One of the first shocks revealed was that GCHQ had bugged foreign leaders at two G20 summit meetings hosted in London in 2009. Labour premier Gordon Brown and foreign secretary David Miliband apparently authorised this spying.
The agency had set up fake local internet cafes equipped with key-logging software. This allowed GCHQ to hack delegates’ passwords, which could be exploited later. GCHQ also penetrated their BlackBerrys to monitor email messages and phone calls. A team of 45 analysts kept a real-time log of who phoned whom during the summit. Turkey’s finance minister and 15 other members of his delegation were among the targets. This had, of course, nothing whatever to do with terrorism.
The timing of the Guardian’s discovery was piquant. David Cameron was about to host another international summit for G8 countries on the picturesque banks of Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. Presidents Obama and Putin would be dropping in, and other heads of state. Would GCHQ bug them too?
Fearing an injunction any moment, Paul Johnson decided to rush a print edition on to the British streets. On Sunday 16 June, he rolled 200 special copies off the press in the early evening. Another 30,000 copies were printed at 9.15pm. This made it harder for any late-night judge to order ‘Stop the presses!’ and prevent distribution. They would be too late.
That evening Rusbridger’s phone rang. Retired Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance was on the line. Vallance ran the uniquely British ‘D-Notice’ system, under which the government discreetly discourages the media from publishing stories said to endanger national security.
In 1993, as part of a tentative move towards glasnost, they were rebranded Defence Advisory (DA) notices. This change was meant to reflect the fact that it was voluntary whether or not to seek government advice.
Whether ‘voluntary’ or not, DA notices could be generally relied on to dampen media coverage. Vallance had already issued a ‘private and confidential’ notice not only to the Guardian itself but to the BBC, Sky and other UK broadcasters and newspapers. On behalf of GCHQ it discouraged them from following up Guardian US’s original PRISM scoops. British media largely complied and barely covered the story. Now, he made clear his concern that the Guardian had failed to consult him in advance before telling the world of the G20 snooping.
This was the beginning of a struggle between the British government and the Guardian. Since David Cameron became Conservative prime minister in 2010, Rusbridger had barely spent half an hour with him. ‘It wasn’t a warm or constructive relationship,’ he says. But the following day, while Cameron was hosting the G8 leaders at Lough Erne, his press officer Craig Oliver slipped out and called Rusbridger. With Oliver, a former BBC editor, was Sir Kim Darroch, a senior diplomat and the government’s national security adviser.
Sniffing – he was suffering from hay fever – Oliver said the Guardian’s G20 story risked ‘inadvertent damage’ to national security. He said officials were unhappy with the G20 revelations, and some of them wanted to chuck Rusbridger in jail. ‘But we are not going to do that.’
Rusbridger said that the Guardian was handling Snowden’s leaked material in a responsible manner. Its focus wasn’t operations or names, but the boundaries between security and privacy. The paper was willing to engage with Downing Street on future stories, he added, and to listen to any specific security concerns.
Coming down the pipeline was the TEMPORA article, about Britain’s feats of ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation’. This, as Rusbridger knew, might provoke even more trouble from Britain’s spymasters.
He offered Oliver a conference call in which the Guardian would lay out key details of the TEMPORA story in advance. The aim was to avoid genuine national security damage – and an injunction. Gibson had used the same approach in the US in her dealings with the White House, and Rusbridger had a similar dialogue with the US State Department in 2010, in advance of publishing some of its WikiLeaks cables. Oliver agreed the government wanted a ‘sensible conversation’. But, asked about possible injunctions, he refused to give any assurances, saying vaguely: ‘Well, if the story is mega…’
The Guardian went ahead and told Sir Kim Darroch, the national security adviser, about TEMPORA. Two days later, the government came up with a formal response. Oliver said, apologetically: ‘Things move at a very slow pace.’ He said the prime minister had only recently been briefed on Snowden after Putin and the other guests had gone. And he was ‘concerned’. Oliver added: ‘We are working on the assumption you have got rather a lot of stuff.’
The upshot was a personal visit from Cameron’s most lofty emissary, the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. This top official had advised three prime ministers and three chancellors. Assured, urbane and intelligent, Oxford- and Harvard-educated Heywood was used to having his own way.
In a 2012 profile, the Mirror had dubbed Heywood ‘the most powerful unelected figure in Britain… and you will never have heard of him.’ Heywood lived in some style in Clapham, south London, it reported (he was building a wine cellar and a gym). Nick Pearce, the former head of Downing Street’s policy unit, told the Mirror jokingly: ‘If we had a written constitution in this country, it would have to say something like, “Not withstanding the fact that Jeremy Heywood will always be at the centre of power, we are free and equal citizens.”’
There was an unhappy precedent for using cabinet secretaries on these sorts of missions. In 1986, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched Sir Robert Armstrong all the way to Australia, in a vain legal attempt to quell intelligence agency leaks. MI5 were seeking to halt the publication of Spycatcher, a memoir by disgruntled former MI5 officer Peter Wright. In it, Wright alleged that MI5’s former director general Sir Roger Hollis had been a Soviet spy, and that MI5 had ‘bugged and burgled’ its way across London, and eavesdropped on Commonwealth conferences. There were echoes here of GCHQ’s bugging of the G20.
Thatcher’s move was a debacle. Armstrong was ridiculed in the witness box, not least for his smug phrase that civil servants were sometimes ‘economical with the truth’. Wright’s memoir sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide on the back of the publicity.
At 8.30am on Friday 21 June, Heywood arrived at the Guardian’s Kings Place office. ‘He was clearly quite irritated,’ Johnson says. The prime minister, the deputy PM Nick Clegg, the foreign secretary William Hague, the attorney general and ‘others in government’ were all ‘deeply concerned’, said Sir Jeremy. (The reference to attorney general Dominic Grieve was deliberate; it was he who would decide any Official Secrets Act prosecution.)
Heywood wanted reassurances that locations of troops in Afghanistan wouldn’t be revealed, or ‘our agents undercover’. ‘Absolutely,’ Rusbridger agreed. The government was ‘grateful’ to the Guardian for the reasonable way it had behaved so far, Heywood conceded. But further publication could help paedophiles and endanger MI5 agents.
The editor said the Guardian’s surveillance revelations were dominating the news agenda in the US and had sparked a huge debate. Everyone was concerned, from Al Gore to Glenn Beck; from Mitt Romney to the American Civil Liberties Union. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the internet, and Jim Sensenbrenner, the congressman who drew up the Patriot Act, were also supportive. Even President Obama had said he welcomed the debate.