Coming to terms with Snowden
Narrative in hacking case could also tar Russian government
The Edward Snowden story won’t go away. One reason for its persistence is that everybody who has given it a second’s further thought surely sees something astonishingly weird about it: For goodness sake, Snowden, the mastermind of the greatest theft of U.S. intelligence in history lives in comfort and security in Russia where he’s protected from pursuit by the U.S. government. This is a tear in our hero’s tale that, in liberal society, we aren’t supposed to pay attention to.
This heroism, it is important to note, derives from Snowden’s own version of his story. The Guardian and The Washington Post effectively partnered with Snowden in publishing his documents and telling his tale (the
Guardian, making a big financial bet on Snowden in its expansion into the American market, overtly went into the Snowden promotion business), with The New York Times joining later. Citizen 4, the Oscarwinning documentary about Snowden made by Laura Poitras, one of Snowden’s collaborators in the release of the documents, puts Snowden at the center of the film with him as the single source of his heroic narrative. Snowden, the feature film made by Oliver Stone, basically dramatizes the making of that documentary as well
as Snowden’s own telling of the events. Current media sources for information about Snowden are almost exclusively limited to Snowden’s circle of advisers and defenders — and to Snowden’s own tweets.
Nobody, except the federal government — which arrived at the exact opposite conclusion from the media regarding Snowden’s actions and motives — has meticulously scrutinized the Snowden tale, and the federal government is seen not as the rightful protector of the nation’s secrets, but as the party exposed by them.
But that’s the rub. While the government might be fairly tarred for its surveillance overreach by a few of the Snowden documents, there are yet millions more documents in the Snowden heist, according to the government, with secrets that are now in unknown hands. It’s the fate of those secrets that’s at the heart of Edward Jay Epstein’s new book, How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, The Man and the Theft, the first independent investigation of the affair, to be published by Knopf next week.
Epstein is a legend in the world of secrets in his own right. His first book Inquest, featuring an exclusive set of interviews with most of the players on the Warren Commission, shattered confidence in the commission’s report and opened the door for decades of conspiracy theory. He’s the biographer of the CIA’s legendary counter-intelligence chief, James Angleton, and, too, of the Russian-connected billionaire and businessman, Armand Hammer.
Epstein in his new book retraces Snowden’s route around the world, deconstructing each of the key, and widely accepted, given in his account:
1) that he acted alone in his extraordinary theft of National Security Agency documents;
2) that his flight to Hong Kong was happenstance;
3) that his escape to Russia and sanctuary there were more happenstance;
4) that he somehow dispatched his millions of documents before his flight to Moscow and that the Russians were gentlemen enough to allow him to arrive empty handed.
At the heart of the book is not only the finding that Snowden gave his secrets to Putin’s Russia — is it possible to imagine a scenario in which Putin and Russian intelligence would not have wrangled the greatest cache of U.S. secrets ever available to them? — but that, in every epistemological sense, Snowden’s actions and motivations, idealistic or not, track the long history of men and women we regard as having betrayed their countries.
It is, as Epstein vividly shows, a story seen through the topsy-turvy politics of this particular moment. Snowden is a hero to liberals everywhere, except to the liberals who have the maximum amount of information about his actions: almost all members of the Obama administration and every liberal Democrat involved in congressional intelligence oversight, see Snowden as a dangerous national security malefactor (there is, among Snowden defenders, a tacit belief that the intelligence establishment has brainwashed everybody in the Obama administration and all Democrats in Congress).
Trump’s election provides an even more peculiar development. The same liberal media that decries Trump for his purported friendliness toward Putin has been sanguine about Snowden residing comfortably in Moscow.
Edward Jay Epstein is a legend in the world of secrets in his own right.