Facts and Fears by James R. Clapper & Trey Brown

Author:James R. Clapper & Trey Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Snowden

The same week that DOD announced it would not furlough NIP-funded employees, an IT administrator on contract at the large, and very important, NSA facility in Hawaii told his supervisor he was taking medical leave to fly to the US mainland for treatment. Edward Snowden gave a completely different story to his girlfriend, with whom he shared a home, explaining that he would be away for a few weeks and couldn’t say where he was going, conveying the implication that he was off on a secret mission for NSA. On Monday, May 20, 2013, he flew to Hong Kong carrying a bag of laptops holding hundreds of thousands—maybe millions, as we had no idea of the actual number at the time and still aren’t certain—of intelligence documents and communications, many not just classified but compartmented to protect sensitive sources; cleared employees are read into compartmented programs only when they have a need to know about them. Tapping into what he thought he knew about maintaining cover, he checked into a plush hotel and began subsisting on room service.

Over the next two weeks, as Snowden divulged gravely damaging secrets about how the US Intelligence Community operated, he wrapped his every action in mystery, using signals and secret code phrases to rendezvous with reporters and give them his stolen information. If we had been looking for him, I believe we would have found him. But we weren’t. Snowden’s lies to his supervisor and girlfriend were credible enough that neither questioned them, and so the US Intelligence Community was blissfully unaware that, in an exotic port city of mainland China, we were hemorrhaging intelligence capabilities through a trusted insider turned traitor.

Looking back, there’s a coincidental timing to all of this that makes our naïvete in not preparing for the possibility of insider treachery and actively monitoring for it inexcusable. On June 3, in Washington, DC—literally as Edward Snowden was meeting with two reporters and a documentary filmmaker in Hong Kong—the military trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning was getting under way. (We knew Manning was a transgender woman in June 2013, but she didn’t become Private Chelsea Manning until after her sentencing in August.)

Manning had been a low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq from late 2009 into 2010, when she became disenchanted with intelligence reports she was reading, which she felt showed a moral ambiguity not apparent in the public narrative of the war. She felt obligated to reveal that prisoner abuses were still taking place, nearly six years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, and she was disturbed by combat reports and video that indicated that US soldiers—some of whom had deployed on repeated combat tours—had a casual attitude toward killing. For Manning, the line defining which side was “in the right” had blurred until it ceased to exist. Envisioning it a form of citizen activism, she swept up all the classified and sensitive materials she could acquire—half a million military documents and a quarter million diplomatic cables—and gave them to the online organization WikiLeaks in January 2010.

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