The Snowden Files by Luke Harding

Author:Luke Harding [Harding, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7353-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

That afternoon, Jill Abramson of the New York Times and her managing editor, Dean Baquet, slipped into the Guardian’s London office.

The Guardian had 14 conditions, set out on a sheet of A4, for the collaboration.

They stipulated that both papers would work together on the material. Rusbridger knew the Times newsroom included reporters with deep expert knowledge of national security matters. ‘This guy is our source. I think you should treat him as your source,’ Rusbridger said. He added that neither Snowden nor Greenwald were exactly fans of the Times. British journalists would move in and work alongside their Times colleagues.

Abramson gave him a wry smile. She agreed to the conditions.

Later Abramson and Baquet arrived at Heathrow airport to fly home. Security officers pulled them to one side. Was this a random stop? Or were they looking for the GCHQ files? They didn’t find them. The documents had already been spirited across the Atlantic.

Rusbridger himself was due to go off to his regular summer ‘piano camp’ in the Lot Valley in central France. He had recently published a book entitled Play it Again, an account of how he had combined demanding editing duties and the WikiLeaks story with learning Chopin’s most exacting work, ‘Ballade No. 1’. After consulting with Johnson, Rusbridger decided he might as well still go, despite all the dramas. He boarded the Eurostar train bound for Bordeaux. At first it was hard to concentrate on music. Soon, however, he immersed himself completely in Debussy.

As he worked on his piano technique, events in London now moved towards what Rusbridger would later describe as one of the strangest episodes in the Guardian’s long history. Robbins reappeared. ‘He was punctiliously polite, very well-mannered. There was no obvious aggression,’ Johnson says. But the official said the government wanted to seize the Guardian’s computers and subject them to forensic analysis. Johnson refused. He cited a duty to Snowden and to Guardian journalists. The deputy editor offered another way forward: to avoid being closed down, the Guardian would bash up its own ‘war room’ computers under GCHQ’s tutelage. Robbins agreed.

It was a parody of Luddism: men were sent in to smash the machines.

On Friday 19 July two men from GCHQ paid a visit to the Guardian. Their names were ‘Ian’ and ‘Chris’. They met with Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons. The Kremlin was apparently capable of techniques straight from the pages of James Bond, Ian told her: ‘You have got plastic cups on your table. Plastic cups can be turned into microphones. The Russians can send a laser beam through your window and turn them into a listening device.’ The Guardian nicknamed the pair the hobbits.

Two days later the hobbits came back, this time with Robbins and a formidable civil servant called Kata. Ian, the senior of the two, was short, bubbly and dressed in shirt and chinos. His accent hinted at south Wales. Chris was taller and more taciturn. They carried a large and mysterious rucksack. Neither had previously spent any time with journalists; this was a new experience for them.

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