Edward Jay Epstein: Was Snowden’s Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932?mg=reno64-wsj
Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives.
Edward Snowden’s massive misappropriations of classified documents from the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence is mainly presented by the media as a whistleblowing story. In this narrative—designed by Mr. Snowden himself—he is portrayed as a disgruntled contractor for the National Security Agency, acting alone, who heroically exposed the evils of government surveillance beginning in 2013.
The other way of looking at it—based on the number and nature of documents Mr. Snowden took, and the dates when they were taken—is that only a handful of the secrets had anything to do with domestic surveillance by the government and most were of primary value to an espionage operation.
So far, only the whistleblower version has had immense international resonance. The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists who assisted Mr. Snowden in this enterprise were awarded the 2014 Polk Award for national-security reporting. Former Congressman Ron Paul organized a clemency petition in February for Mr. Snowden, stating: “Thanks to one man’s courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them.”
Yet others—until now not often quoted in news accounts—see Mr. Snowden as neither a hero nor a whistleblower. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2014, that “The vast majority of the documents that Snowden . . . exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities.” Time magazine on April 3 quoted Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), the head of the House Intelligence Committee, as saying Mr. Snowden was “definitely under the influence of Russian officials.”
On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden’s theft of documents as “an act of treason.” A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.
Mr. Snowden’s critics regard the whistleblowing narrative as at best incomplete, at worst fodder for the naïve. They do not believe that it explains the unprecedented size and complexity of the penetration of NSA files and records. For one thing, many of his critics have intelligence clearance. They have been privy to the results of an NSA investigation that established the chronology of the copying of 1.7 million documents that were stolen from the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii. The documents were taken from at least 24 supersecret compartments that stored them on computers, each of which required a password that a perpetrator had to steal or borrow, or forge an encryption key to bypass.
Once Mr. Snowden breached security at the Hawaii facility, in mid-April of 2013, he planted robotic programs called “spiders” to “scrape” specifically targeted documents. According to Gen. Dempsey, “The vast majority of those [stolen documents] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures.”
Rick Ledgett, the NSA executive who headed the NSA’s damage-assessment task force, said on the Dec. 13, 2013, edition of “60 Minutes” that this data contains “the keys to the kingdom.” Keys, he told the CBS CBS -2.19% show, that could provide “adversaries with a road map of what we know, what we don’t know.” Many of the documents concerned secret operations against the cyber capabilities of adversaries. But only a minute fraction of them have anything to do with civil liberties or whistleblowing, former NSA Director Keith Alexander says in the Australian Financial Review published May 8.
The chronology of Mr. Snowden’s thefts suggests that a top priority was lists of the computers of U.S. adversaries abroad that the NSA had succeeded in penetrating. Mr. Snowden confirmed this priority in October 2013, when he told James Risen of the New York Times NYT +3.29% that his “last job” at the NSA—the job he took on March 15, 2013, with outside contractor Booz Allen Hamilton—gave him, as Mr. Snowden said, “access to every target, every active operation” mounted by the NSA against the Chinese. Soon after Mr. Snowden fled to Hong Kong in May 2013, he told Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post that his new job gave him access to the lists of machines in China, Hong Kong and elsewhere that “the NSA hacked. That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”
Mr. Snowden took the Booz Allen Hamilton job in March of 2013, but it was only at the tail end of his operation—in May—that he copied the document (possibly the only one) that specifically authorized the NSA’s controversial domestic surveillance program. This was a Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act court order, instructing Verizon to provide metadata on U.S. phone calls for 90 days, that Mr. Snowden gave to the Guardian newspaper in London on June 3, 2013. (He also leaked a secret presentation in slides about the NSA’s Prism Internet surveillance. This program, operated with the FBI, targeted only foreigners, though it could be extended, with the approval of the attorney general, to suspects in the U.S. in contact with foreign targets.)
Contrary to Mr. Snowden’s account, the document he stole about the NSA’s domestic surveillance couldn’t have been part of any whistleblowing plan when he transferred to Booz Allen Hamilton in March of 2013. Why? Among other reasons, because the order he took was only issued by the FISA court on April 26, 2013.
The suspicions that whistleblowing was a cover for espionage by Mr. Snowden are further heightened by his winding up under the protection of the Russian security service, the FSB, in Moscow. Whether or not Mr. Snowden took the 1.7 million stolen documents to Moscow or stored them in cyberspace, the theft effectively compromises all the sources and methods in them.
What accounts for the extraordinary divide between the Snowden and anti-Snowden camps is a disparity in the available information. The pro-Snowden camp’s view is largely informed by Mr. Snowden himself. In the anti-Snowden camp are administration officials and the members of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees who have been at least partially briefed on the continuing investigations of the Snowden affair.
In short, the media and Mr. Snowden’s admirers have only his word as to what went on. His detractors are the people who know enough about what happened to conclude that far from being a whistleblower, Mr. Snowden was a participant in an espionage operation and most likely steered from the beginning toward his massive theft, whether he knew this at first or not.
Little, if any, of this classified data has reached the public or the news media. The evidence backing up the government’s criminal complaint against Mr. Snowden—involving both espionage and the theft of government property—has been sealed since June 22, 2013. Even Mr. Snowden’s legal standing is unclear. President Obama said on Dec. 20, 2013, that he was “under indictment”—and then a spokesperson corrected the president, saying that the grand jury had not in fact indicted him.
Until there is an indictment by a federal grand jury, and the state’s evidence against Mr. Snowden is unsealed, his portrait as a crusader will persist.
Mr. Epstein’s most recent book is “The Annals of Unsolved Crime” (Melville House, 2013).
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