Is Edward Snowden a spy?

Edward Jay Epstein has produced a long, detailed book elaborating on his theory

HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft

Edward Jay Epstein

Alfred A Knopf

350 pages; $27.95

People who reveal secrets are either heroes or betrayers, depending on what the secrets are and on the inclinations of the audience for them. In the case of Edward Snowden, who took and then released a great deal of internal data from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, his admirers have campaigned for a last-minute pardon by President Obama, but Donald Trump has mused that execution might be more appropriate. Journalism based on Mr Snowden’s revelations won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2014, and the Oscar for best documentary in 2015; on the other hand, many American government officials think Mr Snowden, who lives in Russia, should be brought home and prosecuted for revealing classified information.

In 2014, Edward Jay Epstein, the veteran writer on espionage, published a provocative article in The Wall Street Journal proposing another way of looking at Mr Snowden: As a spy. Mr Epstein wrote that an unnamed “former member of President Obama’s cabinet” had told him “that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation; 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.”

Now Mr Epstein has produced a long, detailed book elaborating on his theory. You can see the outlines of a coherent hypothesis in “How America Lost Its Secrets.” Perhaps Mr Snowden was planted at the NSA by either Russia or China, or by both. Perhaps while he was there he worked with other, as yet undetected, insiders who were also serving foreign powers. Perhaps in Hong Kong he put himself into the care of Chinese handlers who debriefed him extensively during the nearly two weeks between his arrival and his self-outing. Perhaps the same thing happened in Moscow during the first 37 days after he landed there, when he seems to have been hiding somewhere inside the airport security perimeter. Perhaps his reward for, in effect, defecting has been the odd protected life in Russia that celebrated spies like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess previously enjoyed. Perhaps his media-abetted role as a whistle-blower was merely a counterintuitive (because it was so public) new form of cover.

Mr Epstein proves none of this. “How America Lost Its Secrets” is an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly soufflé of speculation, full of anonymous sourcing and suppositional language like “it seems plausible to believe” or “it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude”. 

Sometimes it seems as if Mr Epstein so much enjoys exploring the twists and turns in Mr Snowden’s story — his encounter with Mr Snowden’s mysterious lawyer in Moscow, Anatoly Kucherena, is especially memorable — that he doesn’t have an overwhelming need to settle the questions he raises. 

This is Mr Epstein’s primary conclusion: Even if the American public was a partial beneficiary of Mr Snowden’s revelations, the main beneficiary was Russia, which to his mind couldn’t possibly have failed to take possession of all the material Mr Snowden took from the NSA. Whatever caveats he uses and whatever hard evidence he hasn’t found, Mr Epstein clearly wants to leave readers with the impression that Mr Snowden remains in Russia as a result of a deal exchanging his information for its protection. 

Mr Snowden, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and their immediate circle of allies come from a radically libertarian hacker culture that, most of the time, doesn’t believe there should be an NSA at all, whether or not it remains within the confines of its legal charter. Mr Epstein, conversely, is a strong supporter of the agency’s official mission of “communication intercepts,” which he sees as an essential element in the United States’ ability to participate in “the game of nations”.

The age of the internet, Vladimir Putin, Mr Snowden and WikiLeaks has generated its own particular form of disruption around how we think about the revelation of government secrets. Traditional spies seem far less important these days, because unclubbable, technically adept people can do that kind of work far more effectively. The press, at least for now, has assumed a larger role in the ecosystem of revelation, because hackers prefer finding partners in the mainstream media to simply releasing information on their own. But this new set of arrangements makes journalists look more like conduits and contextualisers, and less like originators of information. 

Journalists are quite comfortable with the idea of the news media uncovering government secrets that should not have been secret in the first place. This may be a role whose run is coming to an end. Information is too copious and flows too freely, and there are too many players in the revelation game — political activists, foreign governments, tricksters, self-publishers — for journalists to function as the arbiters of revelation. 

Mr Epstein has long been annoyed with the idea of the press as the key actor in secrecy dramas, digging up what the public should know but not exposing everything willy-nilly. His concern seems to be half with the celebratory closed loop between Mr Snowden and the journalists who covered him, and half with the causes and consequences of a major security breach at the NSA. The heart of the matter is the second of these concerns, not the first. In the Snowden affair, the press didn’t decide what stayed secret, and neither did Congress, the White House or the NSA. Mr Snowden did.
 

©2017 The New York Times News Service