No Place to Hide Read online

  We were to go to the third floor of Snowden’s hotel, which was where the conference rooms were located. He had chosen a specific conference room for what he thought was its perfect balance: sufficiently isolated to discourage substantial “human traffic,” as he called it, but not so obscure and hidden that we would attract attention while waiting there.

  Laura told me that once we got to the third floor, we were supposed to ask the first hotel employee we ran into near the designated room whether there was a restaurant open. The question would signal to Snowden, who would be hovering nearby, that we had not been followed. Inside the designated room, we were to wait on a couch near “a giant alligator,” which, Laura confirmed, was some kind of room decoration rather than a live animal.

  We had two different meeting times: 10:00 and then 10:20. If Snowden failed to arrive within two minutes of the first time, we were to leave the room and come back later at the second time, when he would find us.

  “How will we know it’s him?” I asked Laura. We still knew virtually nothing about him, not his age, race, physical appearance, or anything else.

  “He’ll be carrying a Rubik’s Cubed,” she said.

  I laughed out loud: the situation seemed so bizarre, so extreme and improbable. This is a surreal international thriller set in Hong Kong, I thought.

  Our taxi dropped us at the entrance to the Mira Hotel, which, I noted, was also located in the Kowloon District, a highly commercial neighborhood filled with sleek high-rises and chic stores: as visible as it gets. Entering the lobby, I was taken aback all over again: Snowden wasn’t staying in just any hotel, but in a sprawling high-priced one, which I knew must cost several hundred dollars a night. Why, I wondered, would someone who intended to blow the whistle on the NSA, and who needed great secrecy, go to Hong Kong to hide in a five-star hotel in one of the most visible neighborhoods in the city? There was no point at that moment in dwelling on the mystery—I’d be meeting the source within a matter of minutes and presumably would have all the answers.

  Like many Hong Kong buildings, the Mira Hotel was the size of a village. Laura and I spent at least fifteen minutes searching the cavernous hallways for our designated meeting spot. We had to take multiple elevators, cross internal bridges, and repeatedly ask for directions. When we thought we were close to the room, we saw a hotel employee. Somewhat awkwardly, I asked the coded question, and we listened to instructions about various restaurant options.

  Turning a corner, we saw an open door and a huge, green, plastic alligator lying across the floor. As instructed, we sat on the couch that was stranded in the middle of this otherwise empty room, waiting nervously and in silence. The small room appeared to have no real function, no reason for anybody to enter it, as there was nothing in it but the couch and the alligator. After five very long minutes of sitting in silence, nobody came, so we left and found another room nearby where we waited another fifteen minutes.

  At 10:20, we returned and again took our place near the alligator, on the couch, which faced the back wall of the room and a large mirror. After two minutes, I heard someone come into the room.

  Rather than turn around to see who had entered, I continued to stare at the back wall mirror, which showed a man’s reflection walking toward us. Only when he was within a few feet of the couch did I turn around.

  The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik’s Cube, twirling in the man’s left hand. Edward Snowden said hello but did not extend his hand to shake, as the point of the arrangement was to make this encounter appear to be random. As they had planned, Laura asked him about the food in the hotel and he replied that it was bad. Of all the surprising turns in this entire story, the moment of our meeting proved to be the biggest surprise of all.

  Snowden was twenty-nine years old at the time, but he appeared at least several years younger, dressed in a white T-shirt with some faded lettering, jeans, and chic-nerd glasses. He had a weak goatee of stubble but looked like he had only recently started shaving. He was basically clean-cut and his posture military-firm, but he was quite thin and pale, and—like all three of us at that moment—clearly somewhat guarded and cautious. He could have been any mildly geeky guy in his early to mid-twenties working in a computer lab on a college campus.

  In the moment, I simply couldn’t put the pieces together. Without having consciously thought about it, I had assumed for a number of reasons that Snowden was older, probably in his fifties or sixties. First, given the fact that he had access to so many sensitive documents, I had presumed he held a senior position within the national security system. Beyond that, his insights and strategies were invariably sophisticated and informed, leading me to believe he was a veteran of the political scene. Last, I knew he was prepared to throw his life away, probably spending the rest of it in prison, to disclose what he felt the world must know, so I imagined he was near the end of his career. For someone to arrive at so extreme and self-sacrificing a decision, I figured, he must have experienced many years, even decades, of profound disillusionment.

  To see that the source of the astonishing cache of NSA material was a man so young was one of the most disorienting experiences I have ever had. My mind began racing to consider the possibilities: Was this some sort of fraud? Had I wasted my time flying across the world? How could someone this young possibly have access to the type of information we had seen? How could this person be as savvy and experienced in intelligence and spycraft as our source clearly was? Maybe, I thought, this was the source’s son, or assistant, or lover, who was now going to take us to the source himself. Every conceivable possibility flooded my mind, and none of them made any real sense.

  “So, come with me,” he said, obviously tense. Laura and I followed him. We all muttered a few incoherent words of pleasantries as we walked. I was too stunned and confused to speak much, and I could see that Laura felt the same way. Snowden seemed very vigilant, as though he were searching for potential watchers or other signs of trouble. So we followed him, mostly in silence.

  With no idea where he was taking us, we entered the elevator, got off on the tenth floor, and then made our way to his room. Snowden pulled out a card key from his wallet and opened the door. “Welcome,” he said. “Sorry it’s a bit messy, but I basically haven’t left the room in a couple of weeks.”

  The room was indeed messy, with plates of half-eaten room-service food piled up on the table and dirty clothes strewn about. Snowden cleared off a chair and invited me to sit down. He then sat on his bed. Because the room was small, we were sitting less than five feet apart. Our conversation was tense, awkward, and stilted.

  Snowden immediately raised issues of security, asking whether I had a cell phone. My phone only worked in Brazil, but Snowden nonetheless insisted that I remove the battery or place it in the refrigerator of his minibar, which would at least muffle conversations, making them more difficult to overhear.

  Just as Laura had told me back in April, Snowden said the US government has the capability to remotely activate cell phones and convert them into listening devices. So I knew that the technology existed but still chalked up their concerns to borderline paranoia. As it turned out, I was the one who was misguided. The government has used this tactic in criminal investigations for years. In 2006, a federal judge presiding over the criminal prosecution of alleged New York mobsters had ruled that the FBI’s use of so-called roving bugs—turning a person’s own cell phone into a listening device through remote activation—was legal.

  Once my cell phone was safely sealed in the refrigerator, Snowden took the pillows from his bed and placed them at the bottom of the door. “That’s for passersby in the hallway,” he explained. “There may be room audio and cameras, but what we’re about to discuss is all going on the news anyway,” he said, only half joking.

  My ability to assess any of this was very limited. I still had very little idea of who Snowden was, where he worked, what truly motivated him, or what he had done, so I couldn’t be sure what threats might be lurking,
of surveillance or any other kind. My one consistent feeling was uncertainty.

  Without bothering to sit down or say anything, Laura, perhaps to relieve her own tension, began unpacking her camera and tripod and setting them up. She then came over and put microphones on both Snowden and me.

  We had discussed her plan to film us while in Hong Kong: she was, after all, a documentarian working on a film about the NSA. Inevitably, what we were doing would become a huge part of her project. I knew that, but I hadn’t been prepared for the recording to begin quite so soon. There was great cognitive dissonance between, on one hand, meeting so covertly with a source who, to the US government, had committed serious crimes and, on the other, filming it all.

  Laura was ready in a matter of minutes. “So I’m going to begin filming now,” she announced, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. The realization that we were about to be taped heightened the tension even more.

  That initial interaction between Snowden and myself was already awkward, but as soon as the camera began rolling, we both became instantly more formal and less friendly; our posture stiffened and our speech slowed down. Over the years, I’ve given many speeches about how surveillance changes human behavior, highlighting studies showing that people who know they are being watched are more confined, more cautious about what they say, less free. Now I saw and felt a vivid illustration of that dynamic.

  Given the futility of our attempts at exchanging pleasantries, there was nothing to do but plunge right in. “I have a lot of questions for you, and I’m just going to start asking them, one by one, and, if that’s OK with you, we can go from there,” I began.

  “That’s fine,” Snowden said, clearly as relieved as I was to get down to business.

  I had two primary goals at that point. Because we all knew there was a serious risk that he could be arrested at anytime, my urgent priority was to learn everything I could about Snowden: his life, his jobs, what led him to the extraordinary choice he had made, what he had done specifically to take those documents and why, and what he was doing in Hong Kong. Second, I was determined to figure out whether he was honest and fully forthcoming or whether he was hiding important things about who he was and what he had done.

  Although I had been a political writer for almost eight years, the more relevant experience for what I was about to do was my prior career as a litigator, which included taking depositions of witnesses. In a deposition, the lawyer sits across a table with a witness for hours, sometimes days. The witness is forced by law to be there and required to answer every one of your questions honestly. A key goal is to expose lies, find inconsistencies in the witness’s story, and break through any fiction the witness has created in order to let the concealed truth emerge. Taking depositions was one of the few things I really liked about being a lawyer, and I had developed all sorts of tactics for breaking down a witness. They always involved a relentless barrage of questions, often the same questions asked repeatedly but in different contexts, from different directions and angles, to test the solidity of the story.

  Shifting from my stance with Snowden online, where I had been willing to be passive and deferential, these were the aggressive tactics I used that day. Without so much as a bathroom break or a snack, I spent five straight hours questioning him. I started with his early childhood, his grade school experiences, his pre-government work history. I demanded every detail he could recall. Snowden, I learned, had been born in North Carolina and grew up in Maryland, the son of lower-middle-class federal government employees (his father had been in the Coast Guard for thirty years). Snowden felt deeply unchallenged in high school and never finished, far more interested in the Internet than in classes.

  Almost instantly, I could see in person what I had observed from our online chats: Snowden was highly intelligent and rational, and his thought processes methodical. His answers were crisp, clear, and cogent. In virtually every case, they were directly responsive to what I had asked, thoughtful, and deliberative. There were no strange detours or wildly improbable stories of the type that are the hallmark of emotionally unstable people or those suffering from psychological afflictions. His stability and focus instilled confidence.

  Although we readily form impressions of people from online interactions, we still need to meet in person to develop a reliable sense of who they are. I quickly felt better about the situation, recovering from my initial doubts and disorientation about whom I was dealing with. But I still remained intensely skeptical because I knew the credibility of everything we were about to do depended on the reliability of Snowden’s claims about who he was.

  We spent several hours on his work history and intellectual evolution. As with so many Americans, Snowden’s political views had changed significantly after the 9/11 attack: he became much more “patriotic.” In 2004, at twenty, he had enlisted in the US Army intending to fight in the Iraq War, which he thought at the time was a noble effort to free the Iraqi people from oppression. After only a few weeks in basic training, however, he saw that there was more talk of killing Arabs than liberating anyone. By the time both of his legs were broken in a training accident and he was forced to leave the military, he had become highly disillusioned about the real purpose of the war.

  But Snowden still believed in the core goodness of the United States government, so he decided to follow the example of many of his family members and went to work for a federal agency. With no high school degree, he had nonetheless managed in early adulthood to create opportunities for himself, including paid technical work at thirty dollars an hour before he turned eighteen, and he had been a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer since 2002. But he viewed a career in the federal government as something both noble and professionally promising, so he started as a security guard at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, a building secretly managed and used by the NSA. The intention, he said, was to get top secret clearance and thus get his foot in the door to then do technical work.

  Although Snowden was a high school dropout, he had a natural talent for technology that became evident in his early adolescence. Combined with his obvious intelligence, those attributes, despite his young age and lack of formal education, enabled him to advance quickly in his jobs, moving rapidly from security guard to a position in 2005 as a technical expert for the CIA.

  He explained that the entire intelligence community was desperate for tech-savvy employees. It had transformed itself into such a large and sprawling system that finding enough people capable of operating it was hard. Thus the national security agencies had to turn to nontraditional talent pools to recruit. People with sufficiently advanced computer skills tended to be young and sometimes alienated, and had often failed to shine in mainstream education. They often found Internet culture far more stimulating than formal educational institutions and personal interactions. Snowden became a valued member of his IT team at the agency, clearly more knowledgeable and proficient than most of his older, college-educated colleagues. Snowden felt that he had found exactly the right environment in which his skills would be rewarded and his lack of academic credentials ignored.

  In 2006, he transitioned from being a contractor with the CIA to full-time staff, which increased his opportunities further. In 2007, he learned of a CIA job posting that entailed working on computer systems while being stationed overseas. Boasting glowing recommendations from his managers, he got the job and eventually ended up working for the CIA in Switzerland. He was stationed in Geneva for three years, through 2010, deployed there undercover with diplomatic credentials.

  As Snowden described his work in Geneva, he was far more than a mere “systems administrator.” He was considered the top technical and cybersecurity expert in Switzerland, ordered to travel throughout the region to fix problems nobody else could. He was hand-picked by the CIA to support the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania. Despite this success, it was during his stint with the CIA that Snowden began to feel seriously troubled by
his government’s actions.

  “Because of the access technical experts have to computer systems, I saw a lot of secret things,” Snowden told me, “and many of them were quite bad. I began to understand that what my government really does in the world is very different from what I’d always been taught. That recognition in turn leads you to start reevaluating how you look at things, to question things more.”

  One example he recounted was an attempt by CIA case officers to recruit a Swiss banker to provide confidential information. They wanted to know about the financial transactions of people of interest to the United States. Snowden recounted how one of the undercover officers befriended the banker, got him drunk one night, and encouraged him to drive home. When the banker was stopped by the police and arrested for DUI, the CIA agent offered to help him personally in a variety of ways, provided that the banker cooperated with the agency. The recruitment effort ultimately failed. “They destroyed the target’s life for something that didn’t even work out, and simply walked away,” he said. Beyond the scheme itself, Snowden was disturbed by how the agent bragged about the methods used to reel in his catch.

  An added element of frustration came from Snowden’s efforts to make his superiors aware of problems in computer security or systems he thought skirted ethical lines. Those efforts, he said, were almost always rebuffed.

  “They would say this isn’t your job, or you’d be told you don’t have enough information to make those kinds of judgments. You’d basically be instructed not to worry about it,” he said. He developed a reputation among colleagues as someone who raised too many concerns, a trait that did not endear him to superiors. “This was when I really started seeing how easy it is to divorce power from accountability, and how the higher the levels of power, the less oversight and accountability there was.”