listen. So the first person he tries, and it's a really interesting character, an important character in our story, is a guy called Glenn Greenwald. Now, Glenn Greenwald, his background is as a civil liberties lawyer. He's become a journalist with the Guardian US, the...
the branch of The Guardian published out of America, but he lives in Brazil and he's been focusing on abuses of power by the US government for some time. He's only just joined The Guardian a previous year. He is quite a radical campaigning figure. Now, it's interesting because in the journalist world, some people say, well, is he a journalist? He's more of an activist.
I actually think he is more of a sign about how journalism was changing, where you get these people who've got quite strong individual brands and who have quite strong views and have an online presence. And Greenwald, in a way, I think is ahead of his time in being one of those characters.
So he's very much being reached out to by Snowden, who I think has been reading some of his blogs because of who he is, rather than necessarily it being The Guardian specifically at this point. But December the 1st, 2012, Green will get an email from someone called Cincinnatus. Now, remember, this is the name of a Roman who voluntarily relinquished power.
So, you know, it's a little clue in the name.
And a nice little sign of Edward Snowden's subterranean narcissism.
Or not so subterranean narcissism. You've got to pick a code name. So, I mean, why not? It's not the worst one to pick, I could think. Anyway, he says in this email, I have some stuff you might be interested in. It is vague, though. And here's what's interesting. Greenwald is told that to get the information, he has to use a type of encryption called PGP, pretty good privacy.
I've always liked that it's only pretty good privacy. Well, I think it's supposed to be ironic. So this is, I mean, this is interesting. As a journalist myself, it's not the normal encryption that's built into your laptop or phone. It's something which provides really quite intense encryption, which if you use it properly... It shouldn't be crackable.
If someone intercepts that message, even the NSA, they wouldn't be able to decipher and decode what's in the message. So Snowden has said, look, you need to use this and install this in order for me to be able to send you what I need to send. And it's interesting because Greenwald doesn't get around to doing it. He's just busy. He's busy.
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Chapter 3: Who are the journalists Snowden reached out to first?
So he now tries a filmmaker, Laura Poitras. She's another very interesting character who has been making a series of films about, if you like, the war on terror, about US policy post 9-11, including Iraq. And the reason I think he picks her is because as a result of making those films, she's finding herself getting stopped at airports. She's clearly on some kind of watch list.
She's having her devices seized and confiscated. And so she's learning about encryption and the need to protect her stuff.
And she's based in Berlin.
And she's based in Berlin.
Critically, both of these journalists are outside of the US.
Are outside the States. Yeah, that's right. Greenwald in Rio. Even though they're Americans. Yeah. She starts to get these emails every week from Snowden, normally at the weekends. And it's interesting. At one point, she writes, I don't know if you are legit, crazy, or trying to entrap me. She also is a bit like, oh, this is kind of weird. But by February 2013, she's taking them seriously.
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Chapter 4: What encryption methods did Snowden insist on?
So he starts contacting Greenwald in December of 2012. We're now three or so months later. He's not provided any documents, right? He kind of hasn't shown his bona fides.
Yeah. And so you can see why people are skeptical. So then time passes. I mean, you know, quite a lot of time passes. It must be kind of weird for Snowden, who's taken this risk, basically. He's reaching out to people and nothing is happening.
It does make me think a little bit of... the series we did earlier in the year on Adolf Tolkachev, where he reaches out to the CIA four, five, six times and essentially gets the cold shoulder.
There is kind of this... Interesting parallel, you're right. But then in April, Laura Poitras is starting to take it seriously and she actually gets in touch with... Glenn Greenwald, and they meet up when they're both in New York. She says, take the battery out of your phone first. She says she's got emails from someone promising secret documents on surveillance.
She seems kind of nervous, unsure about it. They agree it seems serious, but they need the documents. They need some proof, which is, you know, typical. if you're a journalist, and Poitras does want to interview him. So they kind of part ways, go back to Berlin and Rio, unsure if they'll hear any more.
Mid-April, Poitras tells Greenwald to expect a delivery and a FedEx parcel arrives with instructions on how to use an encrypted chat. And meanwhile, Snowden is now starting to send out some of the files. And he sends her an encrypted file, which is about something called Prism. We'll come to what it is shortly.
But the point is, it's now clear that he's got access because this is, you know, this is something top secret.
She's actually received a stolen document from the National Security Agency at this point.
She knows it's the real deal. And he's saying the source, you still don't really know that much about him, that they need to meet. And this is interesting because we're now heading towards May. And when you talked about Edward Snowden fleeing and he's going to tell her that she needs to go to Hong Kong.
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Chapter 5: How did Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras respond to Snowden's approach?
Not by the Americans, no. So it would be unusual. You want to know, is it true? Is it fake? Your question is, who is the source? What is their motivation? What access do they have? Can I trust them? Is there a public interest in looking at this or in dealing with this? You know, what's the what is the story and what are the risks of meeting them? I have to say, Hong Kong would be a stretch.
I mean, not least for the budget when you go to the bus. It is interesting because around this time, when Glenn Greenwald has been slow to respond, Laura Poitras has also gone to a Washington Post journalist called Bart Gellman. and talk to him about whether he could do it with the Post. He's just left the Washington Post.
But actually, at the Washington Post, when they hear Hong Kong, they're like, whoa, this sounds kind of risky.
And I think, right, that Hong Kong is suspicious solely because it's part of China, right? So it immediately casts kind of this shadow over the leaks because it, at first blush, could make it look like he's under the control of or sort of being influenced by maybe the Chinese intelligence services.
Yeah. And it would be an obvious kind of suspicion, which is, is this someone who's basically a Chinese spy who's gone to China or a part of China in the case of Hong Kong? Or a defector, maybe. Or a defector, you know, with the documents. And therefore, you know, you're into kind of foreign spy world.
But it is interesting because I recently spoke to someone who was a very senior intelligence official at the time about these kind of suspicions. You know, could he have been a Chinese spy or a Russian spy, given where he ended up? And they said they looked very hard at this at the time, as you'd expect them to do in the intelligence community.
And they said the Russians and Chinese were both as surprised as the Americans were when he turned up in Hong Kong or when he eventually emerges and goes public in Hong Kong. So in other words, they didn't know that he was there. They're like, who's this guy?
And you imagine that this is basically the US intelligence community spying on Russian and Chinese communications and seeing that they're surprised by it, which suggests they didn't have advanced knowledge.
I think it also does show a bit of Snowden's naivete in the signal that this move would send to these journalists, right? Because it does immediately – and this is one of the things that's going to color a lot of the stories – The movement out of the United States really casts a pall over him, right?
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Snowden face in contacting journalists?
Sorry, privacy. A privacy jihadist. Privacy jihadist. OK. But I think it makes him look quite ideological, as we talked about, the kind of libertarian stuff. And I think there is a bit of nervousness at the Guardian, I think, at this point, about him and his motivation, whether he's for real. This manifesto, I think, also makes them even more nervous.
It's like, you know, is this guy a bit cranky or something? But they realise this is potentially a massive story. This is the first time...
I believe that he's told them who he is. Yeah. Right. These journalists, because he up until this point, he'd been using. Yeah.
Cincinnati. Virax or whatever.
Yeah. And this time he reveals that he's Ed Snowden. He reveals his social security number. He reveals. I love this. His CIA funny name was Dave M. Churchyard. Yeah. Which is a relatively bizarre one. But those funny names, which are ridiculous, there was always a rumor.
They're generated by a computer, but there was always a rumor that the sort of, I guess, upstream, like the thing that was fed into that computer originally was a British phone book from the night, like a London phone book from the 1950s that would sort of go and pull pieces of names to put them together. Like I had a ridiculous one. I actually can't share it.
Oh, come on.
But it's always a first name. Yes. It's always a first name, middle initial. It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but we'd always come up with what it meant internally. And then a weird last name. And there were actually a few people I knew who the program... It just gets generated, right? When you join.
The program generated one for them that was so inappropriate that they actually had to go through a formal process to try to get it changed because it had already been issued. But Dave M. Churchyard...
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of Snowden's manifesto?
And I've been inside the eye of the storm, 11 wild days in Trump's White House. I have seen how the sausage gets made and who's holding the knife.
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We've got both of us, access, experience, and just enough cynicism to know when something smells a little off and how to trace it back to the source.
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The rest is politics, U.S. New episodes every week.
Well, welcome back. We are with Edward Snowden. He is stuck in a horribly dank hotel room in Hong Kong. And now journalists are on the way, finally, to meet with him to hear his story.
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Chapter 8: How did The Guardian decide to send journalists to Hong Kong?
He's probably watching them from somewhere else.
Exactly. I think the assumption is he's checking them at that first meeting. And that's why nothing happens then. And then this is from Glenn Greenwald in his memoir, No Place to Hide. At 10.20, we returned and again took our place near the alligator on the couch. Was there an alligator, like a stuffed alligator? I don't know. I'm stuck on this detail, Gordon.
Was it an alligator skin couch or was it a couch that looked like an alligator? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe someone can tell us who stayed at the hotel, which faced the back wall of the room and a large mirror. After two minutes, I heard someone come into the room.
Rather than turn around to see who'd entered, I continued to stare at the back wall mirror, which showed a man's reflection walking towards us. Only when he was within a few feet of the couch did I turn around. The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik's Cube twirling in the man's left hand. It's not even solved. That's my sin number six. Failing to solve the Rubik's Cube.
You're probably one of those people who does it like that. Anyway, so here's the really interesting thing. And I think this is a really interesting detail is they're shocked by who he is because here is this guy and they had been in their heads for
expecting someone in their 50s or 60s like a chain smoking you know alcoholic washed up spy as they put it snowden himself says expecting someone with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience and and instead they get basically they look at it they go really It's a young guy in a white T-shirt with some faded lettering. And as Greenwald puts it, jeans and chic nerd glasses.
After having seen the documentary, I'm not sure I would describe him as chic nerd glasses.
With a bit of a kind of goatee and some stubble.
Greenwald also says that Snowden looked like he had only recently started shaving. Yeah. Perhaps new at the practice.
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