Another
Hatchet Job on Snowden
The hatchet jobs against NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden keep on coming with a new book
whose author says he applied James Angleton’s
counterintelligence techniques to Snowden.
By Ray McGovern
March 05,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
- In depicting National Security Agency
whistleblower Edward Snowden as a Russian spy,
author Edward Jay Epstein acknowledges his debt
to the CIA’s famously paranoid
counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton,
who specialized in counterintuitive thinking
that surely smeared more honest CIA officers
than it snared actual spies.
At a
recent book signing at the Hoover Institute in
Washington, D.C., for How America Lost Its
Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,
Epstein proudly announced that he learned the
tricks of the counterintelligence trade from the
now-deceased Angleton.
But
Angleton, like other counterintelligence
sleuths, assumed the carte-blanche right to
smother a slender fact with weighty assumptions
and then weave upon them a hefty garment of
allegations, speculation and imagination fitting
with the occupational predisposition to detect a
spy.
Over
the decades, it’s conceivable that this
“methodology” may have caught a spy or two
(although Angleton is perhaps best known for
missing the notorious Soviet spy Kim Philby).
But creating a counterfactual, evidence-free
scenario seems an irresponsible way to write
about Edward Snowden, a whistleblower
responsible for the most consequential
intelligence leak in U.S. history.
In his
new book, Epstein spins his intricate web to
prove Snowden’s supposed treachery around the
fact that after leaking secrets to Western
journalists in Hong Kong, Snowden wound up in
Russia. The well-known reality is that Snowden
never intended to get stuck in Russia but was
stranded there when the US government blocked
his path to South America. Yet, however clear
the record regarding how and why Snowden found
asylum there, Epstein sees a more sinister
logic.
As a
veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and a
private citizen who has befriended many
government whistleblowers, I happen to have
known Angleton and currently know Snowden (whom
I count among my friends).
I
recall in 1974, when CIA Director William Colby
finally fired Angleton, audible sighs of relief
rippled through spydom. Angleton had ruined the
careers – and sometimes the lives – of many
conscientious CIA officers. When, finally,
Angleton was not in position to do any more
damage, many of my contemporaries recounted
personal examples of how misguided and harmful
Angleton’s periodic witch hunts had been.
Like
Angleton, Epstein also has a tendency to see
spies where they aren’t, including asserting
that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Soviet spy, a claim
that finds zero support in the KGB records now
available. That proclivity is also evident in
Epstein’s new book.
Before the book signing at the Hoover Institute,
a New York Times review
and Pulitzer Prize winner
Barton Gellman had thoroughly panned
Epstein’s book, and more recently
New York Times journalist Charlie Savage picked
it apart. Their
indictments suffice; I feel no need to again
recite Epstein’s errors of fact and analysis.
Squeezing
in a Question
But I
did squeeze a question in at the Hoover book
event. Epstein’s interviewer, Ben Witte of
Brookings, had served up a few innings-worth of
softball pitches but allowed no questions from
the audience. However, when Epstein claimed that
his best source on Snowden’s perfidy was Russian
President Vladimir Putin, whom Epstein proceeded
to quote – incorrectly – to the effect that
Snowden had met with Russian officials in Hong
Kong. I spoke out, saying, “Putin did not say
that.”
Shock
hit the audience at my impertinence, and Witte’s
eyes scoured the back of the room apparently
looking for Security. But the ever-genteel
Epstein saved the day by admitting that I was
right and that he had misspoken.
After
the Witte-Epstein dialogue, the audience was
allowed to approach Epstein for conversation. I
introduced myself and noted that I had joined
other former intelligence officers in visiting
Snowden in Moscow.
“Oh,
yes, I remember your name,” Epstein said,
prompting me to ask why he did not seek to
interview me for the book. “Yes, I should have
contacted you,” he said with a smile.
At the
time I was unaware of the curious limits Epstein
had put on his outreach. Besides those of us who
had met with Snowden in Moscow, Epstein “should
have contacted” Sarah Harrison, who stayed by
Snowden’s side during his five weeks at Moscow’s
Sheremetevo Airport and then for a few
additional months; Julian Assange, who pulled
out all the stops to facilitate Snowden’s sudden
and safe departure from Hong Kong; NSA
whistleblowers William Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Ed
Loomis; and Diane Roark, House Intelligence
Committee senior aide who had the NSA account
for several years.
Epstein’s book shows that – while ignoring
people who know Snowden or have had painful
experiences trying to expose NSA wrongdoing by
going through the “proper channels” – he
conducted many interviews with people who
consider Snowden, as well as Putin, the devil
incarnate.
There
is also the issue of how much actual “damage”
Snowden’s disclosures caused. According to
former NSA Technical Director William Binney, it
is fair to say that the extent of the NSA’s
vacuuming up of bulk data on Americans and
people around the world was a surprise, first
and foremost, to Americans whose eyes were
opened (as Snowden intended); that US
adversaries were generally aware of NSA’s
capabilities; and that damage to sources and
methods typically has been exaggerated by those
interested in overstating it.
Alarmist
Complaints
Here
there are shades of the alarmist complaints
about the supposed damage caused by the
disclosures about the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq from Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley)
Manning.
After
Defense Secretary Robert Gates had joined other
senior officials in lamenting the “grave damage”
from Manning’s revelations, Gates was asked by
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin
to put it in writing. Gates came back with an
honest report: Early claims of damage had been,
in Gates’s words, “significantly overwrought.”
Bill
Binney and his colleagues tell me the same is
probably true of the hyperbole used to portray
the damage from the Snowden disclosures.
Yet,
balancing whatever that “damage” was is the
significance of Snowden’s argument that the
warrantless bulk surveillance of Americans was
illegal under the Constitution and created the
risk of a future leader imposing a “turnkey
tyranny” on the United States because of all the
embarrassing and incriminating information that
would be collected on American citizens.
There
is now no doubt that Snowden’s constitutional
concerns were well-founded and it is not hard to
imagine how an unscrupulous politician might
make effective use of people’s personal secrets
or their unguarded comments.
But it
is easier to discredit Snowden by simply
portraying him as a Russian spy. After all, we
are now deep in a New McCarthyism that
accompanies the New Cold War. Any contact with
Russians – no matter how unintentional in
Snowden’s case – is regarded as somehow
disqualifying.
So,
that is the tack that Epstein took. However, the
evidence isn’t there.
Chris
Inglis, who was NSA’s Deputy Director when
Snowden made the disclosures and who headed the
initial NSA investigation, said about Snowden a
year ago: “I don’t think he was in the employ of
the Chinese or the Russians. I don’t see any
evidence that would indicate that.”
Epstein
– like so many others – also shows a basic lack
of understanding of the important, graduated
scale of values that Ed Snowden and other
whistleblowers take with utmost seriousness. At
one point, Epstein glibly says of Snowden, “In
signing this [nondisclosure] document, he swore
an oath not to divulge any of this information.”
But that’s not correct. The only oath
that we, as military or other government
officials swear is:
“To support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all
enemies foreign and domestic.”
Ethicists describe such an oath as a
“supervening value,” far more serious than a
promise like that embedded in the contract one
signs in agreeing not to disclose classified
information that could be harmful to US national
security. In other words, what do you do when
your oath conflicts with the contract language,
which one has the priority?
Snowden’s
Choice
Are
promises important? Of course they are. But in
the moral sphere, oaths supersede promises. NSA
was playing fast and loose with the
Constitution’s Fourth Amendment (and arguably
with the First and the Fifth as well) with
warrantless surveillance. Snowden chose not to
break his oath to the Constitution. Nor would he
remain silent when others broke theirs.
Watching what happened to fellow whistleblowers
– like Thomas Drake – who tried to “go through
channels,” Snowden knew that he had to “get out
of Dodge” to have any hope of remaining at
liberty long enough to complete his mission. He
decided to run the huge risk involved in
defending the Constitution against incipient
“turnkey tyranny.”
That
may be difficult for Epstein and many cynical
observers to believe, but without any evidence
to the contrary, Snowden hardly deserves to be
treated like the CIA officers who faced
character assassination from Epstein’s paranoid
mentor, Angleton.
I
first met Snowden in early October 2013 when I
was a member of the first delegation of
Americans to visit him as a political exile in
Russia. Four of us, all members of
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in
Intelligence,
officially presented him with our annual award
for integrity.
My
three colleagues, each of them an earlier
awardee, were whistleblowers Coleen Rowley,
Thomas Drake, and Jesselyn Raddack (ex-FBI, -NSA,
-Department of Justice, respectively). After the
award ceremony we spent seven hours relaxing and
comparing notes with Snowden. And a year later,
I had a long lunch with him in Moscow.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
For my
colleagues and me, this unassuming, courageous
young man, known to us only by what he had said
and done over the previous three months, proved
to be the precisely the patriotic whistleblower
we thought he was. His courage and motivation
were altogether believable to Rowley, Drake and
Raddack, for each of them had taken similar
risks in blowing the whistle on US government
misconduct.
This is
simply to say that all four of us seasoned
professionals had a unique opportunity to take
the measure of Snowden up close and personal. It
is a truly a pity that author Epstein did not do
the same.
Ray
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he
briefed the president’s daily brief one-on-one
to President Reagan’s most senior national
security officials from 1981-85.
