5
THE MAN IN THE ROOM
MACASKILL: ‘What do you think is going to happen to you?’
SNOWDEN: ‘Nothing good.’
Ewen MacAskill was no stranger to Hong Kong. But during his trips to the then British colony in the early 1980s, his name had been ‘Yuan Mai’. This was the official Chinese byline he used while writing for the China Daily. Back then, the young MacAskill lived in Beijing. He was, in theory at least, a member of the Chinese communist party’s propaganda unit. In reality, he was on secondment from the respected Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh. He had spotted an advert there for an English-speaking journalist.
Working for the China Daily was less stressful than it might have appeared, since all mention of politics was taboo. MacAskill’s role was to mentor Chinese journalists. The hope was they would produce a modern English-language newspaper. There were charming tales to be told along the way. As well as obligatory stories on grain production in Tibet, MacAskill interviewed the brother of China’s last emperor, and the first climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest from the Chinese face. He wrote about a Chinese nuclear physicist who later in life – maybe as repentance – designed playground rides for kids.
‘People were still wearing Mao suits and riding bikes,’ MacAskill recalls. It was an exotic world for a young Scot who had grown up in a tenement block in chilly Glasgow.
MacAskill had become one of the Guardian’s most respected journalists. Britain’s Fleet Street trade may have been notorious for phone hacking, blagging, subterfuge and other acts of petty treachery, but MacAskill was one of the straight guys. In a highly regarded career he had never done anything devious. He was one of few to whom Humbert Wolfe’s epigram didn’t apply:
MacAskill’s integrity perhaps owed something to his Scots parents, who belonged to the Free Presbyterian Church. The small sectarian group took an uncompromising view on sin. Family summers in the Hebridean island of Harris, a diehard Calvinist refuge, reinforced the evangelical creed. A working-class boy in the late 1950s, MacAskill learned that Sundays were for church. Dancing, music and fornication were forbidden. Lying was, of course, wrong.
Aged 15, MacAskill discovered books. He became an atheist. He stopped going to church. (The breach came one Sunday when the minister devoted an entire sermon to the evils of long hair; MacAskill was the only hirsute teenager in the congregation. The Beatles were increasingly hairy; beards were flourishing.) He won a place at Glasgow University to study history. ‘It transformed my life,’ he says. There, he realised the students who had been privately educated were no brighter than he was; that Britain’s intractable postwar social divisions were more porous than he had thought.
After university, MacAskill joined the Glasgow Herald. He was a trainee. It was the 1970s. The period was one of old-school journalism, when the Herald’s reporters were kings, rather than its columnists, the stars of today’s popular media, and there was a culture of Big Drinking. Reporters not working on stories would go to Ross’s, a nearby bar down a dark, cobbled lane. If a story broke and you needed a reporter you went to the bar.
MacAskill thrived at the Herald but also had what the Germans call Fernweh, a longing to be far away. In 1978–9 he spent two years training journalists in remote Papua New Guinea. After China, he moved to the Scotsman, and then to London as the Scotsman’s political correspondent. In 1996 he applied for the same role at the Guardian. Ahead of his interview with Rusbridger, MacAskill was nervous; afterwards the editor told him: ‘That’s the worst interview I’ve heard in my life.’
Nevertheless he got it. MacAskill reported on Tony Blair’s 1997 UK election landslide victory and in 2000 became diplomatic editor, covering Iraq and the Israel–Palestine intifada. In 2007 he moved to Washington. At first his view of Obama was positive, ‘a pretty good president’. Latterly, the administration’s heavy-handed pursuit of journalists and their confidential sources disillusioned him. The relationship between the executive and the Fourth Estate was getting darker and more nasty, its battleground the control of digital information.
So Janine Gibson, the Guardian’s US editor, could certainly rely on MacAskill for imperturbable and honest advice. He now had a challenging assignment: to verify whether Greenwald’s mysterious ‘NSA whistleblower’ was the real deal. On Monday 3 June, he stayed ensconced in the W Hotel in Kowloon while his pair of freelance companions went off to find their alleged intelligence source for the first time.
MacAskill whiled away the day taking the subway to Hong Kong Island, revisiting old haunts. It was hot and humid. Later that evening, Greenwald returned with his news – Snowden was plausible, if ridiculously young. He had agreed to meet MacAskill. They took a cab back to the Mira Hotel the next morning. Past its onyx entrance, they found Poitras in the lobby. She took them up to room 1014.
Inside 1014, MacAskill saw someone sitting on the bed. The young man was casually dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans and trainers. They shook hands, MacAskill saying: ‘Ewen MacAskill from the Guardian. Pleased to meet you.’ This was Snowden. His living conditions were cramped. There was a bed, and a bathroom; a small black suitcase lay on the floor. A large TV was on with the sound turned down. Through Snowden’s window you could see Kowloon Park; mums and dads were strolling with their kids across a flash of green; it was drizzling, the sky dull and overcast.
The remains of lunch were on the table. When he left Hawaii Snowden clearly hadn’t taken much with him. There were four laptops, with a hard case for the biggest of them. He had brought a single book, Angler: The Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney, by the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman. It told the story of how Vice President Cheney secretly brought in ‘special programs’ in the wake of 9/11; the STELLAR WIND affair, part-exposed by the New York Times.
Chapter six, well-thumbed by Snowden, read: ‘The US government was sweeping in emails, faxes and telephone calls, made by its own citizens, in their own country… Transactional data, such as telephone logs and email headers, were collected by the billions… Analysts seldom found information even remotely pertinent to a terrorist threat.’
The encounter with MacAskill went smoothly until he produced his iPhone. He asked Snowden if he minded if he taped their interview, and perhaps took some photos? Snowden flung up his arms in alarm, as if prodded by an electric stick. ‘I might as well have invited the NSA into his bedroom,’ MacAskill says. The young technician explained that the spy agency was capable of turning a mobile phone into a microphone and tracking device; bringing it into the room was an elementary mistake in operational security, or op-sec. MacAskill exited, and dumped the phone outside.