Edward Jay Epstein - How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft

T HE 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 NSAs 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 NSAs 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 NSAs 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 Kongs 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.

Snowdens 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 mysterya howdunit, if you likethat 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 Snowdens 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 Americas request to extradite Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted for insider trading.