The Edward Snowden Affair (25 page)

Fourteen minutes after beginning the meeting, Snowden started taking questions. Amid the awkward pauses during translation and Sheremetyevo Airport’s perpetual travel announcements, he remained jovial, laughing periodically, but the stress of the situation was ever present in his voice. He graciously accepted question upon question long after declaring the G9 summit had come to a close. Conversations with various individuals included discussion of the legal technicalities of seeking and accepting asylum in multiple countries, his political affiliation, the U.S. government’s hypocritical refusal to respect other nations’ decisions to grant him refugee status since America is a signatory on UDHR and how Snowden viewed Washington’s persecution as “purely political” and driven solely upon the desire to evoke fear in anyone who would doubt or challenge its policies.

Snowden informed the G9 gathering he had been recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but, though a member, the United States did not accept the Commissioner’s judgment. He reported that during a private meeting in Iceland, the U.N. secretary general, South Korean diplomat Ban Ki-moon, disagreed with Snowden’s actions and was “biasing” the Federation’s opinion of him. When questioned how he received the information, Snowden reported that Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a sympathetic member of the Icelandic party who had voted to put Snowden’s citizenship application on the government’s docket, made the report.
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It is the U.N. agency’s mandated mission to aid refugees’ repatriation to their adopted country.
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Even amid harsh criticism that its pursuit of Snowden was extreme, the U.S. government made sure its presence was known and felt. Eight minutes into the Q & A session, Lokshina told Snowden the U.S. Embassy had instructed her to relay to him it did not consider him a whistleblower and he should be “punished for breaking the law.”
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Snowden quickly countered by stating that the American populace’s will was being better represented by various foreign governments because 55 percent of U.S. citizens agreed with him. The meeting had lasted 42 minutes.

Washington started to show signs it was catching on. The White House chastised Moscow for giving Snowden a “propaganda platform.”
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It is reasonably believed that the meeting was only possible through the Kremlin’s guidance; otherwise the successful organization of a variety of Russian officials, attorneys and human rights groups would not have been possible on such short notice, especially in a sea of over 200 reporters.
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The Kremlin is metaphorically and literally analogous to the American White House. It is both the residence and symbol of Russian politics.

Whereas the White House viewed Snowden’s extending invitations to the human rights organizations was political innuendo that implied his innocence, its true purpose was to blur the Kremlin’s role in the American exile’s plight. Snowden needn’t have called a conference to make the announcement he was applying for Russian asylum. He could have merely filed his paperwork as he had before. Furthermore, as one attorney pointed out during the Q & A, Snowden could not accept asylum status in multiple countries.
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He had coincidentally found himself obligated to void all other refugee offers in order to reapply in Russia. He made sure to add, “I am only in a position to accept Russia’s offer because of my inability to travel.”
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Though it was reported he never left,
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Snowden somehow managed to always evade the press, which perpetually swarmed Sheremetyevo Airport.
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It was possible for him to stalk around the Mira undetected until June 9 but now the world knew what he looked like and was conducting its own surveillance. He was so much of a ghost that during the G9 meeting he was asked for an official photograph to confirm his existence in the terminal.
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Bearing in mind the only firsthand reports that surfaced about Snowden after the conference came from Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties to whom Snowden had coincidentally extended a personal G9 invitation, unofficial sources claim he was staying in a safe house under the protection of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KBG.
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Kucherena is a Federal Security Service board member, agreed to process Snowden’s Russian asylum paperwork
pro bono
and during this time held an office in the Kremlin.
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But it was unlikely the Kremlin would chance Snowden being seen outside the airport. It would give away Russia’s position and violate him being permitted on Russian soil without a passport. In all likelihood, either WikiLeaks or the Kremlin was paying for him to stay in Sheremetyevo’s V-Express Capsule Hotel located in the transit zone. Yet if Kucherena can be believed, he did so at great personal risk. Throughout his stay, he was supposedly without protection or additional security.
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The U.S. government became infuriated when it could no longer ignore the obvious. The night of the G9 meeting, Obama called Putin. The conversation ended in a stalemate with respect to the American exile.
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Four days later, Snowden submitted his asylum application. When his paperwork was officially acknowledged by the Russian Federal Migration Service on July 24, thereby giving him license to leave the airport while his case was being decided, it was accompanied by his attorney’s statement that Snowden no longer sought refuge in South America.
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Kerry was back on the telephone with his Soviet equivalent, Sergey Lavrov,
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and members of the Senate Appropriations Committee started preparing speeches which would result in a unanimous vote to move toward imposing sanctions on any country aiding Snowden.
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The U.S. government and the world waited for Snowden to emerge from Sheremetyevo.

At 6 p.m. a man much larger than Snowden emerged from the transit area. It was Kucherena. He told reporters Snowden would not be leaving the airport.
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Der Spiegel
had run a follow-up to XKeyscore three days after Putin reiterated “any actions by [Snowden] connected with harming Russian-American relations are unacceptable.”
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Snowden had reapplied for Russian asylum the day before.

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On July 1, Der Spiegel published a three-part review of NSA surveillance titled “How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe.” It includes two previously unreleased slides—a map showing the world’s fiber-optic network and a Boundless Informant graph comparing French and Italian phone traffic to German communications—but does not offer exclusive infomation aside from 35,321 people were employed by the NSA in 2006, which had a budget of $6.115 billion.

I
N
A
POORLY
TIMED
,
UNCREDITED
ARTICLE
titled, “‘Prolific Partner’: German Intelligence Used NSA Spy Program,”
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Der Spiegel
reports that the BND and Germany’s domestic intelligence agency,
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz
or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), had been given XKeyscore by the U.S. intelligence. Its source is a 2008 classified presentation released to the German press by Poitras.

Though hardly surprising since it was revealed a month before that the NSA had provided GCHQ with PRISM, the exposé provides greater insight into the mysterious program. Using metadata, XKeyscore can “retroactively reveal any terms the target person has typed into a search engine.” This includes “full-take” data which the recording of metadata is said to exclude.
Der Spiegel
relays this is of particular interest to Germans because XKeyscore was one of the primary tools used to collect the previously reported 500 million pieces of domestic information. In December 2012 alone, 180 million data captures were made. The program was first issued to the BND, which then trained the BfV to use the program. A subsequent
Der Spiegel
report would relay that the vice president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency “formally requested” the program after watching it successfully wiretap a DSL connection.
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Prior to discovering there was a breach of faith between the two nations’ intelligence divisions as America narrowed its focus upon its U.N. colleague, in January 2013 Germany was working toward “relax[ing] [the] interpretation of the [nation’s] privacy laws to provide greater opportunities of intelligence sharing” with the NSA. At the end of April, BND officials were invited to meet with NSA specialists to discuss “data acquisition” and “behavior detection.”
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The BND was already considered a “most prolific partner” to the NSA as a result of joint information gathering in Afghanistan.

The BfV, BND and NSA offered no comment.

Aside from the obvious implications of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency using XKeyscore, the article verifies Snowden’s previous
Der Spiegel
interview claims. Even though metadata is used to determine the need for further investigation, XKeyscore’s ability to retroactively cull supposedly uncollected full-take data refutes any claims that only anonymous metadata is being gathered. The report also establishes, as with GCHQ, that the NSA sought a mutual data exchange with its German counterparts.

To make matters worse, a Brazilian periodical new to the classified disclosure field debuted a rather incriminating article three days after Russia had recognized Snowden’s paperwork.

Well-meaning but under present circumstances contrary to its masthead,
Epoca
premiered “Spies of the digital age”
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on July 27. It bears no byline by Greenwald. The exposé follows in the footsteps of
The Guardian
’s G20 report and tells the riveting tale of a 2010 U.S.-initiated U.N. sanction meeting. The topic was Iran’s plan to enrich uranium on native soil. Brazil’s then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva courageously stepped into the crossfire and accepted the role of mediator. Because the Middle Eastern country had already broken its verbal agreement not to pursue nuclear activities, Brazil and Turkey wanted an alternative to sanctions, which would only enrage Iran. Turkey bravely offered to permit Iran to continue its nuclear research within its neighbor’s borders. The logic was simple. A U.N. member could then keep an eye on Iran.

The United States was worried. The Security Council needed nine of 15 votes to pass a resolution. Russia and China threatened to veto the vote. Other nations weren’t showing their cards. With a plan in place and carrying along Washington’s blessing, Brazil’s president traveled to Tehran to try to get then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s signature promising he’d play nice.

If he refused, the argument would automatically become that there was no other choice but to instate sanctions. But the had no intention of humoring Ahmadinejad’s autograph even if Brazil somehow managed to acquire it. The South American nation had been given the green light by Washington because it wanted to prolong the proceedings. While Brazil’s leader was burning through political capital, America was leveraging the other nations. It was able to do so because the NSA had conducted espionage on eight U.N. members. diplomats therefore knew where their counterparts stood on the issue and had modified the debate accordingly.

Exhausted, Brazil and Turkey miraculously presented Ahmadinejad’s agreement to the U.N. council. To the countries’ dismay, the U.S. suddenly announced that France, Britain, Russia and China were ready to vote. The Iranian sanction resolution passed by an overwhelming margin. Only Brazil and Turkey had dissented.

Epoca
had framed the NSA. Though primarily concerned with German surveillance, the July 20
Der Spiegel
article implicated the American intelligence agency. Snowden remained ominously hidden after the reports’ publication.
The Guardian
relayed that his only physical contact with the outside world was through Kucherena.
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WikiLeaks claimed Harrison had remained by his side since his departure from Hong Kong.
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When entering the transit zone to meet with Snowden on July 24, Kucherena was brandishing a brown paper bag. As he left to announce that Snowden would not be leaving the airport, the bag was nowhere to be seen. When questioned, Kucherena stated he’d brought Snowden clothes, a pair of shoes and books to pass the time and gain a better understanding of the history and culture in which he had found himself. Snowden had been given Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, the works of Anton Chekhov and Russia’s history by Nikolai Karamzin.
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