Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman

Author:Barton Gellman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed, to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.

I pretty much stopped listening after the word “accomplices.” This was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was prepared testimony on behalf of the Obama administration, vetted for weeks across multiple departments, including the Department of Justice. And “accomplice” has a meaning in criminal law.

“I had in mind Glenn Greenwald or Laura Poitras,” Clapper told me years later, unrepentant, as the remains of his egg white omelet were cleared from the table. “They conspired with him, they helped him in protecting his security and disseminating selectively what he had, so to me they are coconspirators.”

“I wouldn’t distinguish myself categorically from them,” I replied.

“Well, then, maybe you are, too. This is the whole business about one man’s whistleblower is another man’s spy.”

In a similar vein came remarks by the NSA inspector general, George Ellard. Twice in February 2014, both times as I sat within his sight, Ellard referred to journalists on the story as Snowden’s “agents.” We had done more damage, he said at a Georgetown University conference, than the notorious FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, who helped Soviet security services hunt down and kill U.S. intelligence assets. Tight-lipped and curt, he walked away when someone introduced us after the panel. When we finally spoke nearly two years later, he said, “I must confess I read your work with keen interest.”

Did Clapper agree with Alexander’s idea?

“I understand what Keith was saying,” Clapper told me in late 2018, after retiring as director of national intelligence, publishing a book, and coming under sustained rhetorical assault from President Trump. “I understand why he would say it. Certainly at the time, when I was DNI, if there was some way we could have recovered what [Snowden] stole, I’d have been all for it. I have great reservations about that now, now that I’m part of the ‘fake media.’ I might have felt differently about it when I was in the government.” Still, there were practical impediments. The documents were in Germany with Poitras, in Brazil with Greenwald, and doubtless hidden online. “I don’t recall that [the idea] went anywhere,” Clapper said.

The NSA’s general counsel, Raj De, told Alexander to forget about taking the Snowden documents back, people told me later. The First Amendment protected me and the other journalists, De said, however unfortunate the effects of our work. But that was not really right, not altogether. American political culture and governing norms, not the letter of the law, were the real protection.

Copies of the Snowden documents were arguably evidence in a criminal case. They were arguably contraband as well, illegal to possess, and therefore subject to search and seizure. More significant, perhaps, they were alleged to be the fruits of espionage. The latter, I thought, might have allowed the invocation of counterintelligence tools, including secret physical and electronic searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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