For all these reasons, the Snowden disclosures have had a catastrophic long-term effect on British and American intelligence. As I have explained above, even the threat of a breach is enough to endanger an intelligence operation. But publishing secrets in the media introduces a whole extra level of risk. It is bad enough if the Chinese and Russian intelligence services have knowledge of (or access to) the programmes compromised by Snowden. But when they are actively publicised, even the dimmest and worst informed terrorist, anarchist or criminal gets the message. Capabilities that work when deployed stealthily become useless once everyone knows about them. Once you learn that a computer screen can be read from far away through an open window, you draw the curtains. Once you know that a computer can plant malware on a mobile phone, or vice versa, you start keeping mobile devices in a lead-lined box. To be sure, the agencies will develop new capabilities. But if your navy has been sunk, it is little comfort to be told that you can always build another one. What are you going to do in the meantime?
The pleas of the Snowden-friendly media that they screen the material before publishing it cut little ice. It is nice of them to take advice, in some cases, from government security sources about disclosures that might be particularly damaging, and even to refrain from making them. Many of the more responsible media outlets have partially redacted the documents they have published, at least protecting the names of intelligence officers. But that does not stop Greenwald from offering the same material elsewhere. His petulant remarks after his partner Miranda was stopped at Heathrow Airport did not suggest a responsible attitude to the secrets he guards. ‘I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England’s spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did.’[67] Publishing secret documents is a grave responsibility. Surely the justification should be to expose wrongdoing, not to satisfy personal pique?
The damage was foreshadowed by WikiLeaks—a forerunner of the Snowden disclosures. A German politician, Helmut Metzner, had to resign and faced prosecution when he was outed as the anonymous source mentioned in a leaked American diplomatic cable (he denied wrongdoing and charges of espionage were eventually dropped). America’s State Department has spent a great deal of time and money trying to safeguard other individuals whose identities have been wholly or partially exposed in the leaked cables. To be fair, in the versions that WikiLeaks published initially, the names of interlocutors were redacted. But a mixture of carelessness and ignorance meant that the passphrase for the unedited versions of the cables became available. The result is unlikely to have increased foreigners’ willingness to meet and speak frankly with American diplomats about even mundane matters.
When intelligence sources, as opposed to mere diplomatic ones, are put at risk the damage is far greater. The stolen documents include the names of many NSA and GCHQ officers. Some of them will have been posted abroad—and may well have had sensitive contacts with locals. If their names and identities become known, then anyone who has met them, say in China, Iran or Russia, is in danger. Snowden says he will not release such material. So why did he steal it in the first place? In any case, as I have argued above, he cannot be sure that it will not leak out, given the amateurish way in which it is safeguarded. That is a profound worry to existing sources, and a grave deterrent to new ones.[68]
The disclosures of espionage by American allies damage them too. Diplomatic capital is consumed in issuing new assurances and tokens of friendship, as Australia has had to do with Indonesia. Other agreements may be put on hold. Trust is the most valuable commodity in espionage. Stolen secrets are fragile and perishable commodities. The instinctive desire of every intelligence officer and every spy service is to hoard, not to share. That preserves sources and methods, and makes the next secret easier to obtain. Handing hard-won material to a foreign partner is possible only when you believe that the country concerned is at least as trustworthy as you are yourself. The NSA’s failure to keep its secrets has dented America’s reputation as a trustworthy partner.
The quite unnecessary damage caused by Snowden makes it hard to believe that his aim was solely to expose wrongdoing. It looks far more likely that he was trying to cripple the NSA and its allies, and to hurt America’s standing in the world. Taking a huge cache of documents, and in a way that largely defies description, analysis or mitigation, is not the action of a patriotic whistleblower. It is the behaviour of a saboteur. It is a sign of the desperation now reigning in the NSA that some are willing to offer him an amnesty even now, if he will only hand back the missing files. Nobody can be confident that they have not been seen by others. But at least the agency will have a clearer idea of what was taken, and how.
All this damage, of course, suits Russia. The NSA and other American and allied intelligence and security agencies have been a prime target for the Kremlin since even before the Cold War. The successes have been great: recent triumphs include recruiting the heads of Soviet counter-intelligence at the FBI (Robert Hanssen) and the CIA (Aldrich Ames). Signals intelligence in the ‘Five-eyes’ alliance of America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has been a particular target. Western countries have shifted their attention since the end of the Cold War. The reverse is not the case. The ten Russian ‘illegals’ arrested in America in June 2010 prompted a lengthy, disabling and so far fruitless search within the NSA for the sources which at least one of them was believed to have recruited there. Was Snowden’s decision to do what seems like deliberate damage to the NSA and America mere recklessness and vindictiveness? Or was there another motive, conscious or unconscious, in the background? No definitive answer to that is available on the evidence presently available. But some historical examples are instructive.
Chapter Four: History Lessons
In the 1970s, the nuclear disarmament movement in the West was moribund. People worried more about the energy crisis, militant trade unions, terrorism and other issues. That began to change in 1977, when the Soviet leadership launched a vigorous and successful public campaign in continental Europe against the ‘neutron bomb’—an American anti-tank weapon aimed at shoring up the alliance’s fragile conventional defences in Europe. The anti-nuclear cause was fuelled further by the NATO decision in 1979 to place Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe in response to the Soviet deployment of the similar SS20 missiles from 1977 onwards.
As the anti-nuclear movement mushroomed, the Atlantic alliance came under huge strain. Ronald Reagan was seen in Europe as a warmonger and a cowboy. Pro-American governments burned political capital fighting against seductive if simplistic arguments. Surely it was better to have fewer nuclear weapons, not more? Why not try unilateral confidence-building moves to defuse tension, rather than escalate the risk of war by boosting arsenals further? ‘Ban the bomb’, and the romantic eccentricity of the ‘Women’s Peace Camp’ at Greenham Common near London, had an appeal that the dry arguments for the status quo could not match. Few went as far as the Spartacist League, with their hallmark chant of ‘Smash NATO! Defend the Soviet Union!’ But the consensus in the peace movement was that America was a bigger threat than the Soviet Union.
67
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/glenn-greenwald-uk-secrets-britain-detains-partner_n_3779667.html. Greenwald said later that his remarks, in Portuguese, were not meant to be construed this way. But he has given little reason to doubt the sentiment.
68
Paul Pilar has argued this well in the