Snowden contacted Poitras again: ‘You should come. I will meet with you. But it’s risky.’
It was the next stage of their plan. Snowden intended to leak one actual document. The file would reveal collaboration between the NSA and giant internet corporations under a secret program called PRISM. ‘Heart attacks will be had over this,’ Snowden claimed.
Snowden didn’t want Poitras directly involved; instead he asked her to recommend other journalists who might publish it without attribution to him. He wanted to spread his net wider.
Poitras flew across to NYC again for what she imagined would be her meeting with a senior intelligence bureaucrat. She assumed this would naturally take place somewhere on the US east coast – probably in Baltimore, or a country house in Maryland. She asked for a minimum of half a day to film, and ideally a whole day. The source then sent her an encrypted file. In it was the PRISM PowerPoint. And a second document. It came as a total surprise: ‘Your destination is Hong Kong.’
The next day a further message arrived for Poitras, in which the source for the first time gave his name: ‘Edward Snowden’.
The name meant nothing; Poitras knew that if she searched Snowden’s name on Google this would immediately alert the NSA. Attached was a map, a set of protocols for how they would meet, and a message: ‘This is who I am. This is what they will say about me. This is the information I have.’
Snowden now contacted Greenwald himself, using his new encrypted channel. ‘I have been working with a friend of yours… We need to talk, urgently.’
The whistleblower finally had something he had been craving for nearly six months – a direct, secure connection to the elusive writer. The source was evidently familiar with Greenwald’s work. The two messaged. Snowden wrote: ‘Can you come to Hong Kong?’
The demand struck Greenwald as bizarre and it left him ‘really confused’: what would someone who worked for a US security agency be doing in a former British colony, part of communist China and far away from Fort Meade? ‘I didn’t understand what Hong Kong had to do with this,’ Greenwald says. His instinct was to do nothing. He was working on things that appeared important at the time; a book deadline loomed. ‘I kind of stalled a little bit,’ he says.
Snowden tried again via Poitras, urging her to get Greenwald to fly to Hong Kong ‘right now’.
Sitting alone in his Chinese hotel room, expecting exposure at any moment, Snowden was growing frantic. His plan to escape with a cache of top-secret NSA and GCHQ material had worked thus far with remarkable ease. That was supposed to be the hard part. But the easy bit – passing the material to sympathetic journalists – was proving tricky.
Greenwald contacted Snowden via chat. ‘I would like some more substantial idea why I’m going and why this is worthwhile for me?’
Over the next two hours Snowden explained to Greenwald how he could boot up the Tails system, one of the securest forms of communication, which uses the anonymising Tor network. Eventually the task was done.
Snowden then wrote, with what can only be called bathos: ‘I’m going to send you a few documents.’
Snowden’s welcome package was around 20 documents from the NSA’s inner sanctuaries, most stamped ‘top secret’. Among them were the PRISM slides. There were files that filled in the gaps on STELLAR WIND, the main case study of top-level impunity in Greenwald’s latest book.
It was, quite simply, treasure – a rich trove of extraordinary data. At a glance it suggested the NSA had misled Congress about the nature of its domestic spying activities, and quite possibly lied to it. Greenwald: ‘I always equate things with dog behaviour. Snowden was treating me like a dog and putting a biscuit in front of my nose. He was showing me top-secret programs from the NSA. It was unbelievable. There are no leaks from the NSA. It was enough to make me hyperventilate.’
Snowden was smart enough to indicate this was just the start – and that he was in possession of a very large number of secrets. Greenwald now comprehended. He picked up the phone to Janine Gibson, the Guardian US’s editor in New York. He said it was urgent. When Greenwald began explaining about the NSA documents, Gibson shut him down and said: ‘I don’t think we should be discussing this on the telephone.’ She suggested he come to New York.
Two days later, on Friday 31 May, Greenwald flew from Rio’s Galeão international airport to JFK, going directly to Guardian US’s SoHo HQ. He sat in Gibson’s office. He said a trip onwards to Hong Kong would enable the Guardian to find out about the mysterious source.
The source could help interpret the leaked documents. Many of them were technical – referring to programs, interception techniques, methods, that practically nobody outside the NSA knew existed. Most were not written in human language but in a kind of weird lexicon understandable only to the initiated. A few made no sense at all, as comprehensible as ancient Assyrian tablets.
‘This was a very serious thing. And the most exciting thing it was possible to imagine,’ Greenwald says. ‘Snowden had picked documents that got me completely excited. They worked with everyone at the Guardian. Some were mind-blowing. What we had was the tiniest tip of the iceberg.’
Stuart Millar, the deputy editor of Guardian US, joined the discussion. Both executives felt that Snowden’s manifesto came across as overwrought. In portentous terms, the source was talking about his personal philosophy, and the cataclysmic no-way-back journey he was taking. With hindsight, Snowden’s tone was understandable: he was, after all, about to become the world’s most wanted man.
But for the Guardian’s editorial staff there was a realisation that they could be in for a difficult ride – about to incur the wrath of the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the White House, the State Department, and probably many other government departments so secret they didn’t officially exist.
Gibson and Millar agreed that the only way to establish the source’s credentials was to meet him in person. Greenwald would take the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong the next day. Independently, Poitras was coming along, too. But Gibson ordered a third member on to the team, the Guardian’s veteran Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill. MacAskill, a 61-year-old Scot and political reporter, was experienced and professional. He was calm. He was unfailingly modest. Everybody liked him.
Except Poitras. She was exceedingly upset. As Poitras saw it, an extra person might freak out the source, who was already on edge. MacAskill’s presence might alienate him and even blow up the entire operation. ‘She was insistent that this would not happen,’ Greenwald says. ‘She completely flipped out.’ Greenwald tried to mediate, without success. On the eve of the trip, Poitras and Greenwald rowed for the first time ever. Tensions were high. At this point Greenwald was thinking of MacAskill as the Guardian’s corporate representative – as the cautious, dull guy. Later he discovered the Scot was the most radical of the three, prepared to publish much that was in the public interest.
At JFK airport, the ill-matched trio boarded a Cathay Pacific flight. Poitras sat at the back of the plane. She was funding her own trip. Greenwald and MacAskill, their bills picked up by the Guardian, were further up in Premium Economy. ‘I hate coach!’ Greenwald says, pointing out that he had slept little since arriving from Brazil 48 hours earlier.
As flight CX831 gained speed down the runway and took off, there was a feeling of liberation. Up in the air there is no internet – or at least there was not in June 2013. It was a space that, at that date, even the omnipotent NSA didn’t penetrate. Once the seatbelt signs were off, Poitras joined Greenwald in Premium Economy: there was room in front of his seat. She brought a present they were both eager to open: a USB stick. Snowden had securely delivered to her a second cache of secret NSA documents. This latest data-set was far bigger than the initial ‘welcome pack’. It contained 3–4,000 items.