The Rest Is Classified - 45. The Leak That Changed The World: America Exposed (Ep 3)

Episode Date: May 11, 2025

With Snowden now in possession of 1,500,000 secret American files, how can he get them in the public eye? Which journalists will he choose to help him? And why does he choose to hole himself up in a hotel room in Hong Kong? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera discuss just how Snowden and the journalists he was working with plan to publish one of the most consequential stories of the 21st century. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠ Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops, secure communications, normal communications at decoy, and an air gap, a computer that had never gone and would never go online. I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad, on which I scribbled in pen, got called away for work, I love you. I signed it with my call letter nickname, Echo. Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash and on May 20th arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me. Blah, okay. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And that, unfortunately, dear listeners, was yet another reading from Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record. And we are now, for those who've been listening to this wonderful series about Edward Snowden, we are now at a really a critical kind of turning point

in this story because Edward Snowden is taking the plunge and he is going to finally reach out to journalists to get his information out to the world. And I think it's probably worth a little bit of how did we get here? Yep. You know, Snowden up to this point, he's been a CIA officer, technical officer.

He's been a contractor for the NSA. He has taken really via bulk downloads and some kind of fairly ingenious methods of sneaking information out of his NSA office in Hawaii, this bunker beneath the pineapple field. He's taken out a trove of about 1.5 million documents, a variety of internal databases, and he's now at a point where he is figuring out how does he get this information out to the world.

That's right. He's decided he doesn't want to publish it himself. He wants to go through journalists who he think can kind of work through it and make the most of it and decide what to publish. So who's he going to try? I mean, he actually is wary of one obvious place, which is the New York Times, because he feels that in the past they were leaned on by the government to not publish certain stories about government surveillance and had held back.

So instead he wants to look for figures who he thinks I think will be more sympathetic, who he's going to reach out to initially anonymously to try and persuade them to listen. So the first person he tries, and it's a really interesting character, an important character in our story, is a guy called Glenn Greenwald. Now Glenn Greenwald, his background is as a civil liberties lawyer. He's become a journalist with the Guardian US, the branch of the Guardian published out of America, but he lives in Brazil and he's been focusing on abuses of power by the US government for some time, he's only just joined

the Guardian a previous year. He is quite a radical campaigning figure. Now it's interesting because in the journalist world, some people say, well, is he a journalist? He's more of an activist. I actually think he is more of a sign about how journalism was changing, where you get these people who've got quite strong individual brands and who have quite strong views and have an online presence. Greenwald, in a way, I think is ahead of his time in being one of those characters. He's very much being reached out to by Snowden, who I think has been reading some of his time in being one of those characters. So he's very much being reached out to by Snowden, who I think has been reading some of his blogs because of who he is, rather

than necessarily it being the Guardian specifically at this point. But December the 1st, 2012, Green will get an email from someone called Cincinnati. Now remember this is the name of a Roman who voluntarily relinquished power. So, you know, it's a little clue in the name. And a nice little sign of Edward Snowden's subterranean narcissist, or not so subterranean narcissist. You've got to pick a code name. So, I mean, why not? It's not the worst one to pick, I could think.

Anyway, he says in this email, I have some stuff you might be interested in. It is vague though. And here's what's interesting. Greenwald is told that to get the information he has to use a type of encryption called PGP, pretty good privacy. I've always liked that it's only pretty good privacy. Well, I think it's supposed to be ironic. This is interesting. As a journalist myself, it's not the normal encryption that's built into your laptop or phone. It's something

which provides really quite intense encryption, which if you use it properly, it shouldn't be crackable. If someone intercepts that message, even the NSA, they wouldn't be able to decipher and decode what's in the message. So Snowden has said, look, you need to use this and install this in order for me to be able to send you what I need to send. And it's interesting because Green World doesn't get around to doing it. He's busy.

He's busy. But he also admits in his memoir, No Place to Hide, that he's not that into technology. He's actually not. It all looks a bit too complicated. We've all been there when someone says you have to install this or do that. And you're like, really? I think that's Greenwald. Well, I mean, honestly, in the documentary about Snowden, Citizen 4, there is a scene where Greenwald and Snowden are sitting together and Greenwald, I'm actually kind of shocked it was in the documentary because it's just Greenwald for about 60 seconds

struggling with technology on his laptop. So he is an ideal mouthpiece for Snowden because he is at heart a civil liberties lawyer. He's an advocate. He is going to be less skeptical of Snowden than many other journalists, right? But he doesn't know how to use PGP. Yeah. So the weeks go by. Eventually, Cincinnati's, you know, this mysterious account gets back in touch again in late January and says, not willing to share anything until you encrypt

something and Green World is clearly thinking, I'm not going to take this seriously unless they show me something. I know it's for real. And, you know, Stodin actually sends him tutorials on how to do encryption because he's so desperate. Is that a normal thing, Gordon, just to have someone who could be legit or could be a total whack job reaching out with some, you know, sort of tantalising hint that they've got a great story for you? I mean, that must happen some frequency. It happens all the time. I mean, I literally have one a few weeks ago where someone emailed me. I won't say what it was. Their email address was clearly a kind of made up name

and was like, do you have time to meet? I've got something to talk to you about. And I'm glad you finally got my message. I tried to contact you for weeks. Yeah, there are other ways, David. But you do get a lot of these messages actually. And I've had some which have been, as you would politely put it, whack jobs, where people have said, you know, I've been tortured by the British state and you end up talking to them and you realize, no, you know. Somebody's tortured you, but it probably wasn't the British state.

And then you get other ones where you go meet up with me. I've got some secret documents to hand over. And I remember once doing the classic thing, going into a kind of hotel, meeting someone who claimed to have secret documents, I think in that case, relating to the Iran nuclear program. And you're like, this looks exciting. Anyway, you went back and looked at them and kind of shared them with some experts and realized that actually they were fake. And it was the person who'd handed them to me was trying to implicate someone else as having supplied something to the Iranian nuclear program.

And it was a kind of, you know, set up where they were hoping you'd report on it. And this person would get into trouble about it. And then occasionally maybe you get the real deal and you get a kind of source who does provide stuff. So it definitely happens. And it is definitely really hard to know which ones to take seriously. So we've pushed on him, but you can understand. I can absolutely understand it.

But it's funny because Snowden himself says, here am I ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life to hand this guy thousands of top secret documents from the nation's most secretive agency, a leak that will produce dozens, if not hundreds of journalistic scoops and he can't even be bothered to install an encryption program. At this point, Snowden tries someone else. He now tries a filmmaker, Laura Poitras. She's another very interesting character who has been making a series of films about, if you like, the war on terror, about US policy post 9-11, including Iraq.

The reason I think he picks her is because as a result of making those films, she's finding herself getting stopped at airports. She's clearly on some kind of watch list. She's having her devices seized and confiscated. And so she's learning about encryption and the need to protect her stuff. And she's based in Berlin.

And she's based in Berlin. Critically, both of these journalists are outside the States. Yeah, that's right, Green World in Rio. Critically, both of these journalists are outside the States. Yeah, that's right. Greenwald in Rio. Even though they're Americans. Yeah. She starts to get these emails every week from Snowden, normally at the weekends. And it's interesting, at one point she writes, I don't know if you are legit, crazy or trying to entrap me. She also is a bit like, this is kind of weird. But by February 2013,

she's taking them seriously. So he starts contacting Greenwald in December of 2012. We're now three or so months later. He's not provided any documents, right? He kind of hasn't shown his bona fides. Yeah. And so you can see why people are skeptical. So then time passes. I mean, quite a lot of time passes. It must be kind of weird for Snowden, who's taken this risk, basically. He's reaching out to people and nothing is happening. It does make me think a little bit of the series we did earlier in the year on Adolf Tolkochev, where he reaches out to the CIA and gets nothing four or five, six times and

essentially gets the cold shoulder. There is kind of this- Interesting parallel, right? Yeah. Yeah. But then in April, Laura Poitras is starting to take it seriously and she actually gets in touch with Glenn Greenwald and they meet up when they're both in New York. She says, take the battery out of your phone first.

She says she's got emails from someone promising secret documents on surveillance. She seems kind of nervous, unsure about it. They agree it seems serious, but they need the documents. They need some proof, which is typical if you're a journalist. Poitras does want to interview him. So they kind of part ways, go back to Berlin and Rio, unsure if they'll hear any more. Mid-April, Poitras tells Greenwald to expect a delivery and a FedEx parcel arrives with instructions on how to use an encrypted chat. Meanwhile, Snowden is now starting to send out some of the files. He

sends her an encrypted file, which is about something called PRISM. We'll come to what it is shortly. But the point is, it's now clear that he's got access because this is something top secret. She's actually received a stolen document from the National Security Agency at this point. Yeah. She knows it's the real deal. He's saying the source, you still don't really know that much about him, that they need to meet. And this is interesting because we're now heading towards May and when you talked about Edward Snowden fleeing and he's going to tell her that she needs to go to Hong Kong.

Now I think this is one of the really interesting bits of the story, the choice of destination of where Edward Snowden wants to go and wants to meet these people. If you put yourself, Gordon, in Greenwald or Poitras's shoes, what do you do? I'm fascinated with this as someone who's inside the CIA and knows that if someone had sent me a top secret document, I would have to report it immediately to security and kind of there's a whole procedure. But as a journalist, I mean, what's the play here, right? I mean,

so you've got a document that's really interesting. And then you have a source who says, I want to meet me in Hong Kong. There's probably no playbook here. There is no playbook. I think that's really interesting because your first question is, is this a trap? And I think Laura Poitras had raised that because you do see journalists, I mean, you see it particularly in Russia who are entrapped with the offer of, come on, meet me for some secret. And then they get sprung on by the FSB and, you know, by the American, but not by the Americans. No, so it would be unusual. You want to know, is it true? Is it fake? Your question is, who is the source? What is their motivation? What access do they have? Can I trust them? Is there a public interest in

looking at this or in dealing with this? What is the story and what are the risks of meeting them? I have to say, Hong Kong would be a stretch. I mean, not least for the budget when you go to the bar scene. It is interesting because around this time, when Glenn Greenwald has been slow to respond, Laura Poitras has also gone to a Washington Post journalist called Bart Gellman and talked to him about whether he could do it with the Post. He's just left the Washington Post. But actually at the Washington Post, when they hear Hong Kong, they're like, whoa, this sounds kind of risky. And I think, right, that Hong Kong is suspicious solely because it's part of China, right? So it immediately casts kind of this shadow over the leaks because at first blush it could

make it look like he's under the control of or sort of being influenced by maybe the Chinese intelligence services. Yeah. And it would be an obvious kind of suspicion, which is, is this someone who's basically a Chinese spy who's gone to China or a part of China in the case of Hong Kong? Or a defector maybe. Or a defector with the documents and therefore you're into foreign spy world.

But it is interesting because I recently spoke to someone who was a very senior intelligence official at the time about these kinds of suspicions. Could he have been a Chinese spy or a Russian spy given where he ended up? They said they looked very hard at this at the time, as you'd expect them to do in the intelligence community. They said the Russians and Chinese were both as surprised as the Americans were when he turned up in Hong Kong or when he eventually emerges and goes public in Hong Kong. In other words, they didn't know that he was there. They're like, who's this guy? You imagine that this is basically the US intelligence community spying on Russian and Chinese communications and seeing that

they're surprised by it, which suggests they didn't have advanced knowledge. Will Barron I think it also does show a bit of Snowden's naiveté in the signal that this move would send to these journalists, right? Because it does immediately, and this is one of the things that's going to colour a lot of the journalists, right? Because it does immediately, and this is one of the things that's gonna color a lot of the stories, the movement out of the United States really casts a pall over him, right? And it does, even if there aren't facts to substantiate the fact that he's working for the Chinese intel services

or later the Russians, just that sheer movement makes it harder for Poitras and Greenwald to defend him, doesn't it? It is a problem for him. His argument, or the argument of those people who met him and talked to him about it, was that he saw Hong Kong as a no-man's land. It's worth saying Hong Kong formed a British colony, but at this point, back to Chinese

control after 1997, but under one country, two systems. China didn't have full control. It's only actually after Snowden that China really puts its national security law into practice in Hong Kong and really takes the place over. So at that time it still had a kind of slightly more freewheeling ambiguous role, but it is still technically part of China. And I guess it seems Snowden's calculation is that it's a place out of reach of American law and with options of where

you can get to, but with a bit more freedom than anywhere else. That seems to be why he picked it. And in this case, so he basically has gone to his supervisor at the NSA facility in Hawaii, says he needs to be away from work for what he'll say is a couple of weeks to receive treatment for epilepsy, which has kind of been an ongoing medical problem for him throughout his career. And then he basically, you know, that quote I read upfront says nothing to his girlfriend about the true purpose for his trip, packs his bags, takes all these documents and goes to Hong Kong.

That's right. And he goes to the Mirror Hotel in the Kowloon district. Very nice. Very nice hotel. Itowloon district. Very nice. Very nice hotel. It's a commercial district. It's a big fancy hotel. And this is where he is going to try and bring the journalists. And initially he's there and he's waiting.

He says, you know, I barricaded myself in my room at the Mira Hotel, which I chose because of its central location. I put the privacy, please do not disturb sign on the door handle to keep cows keeping out. For 10 days I didn't leave the room for fear of giving a foreign spy the chance to sneak in and bug the place. So he's there and he's still trying to get the journalists to come out. Laura Poitras has talked to Bart Gellman and now Glenn Greenwald is back in play. So in late May, Edward Snowden has gone back to Greenwald to try and persuade him to come out. Greenwald

still seems suspicious about why Hong Kong, but then Snowden sends him documents. Again, you know, it's the kind of calling card. This is the real deal. So at this point, Greenwald goes to New York to see the US editor of The Guardian, Junine Gibson, on May 31st to say, I think I need to go out there. I mean, they see the documents, they realise this is potentially massive. But also the documents, you know, as we'll come to a kind of quite technical, they're quite difficult to understand. You need the person, the document itself isn't enough. And so the Guardian team look at this, they also look at a kind of manifesto he seems to have written, which I think is a really interesting document because I don't think

it's ever fully been published. And they actually say at the time, we don't think this should be published because it's basically what his why he's doing it document. And it's insane. Right. The journalists who are looking at this are like, look, this guy, it makes him look like, I would say, a privacy jihadist. I'm not sure I'd use the jihadist term.

Sorry, privacy. A privacy jihadist. Privacy jihadist. Okay. But I think it makes him look quite ideological, as we talked about the kind of libertarian stuff. And I think there is a bit of nervousness at the Guardian, I think, at this point, about him and his motivation,

whether he's for real. This manifesto, I think, also makes them even more nervous, is like, you know, is this guy a bit cranky or something? But they realize this is potentially a massive story. This is the first time I believe that he's told them who he is, right? These journalists, because he, up until this point, he'd been using Cincinnati's or Verax or whatever.

And this time he reveals that he's Ed Snowden. He reveals his social security number. He reveals, I love this, his CIA funny name was Dave M. Churchyard, which is a relatively bizarre one, but those funny names, which are ridiculous. There was always a rumor, they're generated by a computer, but there was always a rumor that the sort of, I guess, upstream, like the thing that was fed

into that computer originally was a British phone book from the night, like a London phone book from the 1950s that would sort of go and pull pieces of names to put them together. Like I had a ridiculous one, I actually can't share it. But it's always a first name. Yes, it's always a first name, middle initial. It doesn't necessarily mean anything,

but we'd always come up with what it meant internally. And then a weird last name. And there were actually a few people I knew who the program, it just gets generated, right? When you join, the program generated one for them that was so inappropriate that they actually had to go through a formal process to try to get it changed because it had already been issued. But Dave M. Churchyard, it's pretty good.

By the way, audience members can email in with what they think Dave could or should be anyway, if you can guess it, or if you know it even better, you might have access to the CIA database. This is another example when he says, hey, I'm Ed Snowden, Dave M. Churchyard, where again, we have deadly sin number one, Edward Snowden, serial fabricator, where when he's describing his role, right,

he says to Poitras and Greenwald, he's a senior advisor at NSA, under corporate cover. Not true, he's a contractor advisor at NSA under corporate cover. Not true. He's a contractor. He's working for Dell. He says he's a lecturer at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He had like stepped in and given a few lectures like once when someone got sick. Who hasn't embellished their CV a little bit?

He's good. Listen, he's trying to convince them. He's sitting on a stack of top secret documents. But that's all he needs. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? This is the thing. It's all he needs. Yeah. You know what I mean? This is the thing. It's all he needs to do is provide them one document on Prism and they're hooked.

And yet he's got this whole persona that he's built up in his own mind, right? Of how important he is. And it's just even seeping through in what he leaks to the journalists. Okay. So this meeting takes place at the Guardian and they're convinced enough to send Glenn Greenwald and to go with Laura Poitras. Interestingly enough, they also send Ewan McCaskill to go with them. And full disclosure, Ewan was my kind of counterpart at The Guardian when I was at the BBC. I know him well, I've spoken to him and a very smart choice. And I

would say that, wouldn't I? But I think it is true. He's a kind of veteran, serious journalist who knows a good story and knows how to pursue a story, won't be intimidated off it. But who is clearly there, I think, you can read between the lines, to kind of slightly babysit the other two and kind of keep the kind of rigorous journalism side on track on this. He's going to go out with them. I think much to Laura Poitras' disappointment and annoyance, who's this guy who's been to go out with them. I think much to Laura Poitras' disappointment and annoyance, who's this guy who's been sent along with us, it's supposed to be me and Glenn, but the Guardian go, we need our person to be there as a kind of reporter to look at this.

They were flummoxed at the addition of a credible journalist to the soup that Edward Snowden was assembling in Hong Kong. But he's going to play an important role. So there we are. Are we going to skip Pat? You're not going to let me read any lines from his manifesto, Gordon? Go on then. I know you love reading. You're making me read from this polished memoir. I can't read from the deranged lines from the manifesto.

Do it, David. Okay. There's a lot here. Yeah, just pick your favorites. I'll pick a couple. Here's a great one. As I advanced and learned the dangerous truth behind the US policies that seek to develop secret irresistible powers and concentrate them in the hands of an unaccountable few,

human weakness haunted me. As I worked in secret to resist them, selfish fear questioned if the stone thrown by a single man could justify the loss of everything he loves." And Edward Snowden is right back there playing Tekken as a 13 year old. Who cares what your clan thinks? You're out there in single combat with your own ideas about how to defend them. Okay. With you having voluntarily read a bit more from Edward Snowden, I think let's pause there to take a break as we and the journalists arrive in Hong Kong to meet

Edward Snowden. This episode is sponsored by Incognito. arrive in Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden. – quietly collecting your personal information, building detailed profiles and then selling them on without a warrant and without any warning. That's right, your address, phone number, family ties, even political leanings all online. It's like your personnel files being left open on a café table. And once it's out there, it spreads to scammers, identity thieves, really anyone with a wifi signal and bad intentions. That's why we use Incogni. They act on your behalf, demanding data brokers delete your information, and they keep doing that automatically because it's not a one-time breach, it's the risk

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In 1994, 16 year old Eamon wants to die. He heads to war-torn Bosnia to join the Mujahideen and save his fellow Muslims. He hopes to become a martyr so that he can be reunited with his dead parents in paradise. Instead, he's about to be confronted by a cruel and bloody reality. A reality that'll lead him to turn his back on terrorism

and become the West's top spy inside Al-Qaeda. Follow the Spy Who on the Wanderi app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of the Spy Who betrayed Bin Laden early and ad-free with Wanderi+. Well welcome back. We are with Edward Snowden. He is stuck in a horribly dank hotel room in Hong Kong, and now journalists are on the way, finally, to meet with him to hear his story. That's right.

On the plane, they're looking at the documents that he sent them, thousands of them, and they're realizing they're onto something big. These three eventually arrive in Hong Kong on June the 2nd, and it's agreed that initially just Greenwald and Poitras will go to meet Snowden on June the 3rd. It's interesting because he's left very specific spy-style instructions on how they're going to meet. And the instructions are, they go to the third floor of the Mirror Hotel, go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, which is furnished, bizarre

detail, with an alligator skin looking leather couch. It's not actual alligator skin. Alligator skin looking. It looks like it might be alligator skin. They ask the first hotel employee, you know, near the room, whether there was a restaurant open and that would be a kind of signal to Snowden. You'd be hovering nearby that they'd not been followed.

And then they wait around for a guy with a Rubik's cube. His favorite thing. Well, they don't know what he looks like. No, they don't know. So exactly. And to be fair, I guess it's a pretty good recognition thing, a Rubik's cube, because it's not the kind of thing most grown people carry around with them. So the idea is, it's one of the few recognisable things that he's brought with him.

He can show it to them and they'll know who he is. It feels like a really great way to stand out in the middle of a hotel, to be standing there holding a Rubik's Cube. If you're trying to fly under the radar, a Rubik's Cube working on it like some kind of lunatic in the middle of a hotel, perhaps sprawled across an alligator skin looking leather couch is not the most sort of clandestine way to make contact.

Well, you've got to make contact somehow. So anyway, first time at 10 o'clock, no one comes. They say the recognition words, no one comes. They go back again 20 minutes later, which is the kind of backup moment. He's probably watching them from somewhere else. Exactly. I think the assumption is he's checking them at that first meeting. And that's why nothing happens then. And then this is from Glenn Greenwald in his memoir, No Place to

Hide. At 10.20, we returned and again took our place near the alligator on the couch. Was there an alligator, like a stuffed alligator? I was stuck on this couch. Was there an alligator, like a stuffed alligator? I was stuck on this detail. Was it an alligator skin couch or was it a couch that looked like an alligator? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe someone can tell us who stayed at the hotel, which faced the back wall of the room and a large mirror. After two minutes, I heard someone come into the room rather than turn around

to see who'd entered, I continued to stare at the back wall mirror, which showed a man's reflection walking towards us. Only when he was within a few feet of the couch did I turn around. The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik's cube twirling in the man's left hand. It's not even solved. That's my sin number six. Failing to solve the Rubik's cube. Failing to solve the Rubik's cube. You're probably one of those people who does it like that really in 10 seconds. Anyway, here's the really interesting thing, and I think this is a really interesting detail, is they're

shocked by who he is. Because here is this guy, and they had been in their heads expecting someone in their 50s or 60s. Like a chain smoking, alcoholic,, alcoholic, washed up spy. As they put it, Snowden himself says, they're expecting someone with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience. And instead, they get, basically, they look at it, they go, really? It's a young guy in a white t-shirt with some faded lettering and as Greenwell puts it, jeans and chic nerd glasses. By God. After having seen the documentary, I'm not sure I would describe them as chic nerd glasses. With a bit of a kind of goatee and some stubble. Greenwald also says that Snowden looked like he had only recently started shaving.

Yeah. Perhaps new at the practice. So you can see that they're again going like, really? Is this for real? I wonder why they thought he was going to be so much older. I don't know. It's what you'd imagine like when you watch all the president's men and deep throat and these things, you know, you always imagine this kind of older guy who's at the end of

his career and is unhappy with the way things have gone and who's knows all the secrets. Because I guess maybe they're thinking to have access to all these secrets, he's got to be a senior. Senior. Yeah. And so anyway, they're surprised by it. They exchanged the recognition phrase, what time's the restaurant open at noon, but don't go there. The food sucks. Snowden says.

Greenwald actually, according to Luke Harding's book on this, you know, he's a Guardian journalist, he says Greenwald struggled to keep a straight face because he found it all slightly comic, but the three of them head off towards the lift, not saying anything. It's an elevator. An elevator and lift. For American listeners. Thank you. And they go to room 1014. Now this is the scene. I mean, this is the place where it's really going to happen for the next few days between those three journalists and Snowden.

But of course Snowden's already been there 10 days. And so there's room service plates, there's trash, you know, there's noodle containers, half-eaten burgers, there's dirty laundry, there's damp towels on the floor. He's barely left the room. He's back in his parents' basement playing Tekken. He's like a teenager room. I mean, he's only been out of the room like three times in the nearly two weeks he'd been there. And so it's quite a small room and you can see it on Citizen 4, Laura Poitras' film. You know, it's not a big suite in which they're now going to be holed up

together. And this is a sprung for the suite. Yeah, tremendous error on his part should have paid for it. So you know, he tells them put your phones away, put your phone in the mini bar fridge, and then Snowden takes the pillows from the bed and he places them at the bottom of the door, which I guess is him thinking if someone's got a microphone outside, it's not going to pick up the sounds of what they're talking about. You wrote here, Gordon, in our notes, he tried using spy tricks involving water and soy sauce patterns on a piece of paper to see if anyone came in while he was out. I didn't understand that.

In my notes, I wrote WTF is this. What is that? I don't know. It's something to do with like, if the water falls on the soy sauce, then you get a pattern and you can, I don't know. I didn't understand it actually. An elaborate soy sauce drip machine that's set up, triggered by the door. But here we are, and they're going to be in this room for days, it's worth saying.

Now Ewan McCaskill, the Guardian journalist comes on the second day, because Snowden wasn't necessarily expecting him. He actually, you can see, actually takes a lot of lead in the kind of questioning Snowden and trying to understand who he is. And you know, Snowden sits on the bed and... White t-shirt. White t-shirt. Glenn Greenwald and Ewan McCaskill start asking questions.

They basically, they need to answer that question like, who are you and why are you doing this? They have to understand his kind of motivation and his credibility. And I mean, they do find his story a little odd at first, I think. You can see he hadn't finished college, sounded like he'd worked with the CIA and the NSA, he'd be training for special forces. So there's a bit of them going like, it sounds like a bit crazy, but he's, you know, providing also some IDs and some details, which make it clear that he's for real. And of course he's got the documents.

So they are kind of coming around to understand that he's the real deal. Well, there's a great segment in Citizen Four, the documentary where it's when Ewan has showed up and, you know, Ewan sits down and he's kind of got, unlike Greenwald, you kind of get the sense that, and I think you know Ewan, I don't know if this is his style, but he's not really trying to establish a lot of rapport

right away with Snowden. He's trying to establish some facts. And so he says, you know, tell me, I think it's more like, who are you? And Snowden starts to give his life story a job description and Ewan's like, no, what's your name? And he has him spell the name out. One other thing that is interesting, because you can see all of this on Citizen Four, Snowden, why did he wear that white T-shirt the

whole time? He's being filmed. It was a terrible wardrobe decision. I think he's got other things to worry about at this point than his wardrobe decision. Well, I don't know. He was, yeah. You know, I think what comes across is a certain, you could say innocence. I think you'll pick me up on that. Or naivety around. Yeah, no, that's right.

And I think they immediately are thinking like, is this a guy who's out for money? And it doesn't appear to be. I mean, he talks about his belief, the ideological stuff, which we've been trying to assess, that he believes in the constitution. He talks about the internet, you know, allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being. He said, for many kids, the internet is a means of self-actualisation. I don't want to live, and I think this is a key phrase, I don't want to live in a world

where everything I do and say is recorded. And he says, I worry that mine was the last generation to enjoy that freedom of the internet. I think he's giving them a sense, his argument, except there might be different views of it, that this is someone who's ideologically motivated and they believe in him. It's interesting because there'd been this question back in New York, is he for real? this question back in New York, is he for real? And so Ewan, after the initial meetings, sends a four-word text from Hong Kong back to Janine Gibson at the Guardian in New York. And they knew they couldn't talk openly on the phone, but she needed to know whether it's the real thing. And the phrase is, the Guinness is good. And that means he's the

real deal. The Guinness is bad would have meant he's not trusting him. And according to Ewan, this was a little joke because him and Janine Gibson used to go out for drinks when they were on the road together. And he'd always want a Guinness and she'd want a kind of wine or a cocktail or something. And so, you know, the Guinness was a reference, but that message goes back to New York saying the Guinness is good. He seems like he's for real. It's interesting because obviously that is a huge deal for you and for Glenn, for Laura Poitras, but the room, it's pretty tense in that room. You can feel it even in the documentary.

I mean, it's cramped, it's confined, of course. But it's also, I think it's an interesting question from a journalistic perspective, but you could make the same parallel if, by the way, I'm not saying he's being run by a foreign intelligence service, but just more generally, a comparison between this encounter and a CIA case officer convincing someone to spy for them.

Because you have someone who's really about to jump off a cliff. And he has put really his life and his reputation, Snowden, in the hands of these journalists. Like, totally. Yeah. I think they worry about him, actually. Snowden in the hands of these journalists. Like totally. Yeah, I think they worry about him actually. Ewan says, you know, he had kids the same age and he's thinking, Snowden, you could go to jail for the rest of your life potentially

for what you're doing now. And so they are thinking quite hard about the kind of risks for him. But I think they can see that this is something he's thought through and he wants to do. And you know, they're probing him. Greenwald at one point, I think probes him on his morality and where it comes from. And his is interesting. It's video games.

Should be encouraging for all of us. It's the idea in a video game, you're the kind of individual hero in your game or in your story who's kind of taking on the great powers and you can do it. They're getting this sense of an unusual character, I think. I think they can also see that he is not a spy in the sense of working for a foreign power and that he views it as a patriotic act. Now, I'm sure some people would disagree with that, but he sees himself not as betraying his country, but as defending the constitution, which he thinks has been violated. So I think all of that makes them realize he is committed to doing this. He wants to see it through, knowing the risks.

Again, to take kind of the lens of, to some degree the journalist, is it some degree he's a volunteer here, to some degree the journalists are recruiting him. It's a little bit of a push and pull. I think Snowden's psychological combination here is really perfect from the standpoint of journalists trying to break stories,

or be from the standpoint of a case officer recruiting an asset, because he has, you said innocence or naivete and I think that's right. I mean, there's a complete lack of guile that he has. He's smart, but he sort of lacks that kind of, I don't know, meanness to him. He's just, he's kind of an innocent, naive kid, I guess, you'd say in some ways, who is not importantly, not a coward, right? That's tough

to recruit because if he's a coward, he doesn't want his name out there. But what he has instead is a massive ego and narcissism. And so you combine those things, that lack of guile with a massive ego, and you have someone who's willing to take a massive step, put his name out there as the source of all this stuff. And now in these kind of subsequent days, there is a lot of tension in this room. I think it's really, really interesting. I mean, every day they leave him thinking when they come back the next day, he's going to have been snatched or have disappeared or something will have happened to him. And he is saying, he's finally got them out there. You know, we know he's been waiting for

this. He wants to get this story out. He knows the clock is ticking on the fact that he kind of signed off work ill in Hawaii. But at some point that's going to get noticed. He's been away for a couple of weeks now. He's fearing that at any point he could get picked up, nothing will get released, everyone will get arrested and it'll all be for nothing. He hopes, back to that idea, he hopes that going public will give him some protection. So this is the most vulnerable phase for him because he is out with the secrets, but he's not yet public. So he wants this to move fast. Meanwhile, the journalists are also trying to work out, well, we need to kind of assess this stuff. We need to write the stories. Because they're literally writing stories like in the room.

In the room, yeah. And they're also working across three time zones. London Guardian, where the boss, Alan Rusberg, who's the big editor is, New York, where it's going to be edited out of, and then Hong Kong. So no one's really sleeping much. You've also got this slight tension because Glenn Greenwald also wants to publish the stories as soon as possible. One of the things he fears is being scooped because he knows the Washington Post also have got

some of this through those previous contacts. He's worried that the Guardian might go slow, they might not do it. So actually at some point he starts saying and reaching out to other media saying, I've got a story for you and basically using that to put pressure on the Guardian and saying, if the Guardian back away, I'm going to go somewhere else with this story because I think it's so good. So the stakes are pretty high because also if you're the Guardian, you want to get this right. You've got to make sure this story is bottomed out and you're not going to kind of screw up or make a mistake. So the pressure is really growing at this point as they work on that first story. But in New York, you

know, Janine Gibson, who's the US.S. editor has basically decided this is good and we're going to do it, but we've got to go through the right steps in order to get this story out. You've got to actually contact people in the NSA or the intelligence community to start, I mean, at least saying we have something, right? And this is also really interesting because the Guardian try and contact the U.S. government and the White House to say, we've got a big story coming. And of course, they're not at this point saying what it is.

They're just saying, you need to talk to us. It's a really big story. And so the government doesn't seem to realise at first it's important. But eventually, they get back to the Guardian in a call and they ask for a delay. And they say, can you delay putting this first story out? And it's worked in the past because with US publications, they'd often agree to a bit of a delay and a nice conversation.

But the Guardian and Jeanine Gibson hold firm and go, we want to run this story and we're coming to you for comment, but we're going soon. It's interesting as well because you get a call, which has got the deputy head of the NSA, senior FBI officials. I think one of the things that tells you is this is a real story. This is a big story. You're not getting fobbed off with the press officer going, ah, you know, we'll give you a quick line.

So at this point, the pressure has been building and the Guardian want to get the story out, but Greenwald and particularly Snowden are desperately pushing and the government is pushing back on the Guardian to kind of go with it. And at this point, they get ready to publish. Also Snowden, and you can even see this in the documentary is he's dealing with personal stuff back home too, right? Cause as this story is kind of coming to a head, his absence has been missed now in Hawaii, right?

And police have been out to see his girlfriend in Hawaii. And there's kind of a sense, and you can kind of see him troubled by this in the documentary, that even though he's told his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, absolutely nothing about what he's done, or even where he is, that as I read in his sort of deranged manifesto, this idea that he was going to incur a massive personal cost for doing this. I mean, that is true, right?

And that net is starting to close on him. And that's right. And it's a really interesting little detail that the police or officials go and see his girlfriend in Hawaii. And this is before it seems the stuff has been published. And it is interesting because does it suggest they're onto him in some way? Have they got some parallel track where they know that something's going on with him? Or is it just that he's been missing for work for so long? But it seems a little bit odd? Because some of the timelines don't quite match up here, I have to say, with that visit to his girlfriend. But clearly

someone is suspicious about him. So yeah, he knows the net is closing. So at CIA, and I imagine it's true at NSA too, if you don't show up, you could just be sick or something, bedridden. If you don't show up, they'll call you, contact you. And if you don't answer, they will send people to your house, your apartment to check on you. So it could be the case here that he had said, hey, I need a week. Yeah, and he's been off for longer.

And he's been off for a little bit longer. And then they call, he doesn't respond. Then someone goes out to the house. And so I think it's very possible that it's not like they were spying on him, but that he was gone longer than they had thought. And if you have an employee with a top secret security clearance who has essentially gone AWOL, you check it. Yeah, you check it. So there we are. I think he knows time is running out. He knows the net might be closing around him.

But at last, as we head towards June the 5th, the first story is about to come out and the world is about to learn about Edward Snowden. And I don't think it's ever going to be the same again. Well, and it really is an absolute banger of a story that's going to turn the entire United States and its intelligence community completely upside down. So maybe there we'll leave poor Edward Snowden in his decrepit smelly hotel room in Hong Kong and when we return we'll see what in the world that earth-shaking story had to

say. And of course, if you want to hear that right now, you can join the Declassified Club to hear the whole series. Our first weekly bonus episode was released on Friday, but members also have access to a weekly newsletter, discounted spy books, ad-free listening, first access to live show tickets and an upcoming prize draw. To become a member just sign up at therestisclassified.com and take advantage of our launch discount. And rumour is that first prize draw Gordon is going to be for lucky winners to receive a copy of

your latest book, The Spy in the Archive, signed by you. Isn't that right? As opposed to being signed by you. Well thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. I'm Indra Varma and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on the spies who invaded suburbia. The illegals weren't just blending in, they were the embodiment of the American dream. Nine-to-five jobs, dropping the kids off at soccer practice, and just the right amount of charm to slide into the orbits of the powerful.

But behind closed doors, they were Russian operatives, meticulously crafting coded messages and feeding Moscow everything it needed to stay one step ahead of the US. When a powerful mole reveals the names and locations of the undercover spies, the FBI finds itself walking a tightrope, protect its most crucial informant, whilst avoiding a catastrophic diplomatic firestorm. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondry app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spies Who Invaded Suburbia early and ad-free with Wondery+.