Poitras asked if Snowden had seen her file, detailing her detentions entering the US. He said he hadn’t. But he did explain that he had ‘selected’ her because of the harassment she had experienced. The security agencies had the capacity to track and monitor ‘anyone’, not just Poitras – across borders, city or streets, he said. ‘I bet you don’t like this system. Only you can tell this story.’
If anything, Poitras was even more paranoid than Snowden during this early period. She remained suspicious of an opaque government plot against her. Meanwhile, in Hawaii, Snowden was taking extreme precautions. He never made contact from home or office. ‘He made it clear it was hard for him to communicate. He was going to another location to do so. He wasn’t doing it from his regular networks. He created some kind of a cover,’ Poitras says.
The emails continued to flow. There was one a week. They usually arrived at weekends, when Snowden was able to slip off. The tone was serious, though there were moments of humour. At one point Snowden advised Poitras to put her mobile in the freezer. ‘He’s an amazing writer. His emails were good. Everything I got read like a thriller,’ she recalls. Snowden was keen to keep up a regular correspondence but clearly found it difficult to find a secure spot to type. He gave little away. There were no personal details.
Then Snowden delivered a bombshell. He said he had got hold of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a top-secret 18-page document issued in October 2012. It said that Obama had secretly ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks. Not defence, but attacks. The agency was tapping fibre-optic cables, intercepting telephony landing points and bugging on a global scale, he said. He could prove all of it. ‘I almost fainted,’ Poitras says.
At this point the film-maker sought out trusted contacts who might help her authenticate these claims. In New York she consulted the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. Over dinner in the West Village she talked with the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman. Gellman, a national security expert, thought the source sounded real. But he was a tad noncommittal. Meanwhile, the source made it clear he wanted Greenwald on board.
Back in Germany, Poitras moved ultra-cautiously. It was a fair assumption that the US embassy in Berlin had her under some form of surveillance. In connection with her latest documentary, Poitras had been in touch with Julian Assange, Washington’s bête noire, who since the summer of 2012 had been holed up in London’s Ecuadorean embassy. Given the company she’d been keeping and the many other reasons she was a person of interest to US security forces, she could be sure that any conventional means of communication would be monitored. Phones were no good; email was insecure. How could she contact her friend Greenwald about her mysterious correspondent?
It would have to be a personal meeting. In late March she returned to the States. From here she sent Greenwald a message, suggesting that they meet face to face, without any electronics.
Greenwald was already due to fly to New York to give a talk to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim civil rights organisation. The pair met in the lobby of Greenwald’s hotel, the Marriott in Yonkers – an unlikely, ‘horrible’ venue for what was to be the first step of the most significant leak in US intelligence history.
Poitras showed Greenwald two emails. She didn’t know the unknown source had already tried to reach Greenwald himself. Was he real? Or an imposter, trying to entrap her? Poitras was excited, nervous and seeking verification. ‘There were no details in the emails. The source didn’t identify himself. He didn’t say where he worked,’ Greenwald says.
Instead of facts, the emails offered up a radical personal manifesto – an intellectual blueprint for why Snowden was prepared to leak classified material, and what the life-changing consequences of this action would inevitably be. ‘It was philosophically what he wanted to achieve and why he was willing to take these risks,’ Greenwald says. The source seemed credible: ‘Somehow Laura and I instinctively felt there was so much authentic passion about it. We both realised the emails were real. [The tone] was smart and sophisticated, not rambling or crazy.’
A picture was forming – of an intelligent, politically savvy, rational individual, of someone who had been working on a plan for some time. The source was unfolding it, stage by stage. The journalists had to wait for each new episode. ‘He was talking as though he was taking a huge risk, about disclosures that were very serious,’ Greenwald says. ‘He didn’t seem frivolous or delusional.’
Chatting to Poitras, Greenwald sketched out a way forward of his own. For the story to have impact, people needed to care, Greenwald argued. They would only care if the source could demonstrate convincing evidence of illegality – of wrong behaviour by the NSA, which went way beyond any democratic mandate. The best way of doing this would be to get hold of the national security documents: without them it would be difficult to rattle the doors on these issues.
The source behaved in an unexpected way. Poitras had assumed that he would seek to remain anonymous. After all, coming forward would bring the law down on his head. But Snowden told her: ‘I’m not cleaning the metadata. I hope you will paint a target on my back and tell the world I did this on my own.’
In another email Snowden said that the ‘hard part’ of pulling the documents was over, but that a different dangerous phase was beginning. ‘I could sense the stakes,’ says Poitras. ‘He was very worried about his friends and family being implicated. He didn’t want to remain anonymous. He didn’t want other people to take the fall.’
Snowden, it seemed, knew his actions were likely to end with him going to jail. He warned: ‘You need to manage your expectations. At a certain point I’m not going to be reachable.’
Once a relationship of trust had been established, Poitras told the source she would like to interview him. She told Snowden he needed to articulate ‘why’ he was taking these risks. This was important.
It hadn’t occurred to Snowden to give an interview. But the idea was a good one: his goal was to get the documents out to the world. He had had a view to leaking this material for four years, he said. At one stage he had considered giving the material to Assange. Eventually he rejected the idea. WikiLeaks’ submission site was down and Assange was under surveillance, stuck in a foreign embassy. Even with Assange’s security skills, Snowden realised it would be difficult to punch through to him.
By late spring 2013, the idea of a conclusive meeting was in the air.
‘I need six to eight weeks to get ready to do this,’ Snowden wrote.
What exactly the ‘this’ meant was still tantalisingly unclear. Poitras returned to Berlin. Greenwald returned to Rio. He got on with his life. The shadowy source was interesting. But – as is so often the case with journalistic leads – the ‘this’ could have been less alluring than it seemed; one of journalism’s many false starts. ‘I didn’t sit around fantasising about it. He could be fake,’ Greenwald says. As the weeks went by it seemed less rather than more likely that something would happen. ‘I gave it almost no thought. I really wasn’t focused on it at all.’
In mid-April, Greenwald received an email from Poitras. It told him to expect a FedEx delivery. Neither of the two parties had communicated much in the interim; Greenwald still hadn’t got encryption. But the FedEx parcel signalled that things were moving and that, as Greenwald puts it, ‘the eagle had landed’.
The package arrived; inside it were two thumb drives. Greenwald at first imagined that the USB sticks contained top-secret documents ‘wrapped in layers of encryption and Linux programs’. In fact, they contained a security kit, allowing Greenwald to install a basic encrypted chat program.