Edward Snowden has been embraced as a hero and a whistleblower. He’s been the subject of adoring front-page profiles, an Oscar-award winning documentary, a big-budget Hollywood movie and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
However, investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein argues in a new book that Snowden is not a national treasure; on the contrary, he has all of the fingerprints of a foreign spy.
In “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,” Epstein contends that the sheer number of documents that Snowden stole — 1.5 million in total, according to the most recent House Intelligence Committee report — calls into question Snowden’s self-professed altruism.
“If Snowden had only exposed the NSA telephone program, he would be a hero to me,” Epstein says. But the damage caused by Snowden has been so far-reaching that it may have enabled Russia to commit cyber attacks that swayed the 2016 election.
Among the classified materials that Snowden stole are the so-called “keys to the kingdom”: documents that reveal the full extent of the US’s foreign intelligence capabilities, as well as military and nuclear secrets. In the hands of a foreign adversary like Russia, these documents provide a road map to our clandestine overseas activities and expose holes in our network of protection, making our national cyber security more vulnerable.
Epstein says it would be “by far the biggest intelligence coup under Putin’s reign.”
To be clear, Epstein does not believe that Snowden started stealing secrets with the intention of handing them over to the Kremlin. As a libertarian, who was prominent in the WikiLeaks hacktivist community, Snowden initially set out to expose the NSA for collecting phone records of US citizens, under a program authorized by President George W. Bush after 9/11.
“Snowden was correct, in my opinion, in describing the threat of a surveillance state and the loss of privacy as a legitimate public concern,” Epstein writes.
By March 2013, Snowden made a decision that indicates his intentions, and perhaps his allegiances, had shifted. He left his job as a system administrator at Dell, where he first began copying government files, for a lower-paying position at Booz Allen Hamilton that provided him with a deeper level of access.
Snowden “deliberately went to Booz Allen to get access to the ‘lists’ revealing the NSA’s sources in foreign countries,” Epstein writes in his book. What he wanted to do with these lists, which he did not turn over to journalists, remains a mystery. (Epstein flew to Moscow and attempted an interview, but was unable to sit down with Snowden.)
Regardless, Snowden’s decision to switch jobs for the purpose of collecting more restricted documents is typical of what the CIA describes as “expanding penetration,” also known as spy behavior. From his post at Booz Allen, Snowden obtained highly classified “Level 3” materials that outlined exactly how the US government has gathered foreign intelligence, information that Russia has been trying to obtain since 1952, Epstein writes.
As far as Epstein is concerned, Snowden has taken a side. He’s had asylum in Moscow since July 31, 2013, after flying there from Hong Kong where he filmed the HBO documentary “Citizenfour.” Epstein believes that Putin would have exacted a price for his protection — in the form of the very same government secrets that Snowden stole.
While the details of Snowden’s arrangement with Russia are unknown, the House Intelligence Committee Report confirms that since his arrival in the capital, Snowden has been in contact with Russian intelligence services.
Whether Snowden deliberately set out to collaborate with Russia when he took the job at Booz Allen, or if he traded secrets later after fleeing the States in exchange for safe harbor, Epstein believes the outcome is the same: Snowden has compromised national security and worse, undermining the effectiveness of the global war on terror.
The US government seems to agree. As President Obama last week commuted the prison sentence of Army leaker Chelsea Manning, any such clemency for Snowden was brushed off — probably least of all because he failed to request it.
The book’s conclusions are unpopular with those who wish to celebrate Snowden’s bravery. But Epstein, who has been reporting on the details of Russian-American espionage since the 1980s, is unmoved.
“Here’s a guy who chose Russia over America,” he says of Snowden’s decision to defect to enemy territory with over a million government documents in hand. “He says he’s very happy. But they control him now . . . Who knows what they want him to do.”