Cipher Brief Expert Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations. He led the Intelligence investigation for the CIA into Edward Snowden's activities once he fled the U.S. in 2013.
Speaking in 1978, journalist David Frost wryly observed that “whereas former secret agents in Britain tend to defect to the Russians, in America former secret agents tend to defect to their publishers”. With the publishing of his reputedly self-authored Permanent Record, Edward Snowden has now done both.
He is not the first American traitor to register such a disreputable achievement. Former CIA officer Philip Agee, for instance, in the early 1970’s volunteered to defect to the KGB which (much to the chagrin of KGB Counterintelligence Chief Oleg Kalugin) rejected his approach. Agee ultimately defected to the Cubans and spent the rest of his all too lengthy life in Havana, authoring several books exposing purported Agency operations and personnel at the behest of his masters in Cuban and Soviet intelligence. His treason likely had deadly consequences. Agee’s exposure of CIA Athens Station Chief Richard Welch probably led to the latter’s 1975 assassination by the Greek terrorist group 17 November.
Snowden likewise probably has blood on his hands by virtue of his revelations of programs crucial to U.S. and UK counterterrorism efforts. In 2015, for instance, then-CIA Director stated that Snowden’s disclosures made it “much more difficult” to track terrorists such as the ISIS adherents who killed 130 during attacks in Paris in November of that year.
I myself have not read Permanent Record. When I learned it was out, I resolved not to buy it. I hoped that if I – in light of my putative interest in his case stemming from my role in dealing with his defection and the consequences of it - did not buy this tome, not too many others would be interested in it. Moreover, I did not want to feed Snowden’s already overweening ego or contribute, however minutely, to a further delay in his inevitable descent from ill-earned fame to richly deserved ignominy. Finally, I just could not bring myself to put filthy lucre in the traitor’s pockets, or in those of his Russian FSB handlers.
I have, however, read a number of reviews of the book; some sympathetic and a few less so. Nothing in them is surprising or engenders in me a desire to read the book in its entirety as it would appear to be a compilation of the lies and distortions he has already put forth to justify the unjustifiable. Those reviews would also indicate that Permanent Record adds little to the tales spun by, and about, Snowden since his defection (see, for instance, my review of Oliver Stone’s movie about him.)
That being said, the reviews speak to a number of themes worth (re-)emphasizing for the permanent record, as it were:
Snowden is not a ‘whistleblower’
Judging from the reviews, Snowden’s claimed ‘whistleblower’ status continues to have unwarranted resonance. This is both counterfactual and damaging to true whistleblowers. A real whistleblower utilizes established channels with their mandated protections to raise issues of concern and does not do so for personal, political or ideological reasons. There is, however, no record of Snowden having sought to avail himself of those channels and protections to bring any such matters to the attention of his chain of command or any whistleblower authority. Indeed, he sought to hide his actions and intent from his supervisors and colleagues at NSA.
Moreover, as Jill Lepore points out in her review for The New Yorker, Snowden “didn’t come across evidence of wrongdoing. He went looking for it.” That is the action of a zealot, not a whistleblower. Even some of the steps Snowden has taken to try to justify his conduct belie a fundamental contradiction. The fact that he now serves as head of the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation might have granted him additional legitimacy in some circles by virtue of the fact that one of its founders is Daniel Ellsberg. That is, until one considers that while Ellsberg had courage enough to risk prosecution after leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971, Snowden fled to the sanctuary of an adversary like a thief in the night. That, too, is not the norm for a real whistleblower case.
Finally, and predictably, casting Snowden as a whistleblower has encouraged others to try to exploit whistleblower status to rationalize their own illegal actions. One of them, former CIA officer John Kiriakou - sentenced to 30 months in prison in October 2012 after pleading guilty to disclosing to a journalist the name of a covert CIA officer and to disclosing information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities - has cast himself as a whistleblower in appealing to President Trump for a pardon. I trust the President will reject Kiriakou’s request as granting such a pardon would de facto condone actions that put CIA personnel working to protect our country from terrorists, at risk.
Kiriakou will surely not be the last to falsely assert whistleblower status. We have Snowden, and a seeming inability to call him what he is, to thank for diminishing confidence in an important means for government employees to address real or perceived wrongdoing and for blurring what should be a clear distinction between deceitful and honorable acts.
Rebel without a point?
Reviewers of Snowden’s book apparently looked in vain in Permanent Record for new reasons underlying his actions. Most of the explications of motive Snowden does provide are premised upon his supposed fealty to a loyalty higher than his sworn oath to his country. “I used to work for the government”, he writes, “but now I work for the public”. The problem is that none of those explanations stand up to scrutiny. “I had the sneaking sense” Snowden says, that “while I was looking through all this China material (on that country’s surveillance capabilities) that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America.” The absurdity of such a comparison aside, the chief difficulty with this assertion is that Snowden began secretly collecting information from NSA months before he started working on China issues.
Snowden’s egotism and inability to work cooperatively within a disciplined system were obvious predicating factors in his decision to betray. Further, an ideological bent towards the free flow of information, evident in what the reviewers characterize as a naïve yearning for a return to the ungoverned Internet of his youth, was clearly a driving element in his actions. It is, however, hard to reconcile Snowden’s oft-stated desire to promote the unfettered flow of information with his decision to accept sanctuary in a country known for its efforts to monitor, restrict and shape it.
All the reviewers I read made the point that Snowden’s innate capacity for deception was apparent early on in the many online personas he assumed. This trait would ultimately manifest itself in a web of exaggerations, prevarications and outright lies directed at the organizations for which he worked and the people with whom he served. A capacity to deceive is a good skill to have in the intelligence world, provided one does not confuse the necessity of lying to one’s adversaries with the deceit of lying to one’s own side. Snowden’s inability to differentiate between the two is a crucial - if all too banal – factor that led him on a path that ended in Moscow.
Snowden as arch-type?
I am often asked whether the Snowden case is representative of some sort of generational or occupational insider threat arch-type. A common worry about their supposed neediness and frequent job changes aside, I see nothing to indicate that millennials have any higher propensity for betrayal than previous generations. The sad reality is that for every Snowden or Reality Winner, there was an Aldrich Ames or a William Kampiles at an earlier time.
Snowden is, however, the personification of Rebecca West’s prescient warning that “science, continually adding to our armoury, continually demands more mechanics and more clerks” and that those “small fry also have the power of betrayal, having now access to secrets which can be betrayed and are worth betraying.” Snowden would, of course, take umbrage at any description of him as ‘small fry’. But it is worth considering what lessons we might draw from his case that are applicable to the broader IT culture.
His assertions that: ‘“There is no such thing as just a systems administrator”’ and that the “systems administrator is always the most powerful person on the entire network”’ aptly captures a key information protection challenge we face.
Snowden’s access to highly classified material, his duplicity, increasingly radical views regarding information freedom, inability to accept supervision and hubris combined to make him a perfect counterintelligence storm. While such a toxic brew hopefully cannot be replicated in other cases, it behooves organizations wishing to protect their sensitive data to ensure that access to it is as restrictive as it can be without jeopardizing mission or the pace of business; that those handling that data be subjected to enhanced vetting and audit measures; and that automation be promulgated as rapidly as technology allows so as to limit the number of persons touching that data. West’s conclusion that every scientific step forward “makes the problem of security more difficult to solve”, while true enough, must not dissuade us from doing what needs to be done to protect sensitive information from those who would abuse their privileged access to it.
Wikileaks is a Malevolent Actor
It is not always good to be right. In the aftermath of the Snowden affair, I predicted that the next steps by Russia would be to fully operationalize Wikileaks as an intelligence instrument and then to exploit it to disseminate information with the imprimatur of legitimacy conferred by its ‘whistleblower site’ status. That conclusion regrettably played out.
Commenting in Permanent Record, Snowden says he originally wanted to release his stolen data through Wikileaks. He concluded, however, that its “total transparency” - he apparently hasn’t hoisted on board, (or has been told to ignore) the fact that Wikileaks prints virtually nothing unfavorable to Russia or China - was unsuited for what Snowden professes to have desired. That being a judicious presentation of what he stole accompanied by commentary and context provided by his journalist abettors. In his book, he wrote of the importance of this approach to his professed higher intent: “Whereas other spies have committed espionage, sedition and treason, I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism.”
Such an uncontrolled, unmonitored release of information damaging to its main adversary would never have suited the goals of Russian intelligence.
Fortunately for them, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s close confidante, Sarah Harrison, was there to help ensure Snowden got safely from Hong Kong to Moscow and thence into the hands of the FSB. The Russians’ leveraging of Snowden’s Wikileaks ties to draw him into their orbit told us much about that organization’s links to Moscow. There are no coincidences in the intelligence arena.
Russian intelligence services are still not charities
Neither Snowden’s recounting of his first encounter with Russian intelligence in Moscow nor his portrayal of their disinterest in him since he arrived there, are credible. According to Snowden, on arrival in Moscow he rejected an FSB pitch to work as their agent. He goes on to claim that he has had no other interaction with Russian intelligence since, speculating that the Russians are satisfied with the propaganda value vis-à-vis the U.S. that his presence in Moscow confers upon them. I don’t believe him.
Snowden tells us his life with his American wife in a two-bedroom rented apartment in Moscow is a happy one. One wonders who pays the rent. The Russian services, like all intelligence services, deal in quid pro quos - only more so. They are not charitable organizations. Concurrence of those services in his flight to Moscow, their arranging of citizenship and accommodation for him, as well as their escorting, monitoring and collecting on him, will all have come at a price. That price was surely Snowden’s agreement to work with them, his denials notwithstanding.
Even assuming he does not decide to return to the U.S. to face trial for his actions, Snowden’s future looks bleak. Perhaps, post-mortem like Kim Philby, his image will be on a holographic tombstone in a Moscow cemetery or he will have a city square named after him. For now, he is a man who has turned his back on his country. Snowden will never be fully trusted by his hosts. They will wring information out of him, growing ever more tired of catering to his needs as his utility to them wanes. Like other defectors before him, he will slowly fade into obscurity in an alien land. “Traitors”, one world leader has grimly opined, “always end up badly. They end up, as a rule, on booze, drugs or in the gutter.” Snowden ought to pay attention to that assessment of his likely prospects. It came from Vladimir Putin.
Snowden continues to harm U.S. national security
Efforts on the part of Snowden and his apologists to minimize the impact his actions have had on U.S. national security notwithstanding, Snowden has inflicted, and continues to inflict, great damage on our country. Speaking in 2018, Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) Bill Evanina, stated that over the preceding year there had been “more international, Snowden-related documents and breaches than ever.” That material included reporting published in The Intercept on a purported Japanese-run mass surveillance program and on alleged NSA targeting of bitcoin users to gather intelligence to counter narcotics and money laundering. “Since 2013, when Snowden left”, the NCSC head said, “there have been thousands of articles around the world with really sensitive stuff that’s been leaked.”
Moreover, Evanina judged, “we don’t see this issue ending anytime soon” as only about one percent of the material taken by Snowden had appeared in public. This, of course, leaves open the question of the disposition of the vast preponderance of the estimated 1.7 million documents he stole. That material can be deployed by Snowden, his media enablers or his Russian masters at any time either overtly or, in the case of the latter, clandestinely. It is, therefore, likely that Snowden will continue to do harm to the nation for years to come.
It was, consequently, with a profound sense of satisfaction and a deep appreciation for irony that I read of a recent decision by federal District Judge Liam O’Grady that the U.S. Government could confiscate all monies the traitor receives from sales of his book. The Judge’s statement that the secrecy agreements Snowden signed are binding contracts that “require prepublication review of a signatory’s public disclosures which refer to, mention, or are based upon, classified information or intelligence activities or materials” must have come as a profound shock to a man accustomed to acting with wanton disregard for any such obligations.
The decision – coming in the wake of a virtual tsunami of leaks of classified information over the last three years – signals a welcome U.S government resolve to enforce adherence to secrecy obligations freely entered into by those privileged to serve the nation. It also serves as a warning to those who would betray their oaths that they will no longer be allowed to profit by so doing. Finally, it marks a significant step forward in a much-needed legal and historical reckoning with Mr. Snowden for the betrayal of our country that constitutes his real Permanent Record. But I still will not buy the book.
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