Two weeks passed, with the Guardian continuing to publish. For those in the bunker it was a demanding and stressful period. They couldn’t talk to friends or colleagues, only to those in the circle of trust. Then on Friday 12 July, Heywood reappeared, accompanied by Craig Oliver, who was wearing a pink striped shirt. Their message was that the Guardian must hand the GCHQ files back; the mood in government seemed to be hardening, although scarcely more well-informed. ‘We are pretty aware of what you have got,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘We believe you have about 30 to 40 documents. We are worried about their security.’
Rusbridger said: ‘You do realise there is a copy [of the documents] in America?’ Heywood: ‘We can do this nicely or we can go to law.’ Then Rusbridger suggested an apparent compromise: that GCHQ could send technical experts to the Guardian to advise staff how the material could be handled securely. And possibly, in due course, destroyed. He made it clear that the Guardian didn’t intend to hand the files over. ‘We are still working on them,’ he said. Heywood and Oliver said they would think about this over the weekend, but they wanted Rusbridger to reconsider his refusal to hand the stuff back.
Three evenings later, Rusbridger was having a quiet beer in the Crown, a Victorian pub in nearby Islington. A text arrived from Oliver, the premier’s press secretary. Had the editor set up a meeting with Oliver Robbins, Cameron’s deputy national security adviser?
‘JH [Heywood] is concerned you have not agreed the meeting he suggested.’
Rusbridger was nonplussed. He texted back: ‘About security measures?’
Oliver: ‘About handing the material back.’
Rusbridger: ‘I thought he suggested meeting about security measures?’
Oliver: ‘No. He is very clear. The meeting is about getting the material back.’
It appeared that over the weekend something had changed. Rusbridger told the press secretary there hadn’t been a deal to return the Snowden files.
Oliver was blunt: ‘You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to hand the files back.’
Rusbridger replied: ‘We are obviously talking about different meetings. That’s not what we agreed. If you’ve changed your mind that’s fine.’
Oliver then went for the big stick: ‘If you won’t return it we will have to talk to “other people” this evening…’
The conversation left Rusbridger amazed. Since the first Snowden story six weeks earlier Downing Street had treated the leak non-urgently – often taking days to respond. It was bureaucratic delay verging on sloth. Now it wanted a resolution within hours. ‘We just sat up and thought “Oh my God”,’ one insider said. It was possible the security services had detected an imminent threat from an enemy power. Or the securocrats had grown exasperated. Or Cameron had given a languid order to deal with it.
The next morning, Robbins called. Aged 38, Robbins had enjoyed a sharp vertical rise – Oxford, the Treasury, principal private secretary to Tony Blair, director of intelligence in the Cabinet Office. Robbins announced it ‘was all over’. Ministers needed urgent assurances Snowden’s files had been ‘destroyed’. He said GCHQ technicians also wanted to inspect the files to ascertain their ‘journey’: to see if a third party had intercepted them.
Rusbridger repeated: ‘This doesn’t make sense. It’s in US hands. We will go on reporting from the US. You are going to lose any sense of control over the conditions. You’re not going to have this chat with US news organisations.’
Rusbridger then asked, ‘Are you saying explicitly, if we don’t do this you will close us down?’
‘I’m saying this,’ Robbins agreed.
That afternoon, Jill Abramson of the New York Times and her managing editor, Dean Baquet, slipped into the Guardian’s London office.
The Guardian had 14 conditions, set out on a sheet of A4, for the collaboration.
They stipulated that both papers would work together on the material. Rusbridger knew the Times newsroom included reporters with deep expert knowledge of national security matters. ‘This guy is our source. I think you should treat him as your source,’ Rusbridger said. He added that neither Snowden nor Greenwald were exactly fans of the Times. British journalists would move in and work alongside their Times colleagues.
Abramson gave him a wry smile. She agreed to the conditions.
Later Abramson and Baquet arrived at Heathrow airport to fly home. Security officers pulled them to one side. Was this a random stop? Or were they looking for the GCHQ files? They didn’t find them. The documents had already been spirited across the Atlantic.
Rusbridger himself was due to go off to his regular summer ‘piano camp’ in the Lot Valley in central France. He had recently published a book entitled Play it Again, an account of how he had combined demanding editing duties and the WikiLeaks story with learning Chopin’s most exacting work, ‘Ballade No. 1’. After consulting with Johnson, Rusbridger decided he might as well still go, despite all the dramas. He boarded the Eurostar train bound for Bordeaux. At first it was hard to concentrate on music. Soon, however, he immersed himself completely in Debussy.
As he worked on his piano technique, events in London now moved towards what Rusbridger would later describe as one of the strangest episodes in the Guardian’s long history. Robbins reappeared. ‘He was punctiliously polite, very well-mannered. There was no obvious aggression,’ Johnson says. But the official said the government wanted to seize the Guardian’s computers and subject them to forensic analysis. Johnson refused. He cited a duty to Snowden and to Guardian journalists. The deputy editor offered another way forward: to avoid being closed down, the Guardian would bash up its own ‘war room’ computers under GCHQ’s tutelage. Robbins agreed.
It was a parody of Luddism: men were sent in to smash the machines.
On Friday 19 July two men from GCHQ paid a visit to the Guardian. Their names were ‘Ian’ and ‘Chris’. They met with Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons. The Kremlin was apparently capable of techniques straight from the pages of James Bond, Ian told her: ‘You have got plastic cups on your table. Plastic cups can be turned into microphones. The Russians can send a laser beam through your window and turn them into a listening device.’ The Guardian nicknamed the pair the hobbits.
Two days later the hobbits came back, this time with Robbins and a formidable civil servant called Kata. Ian, the senior of the two, was short, bubbly and dressed in shirt and chinos. His accent hinted at south Wales. Chris was taller and more taciturn. They carried a large and mysterious rucksack. Neither had previously spent any time with journalists; this was a new experience for them. In normal circumstances fraternising with the media was forbidden.
Ian explained how he would have broken into the Guardian’s secret war room: ‘I would have given the guard £5k and got him to install a dummy keyboard. Black ops would have got it back. We would have seen everything you did.’ (The plan made several wildly optimistic assumptions.) At this Kata shook her head: apparently Ian’s Boy’s Own contribution was unwelcome.
Ian then asked: ‘Can we have a look at the documents?’ Johnson said he couldn’t.
Next, the GCHQ team opened up their rucksack. Inside was what looked like a large microwave oven. This strange object was a degausser. Its purpose is to destroy magnetic fields, thereby erasing hard drives and data. The electronics company Thales made it. (Degaussers were named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, who gave his name to the Gauss unit of magnetism.)