45. The Leak That Changed The World: America Exposed (Ep 3)

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I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops, secure communications, normal communications, a decoy, and an air gap, a computer that had never gone and would never go online.

I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I scribbled in pen, got called away for work, I love you.

I signed it with my call letter nickname, Echo.

Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo.

In Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash and on May 20th arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me.

Okay, welcome to The Rest Us Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that, unfortunately, dear listeners, was yet another reading from Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record.

And we are now, for those who have been listening to this wonderful series about Edward Snowden, we are now at a really critical kind of turning point in this story because Edward Snowden is taking the plunge and he is going to finally reach out to journalists to get his information out to the world.

And I think it's probably worth a little bit of

how did we get here?

Yep.

You know, Snowden, up to this point, he's been a CIA officer, technical officer.

He's been a contractor for the NSA.

He has taken really via bulk downloads and some kind of fairly ingenious methods of sneaking information out of his NSA office in Hawaii, this bunker beneath a pineapple field.

He's taken out a trove of about 1.5 million documents from a variety of internal databases.

And he's now at a point where he is figuring out how does he get this information out to the world.

That's right.

He's decided he doesn't want to publish it himself.

He wants to go through journalists who he thinks can kind of work through it and make the most of it and decide what to publish.

So who's he going to try?

I mean he actually is wary of one obvious place which is the New York Times because he feels that in the past they were leaned on by the government to not publish certain stories about government surveillance and it held back.

So instead he wants to look for figures who he thinks I think will be more sympathetic who he's going to reach out to initially anonymously to try and persuade them to listen.

So the first person he tries, and it's a really interesting character, an important character in our story, is a guy called Glenn Greenwald.

Now, Glenn Greenwald, his background is as a civil liberties lawyer.

He's become a journalist with The Guardian US,

the branch of The Guardian published out of America, but he lives in Brazil.

And he's been focusing on abuses of power by the US government for some time.

He's only just joined The Guardian a previous year.

He is quite a radical campaigning figure.

Now, it's interesting because in the journalist world, some people say, well, is he a journalist?

He's more of an activist.

I actually think he is more of a sign about how journalism was changing, where you get these people who've got quite strong individual brands and who have quite strong views and have an online presence.

And Greenwald, in a way, I think, is ahead of his time in being one of those characters.

So he's very much being reached out to by Snowden, who I think has been reading some of his blogs because of who he is, rather than necessarily it being the Guardian specifically at this point.

But December the 1st, 2012, Greenwald gets an email from someone called Cincinnatus.

Now, remember, this is the name of a Roman who voluntarily relinquished power.

So, you know, it's a little clue in the name.

And a nice little sign of Edward Snowden's subterranean narcissism.

Well, you're going to pick it up.

You've got to pick a code name.

You've got to pick a code name.

So, I mean, why not?

It's not the worst one to pick, I could think.

Anyway, he says in this email, I have some stuff you might be interested in.

It is vague, though.

And here's what's interesting.

Greenworld is told that to get the information, he has to use a type of encryption called PGP, pretty good privacy.

I've always liked that it's only pretty good.

Well, I think it's supposed to be ironic.

So this is, I mean, this is interesting.

As a journalist myself, it's not the normal encryption that's built into your laptop or phone.

It's something which provides really quite intense encryption, which if you use it properly, it shouldn't be crackable.

You know, if someone intercepts that message, even the NSA, they wouldn't be able to decipher and decode what's in the message.

So Snowden has said, look, you need to use this and install this in order for me to be able to send you what I need to send.

And it's interesting because Greenwald doesn't get around to doing it.

He's just busy.

He's busy, but he also admits in his memoir, No Place to Hide, that he's not that into technology.

You know, he's actually not, it all looks a bit too complicated.

I think we've all been there.

When someone says, you have to install this or do that, and you're like, really?

I think that's Greenwald.

Well, I mean, honestly, in the documentary about Snowden, Citizen 4, there is a scene where Greenwald and Snowden are sitting together.

And Greenwald, I'm actually kind of shocked it was in the documentary because it's just Greenwald for about 60 seconds struggling with technology on his laptop.

So he's he is an ideal mouthpiece for Snowden because he is at heart a civil liberties lawyer.

He's an advocate.

He is going to be less skeptical of Snowden than many other journalists, right?

But he doesn't know how to use PGP.

Yeah.

So the weeks go by.

So the weeks go by.

Eventually, Cincinnatus, you know, this mysterious account, gets back in touch again in late January and says not willing to share anything until you encrypt something.

And Greenwald is clearly thinking, I'm not going to take this seriously unless they show me something.

And I know it's for real.

And, you know, Snowden actually sends him tutorials on how to do encryption because he's so desperate.

Is that a normal thing, Gordon, is to have someone who could be legit or could be a total whack job reaching out with some, you know, sort of tantalizing hint that they've got a great story for you?

I mean, that must happen.

some frequency.

It happens.

It has happened all the time.

I mean, I literally have one a few weeks ago where someone emailed me.

I won't say what it was.

Their email address was clearly a kind of made-up name and was like do you have time to meet i've got something to talk to you about and i'm glad you finally got my message

yeah i just been trying to contact you for weeks yeah

there are other ways david but you do get a lot of these messages actually and i've had some which have been as you would politely put it whack jobs where people have said you know i've been tortured by the british state and you end up talking to them and you realize

no somebody's tortured you but it probably wasn't the british

you know and then you get other ones where you go meet up with me.

I've got some secret documents to hand over.

And I remember once doing the classic thing, going into a kind of hotel, meeting someone who claimed to have secret documents, I think in that case, relating to the Iran nuclear program.

And you're like, this looks exciting.

Anyway, you went back and looked at them and kind of shared them with some experts and realized that actually they were fake.

And it was the person who'd handed them to me was trying to implicate someone else as having supplied something to the Iranian nuclear program.

And it was a kind of, you know, a setup where they were hoping you'd report on it and this person will get into trouble about it and then occasionally maybe you get the real deal and you get a kind of source who does provide stuff so it definitely happens and it is definitely really hard to know which ones to take seriously so we've pushed on him but you can understand

perspective I can absolutely understand it but it's funny because you know Snowden himself says Here am I ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life, to hand this guy thousands of top secret documents from the nation's most secretive agency, a leak that will produce dozens, if not hundreds of journalistic scoops, and he can't even be bothered to install an encryption program.

So, you know, that's the, that's a view.

So at this point, Snowden tries someone else.

So he now tries a filmmaker, Laura Poitras.

She's another very interesting character who has been making a series of films about, if you like, the war on terror, about US policy post-9-11, including Iraq.

And the reason I think he picks her is because as a result of making those films, she's finding herself getting stopped at airports.

She's clearly on some kind of watch list.

She's having her devices seized and confiscated.

And so she's learning about encryption and the need to protect her stuff.

And she's based in Berlin.

And she's based in the United States.

And critically, both of these journalists are outside of the U.S.

Yeah, that's right, Greenwald and Rio.

Even though they're American.

Yeah.

She starts to get these emails every week from Snowden, normally at the weekends.

And it's interesting, at one point, she writes, I don't know if you are legit, crazy, or trying to entrap me.

You know, she also is a bit like, oh, you know, this is kind of weird.

But by February 2013, she's taking them seriously.

So he starts contacting Greenwald in December of 2012.

We're now three or so months later.

He's not provided any documents, right?

Kind of hasn't shown his bona fides.

Yeah.

And so you can see why people are skeptical.

So then time passes.

I mean, you know, quite a lot of time passes.

It must be kind of weird for Snowden, who's taken this risk, basically.

He's reaching out to people and nothing is happening.

It does make me think a little bit of the series we did earlier in the year on Adolf Tolkachev, where he reaches out to the CIA and gets nothing four, five, six times and essentially gets the cold shoulder.

There is kind of this interesting parallel.

You're right.

But then in April, Laura Poitress is starting to take it seriously.

And she actually gets in touch with...

Glenn Greenwald, and they meet up when they're both in New York.

She says, take the battery out of your phone first.

She says she's got emails from someone promising secret documents on surveillance.

She seems kind of nervous, unsure about it.

They agree it seems serious, but they need the documents.

They need some proof, which is, you know, typical if you're a journalist.

And Poitras does want to interview it.

So they kind of part ways, go back to Berlin and Rio, unsure if they'll hear any more.

Mid-April, Poitras tells Greenwald to expect a delivery, and a FedEx parcel arrives with instructions on how to use an encrypted chat.

And meanwhile, Snowden is now starting to send out some of the files.

And he sends her an encrypted file, which is about something called PRISM.

We'll come to what it is shortly.

But the point is, it's now clear that he's got access because this is, you know, this is something top secret.

She's actually received a stolen document from the National Security Agency at this point.

She knows it's the real deal.

And he's saying the source, you still don't really know that much about him, that they need to meet.

And this is interesting because we're now heading towards May and when you talked about Edward Snowden fleeing.

And he's going to tell her that she needs to go to Hong Kong.

Now, I think this is one of the really interesting bits of the story, the choice of destination of where Edward Snowden wants to go and wants to meet these people.

If you put yourself, Gordon, in

Greenwald or Poitress's shoes, what do you do?

I mean, I'm fascinated with this as someone who's inside the CIA and knows that if someone had sent me a top-secret document, I would have to report it immediately to security and kind of, there's a whole procedure.

But as a journalist, I mean, what's the play here, right?

I mean, so you've got a document that's really interesting, and then you have a source who says, I want to go meet me in Hong Kong.

There's probably no playbook here.

There is no playbook.

I think that's really interesting because your first question is, is this a trap?

And I think Laura Poitras had, you know, raised that because you do see journalists, and we see it particularly in Russia, who are entrapped with the offer of, come and meet me for some secret, and then they get sprung on by the FSB and, you know, by rest,

but not by the Americans.

No, so it would be unusual.

You want to know: is it true?

Is it a fake?

Your question is: who is the source?

What is their motivation?

What access do they have?

have?

Can I trust them?

Is there a public interest in looking at this or in dealing with this?

You know,

what is the story?

And what are the risks of meeting them?

I have to say, Hong Kong would be a stretch.

I mean, not least for the budget when you go to the varsity.

It is interesting because around this time, when Glenn Greenwald has been slow to respond, Laura Poitras has also gone to a Washington Post journalist called Bark Gelman and talked to him about whether he could do it with the Post.

He's just left the Washington Post.

But actually, at the Washington Post, when they hear Hong Kong, they're like, whoa, this sounds kind of risky.

And I think, right, that Hong Kong is suspicious solely because it's just, it's part of China, right?

So it immediately casts kind of this shadow over.

the leaks because it at first blush could make it look like he's under the control of or sort of being influenced by maybe the chinese intelligence services yeah and and it would be an obvious kind of suspicion which is is this someone who's basically a Chinese spy who's gone to China or a part of China in the case of Hong Kong?

Or a defector, maybe.

Or defector, you know, with the documents.

And therefore, you know, you're into kind of foreign spy world.

But it is interesting because I recently spoke to someone who was a very senior intelligence official at the time about these kind of suspicions.

You know, could he have been a Chinese spy or a Russian spy, given where he ended up?

And they said they looked very hard at this at the time, as you'd expect them to do in the intelligence community.

And they said the Russians and Chinese were both as surprised as the Americans were when he turned up in Hong Kong or when he eventually emerges and goes public in Hong Kong.

So in other words, they didn't know that he was there.

They're like, who's this guy?

And you imagine that this is basically the U.S.

intelligence community spying on Russian and Chinese communications and seeing that they're surprised by it, which suggests they didn't have advanced knowledge.

I think it also does show a bit of Snowden's naivete in the signal that this move would send to these journalists, right?

Because it does immediately, and this is one one of the things that's going to color a lot of this stories:

the movement out of the United States really casts a pall over him, right?

I mean, and it does, even if there aren't facts to substantiate the fact that he's, you know, working for the Chinese Intel services or later the Russians, just that sheer movement makes it harder for Poitras and Greenwald to kind of defend him, doesn't it?

It is a problem for him.

And his argument, or the argument of those people who met him and talked to him about it, was that he saw Hong Kong as a kind of no man's land and it's worth saying Hong Kong a former British colony but at this point back to Chinese control after 97 but under you know one country two systems so China didn't have full control and it's only actually after Snowden that China really puts its national security law into practice in Hong Kong and really takes the place over so at that time it still had a kind of slightly more freewheeling ambiguous role but it is still technically part of China and I guess it seems Snowden's calculation is that it's a place out of reach of American law and with options of where he can get to, but with a bit more freedom than anywhere else.

That seems to be why he picked it.

And in this case, so he basically has gone to his supervisor at the NSA facility in Hawaii, says he needs to be away from work for what he'll say is a couple of weeks to receive treatment for epilepsy, which has kind of been an ongoing medical problem for him throughout his career.

And then he basically, you know, that quote I read up front, says nothing to his girlfriend about the true purpose for his trip, packs his bags, takes all these documents, and goes to Hong Kong.

That's right.

And he goes to the Mira Hotel in the Kowloon District.

Very nice.

It's a very nice hotel.

It's a commercial district.

It's a big, fancy hotel.

And this is, you know, where he is going to try and bring the journalists.

And initially, he's there and he's waiting.

He says, you know, I barricaded myself in my room at the Mira Hotel, which I chose because of its central location.

I put the privacy, please, privacy, please do not disturb sign on the door handle to keep housekeeping out.

For 10 days, I didn't leave the room for fear of giving a foreign spy the chance to sneak in and bug the place.

So he's there, and he's still trying to get the journalists to come out.

And Laura Poitress has talked to Bark Gellman, and now Glenn Greenwald is back in play.

So in late May, Edward Snowden has gone back to Greenwald to try and persuade him to come out.

Greenwald still seems suspicious about why Hong Kong, but then Snowden sends him documents.

Again, you know, it's the kind of calling card.

This is the real deal.

So at this point, Greenwald goes to New York to see the US editor of The Guardian, Janine Gibson, on May 31st to say, I think I need to go out there.

I mean, they see the documents, they realize this is potentially massive, but also the documents, you know, as we'll come to, are kind of quite technical, they're quite difficult to understand.

You need the person.

The document in itself isn't enough.

And so the Guardian team look at this.

They also look at a kind of manifesto he seems to have written, which I think is a really interesting document because I don't think it's ever fully been published.

And they actually say at the time, we don't think this should be published because it's basically what his why he's doing it document.

And it's insane.

Right.

The journalists who are looking at this are like, look, this guy, it makes him look like, I would say, a privacy jihadist.

I'm not sure the jihadist term.

Sorry, privacy.

Privacy.

Privacy, jihadist.

Okay, but I think it makes him look quite ideological, as we talked about, the kind of libertarian stuff.

And I think there is a bit of nervousness at the Guardian, I think, at this point, about him and his motivation, whether he's for real.

This manifesto, I think, also makes them even more nervous.

It's like, you know, is this guy a bit cranky or something?

But they realize this is potentially a massive story.

This is the first time I believe that he's told them who he is.

Yeah.

Right.

These journalists, because he, up until this point, he'd been using Cincinnatus or Virax or whatever.

And this time he reveals that he's Ed Snowden.

He reveals his social security number.

He reveals, I love this.

His CIA funny name was Dave M.

Churchyard,

which is a relatively bizarre one.

But those funny names, which are ridiculous, there was always a rumor.

They're generated by a computer, but there was always a rumor that the sort of, I guess, guess, upstream, like the thing that was fed into that computer originally was a British phone book from the night, like a London phone book from the 1950s that would sort of go and pull pieces of names to put them together.

Like, I had a ridiculous one, I actually can't share it.

Um, but it's all, but it's always funny, it's always a first name, yes, it's always a first name, middle initial that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but we'd always come up with what it meant internally, and then a weird last name.

And there were actually a few people I knew who the program, it just gets generated, right?

When you join, the program generated one for them that was so inappropriate that they actually had to go through a formal process to try to get it changed because it had already been issued.

But Dave M.

Churchyard is

a pretty good one.

By the way, audience members can email him with what they think Dave is.

That's right.

They shouldn't

name could or should be.

Anyway, if you can guess it, or if you know it, even better, you might have access to the CIA database.

This is another example when he says, Hey, I'm Ed Snowden, Dave M.

Churchyard, where again, we have Deadly Sin number one, Edward Snowden, Serial Fabricator, where he, when he's describing his role, right?

He says to Peutrus and Greenwald, you know, he's a senior advisor at NSA under corporate cover.

Not true.

He's a contractor.

He's working for Dell.

He says he's a lecturer at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He had like stepped in and given a few lectures like once when someone got

who hasn't embellished their CV a little bit.

So again,

he's trying, he's got, listen, he's trying to convince them he's sitting on a stack of top secret documents to go.

That's all he needs.

Yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean?

It's all he needs to do is provide them one document on Prism, and they're hooked.

And yet he's got this whole kind of persona that he's built up in his own mind, right, of how important he is.

And it's just even seeping through in what he leaks to the journal.

Okay, so this meeting takes place at the Guardian, and they're convinced enough to send Glenn Greenworld and to go with Laura Poitras.

Interestingly enough, they also send Ewan McCaskill to go with them.

And full disclosure, Ewan was my kind of counterpart, the guardian, when I was at the BBC.

I know him well, spoken to him, and a very smart choice.

And I would say that, wouldn't I?

But I think it is true.

He's a kind of veteran, serious journalist who knows a good story and knows how to pursue a story, won't be intimidated off it, but who is clearly there, I think, you can read between the lines, to kind of slightly babysit the other two and kind of keep the kind of rigorous journalism side on track on this.

And he's going to go out with them.

I think much to laura poitress's disappointment and annoyance who's like who's this guy who's been sent along with us it's supposed to be me and glenn but the guardian go we need our person to be there as a kind of reporter to work with flow mixed at the addition of a credible journalist well yes to the soup that edward snowden was but he's gonna play but he's gonna play an important role so there we are are we gonna skip past you're not gonna let me read any lines from his manifesto gordon oh go on then i know you love reading manifesto

published memoir i can't read from the manifesto the deranged lines from the manifesto.

Okay,

there's a lot here.

Yeah, just pick your favorite.

I'll pick a couple.

Here's a great one.

As I advanced and learned the dangerous truth behind the U.S.

policies that seek to develop secret, irresistible powers and concentrate them in the hands of an unaccountable few, human weakness haunted me.

As I worked in secret to resist them, selfish fear questioned if the stone thrown by a single man could justify the loss of everything he loves.

And Edward Sonin is right back there playing Tekken as a 13-year-old.

Who cares what your clan thinks?

You're out there in single combat with your own ideas about how to defend them.

Okay, with you having voluntarily read a bit more from Edward Snowden, I think let's pause there to take a break as we and the journalists arrive in Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden.

Well, welcome back.

We are with Edward Snowden.

He is stuck in a horribly dank hotel room in Hong Kong.

And now journalists are on the way, finally, to meet with him to hear his story.

That's right.

On the plane, they're looking at the documents that he sent them, thousands of them, and they're realizing they're onto something big.

These three eventually arrive in Hong Kong on June the 2nd, and it's agreed that initially, Just Greenworld and Poitress will go to meet Snowden on June the 3rd.

And it's interesting because he's left very specific spy-style instructions on how and how they're going to meet.

And the instructions are: they go to the third floor of the Mira Hotel, go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, which is furnished, bizarre detail, with an alligator skin-looking leather couch.

It's not actual alligator skin.

Alligator skin-looking

alligator skin.

They ask the first hotel employee near the room whether there was a restaurant open, and that would be a kind of signal to Snowden who'd be hovering nearby that they'd not been followed.

And then they wait around for a guy with a Rubik's Cube.

His favorite thing.

Well, they don't know what he looks like.

No, no, no.

So exactly.

And to be fair, I guess it's a pretty good recognition thing, a Rubik's Cube, because it's not the kind of thing most grown people carry around with them.

So the idea is it's one of the few recognizable things that he's brought with him.

He can show it to them and they'll know who he is.

It feels like a really great way to stand out in the middle of a hotel, to be standing there holding a Rubik's Cube.

If you're trying to fly under the radar,

a Rubik's Cube working on it like some kind of lunatic in the middle of a hotel, perhaps sprawled across an alligator skin looking leather couch is not the most sort of clandestine way to make contact.

Well, you've got to make contact somehow.

So anyway, first time at 10 o'clock, no one comes.

They say the recognition words, no one comes.

They go back again 20 minutes later, which is the kind of backup moment.

He's probably watching them from somewhere else.

Exactly.

I think the assumption is he's checking them at that first meeting, and

that's why nothing happens then.

And then this is from Glenn Greenwald in his memoir, No Place to Hide.

At 10.20, we returned and again took our place near the alligator on the couch.

Was there an alligator, like a stuffed alligator?

I'm stuck on this detail.

Was it an alligator skin couch or was it a couch that looked like an alligator?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe someone can tell us who stayed at the hotel, which faced the back wall of the room and a large mirror.

After two minutes, I heard someone come into the room.

Rather than turn around to see who'd entered, I continued to stare at the back wall mirror, which showed a man's reflection walking towards us.

Only when he was within a few feet of the couch, did I turn around?

The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik's cube twirling in the man's left hand.

It's not even solved.

That's my sin number six.

Failing to solve Rubik's cube.

Failing to solve the Rubik's cube.

You're probably one of those people who does it like that really 10 seconds.

Anyway, so here's the really interesting thing, and I think this is a really interesting detail, is they're shocked by who he is, because here is this guy, and they had been in their heads expecting someone in their 50s or 60s, like a chain-smoking, you know, alcoholic, washed-up spy, as they put it, Snowden himself says, expecting someone with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience.

And instead, they get, basically, they look at it and they go, really?

It's a young guy in a white t-shirt with some faded lettering and as Greenwald puts it, jeans and chic nerd glasses

after having seen the documentary I'm not sure I would describe him as chic nerd

with a bit of a kind of goatee and some stubble greenwald also says that snowden looked like he had only recently started shaving yeah perhaps new at the practice so you can see that they're again going like really is this for real i wonder why they thought he was going to be so much older i don't know it's what you'd imagine like when you watch all the presidents men are deep throat and these things you know you always imagine this kind of older guy who's at the end of his career and is unhappy with the way things have gone and who's knows all the secrets.

Because I guess maybe they're thinking to have access to all these secrets, he's got to be a senior

senior.

Yeah.

And so anyway, they're surprised by it.

They exchange the recognition phrase, what time's the restaurant open at noon, but don't go there.

The food sucks, Snowden says.

Greenwald's actually spoiling his ruby.

According to Luke Harding's book on this, you know, he's a Guardia journalist.

He says Greenwald struggled to keep a straight face because he found it all slightly comic.

But the three of them head off towards the lift not saying anything and they go

an elevator american listeners thank you and they go to room 1014.

now this is the the scene i mean this is the place where it's really going to happen for the next few days between those three journalists and snowden but of course snowden's already been there 10 days

and so there's room service plates there's trash you know there's noodle containers half-eaten burgers there's dirty laundry there's damp towels on the floor He's barely left the room.

He's back in his parents' basement playing Tekken.

It's like a teenage room.

I mean, he's only been out of the room like three times in the nearly two weeks he'd been there.

Wow.

And so this quite a small room, and you can see it on Citizen 4, Laura Poitrus's film.

You know, it's not a big suite in which they're now going to be holed up together.

He should have sprung for the suite.

Yeah.

Tremendous error on his part.

Should have paid for it.

So, you know, he tells them, put your phones away, put your phone in the mini bar fridge.

And then Snowden takes the pillows from the bed and he places them at the bottom of the door, which I guess is him thinking if someone's got a microphone outside, it's not going to pick up the sounds of what they're talking about.

You wrote here, Gordon, in this, you know, in our notes, he tried using spy tricks involving water and soy sauce patterns on a piece of paper to see if anyone came in while he was out.

Yeah, I didn't understand that.

In my notes, I wrote WTF is this.

Yeah.

What is that?

I don't know.

It's something to do with, like, if the water falls on the soy sauce, then you get a pattern and you can I don't know.

I didn't understand

an elaborate soy sauce drip machine set up triggered by the door.

But here we are and they're going to be in this room for days.

It's worth saying.

Now, Ewan McCaskill, the Guardian journalist, comes on the second day, because Snowden wasn't necessarily expecting him.

He actually, you can see, actually takes a lot of the lead in the kind of questioning Snowden and trying to

understand who he is.

And, you know, Snowden sits on the bed and white t-shirt.

White t-shirt.

Glenn Greenwald and Ewan McCaskill start asking questions.

They basically, they need to answer that question.

Like, who are you?

And why are you doing this?

They have to understand his kind of motivation and his credibility.

And I mean, they do find his story a little odd at first, I think.

You can see he hadn't finished college.

Sounded like he'd worked for the CIA and the NSA.

He'd be training for special forces.

So there's a bit of them going like, this sounds like a bit.

crazy, but he's, you know, providing also some IDs and some details, which make it clear that he's for real.

And of course, he's got the documents.

So they are kind of coming around to understand that he's the real deal.

Well, there's a great segment in Citizen IV, the documentary, where it's when Ewan has showed up.

And Ewan sits down and he's kind of got, unlike Greenwald, you kind of get this sense that, and I think you know Ewan.

I don't know if this is his style, but he's not really trying to establish a lot of rapport right away with Snowden.

He's trying to...

establish some facts.

And so he says, you know, tell me, I think it's more like, who are you?

Yeah.

And Snowden starts to give his life story and job description.

And Ewan's like, no, what's your name?

Yeah.

It started at the beginning.

And he has him spell the name out.

One other thing that is interesting, and because you can see all of this on Citizen 4, Snowden, why did he wear that white t-shirt the whole time?

He's being filmed.

It was a terrible wardrobe decision.

You know, I think he's got other things to worry about at this point than his wardrobe decision.

Well, I don't know.

He was, you know,

what comes across is a certain, you could say innocence.

I think you'll pick me up on that, or naivety around.

No, that's right.

And I think they immediately are thinking, like, is this a guy who's out for money and it doesn't appear to be?

I mean, he talks about his belief.

the ideological stuff, which we've been trying to assess, that he believes in the Constitution.

He talks about the internet, you know, allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being.

He said, for many kids, the internet is a means of self-actualization.

I don't want to live, and I think this is a key phrase, I don't want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.

And he says, I worry that mine was the last generation to enjoy that freedom of the internet.

So I think he's giving them a sense, his argument, and you know, except there might be different views a bit, that this is someone who's ideologically motivated and they believe in him.

And it's interesting because there'd been this question back in New York, you know, is he for real?

And so Ewan, after the initial meetings, sends a four-word text from Hong Kong back to Janine Gibson at the Guardian in New York.

York, and they knew they couldn't talk openly on the phone, but she needed to know whether this was the real thing.

And the phrase is, The Guinness is good.

And that means

he's the real deal.

The Guinness is bad would have meant he's not trusting him.

And according to you, and this was a little joke because him and Janine Gibson used to go out for drinks when they were on the road together.

And he'd always want a Guinness and she'd want a kind of wine or a cocktail or something.

And so, you know, the Guinness was a reference.

But that message goes back to New York saying, the Guinness is good.

He seems like he's for real.

It's interesting because obviously that is a huge deal for Ewen, for Glenn, for Laura Poitras.

But the room, it's pretty tense in that room.

You can feel it even in the documentary.

I mean, it's, it's cramped, it's confined, of course, but it's also, it's an, I think it's an interesting question from a journalistic perspective.

But you could make the same parallel if, and by the way, I'm not saying he's being run by a foreign intelligence service, but just more generally, a comparison between this encounter and a CIA case officer convincing someone to spy for them.

Because you have someone who's really about to jump off a cliff.

And he has put really his life and his reputation, Snowden, in the hands of these journalists.

Yeah.

Like totally.

Yeah, I think they worry about him, actually.

Ewan says, you know, he had kids the same age.

And he's thinking, Snowden, you could go to jail for the rest of your life potentially for what you're doing now.

And so they are thinking quite hard about the kind of risks for him.

But I think they can see that this is something he's thought through and he wants to do.

And, you know, they're probing him.

Greenwald, at one point, I think, probes him on his morality and where it comes from.

And his answer is interesting.

His video games.

Should be encouraging for all of us.

You know, it's the idea in a video game, you're the kind of individual hero in your game or in your story who's kind of taking on the great powers and you can do it.

And so they're getting this sense of an unusual character, I think.

I think they can also see that he...

he is not a spy in the sense of working for a foreign power and that he views it as a patriotic act.

Now, you know, I'm sure some people would disagree with that but he sees himself not as betraying his country but as defending the constitution which he thinks has been violated so i think all of that makes him realize he is committed to doing this he he wants to see it through knowing the risks you know again to take kind of the lens of to some degree the journalists to some degree he's a volunteer here to some degree the journalists are recruiting him that's a little bit of a push and pull you know i think Snowden's psychological combination here is

really perfect from the standpoint of journalists trying to break stories or be from the standpoint of a police officer recruiting an asset because he has, you said innocence or naivete, and I think that's right.

I mean, there's a complete lack of guile that he has.

He's smart, but he sort of lacks that kind of, I don't know, meanness to him.

He's just, he's kind of an innocent, naive kid, I guess you'd say, in some ways, who is not, importantly, not a coward, right?

That's tough to recruit because if he's a coward, he doesn't want his name out there.

But what he has instead is a massive ego and narcissism.

And so you combine those things, that lack of guile with a massive ego, and you have someone who's willing to take a massive step, put his name out there as the source of all this stuff.

And now, in these kind of subsequent days, there is a lot of tension in this room.

I think it's really, really interesting.

I mean, every day they leave him thinking when they come back the next day, he's going to have been snatched or have disappeared or something will have happened to him.

And he is saying, he's finally got them out there.

You know, we we know he's been waiting for this.

He wants to get this story out.

He knows the clock is ticking on the fact that he kind of signed off work, ill, and, you know, in Hawaii.

And, but at some point, that's going to get noticed.

He's been away for a couple of weeks now.

And he's fearing that at any point he could get picked up, nothing will get released.

Everyone will get arrested and it'll all be for nothing.

And he hopes, back to that idea, he hopes that going public will give him some protection.

So this is the most vulnerable phase for him because, you know, he is out with the secrets, but he's not yet public.

so he wants this to move fast meanwhile the journalists are also trying to work out well we need to kind of assess this stuff we need to write the stories because they're literally writing stories like in the room in the room yeah and they're also working across kind of three time zones you know london guardian you know where the boss and russ produce the big editor is new york where it's going to be edited out of and and then hong kong so no one's really sleeping much you've also got this slight tension because glenn greenwald also wants to publish the stories as soon as possible one of the things he fears is being scooped because he knows the Washington Post also have got some of this through those previous contacts.

And he's worried that, you know, the Guardian might go slow, they might not do it.

So actually at some point, he starts saying

and reaching out to other media saying, I've got a story for you and basically using that to put pressure on the Guardian and saying, if the Guardian back away, I'm going to go somewhere else with this story because I think it's so good.

So the stakes are pretty high because also, if you're the Guardian, you want to get this right.

You've got to make sure this story is bottomed out and you're not going to kind of screw up or make a mistake.

So the pressure is really growing at this point as they work on that first story.

But in New York, you know, Janine Gibson, who's the U.S.

editor, has basically decided this is good and we're going to do it, but we've got to go through the right steps in order to get this story out.

You've got to actually contact people in the NSA or the intelligence community to start, I mean, at least saying we have something and we're going to run it.

And this is also really interesting because the Guardian try and contact the us government and the white house to say we've got a big story coming and of course they're not at this point saying what it is they're just saying we you need to talk to us it's a really big story and so the government doesn't seem to realize at first it's important but eventually they get back to the guardian in a call and they ask for a delay and they say can you delay putting this first story out and it's worked in the past because with us publications they'd often agree to a bit of a delay and you know a nice conversation but the guardian and janine gibson kind of hold firm and go we want to run this story and you know know, we're coming to you for comment, but we're going soon.

But it's interesting as well, because you get a call, which has got the deputy head of the NSA, senior FBI officials.

And I think one of the things that tells you is this is a real story.

This is a big story.

You know, you're not getting fobbed off with a press officer going, ah, you know, we'll give you a quick line.

So at this point, the pressure has been building.

And the Guardian want to get the story out, but Greenwald and particularly Snowden are desperately pushing.

And the government is pushing back on the Guardian to kind of go with it.

And at this point, they get ready to publish.

Also, Snowden, and you can even see this in the documentary, is he's dealing with personal stuff back home, too, right?

Because as this story is kind of coming to a head, his absence has been missed now in Hawaii, right?

And police have been out to see his girlfriend in Hawaii.

And there's kind of a sense, and you can kind of see him troubled by this in the documentary, that even though he's told his girlfriend Lindsey Mills absolutely nothing about what he's done or even where he is.

That as I read in his sort of deranged manifesto, this idea that he was going to incur a massive personal cost for doing this.

I mean, that is, that is true, right?

And that's starting, that net is starting to close on him.

And that's right.

And it's a really interesting little detail that the police or officials go and see his girlfriend in Hawaii.

And this is before it seems the stuff has been published.

And it is interesting because does it suggest they're onto him in some way?

Have they got some parallel track where they know that something's going on with him?

Or is it just that he's been missing for work for so long?

But it seems a little bit odd because some of the timelines don't quite match up here, I have to say, with that visit to his girlfriend.

But clearly, someone is suspicious about him.

So, yeah, he knows the net is closing.

So, at CIA, and I imagine it's true at NSA too, if you

don't show up, you could just be sick or something, bedwritten.

If you don't show up, they'll call you, contact you, and if you don't answer, they will send people to your house, your apartment to check on you.

So it could be the case here

that he had said, hey, I need a week.

Yeah, and he's been off a little bit.

And he's been off for a little bit longer.

And then they call, he doesn't respond.

Then someone goes out to the house.

And so I think it's very possible that it's not like they were spying on him, but that he was gone longer than they had thought.

And if you have an employee with a top secret security clearance who has essentially gone AWOL, you check in.

Yeah, you check it.

So there we are.

I think he knows time is running out.

He knows the net might be closing around him.

But at last, as we head towards June the 5th, the first story is about to come out and the world is about to learn about Edward Snowden.

And I don't think it's ever going to be the same again.

Well, and it really is an absolute banger of a story that's going to turn the entire United States and its intelligence community.

completely upside down.

So maybe there we'll leave poor Edward Snowden in his decrepit, smelly hotel room in Hong Kong.

And when we return, we'll see what in the world that earth-shaking story had to say.

And of course, if you want to hear that right now, you can join the Declassified Club to hear the whole series.

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To become a member, just sign up at therestisclassified.com and take advantage of our launch discounts.

And rumor is that first prize draw, Gordon, is going to be for lucky winners to receive a copy of your latest book, The Spy in the Archive, signed by you.

Isn't that right?

As opposed to being signed by you.

Well, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time.