I’m not self-destructive. I don’t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we can’t win.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014
THE NEXT EVENING, May 18, Snowden drove to Honolulu International Airport. He left his leased car in the parking lot. He took with him only carry-on baggage, including a backpack and a laptop with a Tor sticker on it. “I took everything I had on my back,” he said, referring to the backpack. He also said that he took enough cash to pay for his fugitive life and he took the thumb drives containing the NSA’s keys to the kingdom.
At this point, of course, Snowden was not wanted by the authorities. He had provided his employer and the NSA with a medical excuse for his absence from work so he would not be immediately missed. He had a valid passport, a credit card, and ID. Snowden’s destination was Hong Kong. After crossing the international date line, Snowden waited about three hours in the transit zone of Narita. He then boarded a plane to Hong Kong. After the four-hour flight from Narita, he arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning on May 20.
He had visited Hong Kong at least once before, with Lindsay Mills, when he was stationed in Japan. According to Albert Ho, his Hong Kong lawyer, Snowden stayed at a residence arranged for him in advance by a party whom Snowden knew prior to his arrival. As noted earlier, for the next ten days, Snowden did not use his credit card or leave any paper trail to his location. Wherever he was, “his first priority,” as he later told Greenwald, was to find a place safe from U.S. countermeasures. He brought with him a large number of electronic copies of NSA documents marked TS/SCI/NOFORN, which stood for “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information, and No Foreign Distribution.” According to government rules, data carrying these labels could not be removed from a government-approved “SCI facility.” But Snowden, who brought them with him into this semiautonomous zone in China, broke these rules.
Wherever Snowden was staying, apparently he believed he was relatively safe. “That whole period was very carefully planned and orchestrated,” Snowden later told The Guardian in Moscow. On May 22, he sent an e-mail to Bay (who did not know he had left Hawaii) saying that his epilepsy tests came back with “bad” results, and he needed further medical attention. Here Snowden communicated directly first with Gellman and then with Greenwald. He e-mailed Gellman under the alias “Verax.”
Already, via Poitras, he had provided Gellman with PowerPoint slides from an NSA presentation about a joint FBI-NSA-CIA operation code-named PRISM. He believed it qualified as whistle-blowing because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting e-mails, tweets, postings, and other web interactions about foreign terrorists, incidentally also picked up data about Americans. According to the rules imposed on the NSA by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever information was accidently picked up about Americans was supposed to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers were to recheck the data every ninety days to assure that directive was being carried out. Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA.
Snowden had not yet made arrangements to meet journalists, but now he proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong. In attempting to convince him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote that he had reason to believe that “omniscient State powers” imperiled “our freedom and way of life.” He noted, with a touch of modesty, “Perhaps I am naive.” He also added dramatically, “I have risked my life and family.” Even so, Gellman declined coming to Hong Kong. (According to Greenwald, Gellman could not make the trip, because lawyers for The Washington Post were uneasy with having a reporter receive classified documents in a part of China.)
On May 24, 2013, Snowden attempted to apply more pressure on Gellman by telling him that the story about the PRISM program had to be published by the Post within seventy-two hours. Gellman could not accede to such a condition, because the decision of when to publish a story was made not by him but by the editors of the newspaper. He told Snowden that the earliest the story could be published was June 6, 2013, which was well past Snowden’s deadline.
Snowden next turned to Greenwald in Brazil. Both Poitras and Micah Lee had made great efforts to tutor Greenwald on encryption protocols, with Lee’s sending Greenwald a DVD by FedEx that would allow him to receive both encrypted messages and encrypted phone calls. Even then, Greenwald was unable to fully install it. As a result, Greenwald still had not met Snowden’s requisites on encrypting his computer.
With Gellman uncertain, Greenwald was now essential to Snowden’s plan. If he was to have any newspaper outlet, he needed to persuade Greenwald to come to Hong Kong. At this point, he took matters into his own hands. On May 25, Snowden somewhat aggressively e-mailed Greenwald, saying, “I’ve been working on a major project with a mutual friend of ours. You recently had to decline short-term travel to meet with me.” Although he did not specify the “short-term travel” to which he referred, he added pointedly, “You need to be involved in this story.” He suggested that they immediately speak on the phone via a website that encrypts conversations. Snowden began the call by complaining, “I don’t like how this is developing.” He made it clear that he, not the journalist he had selected, was pulling the strings. If Greenwald wanted the scoop, he had to follow Snowden’s instructions, which included dividing the scoops between The Guardian and The Washington Post. According to his plan, Gellman would break the PRISM story in the Post, and Greenwald would break the “mass domestic spying” story in The Guardian. In addition, he insisted that The Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside its story. As he envisioned it, the media event would also include a video component in which Greenwald would interview him.
Greenwald agreed to this micromanaging, so Snowden said he would send him what he called a “welcome package” of documents to demonstrate his good faith. His plan also required a face-to-face meeting. Snowden told him, “The first order of business is to get you to Hong Kong.” The whole conversation lasted two hours, according to Greenwald.
Snowden sent him twenty classified NSA documents labeled “Top Secret.” He also included in the package his personal manifesto, which asserted that the NSA was part of an international conspiracy of intelligence agencies that were working to “inflict upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.”
Meanwhile, Snowden told Poitras he was sending her a number of NSA documents, including a FISA warrant that had been issued less than a month earlier. He wanted that FISA warrant to serve as the basis of Greenwald’s scoop. It was perfect whistle-blowing material for The Guardian because it ordered Verizon to turn over all its billing records for ninety days to the NSA. It was as close to a smoking gun as anything he had copied at the NSA. It would also get attention because James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had stated before Congress just two months earlier that the NSA did not collect phone data in America. This warrant would allow The Guardian, in the best tradition of gotcha journalism, to catch Clapper in an apparent lie.
Continuing his string pulling, Snowden instructed Poitras not to show the FISA warrant to Greenwald until they were safely aboard a plane to Hong Kong. That would prevent Greenwald from releasing the story previously. He also sent Poitras an entire encrypted file of NSA documents, saying it would “include my true name and details for the record, though it will be your decision as to whether or how to declare my involvement.” He did not send her the key to decipher the file, saying, “The key will follow when everything else is done.” He further told her that he preferred that her new film focus on him as the sole perpetrator of the leak so that no one else at the NSA would be suspected.
Poitras and Gellman were not the only journalists involved in the news event. Poitras also asked Appelbaum to help her interview Snowden about the NSA’s operations. She later said that she needed someone with technical expertise in government surveillance to test the bona fides of Citizen Four. She believed that Appelbaum, who had participated in her anti-NSA presentations in 2012, qualified for the position.
Snowden previously had contact with Appelbaum. Appelbaum had communicated with Snowden under his Oahu CryptoParty alias about an obscure piece of software just a few weeks after Snowden had met with Runa Sandvik in Hawaii in December 2012. Appelbaum, in fact, had worked with Sandvik as a core developer of Tor software. Snowden allowed Appelbaum to put detailed questions to him concerning the secret operations of the NSA before he met with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. Indeed, Poitras joined him in asking Snowden via encrypted e-mails such questions as “What are some of the big surveillance programs that are active today and how do international partners aid the NSA?” “Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” and “Do private companies help the NSA?” Snowden answered all the questions to the satisfaction of Appelbaum and Poitras. (The interview was published on July 8, 2013, with Snowden’s approval on the website of Der Spiegel, the German weekly, which had also published the WikiLeaks documents.)
As the days ticked away while Snowden was waiting for Greenwald in Hong Kong, Greenwald was awaiting a green light to go there from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who was based in New York. Under Gibson’s leadership, The Guardian’s website had effectively “gone into the business of publishing government secrets,” as the Guardian columnist Michael Wolff pointed out. Most of the documents had been supplied by Bradley Manning via WikiLeaks. Few if any of these previous documents The Guardian published were highly classified, and none were SCI top secret documents. The NSA documents Greenwald had received from Citizen Four were another matter. They contained the sort of SCI communications intelligence data that no major newspaper had ever published before. Their disclosure might result in journalists’ being imprisoned, because both British law and U.S. law criminalized the disclosure by anyone of communications intelligence. As a lawyer, Greenwald recognized this danger. On the other hand, the NSA documents were far more explosive than the WikiLeaks material and promised an even greater spike in circulation. So Greenwald assumed that Gibson would be willing to authorize their publication and provide the expenses for his trip to Hong Kong.
He flew from Rio to New York on May 30 to meet in person with Gibson, who had concerns about publishing what were purported to be top secret documents that came from an anonymous source. She was certainly not willing to go along with Citizen Four’s demand that The Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside the documents. Aside from its shrill and alarming tone, it sounded, as she told Greenwald, “a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish,” referring to the mathematician known as the Unabomber who had maimed or killed twenty-six people with anonymous mail bombs between 1978 and 1995. Kaczynski had also demanded that newspapers publish his personal manifesto. Gibson explained to Greenwald, “It is going to sound crazy to some people.” Her concern was that it would detract from the credibility of the rest of the story. Snowden had also written to Greenwald to explain his position. “Even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it,” Snowden said. Paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson, he continued, “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.” Snowden, showing his cultlike faith in encryption, substituted “cryptography” for Jefferson’s word “constitution.” Gibson was unmoved. The stolen NSA documents were another matter. They were an enormous scoop that could have a greater impact than the WikiLeaks scoop.
Gibson authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the condition that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had confidence, the Scottish-born Ewen MacAskill, a sixty-one-year-old veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for The Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the bona fides of the anonymous source in Hong Kong for Gibson. Greenwald accepted her terms. Poitras, who would be accompanying them, would be paying her own way.
In case The Guardian failed to publish the story, Snowden had a contingency plan in place. While Greenwald was negotiating with Gibson, Snowden arranged for Micah Lee, Poitras’s associate at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to build a personal website for him. Writing to Lee from Hong Kong, first under his alias Anon108 and later under his real name, Snowden said that he planned to post his “anti-surveillance manifesto.” He would also use it to post “a global petition against surveillance.” Snowden had Lee name the site “SupportOnlineRights.com.” According to Lee, the website would be built with a “dead man’s switch,” which would automatically trigger the release of NSA documents if Snowden was arrested. It was not clear whether Lee was doing this work as a freelancer or in his capacity as the chief technology officer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The website Lee built for Snowden proved unnecessary when Poitras e-mailed him on June 1 that The Guardian had approved the trip and she and Greenwald were booked on a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong. They would arrive the next day.
In his preparation to go public in Hong Kong, Snowden showed himself fully capable of orchestrating what would become a major news story. He not only picked the journalists who would break it but also instructed each of them as to the timing, sequence, and content of their initial disclosures. In the security of his unknown residence in Hong Kong, he also worked to carefully separate the purloined NSA documents into two very different caches. “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed,” Snowden explained to the Guardian journalists in early June. The documents in this first cache were selected to serve what he termed the “public interest.” In the hands of journalists, these selected documents, and the story he fashioned to accompany them, would burnish his image in the public consciousness as a whistle-blower. He did not turn over the second cache, telling Greenwald, “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over.”
By the time he received the message from Poitras, Snowden had finished his preparations for the journalists. With selected documents copied on a thumb drive, he moved from the residence where he had been staying for ten days to a venue for meeting the reporters. The place he chose, as noted earlier, was the Mira hotel in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, where he checked in under his own name. He e-mailed Poitras his name and the address of the hotel; there was no longer any reason to hide his true identity.