The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man”

By Luke Harding

Vintage Books, 2014

Murray Polner is a regular book  reviewer for HNN.

In the first of what will certainly be many books about Edward Snowden’s stunning revelations of NSA’s domestic and foreign spying, Luke Harding, the British Guardian’s foreign correspondent and co-author with David Leigh of Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy and Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia, is out first with his wide-ranging and quite readable Eric Ambler/Graham Greene/John Le Carre -style book.

In it, Harding details what happened and perhaps even why—or at least what we know thus far-- about Edward Snowden. He introduces the reader to the journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, who published the first article about Snowden’s material in the Guardian, the British newspaper, Laura Poitras the documentary filmmaker of My Country My Country, about the impact of America’s invasion on an Iraqi doctor, and who has by her own account  been detained and questioned and her possessions taken about forty times by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, and Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian’s veteran  reporter.  They all met Snowden for the first time in a Hong Kong hotel room and  then helped broadcast his disclosures to the world.

Harding also spends time on his newspaper’s  determination to publish the story despite the c Conservative government’s threats and harassment and its destruction of the newspaper’s hard drives. He illustrates how British spymasters, operating in a country without First Amendment protection or a Constitution, genuflected before their Washington masters because Uncle Sam paid their bills, or as one cynic at GCHQ-- the British successor to M-15-- told Harding, “We have the brains, they have the money.” He also portrays US pressures not to publish on the Guardian’s NY editor, the hard-driving Janine Gibson and her very small but computer-savvy staff, and describes her dread lest the material in her possession might be stolen before portions appeared, as they later  did, in the New York Times, Washington Post and Der Spiegel..

The Snowden Files is replete with once- obscure, secret NSA code names such as UPSTREAM, which allowed the NSA “direct access to the fiber-optic cables carrying internet and telephone data, out of and around the US,” and Snowden’s biggest catch thus far, the top-secret PRISM, which gives the vast US number of post-9/11 intelligence agencies access to virtually anything it needs and wants. NSA’s stated mission is to guard the country’s most secret military and computer networks, especially from Russia and China. which the US has repeatedly charged with cyber spying. No wonder so many in Washington would love to bring him home to stand trial and take the consequences, which could involve a lengthy prison sentence.

Snowden, who never graduated from high school, was a libertarian and to Harding, “a thoughtful conservative” who voted for Ron Paul in 2008, admired John McCain, opposed gun control and backed the Free Tibet movement.  The son of a veteran Coast Guard officer, Snowden joined the US army but was honorably discharged after breaking his legs in a training exercise. He then joined the CIA, quit,  and for three years worked for the NSA in Switzerland, then on to Japan, and finally for the private contractor Booze Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, where he had the  right to use unencrypted files, which included German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal and official communications.

Living with his longtime girlfriend in Hawaii and earning $122,000 a year might mean for most an idyllic and satisfying life, but Harding says  Snowden developed a conscience when he learned what the NSA was up to. “They [the NSA] are intent in making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them,” he said, and reached the conclusion that no-one in positions of authority, either in the second Bush or Obama administrations, ever raised any questions or challenged the indiscriminate collection of data. By the time Snowden left Japan in 2012, Harding says “Snowden was a whistleblower in waiting.” Actually, in 1975  a somewhat similar, if less earth-shattering  event occurred when the intrepid investigative reporter Seymour Hersh discovered  that the CIA, was engaged in illegal  domestic spying on Americans, for which he was damned until he was proven correct.

After releasing the first wave of documents implicating NSA’s wholesale snooping, and obviously fearing arrest, Snowden  flew to Hong Kong, where, writes Harding,  a “mysterious guardian angel” protected him, person still unknown. It was in that Hong Kong hotel room that Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill gathered to hear his story. It is a mystery to Harding and everyone else who has written about the case why the US didn’t do anything to apprehend Snowden  since it was no secret that he was registered at the Mira Hotel  in his own name, used his  own credit  card, and wandered freely through the city.

In that hotel room, the trio “felt they were involved in a joint endeavor of high public  importance” especially after Snowden handed them another bombshell: The top-secret Presidential Policy Directive 20, dated October 2012, in which Obama secretly ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to create a listing of possible foreign targets for US cyber attacks. “Not defense, insists Harding, but “attacks.” This in the face of repeated public US complaints of Chinese cyber attacks.

By then, Snowden had become Public Enemy No. 1, and he fled Hong Kong, first to authoritarian Beijing and finally to Putin’s equally authoritarian Russia, where he remains because of US pressure on countries willing to accept him. Harding relates how leftist Bolivian president  Evo Mirales’ plane, en route from Moscow to Bolivia, was forced to land in Britain, without a doubt  a violation of diplomatic immunity, and where Morales and his staff were held for fifteen hours because of unsubstantiated buzz that Snowden was aboard.

The Snowden Files is not hagiography and Harding, smarting from the harsh treatment accorded his paper his newspaper – the Guardian’s Editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, wrote a Foreword to the book--  has few kind words for Britain’s’security forces. He is, though, obviously sympathetic to Snowden and to some extent the imprisoned Chelsea Manning, though far less so to Wikileaks’Julian Assange, the original mass leaker. 147 Nor does he believe that Snowden is anyone’s foreign agent as Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,  keeps alleging without thus far offering any evidence. In a page one story on February 9, 2014  the New YorkTimes reported, “Investigators have found no evidence that Snowden’s searches were directed by a foreign power.” According to Harding, Snowden believes the White House’s campaign to criminalize his behavior and pile on felony charges is an injustice. He's offered to say as much  before the US Congress—if they would let him. 332 check quotes

What Snowden did was force open a vital and necessary debate about the tensions between the demands of national security and civil liberties, between the rights accorded a powerful if barely understood federal, mysterious agency and the American belief in privacy as enshrined in our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. Snowden’s critics claim he compromised American national security by revealing highly classified information. Secretary of State John Kerry called him “a traitor to his county,” perhaps forgetting  that he was once falsely targeted as a liar about his experiences in Vietnam. So is Snowden just  another Benedict Arnold or is he doomed to become  Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without a Country,” the story of the fictional army Lt. Philip Nolan, who was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in exile, never again  allowed to set foot on American soil.

Future authors will have to grapple with what now seem like intractable questions. In our ever-innovating, constantly- changing digital world that Snowden has opened to Americans, we need to wonder how best to defend the country if  everyone else has the same or even more advanced computer weapons. We need to know if Snowden—and Chelsea Manning too-- actually harmed the military or is this just another fable conjured up by NSA's  defenders? More questions for future authors:  Is there any way the huge phone and internet firms can protect our privacy? Is there perhaps a yet to be discovered alchemy out there which can safely mix defense with civil liberties? Are journalists accountable  to the government for reporting leakers and whistleblowers’ materials? Will Congress and some future administration  do the right thing? And what is the “right thing”? And then, to what extent will all this  seriously taint Obama’s presidential legacy?

The battle continues. Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post will be out with their books in the Spring. And, meanwhile, is  Edward Snowden a whistle blowing hero or a traitor?