THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, or, as it is now commonly called, the NSA, was created on October 24, 1952, in such a tight cocoon of secrecy that even the presidential order creating it was classified top secret. When journalists asked questions about this new agency, Washington officials jokingly told them that the initials NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” The reason for this extraordinary stealth is that the NSA is involved in a very sensitive enterprise. Its job is to intercept, decode, and analyze foreign electronic communications transmitted around the globe over copper wires, fiber-optic cable, satellite, microwave relays, cell phone towers, wireless transmissions, and the Internet for specified intelligence purposes. In intelligence jargon, its product is called COMINT, which stands for communications intelligence. Because this form of intelligence gathering is most effective when the NSA’s targets are unaware of the state-of-the-art tools the NSA uses to break into their computers and telecommunications channels to first intercept and then decrypt their secret messages, the NSA goes to extraordinary lengths to keep them secret. Draconian laws protect this secrecy.
In the first week of June 2013, the NSA learned that there had been a massive breach. Thousands of secret files bearing on communications intelligence had been stolen from a heavily guarded regional base in Oahu, Hawaii.
The suspect was Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old civilian analyst at that base, who had fled to Hong Kong before the breach was discovered. According to a three-count criminal complaint filed by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, Snowden had stolen government property and violated the Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of national defense information to an unauthorized person. He also likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by entering computer systems illicitly.
This was not a whodunit mystery. On June 9, 2013, in an extraordinary twelve-minute video made in a cramped hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden identified himself as the person who had taken the NSA documents. Watching the video, the world saw a shy, awkward, and sympathetic-looking man wearing a rumpled shirt, rimless glasses, and a computer-geek haircut, passionately speaking out against what he termed the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a shaky voice, expressing his willingness to suffer the consequences for exposing them.
Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him, and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA’s alleged illegal collection of data inside the United States. But in fact, Snowden had stolen a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their monitoring of adversaries, which was their job.
By the time the theft had been discovered, in the first week of June 2013, it was impossible for the FBI, a grand jury, or any other U.S. agency to question him because he had fled the country. His first stop, Hong Kong, the economically autonomous city of 7.2 million, is a special administrative region of mainland China. Under the terms of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Great Britain, China is responsible for Hong Kong’s defense and foreign policy, including intelligence services. He then proceeded to Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. Russia granted him asylum, making it unlikely that U.S. authorities would ever have the opportunity to question him.
Snowden’s escape left in its wake an incredibly important unsolved mystery: How had a young analyst in training at the NSA succeeded in penetrating all the layers of NSA security to pull off the largest theft of secret documents in the history of American intelligence? Did he act alone? What happened to the documents? Was his arrival in Russia part of the plan?
Because I had written several books on the vulnerability of intelligence services, this was a mystery—a “howdunit,” if you like—that immediately intrigued me. Even if Snowden had acted for the most salutary of reasons, the unauthorized transfer of state secrets from the United States to an adversary country is, by almost any definition, a form of espionage.
I decided to begin my investigation of this case in Hong Kong, because it was the place to which Snowden first fled after leaving Hawaii. Snowden had planned the trip for at least four weeks, according to the mandatory travel plan he had filed at the NSA. When I spoke to my sources in the intelligence community, they could not explain Snowden’s choice. It would not necessarily protect him from the reach of U.S. law, because Hong Kong had an active extradition treaty with the United States. Just a few months earlier, Hong Kong had made headlines by honoring America’s request to extradite Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted for insider trading.
Nor was Hong Kong particularly convenient to Hawaii. There were no nonstop flights there from Honolulu in May 2013. Snowden flew eight hours to Narita International Airport in Japan, where he waited almost three hours. He then flew five hours to Hong Kong. Snowden could have flown to countries that do not have extradition treaties with America in far less time.
Adding to this mystery, at the time he departed Honolulu, Snowden had not yet arranged for any journalists to meet him in Hong Kong, and as far as U.S. intelligence could determine, he had no known appointments there. Even so, Snowden carried to Hong Kong digital copies he had made of the top secret NSA documents. As General Michael Hayden, who served as the head of both the NSA and the CIA, told me, “It’s very mysterious why Snowden chose Hong Kong.” We can assume he had a compelling enough reason for him to take the risk that he would be arrested there by Hong Kong police after U.S. authorities invoked the detention provision of its extradition treaty. It was of course possible that Snowden had traveled there to see someone he believed could protect him.
I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2014—exactly one year after Snowden had arrived there aboard a Japan Airlines flight. I checked in to the Mira hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon, a ten-minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong Island, where most of the foreign consulates are located.
I chose the Mira because it was the five-star hotel in which Snowden had stayed and where he had made the celebrated video admitting his role in taking the NSA documents. I asked at the front desk for room 1014, the same one that Snowden had occupied in 2013, because I wanted easy access to the hotel’s service and security personnel responsible for the room who might have had contact with Snowden a year earlier. Unfortunately, that room was occupied, but I was given a nearby room that served my purpose.
Snowden had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the Guardian reporters he met in Hong Kong, that he had hidden out at the Mira hotel since his arrival in Hong Kong because he feared that the CIA might capture him. My first surprise was that Snowden had not arrived at the Mira until eleven days after he arrived in Hong Kong. As I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had registered there under his real name and used his own passport and credit card to secure the room, an odd choice if he was hiding out. He had checked in to the hotel not on May 20, as he had told the reporters, but on June 1, 2013. He checked out on June 10.
Wherever Snowden stayed from May 20 to June 1, he apparently considered it a safe enough place from which to send Greenwald a “welcome package,” as he called it, of twenty top secret NSA documents on May 25. He had now not only downloaded documents but also violated the oath he had signed when he took his job by providing them to an unauthorized party. During this period, Snowden also contacted Barton Gellman, on behalf of The Washington Post, via e-mail. Indeed, while he was staying someplace other than the place he claimed to be staying, he made almost all the arrangements for his journalistic coming-out. He was in contact with at least one foreign mission during this period, according to what he wrote to Gellman on May 24. In that e-mail, concerning when and how his story was to be published by The Washington Post, Snowden asked Gellman to include some text that would help Snowden with his dealings with this mission. But which country was he approaching? In an effort to establish Snowden’s whereabouts during these “missing” eleven days, which, among other things, could shed light on why he first came to Hong Kong, I called Keith Bradsher, a prizewinning journalist who had been the New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong in 2013. He had written a well-researched report about Snowden’s arrival there. He proposed we meet at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
Bradsher told me that he had known Albert Ho, who had been retained as Snowden’s lawyer, for more than a decade. He had interviewed him many times, because he was a leader of a political movement in Hong Kong. Bradsher said that a few days after Snowden had revealed himself on June 9, he met with Ho and questioned him about Snowden’s unknown whereabouts.
Ho told Bradsher that all of Snowden’s logistics had been arranged for him by an intermediary, whom Ho called a “carer.” Ho said that Snowden had been in contact with the “carer” prior to his arrival in Hong Kong on May 20. According to Ho, it was this person who had arranged accommodations for Snowden on his arrival and afterward. If so, it seemed to me that this person might be able to shed light on whom, if anyone, Snowden saw in his first eleven days in Hong Kong. Even if this person might have been unaware of the reasons for Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong when he made the arrangements for him, he was still the best lead I had to learning why Snowden had come to Hong Kong. Bradsher told me that he pressed Ho for details about this mystery person over the course of several meetings but Ho would not identify him beyond saying that he was a “well-connected resident” of Hong Kong.
I called Ho’s law office in Hong Kong. He politely declined to be interviewed by me, saying he had said all he was going to say about the Snowden case. I was able, though, to make an appointment with Robert Tibbo, a Canadian-born barrister specializing in civil liberties cases. Tibbo had worked closely with Ho on the Snowden case.
I met Tibbo in the tearoom at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Hong Kong Island. Tibbo, in his early fifties, was tall, with a round face and thinning hair. He talked freely about his remarkable career. After earning a degree in chemical engineering from McGill University and working in Asia as an engineer for a decade, he went to law school in New Zealand and became a barrister in Hong Kong specializing in cases involving the legal status of refugees.
Over a leisurely tea, Tibbo made it clear that he had played a far more active role than Ho in the Snowden case. He had even personally escorted Snowden from the Mira hotel to a safe house on June 10. He did not dispute what Ho had told Bradsher. When I asked him if he could give me the name of the “carer,” he said that he was bound by a lawyer-client privilege that prevented him from providing me with any details that might reveal the identity of the person who had made arrangements for Snowden. When I asked the date that he was officially retained by Snowden, he said that Snowden had signed an agreement hiring him and Ho’s law firm as his legal adviser on June 10, 2013 (which was a matter of public record).
“I understand that,” I said, “but I am inquiring about something that had happened before you became his legal adviser.” He shook his head, as if getting rid of a pesky fly, and said that his oath precluded him from saying anything at all that might do damage to the credibility of his client. “Not even where he was staying in May in Hong Kong?” I persisted. He leaned forward and, after a brief hesitation, said, jokingly I assumed, that he would not divulge that information, “even if you held a gun to my head.” We met two more times, but true to his word Tibbo would not say if he even knew the identity of the “carer.”
Meanwhile, Joyce Xu, a very resourceful Chinese journalist who was assisting me in Hong Kong, had filed the equivalent of a Freedom of Information request with the Hong Kong Security Bureau asking for information about Snowden’s movements in May. Thomas Ng, the secretary for security, turned down the request, adding that Hong Kong authorities do not keep records of hotel registrations. I had run into a dead end with the Hong Kong authorities on the issue of Snowden’s “carer” and Snowden’s whereabouts for those eleven crucial days.
At this point, I got some much-needed help from an old friend on the Obama White House staff. Before I had left New York, I asked him if he could find someone at the consulate in Hong Kong who might brief me on the Snowden case. I didn’t hear from him until just a few days before I was due to return to New York. He put me in touch with a former employee of the Hong Kong consulate, who he said was “fully informed” about the efforts of the U.S. mission to locate Snowden in Hong Kong. This person was still living in Hong Kong, and he agreed to meet with me on condition that I did not mention either his name or his specific job in the U.S. mission in Hong Kong. The venue was the terrace lounge of the American Club in Exchange Square in central Hong Kong, a posh club mainly for expatriate Americans. It was on the forty-eighth floor, with a spectacular view of Victoria Harbor. Once there, I had no problem finding my source, identifying him by the description he had given me. He was sitting alone at a discreet table in the corner.
After we ordered drinks, he told me in a soft voice about the American reaction to Snowden’s revelations in Hong Kong. “All hell broke loose,” he said, describing the atmosphere at the U.S. mission after Snowden’s video was posted on The Guardian’s website on June 9.
I asked about an assertion that Snowden had made concerning the U.S. consulate in that extraordinary video. Snowden had said that he could be seized at any moment by a CIA rendition team based at the U.S. consulate “just down the road” from the Mira hotel.
“Was that true?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes and said, “Snowden has a pretty wild imagination. For one thing, the U.S. consulate is not down the road from the Mira in Kowloon; it is here on Hong Kong Island. And there was no CIA rendition team in Hong Kong.”
My next question concerned a second period during which Snowden’s whereabouts are clouded—the period between the time he left the Mira hotel on June 10 and the day he left Hong Kong for Russia on June 23. When I asked my consulate source whether the U.S. mission took any action to track Snowden during these thirteen days, he explained that the FBI had long maintained a contingent of “legal attachés” based at the consulate to pursue many possible violations of U.S. law including video piracy. In addition, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had retained a handful of “China watchers” under diplomatic cover in Hong Kong. This group constituted the “intelligence mission,” as he referred to it. It had developed informal relations with the Hong Kong police that, along with the NSA’s electronic capabilities abroad, allowed it to track Snowden’s movements after he had outed himself on the video. Because Snowden, his lawyers, and the journalists in his entourage frequently used their cell phones to text one another, it was fairly easy for the U.S. intelligence mission to follow Snowden’s trail after he left the Mira hotel. He said that the Hong Kong police also knew where he was during this period. My source further suggested that the massive Chinese intelligence contingent in Hong Kong also knew, because it had close relations with the Hong Kong police.
“So everyone knew Snowden’s whereabouts as he moved every few days from apartment to apartment,” I interjected. He answered that it was no secret to anyone except the media and the public. “Of course we knew,” he said, adding that there were also photographs of Snowden entering the office building that housed the Russian consulate. I mentioned that there was a report in a Russian newspaper that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate in late June in connection with the flight he later took to Moscow. “All we know is he entered the building,” he answered, with a shrug.
That Russian consulate visit did not come as a complete surprise to U.S. intelligence. After Snowden left the Mira, his interactions with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services in Hong Kong had been closely monitored by “secret means,” a term that in that context likely indicated electronic surveillance. A former top intelligence executive in Washington, D.C., subsequently confirmed this monitoring to me. All of Snowden’s stealth in exiting from the Mira hotel, which included wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, thus proved ineffective in hiding him from U.S. intelligence and presumably other intelligence services seeking the treasure trove of documents he had taken from the NSA.
As for his next destination, I could find no evidence that Snowden had made any arrangements during his monthlong stay in Hong Kong to go to any Latin American country. Before he went public on June 9, he could have easily gotten a visa in Hong Kong with his still-valid passport to go to almost any country in the world, including Cuba (for which a U.S. passport was not necessary), Bolivia, and Ecuador. Yet he did not apply for visas during this time period. Even as late as June 8, after meetings with Greenwald and Poitras, his name had still not been revealed, no criminal complaint had been issued against him, and there was no Interpol red alert for his detention. He could have walked out of the Mira hotel, caught a taxi to the Hong Kong airport, and gone on Swiss International Air Lines via Zurich to any country in South America or to Iceland. But, as in the oft-cited Sherlock Holmes clue of the dog that did not bark, Snowden’s inaction in not obtaining visas during this thirty-day period suggests that he had no plans to go anyplace but where he went: Moscow.
However, the mystery that most concerned me was not where Snowden was housed in the interim between when he went public and when he went to Moscow. It was where, and in whose care, Snowden had been before he checked into the Mira on June 1. When I asked my source about this period, he said that as far as he knew, neither the FBI nor the Hong Kong police could find a trace of him during the period between May 20, when he passed through Hong Kong customs, and June 1, when he first used his credit card and passport to check into the Mira hotel. Other than those transactions, they could not find any credit card charges, ATM withdrawals, telephone calls, hotel registrations, subway pass purchases, or other clues to Snowden’s activities. As far as a paper trail was concerned, Snowden was a ghost during this period.
“Could an American just vanish in Hong Kong for eleven days?” I asked.
“Apparently, he did just that,” my source replied.
Snowden’s whereabouts during these eleven days was not a mystery I was going to solve on this first trip to Hong Kong. I needed to know more about his activities before he got there. After all, Snowden was not, as he himself pointed out from Moscow, an “angel descending from the heavens.” He had been working for the U.S. government for the previous seven years. During that period, he had been part of America’s secret intelligence regime and held a clearance for sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. Such SCI material is considered so sensitive that it must be handled within formal access control systems established by the director of national intelligence.
Nor did Snowden’s breach begin with his handing over classified documents to the Guardian reporters in Hong Kong in June 2013 or, for that matter, in the eleven days prior to his meeting with journalists. He had, as the NSA quickly determined, begun illicitly copying documents in the summer of 2012. Such a dangerous enterprise is not born of a sudden impulse. It was, as his actions suggested, nurtured over many months. Even if he had managed to elude American intelligence from late May to early June 2013, he could not hide all the history that led to his decision to come to Hong Kong. There had to be an envelope of circumstances surrounding it, including Snowden’s motivation, associates, movements, finances, and activities prior to his fleeing to Hong Kong. What was missing was not just Snowden’s first eleven days in Hong Kong but the context of the alleged crime.
I first needed to find out who Edward Snowden was.