Dark Mirror Page 3

  My main argument with Verax had to do with the life cycle of information in public debate. Greenwald disdained my tribe of mainstreamers, but how did he think he discovered the sins he took up arms to denounce? Where had he learned about torture, secret prisons, domestic surveillance, abuse of national security letters, or the ground truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Most of those stories first came to light, and all were considerably advanced, in my journalistic neighborhood. There were other essential players, for sure. Nongovernment organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (and the New York Review of Books, which obtained the ICRC’s confidential report) uncovered hard facts about conditions at Guantánamo Bay. Public interest litigators, from Judicial Watch to the ACLU, forced the government to disgorge secret meeting notes and photographs of detainee abuse. Those in turn fed new disclosures by CBS’s 60 Minutes and the New Yorker. Crowdsourced sightings and analysis on social media exposed clandestine CIA rendition flights and their destinations, which paved the way for a huge scoop about secret overseas prisons in the Post. Opinions helped shape public debate, but the conversations could not begin without the forces of fact. Patient, committed investigative reporting by traditional news organizations was indispensable.

  Verax accepted my limits on advocacy. What he feared was equivocation about unequivocal facts. How could he know I would not water down the story or kill it on command from the U.S. government? I had heard that question before. It always felt outlandish, akin to asking how many facts I typically made up. I wanted to say my record spoke for itself, but I knew that was not something he could verify. Maybe it was a conceit to suppose I had a “record” that anyone could consult. Even if Verax read every word I wrote, he had no vantage point on what I might have left out. I thought the stories made a strong circumstantial case, but I could not offer categorical proof of my independence.

  Verax homed in on first principles. Why did I choose this line of work? How did I measure success? I was impatient to start asking my own questions, but there was no dodging. Journalism mattered to me, I told him, because truth was an elemental value. Truth as best fallible humans could tell it, assembled as we found the pieces and revised as we found more. I believed in transparency as a leveler of power—in the voting booth, the marketplace, and anywhere else decisions had to be made. I did not enjoy personal conflict, I told Verax, but in all modesty I had been pissing off authorities for a long time.

  I found myself telling the story of my abortive high school newspaper career. The principal spiked a story. I published anyway. She fired me, seized the press run, and burned it. A few days later, with adorable teenage hubris, I called a news conference with two other editors to announce Gellman v. Wacker, a First Amendment lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

  “No shit? That is hilarious,” Verax wrote.

  The lasting lesson, I told him, was how easily we were crushed. The School District of Philadelphia ran out the clock, waiting until I graduated to acknowledge our constitutional right to publish. The principal penned a poison note for my college application file and then professed to have lost it, sidestepping my legal right to read what she wrote. By every practical measure we lost. Yet the battle gave me the gift of a career and a lifetime fascination with the use and abuse of power. That was one of my favorite yarns, especially when accompanied by a Philadelphia Inquirer photograph of my Welcome Back, Kotter–era hair.

  Verax got the message. But that was then. Minor league. What proof did I have, he asked, that I was prepared to stand up to government pressure now? It felt like a job interview, but fine. So there was this book I wrote about Dick Cheney, which told stories the former vice president tried to conceal, and he went on television to express his contempt for my work. I did a long piece about the FBI’s use of national security letters to sweep in hundreds of thousands of records of Americans who were not suspected of wrongdoing. The Justice Department wrote, and then had to retract, a ten-page letter to Congress accusing me of willful “distortions and falsehoods.” Two years before that, the CIA had mounted a fierce campaign to discredit my reporting on the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. David Kay, who put his name on that attack, told me matter-of-factly three years later that he knew at the time the story in question was true. Still earlier, a senior aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright banned me from her aircraft because I wrote about secret diplomatic calls that belied her public claims. (Someone higher-ranking thought better of that move.) In my greenest year as Pentagon correspondent, just after the Gulf War, I wrote a front-page piece disclosing that 93 percent of the munitions dropped on Iraq were not the “smart bombs” depicted in Pentagon videos. Two-thirds of them missed their targets. General Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff, offered publicly to put me in a field and see how I liked standing under a payload of “dumb bombs.”

  * * *

  —

  I REALLY want this story,” I told Verax on May 18. “I believe it is quite significant.” And he should want me to do it because, not in spite, of my mainstream media roots. If a major newspaper “takes ownership of this story and devotes resources to pursuing it,” I wrote, “you have something you can’t get anywhere else.”

  You will not relinquish the power to release whatever you think should be released, globally and at will. But spare a little time, before you do that, for the chance that the document will be presented in a frame that says: This is real. We’ve verified it. It looks complicated, but we can tell you what it means. Here is the context and here is why it is news.

  Verax countered that I had no power to promise that. He predicted a corporate publisher would buckle under government threats, whatever my intent. “My concern is about your editors, their lawyers, and the rest of the long tail,” he wrote. “I fear institutional caution is going to dilute this to the detriment of the public.”

  “What you are saying does not match my experience in any way,” I replied. “You do not know my world at all.”

  My departure from the Post had not been happy, but there was no doubt the paper had backed me to the hilt for twenty-one years. I had sat in or listened in as Leonard Downie Jr., the Post’s longtime executive editor, faced down bluster from cabinet secretaries, two intelligence agency chiefs, and a national security adviser. There were other encounters, still higher up, that I did not witness. The Post gave anyone a respectful hearing, but it made up its own mind. I had disagreed with Downie twice, on the margins, about what was fit to print. They were close calls. I could have been wrong.

  I doubt that I convinced Verax, exactly. He remained agnostic about what I could do, but agnostic was enough. He took an engineer’s approach, building in fallbacks and redundant paths to get his story out. If I did not deliver, Poitras or Greenwald might. His plan had no “single point of failure,” he told me later. If all of us pursued the story, there would be, in his mind, a natural division of labor. I told him, as the story neared, that I would not coordinate my coverage with Greenwald’s. It did not matter. Our roles and skill sets, he said, were complementary.

  Verax announced his decision in a note to Poitras and me, conferring a cover name in the NSA’s concatenated style.

  So it is decided! If the journo (henceforth BRASSBANNER) wants to join, I welcome them.

  * * *

  —

  Poitras and I had come to picture a man in late middle age, possibly older. Verax did not seem to write in a woman’s voice, whatever we thought that meant, and the span of his claims to firsthand knowledge suggested a long career. Even so, we did not know his name, his agency, or his job. That was becoming a serious problem for me.

  Poitras asked me to promise that I would not try to discover Verax’s identity without his consent. That was already out of the question for me. In principle it would be a huge breach of trust, and in practice I could put our source in danger by sleuthing around. The NSA or
some other party might know by now that we were homing in on the story. I had no way to know who was watching. If I did so much as a Google search on the small clues I had, authorities might learn more than I did.

  “I will not try to unmask the source,” I wrote to Poitras on May 7, 2013, but I hoped he would unmask himself to us—and soon. He was planning to come forward on his own, a remarkable promise, but only after the debate had been fully joined. He knew all attention would turn to him once the leaker had a name. From my point of view, I needed to know before the story was done.

  The same day, I wrote to Verax and Poitras:

  I will do all I can to authenticate the document. What often happens is that I can do so only in part. Maybe I can get a second source to confirm that a document with this date and title exists, or confirm one or more points in paraphrase or verbatim, or confirm essential facts without specific reference to the document. . . .

  All that said, unless I get completely independent confirmation, there is no easy substitute for confidence in . . . the bona fides of the original source. . . .

  It would be a first for me, in 20-some years of national security reporting, to write the story without knowing where it came from. I am not saying I won’t do it. That depends on the totality of the facts I can turn up. . . . But I’d like very much to know whether there is anything I can do to persuade [you].

  I was treading on thin ice. My channel to Verax was new, still brittle. Ordinarily, I would not push this hard so early. Why take the risk before he sent me anything? But there were greater risks to the integrity of this story. None of us expected a happy ending for Verax. Nearly every scenario left us incommunicado, soon and without warning. He could be arrested, seized without formalities by parties unknown, forced into hiding, or granted refuge on condition of silence. He thought he might be killed. We might not know one outcome from another. He would simply be gone. If I did not ask essential questions now, I might not—probably would not, I thought—have another chance.

  Verax tabled the request for his name but suffered me to ask about scores of other details. These were strange, asynchronous interviews, back and forth by email and chat, with a big hole at their center: I was trying to authenticate a document I had yet to see. By now, he had explained that it would show NSA access to online accounts at big-name U.S. companies. I sent him ten or twenty questions at a time.

  “Why should I believe you have access to classified material, much less the capacity to vouch for it?” I began. Not especially diplomatic, but I hoped to establish an unmannered tone. Bluntness, I discovered, did not bother him. There were lines of inquiry he ruled out of bounds, many of them about himself and the people he loved, but if he made a claim of fact he was prepared to defend it.

  “I have direct access to the documents by virtue of my position,” he replied. “I know they’re authentic because they’re access-controlled, originated internally, and appropriately marked. I’ve said this before, but authenticity will seem immediately apparent when you see it.”

  A piece of paper, I told him, did not mean much on its own. The news would be what it disclosed. Before I could take those disclosures as true, I had to know a lot more.

  Who wrote the document? For what purpose? Were there “chops”—initials or stamps—that showed a chain of approval? Did he have the distribution list? How many people had access? What gave the document authority? It would be ruinous to base a big story on a fabricated document, but nearly as bad if it turned out to be a low-level staff draft, a rejected proposal, or an outdated memo about a pilot program long since revoked. What if the document just had its facts wrong? “Dewey Defeats Truman” was a genuine Chicago Tribune headline in 1948, but the other fellow took the oath of office.

  “Assuming authenticity, is the document accurate?” I asked. “Does it contain any false statements, misleading spin or important omissions?” Verax said he could not vouch for every page, but its descriptions matched his experience with NSA regulations, training, collection systems, and data repositories. This was not an expired memo or obsolete draft, he said. It was a high-level overview of ongoing operations, prepared and updated recently by its top manager. Every military organization had a “command brief” like that, Verax said, in part “to demonstrate the necessity of the program for budget justification.”

  I edged closer to the personal. This story would undoubtedly draw return fire, with attacks on the messenger and his credibility. I could not afford a big surprise there.

  “If the administration tries to discredit the source, either speculating about the source’s identity or purporting to know, is there a particular line of attack I should expect? Is there something the administration might say, fairly or not, that could damage the source’s credibility?”

  Had he been fired from a government job? No. Substance abuse? No. Drunk driving? “I don’t drink at all,” he replied. After a while he said there was no point dwelling on him. He expected attacks on his character. “You can’t protect the source, but if you help me make the truth known, I will consider it a fair trade,” he wrote. “Ultimately, don’t be distracted by me: the activities are more important than the characters.”

  People will say you did not follow procedure, I wrote. If you objected so strongly, what exactly did you do to lodge a protest? Later, after the first stories were published, he would tell me he had in fact raised concerns repeatedly with NSA colleagues and supervisors. I had no way to confirm that. NSA officials told me they found no evidence that Snowden reported a violation of law or rules, but they could not exclude that he spoke of his doubts to colleagues in less formal ways. It became clear, on the other hand, that Snowden did not invoke any official grievance procedure. I did not know then that he was a contractor, rather than a government employee, and therefore might not be covered by the limited whistleblower protections of a recent presidential directive. In this first exchange, his emphasis was on futility: whistleblowers are commonly crushed when they challenge the leaders or priorities of their agencies. I do not know how anyone in government, or any other large bureaucracy, could deny that with a straight face.

  “The IC has had plenty of time to practice defanging internal protest or oversight, and one need only look at outcomes of previous protests to assess the fruitfulness of that avenue,” he said, referring to the intelligence community.

  I often ask people with claims of wrongdoing to give me the other side’s strongest rejoinder. The reply helps me test the source and prepare for interviews with the people he accuses. “What should I expect to hear from the U.S. government when it learns I have the document, and how would you respond?” I wrote.

  “The usual justifications: the program is authorized by law, it is vital to national security, they don’t comment on sensitive programs or corporate partnerships. I don’t think they will try to challenge the authenticity of the document itself, because it would require access to the program details to fake in the first place.”

  “If the administration claims that disclosure of the document, or any part of it, would damage national security, what would be its likely stated reasons? What would be wrong with those claims?”

  Verax predicted, accurately, that the government would say publication of the story “will chill corporate partnerships.”

  I could not let him stop there. Was there really nothing more to say about the security interests at stake? Did he not worry, I asked, that disclosure of this document would reveal “tactics, techniques, procedures or technology the exposure of which would benefit foreign intelligence targets”?

  That got under his skin, and he hinted at renewed doubts about my establishment values. “I am somewhat concerned that journalists are being made to feel that [their] responsibility is protecting the methods that empower an elite at the expense of the world’s inherent right to privacy,” he wrote. “Does such an assertion even require rebuttal?”

  Well, yes, I s
aid.

  Verax, irritated, made a concession that he would decline to repeat later as a public figure, when his statements grew more politic. A story about the document, he acknowledged, would cause some losses. The benefits, he argued, had overriding value. “Yes, beloved USG TTPs will be exposed that could benefit foreign governments (FG), but that disclosure benefits a far wider audience,” he wrote. Foreign governments “already know the NSA subverts big telecoms companies. They do the same when they can.” But the “innocent and uninvolved” people had no idea they were swept up in large-scale surveillance. Because of that, internet companies felt no pressure to protect them. “I am unconvinced that shadowy figures pose a greater threat to security than information control, total surveillance, and permanent national militarization,” he added.

  I would come to think of that tone as his high dudgeon mode. Its arrival, in the months and years to come, signaled time to take a break, to save the subject for another day. Our links were ephemeral. He could close a channel and never show up again. Even so, there were times I pressed past the warning signs. One day, when I asked too many follow-ups, he wrote back, “Are you purposely trying to piss me off with questions you know I won’t answer?”

  The hypothetical questions reached an end on May 20, when the PRISM briefing arrived. The next day brought something else entirely.

  * * *

  —

  Prepare yourself.

  Jesus.

  This was not a Poitras I recognized. Her first urgent email had a practical message: we needed to meet. This second one was purest adrenaline. When I reached her downtown hotel, the room was a shambles. Equipment, clothing, and papers covered the bed and most of the floor. She had not slept or changed, and I could not read her face. Shock, no doubt, but something else, too. Elation? Alarm? Disbelief? If she said anything at the door, I do not remember it. What I do recall is a shake of her head and a sweep of her hand. Come in. See for yourself. I can’t explain.