How America lost its secrets : Edward Snowden, the man and the theft /

Epstein's experience as an investigatory writer is abundantly on display in this scathing censure of Edward Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton employee who grabbed a trove of NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and other agencies' cryptographic codes and processes, dumping them first via Julian Assange's WikiLeaks in late spring 2013 and later obtaining "political asylum" from Vladimir Putin. For those looking for a volume about a young whistle-blower's acting because of higher principles such as transparency, privacy, liberty--well, this is not that book. Epstein's distaste for Snowden is readily evident in his citation of Dostoevsky's portrait of Raskolnikov as one who sees himself as having a right to "commit breaches of morality and crimes" justified by abuses of the political system. Who is Snowden? Epstein's portrait is decidedly that Snowden is a traitor and a spy with many other self-serving individuals facilitating the young man's treason. This is a fascinating, disturbing read for which the author has gone to extraordinary lengths to unearth heretofore publicly unreported findings. Were it not so true, How America Lost Its Secrets would be alongside Le Carrè; unfortunately, the message Epstein convincingly conveys is one of imminent danger. Exhaustive notes and a full index are included. Highly recommended for students, scholars, practitioners, and public audiences. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. --Daniel N. Nelson, Center for Arms Control & Nonproliferation

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 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 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 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 Snowden: as a spy. 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 Epstein has produced a long, detailed book elaborating on his theory. Snowden is known for having revealed that the N.S.A. was illegally spying on American citizens, but Epstein says that he actually took almost a million documents that had nothing to do with that, which he didn't give to journalists. What happened to them? How did a relatively lowly nonemployee at the agency, without much official access, manage to get ah that material in the first place? Why did he choose to announce himself to the world from Hong Kong, and why has he remained in Moscow since he left Hong Kong? You can see the outlines of a coherent hypothesis in "How America Lost Its Secrets." Perhaps Snowden was planted at the N.S.A. 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. 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." Epstein's first book, "Inquest," published more than 50 years ago, featured another mysterious young man who spent time in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. This book has a greatest-hits feeling, because it touches on several of Epstein's long-running preoccupations: Russia; the movie and media businesses; the gullibility of liberals; and, especially, the world of penetration, exfiltration, false flags and other aspects of counterintelligence. The spirit of James Jesus Angleton, the C.LA.'s mole-obsessed counterintelligence chief during the peak years of the Cold War and evidently a mentor to Epstein (he's mentioned several times), hovers over these pages. Sometimes it seems as if Epstein so much enjoys exploring the twists and turns in Snowden's story - his encounter with 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. The sentence from The Wall Street Journal quoted above appears almost verbatim in the book, but it's immediately followed by this: "These severe accusations generated much heat but little light. They were not accompanied by any evidence showing that Snowden had acted in concert with any foreign power in stealing the files or, for that matter, that he was not acting out of his own personal convictions, no matter how misguided they might have been." But then Epstein spends many more pages considering, and not dismissing, the very same severe accusations, and ends by saying that "Snowden's theft of state secrets ... had evolved, deliberately or not, but necessarily, into a mission of disclosing key national secrets to a foreign power." This is Epstein's primary conclusion: Even if the American public was a partial beneficiary of Snowden's revelations, the main beneficiary was Russia, which to his mind couldn't possibly have failed to take possession of all the material Snowden took from the N.S.A. Whatever caveats he uses and whatever hard evidence he hasn't found, Epstein clearly wants to leave readers with the impression that Snowden remains in Russia as a result of a deal exchanging his information for its protection. He repeatedly hints that he has reason to be more certain about his conclusion than he's able to say in print; for one tantalizing example, among the names on a list of people he thanks for their "insights, erudition and criticisms" after reading part of the manuscript is the outgoing secretary of defense, Ash Carter. 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 N.S.A. at ah, whether or not it remains within the confines of its legal charter. 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." To him one of the lessons of the Snowden case is that the agency's reliance on private contractors like Snowden instead of career employees has made it dangerously vulnerable to security breaches. It's an irony of the years since the Reagan revolution that one political strain in the United States, suspicion of big government, has led to spending and staffing limits that have pushed the N.S.A. into the low-security private marketplace to perform its ever-expanding mission. (The contractor that employed Snowden had been acquired by a private equity firm that was pressuring it to cut costs, and elaborate background checks are expensive.) That conflicts with another strain of modern conservatism, support for a vast national-security apparatus. Whatever his motive, Snowden found a way to arbitrage that contradiction. The age of the internet, Vladimir Putin, 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 contextualizers, and less like originators of information. Reporters aren't supposed to be hackers themselves (see the News of the World scandals in London five years ago), but they're not capable of resisting juicy information that others have hacked, no matter how unsavory the purpose (see the ubiquitous coverage of John Podesta's Russian-hacked private emails during the fall campaign). 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. If there isn't any longer going to be one trustworthy group in society, the established press, that acts as a benign check on excessive government secrecy, the discussion of what should and shouldn't be secret becomes a lot messier. 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. Way back in 1974, he published an article in Commentary called "Did the Press Uncover Watergate?" (His answer: no.) This time around, his concern seems to be half with the celebratory closed loop between Snowden and the journalists who covered him, and half with the causes and consequences of a major security breach at the N.S.A. 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 N.S.A. Snowden did. ? Epstein believes Snowden exchanged his information for Russian protection. Nicholas lemann is the PuUtzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for The New Yorker.

*Starred Review* With a half-dozen works on espionage and unsolved crimes under his belt, veteran journalist Epstein focuses a wealth of investigative insight on tackling the enigma of Edward Snowden, the self-proclaimed whistle-blower on the National Security Agency's domestic spying program. Although most U.S. government officials deem Snowden a traitor, in contrast to the hackers and libertarians who revere him, Epstein treads a fine line by letting readers decide the expatriate's moral fitness for themselves. The author begins by explaining how a high-school dropout and avid computer gamer with the grandiose online alias, Wolfking Awesomefox, landed a job with the CIA (an admiral grandfather pulled some strings) and eventually gained top-security clearance with the NSA (outside contractors ran a flawed background check). Despite Snowden's inflated comments about himself in later interviews, such as claiming he'd been a senior defense agency adviser, Epstein emphasizes that Snowden was at least sincere in his conviction that U.S. security agencies were violating citizen rights to privacy. In addition to giving a full and nuanced portrait of the man himself, Epstein details the shattering impact Snowden's theft and famous June 9, 2013, video announcement has had on the agency and the intelligence community worldwide. A riveting and informative work for both Snowden watchers and espionage buffs.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2016 Booklist

A nuanced portrait of the government contractor who absconded with top-secret National Security Agency documents in May 2013.Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? In this sterling investigative study of Snowden's theft of documents from the NSA, where he was contracted to work, and his subsequent alert to international journalists and flight to Hong Kong and then Moscow, investigative journalist Epstein (The JFK Assassination Diary: My Search for Answers to the Mystery of the Century, 2013, etc.) offers a multilayered examination of what Snowden's theft actually entailedand what it means for America's national security. In his late 20s and suffering grievances over perceived incompetence by his superiors at the CIA, where he initially worked, Snowden had taken a speed course in international hacking and befriended many of the online hacktivists and otherwise disgruntled counterculture figures who gravitated toward Tor anonymity software and WikiLeaks. He was a restless high school dropout living with his single mother and finding in computer games a fantasy vision and a series of aliases. He also agreed with hackers expressing outrage over government surveillance overreach. In presenting the Snowden case, Epstein focuses on the discrepancies in the narrative that Snowden presented in his video made with journalists Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald when he first arrived in Hong Kong (the two ultimately made the film Citizenfour), days before Snowden sought asylum in Moscow in June 2013. Of the million-plus files that he had hacked from the NSA, only a few were given to Poitras and Greenwald, as well as WikiLeaks, supposedly only as an act of whistleblowing. Yet the restthe most sensitive material dealing with the NSA's ability to conduct intelligence across the globewas never accounted for. Had Snowden destroyed these files, or had he been lured by Russian intelligence to effect his espionage?A wild and harrowing detective story and impressively evenhanded portrait of a very sticky case. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.