MacAskill, who watched, gripped, as Poitras filmed, felt Snowden came across even better on camera than in person.
For the three journalists, those Hong Kong nights and days blurred into one another: a succession of gruelling work periods, fuelled by excitement, adrenaline and paranoia.
At the Mira, Poitras was soon able to show her video edit to the other two. She had turned Snowden’s interview into a 17-minute film, beautifully framed and with a set-up shot at the beginning showing Hong Kong harbour and a velvety sky. Its title said simply: ‘PRISM Whistleblower’. They discussed possible cuts, with Poitras eventually crunching the interview down to 12-and-a-half minutes, and releasing a second interview later.
‘I felt as if he had been thrust into the middle of a spy movie,’ MacAskill says. How on earth were they safely to ship the key material over to New York and London?
Talking to the Guardian’s editor via encrypted chat, MacAskill said the group needed technical help. David Blishen, the Guardian’s systems editor, was a man who had skills that few working journalists possessed. He also understood how the editorial process functioned. During the WikiLeaks investigation, Blishen helped co-ordinate the redaction of names of sources who had talked to US diplomats and might be at risk if exposed in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Belarus. (This was an important but ultimately futile exercise; in the summer of 2011, six months after the first stories appeared based on US diplomatic cables, Julian Assange released the entire un-redacted cache of documents.)
Blishen was summoned, headed for the airport, and arrived in Hong Kong the next day. For him, too, the trip was nostalgic. He was born in the then colony in 1972; his father, a British official, had been stationed there. When MacAskill joined him at breakfast the two talked about Scottish newspapers where they had both worked. ‘I was none the wiser why I was really there,’ Blishen says. ‘Ewen gave nothing away.’ Afterwards, MacAskill told Blishen to leave his mobile at the hotel reception, and proposed a walk. Once they were outside, MacAskill gave him a memory card; a small, flat, square chip. The SD card didn’t look much. Though it was pretty large – 32 gigabytes.
Blishen needed to transmit Snowden’s video back to Guardian US in New York. Blishen watched the video first, and he was impressed: ‘He [Snowden] is articulate. He seemed principled. With Assange and Manning, people can question if they are rational. Ed seemed completely normal and plausible.’ Taking the edited version, he anxiously jumped into a taxi to get back to his own hotel in Central.
The cabbie asked Blishen in sing-song English: ‘Do you want to go and see girls? They cheap. Very pretty. Do you like Asian girls?’
Blishen needed to get to his room fast. He made clear his lack of interest. The cabbie thought for a moment. His face brightened: ‘Oh, you like boys! Boys! Like me?’ Blishen replied wearily: ‘I’m very boring. I just want to go to my hotel.’ The cabbie persisted: ‘What do you want to do at your hotel?’ Even though it was only 7.30pm, Blishen told the driver he wanted to sleep. ‘I was his worst, dullest passenger ever.’
Back at the Lan Kwai Fong Hotel, Blishen crypto-messaged the Guardian’s James Ball, in New York. He uploaded the video file via a secure connection in an encrypted folder. He sent over the password separately. Disaster ensued. The Guardian US team proved unable to open the file. Time was running out. In the end, the video file had to go again unencrypted, and potentially hackable by the NSA, though still via secure connection. To everyone’s relief, it arrived unmolested.
All along, Snowden had made clear that he planned to reveal himself. In New York, the record of Snowden actually speaking was nevertheless cathartic. And reassuring. ‘We were completely blown away. We thought he was cool and plausible. Everything about him seemed credible,’ Millar says. When the moment arrived, with the video ready to go live, the atmosphere in the newsroom was deeply emotional. ‘It was a terrifying moment,’ Gibson adds. The editorial question remained: was this the right thing to do? Once again Snowden was making his own strategic choices – playing his increasingly limited hand of cards his own way.
Five people, including Rusbridger, were in the office. The video went up around 3pm local time. ‘It was like a bomb going off,’ says Rusbridger. ‘There are a silent few seconds after a bomb explodes when nothing happens.’ The TV monitors were set to different channels; for almost an hour they carried pre-recorded Sunday news. Then at 4pm, the top of the hour, the story erupted. Each network carried Snowden’s image. CNN aired the entire 12-minute video.
It was 3am in Hong Kong when the video was posted online. Twitter instantly exploded. It was to become the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history.
‘It’s a rare thing for a source to come out in public like that. So we knew this video was going to be big,’ MacAskill recalls. ‘The choreography of several huge stories followed by the video was terrific.’
One moment, Snowden was known only to his friends and family, and a few colleagues. Then suddenly he became a global phenomenon, no longer just an individual but a lightning rod for all sorts of conflicting views about the state, the boundaries of privacy and security, and even the entire modern condition.
Snowden took all of this with sangfroid and humour. Sitting in room 1014 he chatted online with Greenwald and MacAskill, and joked wryly about his appearance, and the online comments it provoked. It was the first time he had seen the video. (Poitras had sent it to him before but he had had problems with his internet connection and couldn’t access it.) There was one inescapable corollary: now Snowden’s identity was out, he had just become the most hunted man on the planet.
The chase was already on. Greenwald, in one of his many TV interviews, had been captioned by CNN as ‘Glenn Greenwald, Hong Kong’ – a pretty big clue to everyone watching as to the location of the Guardian’s source. The local Chinese media and international journalists now studied every frame of the video for clues. They were initially thrown off by Poitras’s opening shot, filmed from the W Hotel. They assumed Snowden was there too. But one enterprising hack then used Twitter to identify the Mira from its lamps.
By Monday 10 June, Snowden was packing his belongings to leave the hotel, as Poitras filmed him for the last time. She felt protective towards him. She had known him the longest, and had believed in him from the beginning. She gave him a hug. ‘I don’t know what he planned for that moment. I had no idea what his next move was,’ she says.
Snowden vanished.
At the W Hotel, MacAskill popped out to get a cup of coffee, and to buy himself a suit and a shirt. He had brought enough clothes for a two-day assignment. A crew from CNN doorstepped him. When he returned from Marks and Spencer he found a scene of chaos. TV crews and reporters had staked out the lobby. Not only that but the management said the hotel was now ‘full’ and asked them to leave. They slipped out via a service lift to a waiting taxi and moved into the Sheraton. By the evening, the hacks had found them again. Before going to sleep, MacAskill piled chairs in front of his door. This might give him some warning if someone came for him, he reasoned.
Two days passed. Greenwald, MacAskill and Poitras marked the end of their trip with wine and cheese in Poitras’s room, overlooking the harbour. MacAskill crashed out, exhausted. In the early hours, Poitras rang with alarming news. Snowden had sent a message saying he was in danger. He hinted that he was about to be arrested, and signed off ominously. MacAskill phoned Snowden’s Hong Kong lawyers, who were now dealing with his case. No response. He called the police station. Recorded message. Two hours later one of the lawyers phoned back to say Snowden was OK. The details were hazy but it appeared Snowden had survived a close call.