http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrTcca_lGpYHvkAKCIPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByb2lvbXVuBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg--/RV=2/RE=1483408703/RO=10/RU=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wsj.com%2farticles%2fthe-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143%3fmod%3dtrending_now_1/RK=0/RS=S9S6B.H3CtY2anEFaatLSX1NjB4-
All:
I found this article in the WSJ. I think it is very interesting. We
haven't had any commentary about Mr. Snowden for a good while.
Richard
* Commentary <http://www.wsj.com/news/types/commentary-u-s>
The Fable of Edward Snowden
As he seeks a pardon, the NSA thief has told multiple lies about
what he stole and his dealings with Russian intelligence.
0:00 / 0:00
Opinion Journal Video: Investigative Journalist Edward Jay Epstein on
why the American spy doesn’t deserve a presidential pardon. Photo: Reuters
By
Edward Jay Epstein
Updated Dec. 30, 2016 10:21 p.m. ET
812 COMMENTS
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143?mod=trending_now_1#livefyre-comment>
Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of
secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via
Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never
intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking
to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock
ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to
review what we have learned about his real mission.
Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication
secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed
against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr.
Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training
for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of
the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some
six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work,
emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for
epilepsy.
This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in
Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had
stolen from the NSA.
This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my
investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the
narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in
Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.
This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where
he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary
filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian.
Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr.
Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.
To provide them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden
culled several thousand documents out of his huge cache of stolen
material, including two explosive documents he asked them to use in
their initial stories. One was the now-famous secret order from
America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court requiring Verizon
to turn over to the NSA its billing records for its phone users in the
U.S. The other was an NSA slide presentation detailing its ability to
intercept communications of non-American users of the internet via a
joint program with the FBI code-named Prism.
These documents were published in 2013 on June 5 and 6, followed by a
video in which he identified himself as the leaker and a whistleblower.
At the heart of Mr. Snowden’s narrative was his claim that while he may
have incidentally “touched” other data in his search of NSA files, he
took only documents that exposed the malfeasance of the NSA and gave all
of them to journalists.
Yet even as Mr. Snowden’s narrative was taking hold in the public realm,
a secret damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very
different story. According to a unanimous report
<http://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_review_declassified.pdf>
declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had “removed”
(not merely touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based
on, among other evidence, electronic logs that recorded the selection,
copying and moving of documents.
The number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were
willing to say in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the
House committee had the benefit of the Pentagon’s more-extensive
investigation. But even just taking into account the material that Mr.
Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report concluded
that he compromised “secrets that protect American troops overseas and
secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and
nation-states.” These were, the report said, “merely the tip of the
iceberg.”
The Pentagon’s investigation during 2013 and 2014 employed hundreds of
military-intelligence officers, working around the clock, to review all
1.5 million documents. Most had nothing to do with domestic surveillance
or whistle blowing. They were mainly military secrets, as Gen. Martin
Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the
House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014.
It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was
most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could
reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing
the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was
created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to
penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.
Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to
steal. In an interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June
15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA,
even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of
computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.
He evidently succeeded. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Richard
Ledgett, the NSA executive who headed the damage-assessment team,
described one lengthy document taken by Mr. Snowden that, if it fell
into the wrong hands, would provide a “road map” to what targets abroad
the NSA was, and was not, covering. It contained the requests made by
the 17 U.S. services in the so-called Intelligence Community for NSA
interceptions abroad.
On June 23, less than two weeks after Mr. Snowden released the video
that helped present his narrative, he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow,
where he received protection by the Russian government. In much of the
media coverage that followed, the ultimate destination of these stolen
secrets was fogged over—if not totally obscured from the public—by the
unverified claims that Mr. Snowden was spoon feeding to handpicked
journalists.
In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he was a conscientious
“whistleblower” who turned over all the stolen NSA material to
journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted he had no intention of
defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America when he was
trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to demonize him.
For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m in
exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me
exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.” According to Mr. Snowden, the
U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport
while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus
forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s
passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow
on June 23. The “Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong
authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June
22,” according to the State Department’s senior watch officer, as
reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.
Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government’s pursuit of
him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14,
had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him
while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline
because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot
<http://quotes.wsj.com/AFLT.MZ>, an airline which the Russian government
effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow
Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had neither a
valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly
Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.
By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane
departed Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to
conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further
revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s Izvestia
newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a
security team in a “special operation.”
Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir Putin personally authorized
this assistance after Mr. Snowden met with Russian officials in Hong
Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a televised press conference on Sept. 2,
2013.
To provide a smokescreen for Mr. Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong,
WikiLeaks (an organization that the Obama administration asserted to be
a tool of Russian intelligence after the hacking of Democratic Party
leaders’ email in 2016) booked a dozen or more diversionary flight
reservations to other destinations for Mr. Snowden.
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison, his
deputy at WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowden’s expenses
and escort him to Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowden’s arrival in Moscow was
neither accidental nor the work of the U.S. government.
Mr. Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only
empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote
in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving
in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few
weeks earlier in Hawaii.
As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin
insiders who were in a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually
brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich, was the
first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the Duma
(Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection. “Let’s be
frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016,
“Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do.”
The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer
and Mr. Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between
Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities. On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena
gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia
Today television.
When Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all
the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr.
Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents
in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. “So he [Mr. Snowden] does
have some materials that haven’t been made public yet?” Ms. Shevardnadze
asked. “Certainly,” Mr. Kucherena answered.
This disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained
why NSA documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the
journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the
NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued
to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents
released via WikiLeaks.
As this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden’s narrative, I went to
Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation,
Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was
accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to
Moscow.
Mr. Snowden’s narrative also includes the assertion that he was neither
debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government official after he
arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs counter to findings
of U.S. intelligence. According to the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he arrived in Moscow, “has
had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.”
This finding is consistent with Russian debriefing practices, as
described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I spoke in Moscow
Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in Moscow in December 2013 to have
secrets in his head, including “access to every target, every active
operation. Full lists of them.” Could Mr. Snowden’s Russian hosts ignore
such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had authorized his exfiltration to
Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit options, was in the palm of their
hands. Under such circumstances, as Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his
June NPR interview: “If there’s a possibility to get information, they
[the Russian intelligence services] will get it.”
The transfer of state secrets from Mr. Snowden to Russia did not occur
in a vacuum. The intelligence war did not end with the termination of
the Cold War; it shifted to cyberspace. Even if Russia could not match
the NSA’s state-of-the-art sensors, computers and productive
partnerships with the cipher services of Britain, Israel, Germany and
other allies, it could nullify the U.S. agency’s edge by obtaining its
sources and methods from even a single contractor with access to Level 3
documents.
Russian intelligence uses a single umbrella term to cover anyone who
delivers it secret intelligence. Whether a person acted out of
idealistic motives, sold information for money or remained clueless of
the role he or she played in the transfer of secrets—the provider of
secret data is considered an “espionage source.” By any measure, it is a
job description that fits Mr. Snowden.
/Mr. Epstein’s book, “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the
Man and the Theft,” will be published by Knopf in January./