Snowden's Game

The story of Edward Snowden, the man who told the world about the top-secret PRISM program, which American intelligence agencies used for Internet user surveillance, would make the perfect script for a Hollywood thriller. The first reaction to reading about Snowden in the Western media is: “Real life is not like that.”

This is Snowden, with a pleasant, intelligent face, thin-rimmed glasses, a thoughtful expression. He is a young, 29-year-old idealist from the American hinterland of South Carolina.* At 21, having barely reached adulthood, he joined the Army, intending to find work in the special forces. “I wanted to fight in the Iraq War because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,” he later told journalists. Snowden didn’t make it to the special forces; after four months he broke both legs in a training exercise. He went to work for the National Security Agency, an intelligence agency similar to our FAGCI.** He began practically from zero, as a security guard at the University of Maryland, where the NSA had its laboratories. He quickly progressed and transitioned to the CIA’s department for information security. He worked for two years under cover in Geneva — ostensibly as a simple system administrator, but also servicing computer networks for American intelligence. He later quit and moved to Japan, where he worked for a company that collaborated with the NSA. Such private companies that provide services related to military conflicts or intelligence collection are eager to hire former intelligence community employees, who in turn are happy to exchange a modest government salary for the extremely lucrative prospects of corporate pay.

Snowden made $200,000 a year, loved his work and lived in Hawaii with a beautiful dancer, Lindsay Mills. Photographs can be found on the Internet showing Edward and Lindsay kissing against the backdrop of a Hawaiian sunset, happily standing under a waterfall — in general, enjoying life. But that beautiful, comfortable life ended when Snowden took two weeks of vacation and flew to Hong Kong, leaving Lindsay in Hawaii. In Hong Kong, he met with journalists from The Guardian and The Washington Post and gave them secret NSA documents related to the PRISM program and surveillance of internet users in the U.S. and beyond. Later he allowed them to publish his name, announcing that “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.” Coming out of the shadows, however, Snowden chose to leave the hotel … but not Hong Kong.

As journalists for The Guardian rightly noted, “choosing Hong Kong as a haven was a high-stakes gamble,” and he certainly knew what he was getting himself into. But the strangest thing is that Snowden, having the chance to leave Hong Kong, which has a bilateral extradition agreement with the U.S., preferred to stay in that cosmopolitan city and continue to give interviews to the local press. “I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.”

A lone hero, fearlessly going to war with the system, is a trope familiar from the Hollywood blockbusters. But does it bear any relationship to reality?

“I’ve talked to a bunch of people in Washington today, in official positions, and they are looking at this as a potential Chinese espionage case,” Bob Baer, a former CIA operative and author of several books on intelligence, told journalists. In Baer’s opinion, Snowden’s revelation — coming on the same day that Obama met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss the problem of cyber espionage — is “a pointed affront to the United States.”

The sensitive reaction of the U.S. intelligence community is entirely understandable. Snowden possessed top-secret information related to the specific work of the NSA, CIA and two to three private defense contractors. The loss of such a secret-bearer is a blow below the belt.

On the one hand, Snowden really could be acting out of ethical considerations. As a reminder: From the very beginning, he was idealistically motivated. He joined the Army to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam and “free the oppressed.” He went to work for the NSA dreaming of defending the democratic values of the West.

On the other hand, yesterday a new interview with Snowden appeared in the influential Hong Kong newspaper The South China Morning Post with the sensational title “U.S. Government has been Hacking Hong Kong and China for Years.” In it the fugitive intelligence officer accuses the U.S. of carrying out cyberattacks and surveillance on computers and servers in Hong Kong and mainland China over the course of several years. These statements by Snowden cause his fight to be viewed from a different perspective.

Bob Baer called Snowden‘s actions an “affront to the U.S.” for good reason. Less than a week had passed since Obama tried to convince the Chinese leader, on the California estate, to stop the war against the U.S. in cyberspace, and suddenly Snowden, the fighter for freedom of information, accuses the Americans of engaging in cyber espionage against the Chinese. The response may be somewhat asymmetrical — consider the relative stature of Obama and Snowden — but it is very much in the spirit of Chinese strategy.

How will this remarkable story turn out? It will hardly have a traditional Hollywood happy ending. But a petition demanding Snowden’s pardon by the White House website has collected 64,000 signatures over the course of two days. According to law, the petition must get 100,000 signatures within a month in order to be considered by the president’s administration. The petition’s authors consider Snowden a national hero who has drawn society’s attention to the problem of government surveillance of U.S. citizens. That opinion is shared by many American bloggers, who are indignant about government intrusion into their territory. Many have sympathy for Snowden and are collecting money to pay his legal costs. As long as Snowden remains a lone hero, he will continue to have support. But what if it turns out that behind the former CIA system administrator lurks the powerful specter of Chinese intelligence?

*Editor’s Note: Snowden is actually from North Carolina.

**Translator’s Note: This refers to the Russian Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information.