David McCloskey

What is it? I actually think the best way to think about it is to think about the CIA or sort of the work of the CIA as clandestine journalism. So, if you think about the work that an investigative journalist does, you know, they scope out a story, they go and recruit sources who have information, they put the story together with a whole bunch of disparate, you know, sources, facts,

pieces of analysis and they try to put it together into something that is coherent this objective that's not value driven or laden you know in the best cases of investigative journalism and then they report the kind of what why and so what to their readers and i think the cia actually is trying to do something very similar.

The CIA is out there writing about stories that the president and other American policymakers care about what's going on in the world. We're trying to find sources in the world who will give us that information, sell us that information. And we're trying to put it all together into a picture for the people in our country that make the most important national security decisions.

Information gathering and analysis is really what it is. And at its core, the agency, as we call it, exists to provide us and our elected officials with an information advantage. That is why the CIA exists. So we have more information or better information about what's going on in the world than other countries do. Is that all they do? Well, we do other things, but that's the primary objective.

Well, and it's not as entertaining, is it? Obviously, there are what we call covert action pieces of the work, which is when the president decides that they want something done in the world and they want it to be deniable, they'll turn to the CIA. that stuff tends to be more fodder for fiction, more fodder for, you know,

spy entertainment or spytainment as it's sometimes called, it's hard to make. There's a reason why Jack Ryan as an analyst sort of had to have a gun and talk about how this isn't what an analyst was supposed to do because the actual work of an analyst is not car chases and guns and shooting bad guys. It's finding the truth.

but yeah you're right the agency does other things the agency has covert action work that it does the agency has something that's called a special activities center which does some of the paramilitary work of of the agency but i will stress that although those are very sort of sexy components from a if you're talking about this like a business those would be the pieces of the business that get all the press attention but really you know are a small part of the overall operation

Well, let's get down to the brass tacks of what we're talking about when I mentioned the investigative journalism example, right? So,

recruiting a source what does that actually mean that actually means i'll just make up a hypothetical here that actually means that maybe you're going and finding a russian who has access to somebody in the kremlin and that russian um you know hates his boss and has um is in debt right

We're paying, we might pay that person if we can get in front of them and sort of convince them that this could be done securely. We're paying that person to commit treason. to tell us things they shouldn't tell us. So in effect, the day to day work of the CIA is breaking foreign laws. I mean, that is the sort of the definition of what we're doing.

It very rarely involves shooting and car crashes and all the stuff you see on TV, but at its most basic level, we are, you know, it's an organization committed to convincing other people to commit treason in many respects. Sometimes for reasons we would consider noble, sometimes for reasons that are more mundane or even kind of gross in some cases.

But that is the core of the work, is stealing secrets.

The U.S. intelligence community, I think, technically has like 16 or 17 entities inside it formally.

and if that sounds like a ridiculous number it's because it probably is it can be overall very bloated i think there's probably too much overlap and redundancy between many of these groups but you know for simplicity's sake take a couple of the bigger organizations so the the cia the central intelligence agency is our sort of premier uh foreign intelligence agency meaning we are

working abroad to steal secrets from foreign countries and groups, right? The National Security Agency is our primary signals intelligence arm, meaning they're doing a lot of the intercepts of phone communications, emails, etc. sort of manipulating electronic communication. Obviously, you have the State Department, which is our sort of diplomatic arm overseas.

I mean, there's intelligence agencies or entities inside the State Department, inside the FBI, inside various services of the military. So if you kind of put all this on a couple of pages, it's a bit overwhelming. But all of these groups, in theory, work together and in most cases actually do relatively well.

But of course, there are different cultures and all of that that prevent clean cooperation at all times. And so there can be sort of competition over turf and dropped handoffs between the two. I mean, it's all the things you'd expect with a massive probably too large group of agencies that are all sort of distinct but have overlapping mission sets.

Well, look, I'll tell you this, that there are really, I mean, the mission of CIA is an exceptional one. And although it's not, you know, martinis and tuxedos and car chases, The agency is out there stopping and disrupting terrorist attacks. The agency is sending people into denied environments all the time under very exotic forms of cover.

The agency is fielding incredible sort of next gen technology and it is producing really what I call the most sort of highly classified reports that our president reads and what's called the president's daily brief for PDB. So I see the work of the CIA as being highly exceptional, but it's also...

this sort of big organization at the same time that in many respects would resemble, you know, a Fortune 500 company. So I like to think of the place as being kind of a uniquely bipolar organization. On the one hand, it has this exceptional mission, which I don't think actually has a lot of parallels elsewhere or analogs elsewhere.

And on the other side, you know, it's a big place that's run by people. And so you get a lot of the foibles and quirks that go along with that.

So the agency does have domestic field stations, but those are for basically liaising with FBI and targeting foreign nationals who are in the states. The CIA is prevented from targeting Americans. The CIA does not recruit Americans. And the CIA is a foreign externally facing organization designed to collect on foreign nationals and foreign governments.

What's the relationship? You know, we have liaison relationships with friendly services. So we're sharing information, right? So, you know, we're sharing information with the Brits. You know, we're sharing information with the Israelis, right? sharing information with us.

You could rattle off a long list of foreign intelligence services, some of which I probably shouldn't, that we're engaged in business with. I think the sort of key thing there is a lot of these relationships can be quite warm, they can be quite productive, but intelligence services, they don't sort of generously give

It's an exchange with the expectation that, you know, we give something here, you give something back. This is sort of commerce happening at the secret level.

There's a paramilitary component. Yeah. Who's that? It's called the Special Activities Center. Ooh. Yeah, yeah, I know. Isn't that a good, that's a good name. I like that. Special Activities Center. That is for, so if you recall, let's say some of the first teams that went into Afghanistan after 9-11.

You know, you had a mix on those teams of sort of form like kind of typical CIA case officers, but then you also had paramilitary officers who had typically come out of Army Special Forces or Delta Force or the Marines or something like that. They had a military background and then they're working at CIA and

the CIA has that group because sometimes you want to be able to deploy those types of assets in a, in a deniable way under the auspices of what we call a covert action finding, which is when the president wants something done and they, they don't want, you know, us fingerprints on it. So that's, that's kind of why the CIA has those, has those groups.

So I was an analyst.

Yeah. Well, you realize after about two days, it's not really like Jack Ryan. What I did was, as I worked on primarily Syria and on the broader Middle East, and I did a lot of my work from Langley. I did a lot of my work from the region. Most of what I was doing was taking, basically looking at all of this information that's coming in. And that could be

That's the human intelligence we've gathered. That's just stuff from press. It's stuff from academics. It's stuff from our embassy. It's the signals intelligence we talked about from the National Security Agency, intercepted phone calls, intercepted emails, etc. You're looking at all this and you're answering a question, really, that a policymaker might have.

And so the example I like to give is, you know, I was working on Syria in the opening days of 2020.

uh its unrest which eventually became a civil war this was in early 2011 and the big question that you know the president obama was asking was okay what are the what are the scenarios for how this how this goes down right how long can asa hold on to power and so you're you know i was writing essentially an answer to that question in like two or three pages that sourced and you know structured well and

gives the president the ability to sort of bound reality uh you know what might happen what could happen what would it mean for us in different scenarios so that's an example of something that i wrote and then briefed uh downtown to you

know to the white house to the national security council and analysts who work on russia you know analysts who are working on all these different regions and countries you know are sort of topics today are are answering similar questions uh depending on what might be going on so when you go to work as an analyst for the cia

It feels, now after having done analysis for other companies since I've left, what I will say is it does feel special. And the reason it feels special is because you are dealing with stolen information, and you're dealing with information as a result that other people cannot access.

And one of the fundamental, I think, highs of the place is that you can be sort of led to believe and oftentimes, I think, with reason that you are kind of in the inner ring. You have access to stuff other people don't, which is a thrill. So I think for me, as I look back on it, I think, yeah, it is a special place because it has a very special mission and it's got access to very special stuff.

And there's something inherently, even though, you know, I feel bad, Mike, I deflated you a little bit by saying, you know, it's not explosions and car chases and Jack Ryan. I think there's something very special about the place that

Even now, me as an alum, I still feel, I think I feel a fondness for that work because I felt like I was contributing to something that was bigger than myself and doing something that frankly was really cool.

I do think you have to separate, or at least acknowledge that the CIA of... the 50s and 60s and even early 70s is not the CIA of today, right? The CIA that really helped kind of overthrow governments in Iran in 53 or in Syria later that decade in 56, I think, and in Guatemala and the CIA that was actually, you know,

in some cases, spying on Americans in the 60s, the CIA that was experimenting with psychedelic, you know, drugs on people. Like, this organization doesn't, that organization doesn't exist anymore. That was a far less institutionalized, that was finding its way at the height of the Cold War and essentially operated as the president's black bag outfit.

with sort of a wink and a nod from the president at the time. And it is not how the CIA operates today. When the CIA does something today with... basically no exceptions. It is doing that with the full support and frankly, like formal authority of the president, more so than just the CIA kind of going rogue or anything like that. I think that the mental model of the CIA is some kind of like,

unconstrained bad actor that does its own thing is just simply false. The CIA operates as part of an interagency process in Washington that's driven by the White House and by the president, and it does the president's bidding. And the president, as an elected official, is entitled to do so. So, I think

It's important that we kind of understand the CIA, not as some rogue actor, but as a piece of, you know, sort of the fabric, frankly, of our government and society.

Look, we talked about the sort of covert action side of things and the paramilitary side of things, and I don't have a... direct number for you. I don't know it. My wager would be that a disproportionate number of the stars on that wall come from that sort of thing. So, it's not just pure information gathering, to be clear.

But in either case, the reason why many of those stars are not named, and by the way, many of them are. I mean, if you go into the original headquarters building lobby and you know there's a book that's actually kind of in a case by that wall, and there are names attached to many of the stars, if not most.

Some of them do not have names, and the reason for that, although I certainly couldn't speak to whether any of this on an individual basis is still justified, is because the details around that operation, be they sources, be they methods, remain classified, and so the names cannot be made public.

For the most part, yes. It depends a little bit on your role. So, you know, and I was an analyst, like my wife knew where I worked, my W2 said central intelligence agency. And yet, you know, sometimes I could almost always be open with her about where I was going, but I couldn't really say much about what I was actually doing.

Thanks for explaining all this. Hey, thanks, Mike, for having me. Really enjoyed our conversation.

The day-to-day work of the CIA is breaking foreign laws. It very rarely involves shooting and car crashes and all the stuff you see on TV, but at its most basic level, it's an organization committed to convincing other people to commit treason. All this today on Something You Should Know.

He wants the world to meet him.

Well, maybe there we should take a quick break with Edward Snowden, sort of on his rumpled bed in Hong Kong with his white t-shirt and his sunlight deprivation, talking to Laura Poitras. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll see what the world does when it meets Ed Snowden.

And we are now finally at a point in the story where after Edward Snowden has taken this information, He has got about one and a half million documents on various sort of SD cards and hard drives. He is in Hong Kong now, sort of ensconced in a disgusting hotel room filled with cartons of takeaway food.

And in everyday life, Gordon, well, they usually are, but not spies, data brokers, quietly collecting your personal information, building detailed profiles, and then selling them on without a warrant and without any warning.

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Well, welcome back. We are here continuing Gordon Carrera's quest to make me read every absolute jackalope statement that Edward Snowden has ever made. And it is Sunday, the 9th of June, 2013. Ed Snowden is allowing the world, in his own words, to meet him. Finally, in a video that Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, is filming of Ed Snowden in his hotel room in Hong Kong.

And Snowden makes, let me read again. Gordon, thank you for this wonderful death march.

Okay, this is Ed Snowden, June 9th, 2013, from Hong Kong. I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me, or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the triads. Any of their agents or assets. We've got a CIA station just up the road, the consulate here in Hong Kong.

He is now in a room with journalist Glenn Greenwald, Ewan McCaskill from The Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker. And now June 5th, 2013, this first article drops and it's a massive one.

And I'm sure they are going to be very busy for the next week. And that is a fear I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies. and be completely free from risk. Because they are such powerful adversaries, no one can meaningfully oppose them.

If they want to get you, they will get you in time. But at the same time, you have to make the determination about what is important to you. Thank you for reading that so beautifully. Yes, and for those not watching on video, I have a large bottle of Colgate mouthwash I've been using to rinse my mouth out after reading all of this. So look, that is just one part of the video.

It sounds like something that a sort of enterprising spy thriller writer might include in one of their insane spy thrillers. Yeah, I was going to say, perfect dialogue. Perfect dialogue for you. Great dialogue, yeah.

But I think it does tell you something about his worldview, doesn't it? I realize that there will be a batch of listeners who would assume that this is what the former CIA guy is going to say. But what Snowden is alleging here is ridiculous, that the CIA would attempt to render him from China. I mean, the US will later on request that the Chinese government send him back home.

But the idea here is somehow that there are going to be a group of CIA paid triads that break into his hotel room and put a bag over his head and put him on a Gulfstream to fly back to Washington. I mean, it's actually... And I think it shows you how much of a video game he has turned this into.

Who's just gone public. Yeah. That's right. But yes, you're right. But again, it's this idea that he's filtering.

It does raise the question of what he thought would happen, I think. Because in my view is that he probably thought once these articles came out- that he would be able to go someplace like, I think he even mentioned this as a possibility, like Iceland. Even at this point, I don't think that in his mind, China or Russia are the preferred sort of destinations. Yeah, I think that's true.

I think he believed, again, in this kind of image of him as, hey, I'm the hero in this story, and it's self-evident that what I'm doing is right. I think he believed that someplace more

Now, is that interview the first time that one of his leaks was connected to the US just straight up spying on a foreign adversary. Because that is another piece of this that is obviously not sat well with most Americans, I think, since is that he's revealing here in this interview in China, which by the way, I think

in the context of all of these massive articles coming out in The Guardian the week prior, was sort of ignored, is that he's actually revealing something about just the US spying on a foreign adversary. This had nothing to do with domestic collection. Mass surveillance.

After all those failed attempts by the triads, the CIA hired triads to get into his hotel room. Finally had to play it straight. The base chief in Hong Kong was just furious at the end of the week.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by The Guardian, requires Verizon on a quote, ongoing daily basis to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration, the communications records of millions of U.S.

I guess as he goes, he's got to balance the threat of maybe immediate extradition, right? If you go to some place like Iceland and it goes south, you just maybe get sent home much more quickly, straight away. Whereas Hong Kong, you've got a bit more... There's maybe a little bit more political leeway. And so maybe he's got to balance this kind of intermediate kind of airlock, right? Where he's...

He's potentially going to use the leaks and how that sort of gets filtered publicly to build enough credibility to get a place that he considers sort of open to internet freedom or privacy to then accept him. And obviously, it doesn't pan out that way at all.

Enter WikiLeaks.

But I suppose they've got to create an itinerary that hopscotches through territories where he will not be extradited, right?

Yeah.

You always say that route. That is my preferred way to go. The whistleblower express. Yeah, the whistleblower express. I mean, my WikiLeaks minder next to me. You know, you do have to wonder now, With all that has come out, particularly around sort of WikiLeaks, Russia connections. Yeah. If at some point Assange may have mentioned Snowden to some of his Russian contacts. along this path.

It's just a breezy speculation from a former CIA guy.

So then, as we have discussed... is an interesting combination as a potential intelligence target of egomania bravery and lack of guile. Naivety. Naivety. You could say innocence. And I think in this case, I could certainly buy that Snowden did not understand the implications of traveling through Moscow. But Sarah Harrison? We don't know who suggested it. I mean, yeah.

It's very interesting, though. It is. It is.

The Chinese are keen to get rid of the political hot potato. Yeah. And the Russians, maybe someone inside, Assange had mentioned it to somebody, and someone at the FSB says- Let's let this guy come.

The Aeroflot people in Hong Kong. Yeah.

I mean, of all of the shocking revelations in our series here, the idea of an outbound flight from Moscow being dry might be among the most interesting that we've encountered. I think that's bizarre. Also, the newspapers are approving these expense reports. It's the big story. These outbound flights are just roping on an economy flight from Moscow to Venezuela.

And of course, members of the Declassified Club are able to hear that straight away. And also listeners following the news, Gordon, will see that the Bulgarian spy ring we did a few episodes on a few weeks ago, well, they've been sentenced. And this Friday, we have an absolute treat. For club members, we have recorded an interview with the head of Scotland Yard's Counterterrorism Division.

Now, he was in charge of that case. He has an absolute insider's view on the minions, on those Bulgarians. It's the perfect complement to those episodes. And if you want to hear that, just go ahead and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. and take advantage of our launch discount. That's right.

Here you are. It's 2025 and we're talking Scotland Yard and minions. I believe he did talk about minions and refer to them as minions once or twice, maybe reluctantly.

Now, I will interject here.

the U.S. intelligence community. In defense of James Clapper, I must interject just a couple other points of context that you have left out of this, Gordon, which is this was an open hearing. Now, for those who have seen the video, It would have been hard, I think, to picture James Clapper looking more uncomfortable when he answered that question.

He's constantly sort of scratching his bald head, probably thinking, why in the hell is this guy asking me this question? I think... that the real mistake here that Clapper made was not answering the question in that way, because how could he have answered that responsibly in an open hearing? Yeah. It probably was not correcting the record afterward.

Also, I'll note this Clapper testimony in the sort of Edward Snowden, you know, revisionist history of all of this. In the Snowden history, the Clapper testimony is this sort of turning point for him, right? Yeah. That brings us back to my Snowden deadly sins, right?

And if you recall from earlier episodes of the list, sin number two, impure motive, Snowden's bulk download started months prior to the Clapper testimony. But I agree with you that, and I think this is something that will be a thread connecting the rest of the episodes in our wonderful series on Snowden is, there is a

tremendous gap between the understanding of this program, I think, inside the upper reaches of Congress and the intelligence community in the White House, and what the American people think is happening. That's where this article is such a bombshell, because Americans prior to this, ordinary people, did not have an understanding that any of this was authorized. Exactly.

citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the U.S. over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers. Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.

Well, and Prism is the codename for this program. And I think it is important, very important to note that this is targeting individuals the communications of foreign nationals. The intent behind this is for the United States government, for NSA to be able to query this database, essentially, and to be able to look at email, et cetera, of foreign nationals who are outside the United States. But

As that's being collected, you're, of course, collecting the information of Americans at the same time, right? Who are sort of swept up in these searches. But you're not- They're not the target of it. They're not the target of it, right? It's sort of- almost being collected incidentally by the NSA.

It's got these logos. I would argue very easy to draw on. whatever conclusion you like from that slide deck.

And that, for those who have been listening to our series on Edward Snowden, is the first time, thank you, Gordon, that I have not been forced to read an opening quote from Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record. That is instead... a quote from an absolute bombshell of a new story dropped by The Guardian on June 5th, 2013.

And important to note, it was legal. The tech companies knew this was happening. So a lot of the outrage that came afterward from Silicon Valley was primarily that it was leaked, not that it was happening.

And the legal basis for this was something called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which FISA, that act had been passed in the 70s, been updated, amended over time. The authorities that NSA was operating under, FBI was operating under, were, I believe, part of the 07-08 FISA Act.

And that Section 702 is what really compelled, in many ways, these tech companies to provide that information to the federal government.

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

Well, and I think it is important to note here, again, in Deadly Sin number four, Snowden, indiscriminate, leaking.

There is a massive question when you raise this issue of Snowden even understanding what in the world was on these slides. So there's an annual training inside NSA on Section 702 and FISA and how those queries could happen and the sort of legality and framework for understanding really PRISM. And Snowden had failed his annual training on Section 702, right?

And I will note, though, Gordon, in my effort to take extreme offense at all opening quotes, that this story was broken by a British newspaper, which is also offensive to me. But also an American journalist.

So, it is, again, I think an important fact to bring to bear in this is that he was outraged by this program, much in the way, you know, out in Hawaii, he'd been outraged by acts where he thought the government was sort of intervening as censor or whatever, but had not read the bills. I think, again, in this case, he is, I mean, and there's no doubt that this is an important

civil liberties topic, but at the same time, Edward Snowden does not actually understand, I think, what the NSA is doing as demonstrated by his inability to even pass the annual training on this.

Too many people.

And they probably do know, as we discussed last time, that someone's missing. He's missing.

That's right. That's right. Well, and for those tuning in here, we are on our fourth episode of our journey into the darkness of Edward Snowden's leaks.

But luckily, he's a massive narcissist with a... Massive ego, right? He is a Tekken warrior for his clan, Gordon. But it's so interesting. Single combat against the US government. He can't hide in the shadows.

And in everyday life, Gordon, well, they usually are. But not spies. Data brokers. Quietly collecting your personal information, building detailed profiles, and then selling them on without a warrant and without any warning.

And once it's out there, it spreads to scammers, identity thieves, really anyone with a Wi-Fi signal and bad intentions.

Think of it as your own digital counterintelligence service. So head to incogni.com slash rest is classified for 60% off an annual plan. That's incogni.com slash rest is classified. This episode is sponsored by NordVPN, which, Gordon, frankly, is essential if you'd rather not have your online life monitored like some Cold War embassy.

Also in this period, I will note that Dell had tried to move him in about September of 2010 to a position where he would support IT systems at CIA. But... But, and for those watching, this is a Scattered Castles reference, so mark it down. Because of his DROG mark, his sort of black flag mark, in Scattered Castles, the system that manages clearances, Dell couldn't put him in that position.

It's like having your own digital dead drop. Secure, untraceable, nobody quietly rifling through your browsing history or collecting your personal information.

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Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. No risk, no trace, no loose ends. The link is in the episode description.

All right, well, welcome back. We are with Edward Snowden. He is bunkered under a pineapple field in Hawaii with headphones on, probably looking quite vampiric after a night of playing video games and arriving late to work. Edward Snowden has now moved in his sort of ongoing odyssey through the United States secret state.

He has moved and he is now an analyst working for another contractor, right? Booz Allen Hamilton.

Still in Hawaii. Still working under contract for NSA, but at this other contractor, Booz Allen. And it is 2012. He has started... And despite his sort of sunlight deprived looks, Edward Snowden has a tremendous amount of access inside this world and is starting to really harvest it. Yeah.

Well, I suppose, you know, that wonderful quote you made me read at the beginning of this episode, Gordon, about Stoughton having access to every communication on planet Earth. It's total garbage, right? I mean, it's not true, but I think his access to like a sort of a search like X-Keyscore, a tool like that,

gave him, you know, I think in his own kind of serial fabricator mind, the willingness to say that because he does have access. It's true, right? He has access to a tremendous amount of information.

They had to find another spot for him that didn't require the same level of security clearance. And so he ends up kind of back in another role and then eventually in Hawaii. Yeah.

Well, I've seen the PowerPoint documents that have leaked. The complexity makes me wonder if I would be able to operate XP score because I think I would stare befuddled at the screen for a while without being able to use it. And Snowden even, I mean, and we'll, I'm sure, come to this a little bit later. He did claim... to have wiretapped a bunch of Congress people and Supreme Court judges.

I think most maybe outsiders who are looking at intelligence community buildings or sites through the lens of Hollywood would probably be surprised to know that there are basically no

checks yeah once you're in the system right once you're kind of inside you're cleared yeah obviously if you were carrying a garbage bag of documents out yeah someone might stop him but if you're carrying an sd card or if you have you know 30 pages of documents or something in a briefcase or a bag, no one's checking this stuff. You could just walk out.

And it actually, I mean, I remember every day leaving CIA, kind of going through this process, and it was a little stressful actually, of trying to check all of my bags and stuff to make sure that I wasn't carrying anything out on accident that was highly classified. And that kind of thing happened all the time. I mean, I had

friends who, and analysts actually tend to sweat this more than the case officers, because the case officers are out there in the world, you know, recruiting people and kind of dealing with classified stuff outside of a SCIF, you know, a secure department and information facility or vaults. I had a friend who would walk out and he walked out one time with a document he shouldn't have.

He was about to have a heart attack. The point is, it's easy.

Well, and you've just teed up my fourth deadly sin of Edward Snowden, Gordon, which is completely indiscriminate.

Leaking, right? So 1.5 million documents are what he takes. The vast majority, of course, unrelated documents any of the domestic kind of surveillance programs that so angered him. How high, Gordon, do you think those documents would reach into the sky if they were stacked? I don't know, but you're going to tell me. I am going to tell you. To the moon. I'm going to tell you in kilometers even.

So the measure that you will understand, five kilometers high.

If you stack those up. Okay. He's a system administrator. So he's got access to massive databases kind of read write delete access right so you can see all this stuff so the scraping tools that he uses to do these downloads are more or less completely indiscriminate now he does do some specific searches right but he's scraping through these databases He has no idea what's even on these.

And there's an interesting kind of techie reason for some of this, which is that when senior NSA officials would come from around the world, come from Fort Meade and would log on to computers out at Hawaii, essentially their hard drive, what was on their system, really their user profile rather, in D.C. at Fort Meade would replicate that. out in Hawaii.

And so a lot of the flashier, sexier PowerPoints that ended up getting leaked initially are because senior NSA policy people had come out, not to meet with Snowden, but for other meetings in Hawaii.

And their files are downloaded there and he pulls them. Okay. Unknowingly, in many cases, off of these databases.

That's good. I'm going to steal that for a novel.

And I do agree with that. And I'm grateful that Edward Snowden did not go the WikiLeaks route. It also bears mentioning that If he had gone the WikiLeaks route and just pushed them out, he would have given Assange and his organization, or something like it, the credit. I think at his core, Edward Snowden, good, bad, and ugly, is a narcissist.

It would have been almost unthinkable for him to just push this stuff out there and not be the face of it. It's actually more strategic for someone who wants to be the face of this thing and to kind of ride this. to have journalists or somebody else writing stories that you can sort of catapult yourself on.

He has a five kilometer high stack, three miles for our American listeners of documents, 1.5 million documents. And he's going to try to give them to journalists. And so I guess, I mean, the question here is, well, who is he going to reach out to? Which journalist is he going to try? And who's really going to help him tell this story?

I think as he sees it, this fantastic story, this lewd story about the surveillance state, NSA spying on Americans, and it's all going to lead into an absolutely insane encounter and really a chase, I think, in a most unusual place.

And we may also finally give me an opportunity, Gordon, to watch War Games, right? And discuss it with you. Thus completing my delayed entry into American manhood. So thank you for listening and we will see you next time. See you next time.

Well, and he's also remembered in this period for not being able to show up to work on time, which I'll just mention in my fact.

Right. And apparently because he's playing video games so late at night, you know, and again, it's this kind of thread of this guy is smart, actually likable in many respects. He's introverted, but, you know, he's got a long term girlfriend. He's got relationships with people, but he's not really able to kind of function properly. in a normal work environment.

There is another feature here, which is colleagues from... the sort of pineapple bunker, remember that Snowden was sort of very... He would come out and say that, okay, well, things like the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, these are going to lead to online censorship, which is a theme of his. He's very concerned about that. Free internet is what he wants.

But then he'll admit to having read neither bill and not understanding really what's in them. So I do think you also see... these glimmers in this period, even earlier, of somebody who is extremely certain about his beliefs, does have... Ideological beliefs. Ideological beliefs.

And despite the fact that I think that line, Gordon, that I just read, that you just made me read, which is actually the better way to say it, is completely fabricated. Deadly sin number one from Edward Snowden. We're going to talk a little bit today about really Snowden's journey to getting to a point where he is sitting on top of a trove of massive secrets.

He's not just a mercenary, but he jumps to conclusions very quickly, gets to very certain conclusions very quickly about those beliefs. Yeah, I think that's right.

Well, no, I don't buy it. There's a very kind of critical period in the middle of 2012 that's kind of essential to this. But up until that point, I mean, it is probably worth us talking a little bit about that kind of access he had. Because he does end up in a unique position to take a massive trove of documents.

And he's kind of pulling together it is, you know, because again, in Hawaii, I mean, I think he'll say he had like 30 minutes of work to do a day of actual work. So he starts kind of pulling together what is this program called Heartbeat, where he's essentially trying to create a centralized repository for a lot of the documents he's going to end up stealing.

Well, if you enter Edward Snowden on Google, his tagline will say NSA whistleblower. Yeah. And that's how he pops up. But I think this is... Deadly sin number two.

So this is impure motives.

This is critical to understand because lost in all of the memoirs, a lot of the very positive reception that Snowden's leaks received is a very critical piece of the timeline, which is you get to June of 2012. Okay. He's in Hawaii and Snowden has a massive fight with his supervisors over what else? A software patch that gets deployed. It fails. Right.

And there is a fight on his team between supervisors over why this happened. And. Essentially what Snowden does, which is similar to what he did in his very kind of first months at CIA, is in this back and forth fight, he sends a note like three or four levels above the chain to a senior NSA employee at Fort Meade. And keep in mind, Snowden is a contractor working for Dell.

So rightly or wrongly, he's not a blue badge NSA employee working at the fork. So he's elevated this issue massively. This obviously doesn't go well for him. There's a note that comes back. He gets a quick rebuke from Washington. His behavior is, quote, totally unacceptable. Unacceptable in all caps. And so you can only imagine what's going on in the cubicle form out under that pineapple field.

And it is two weeks after this. June, 2012 incident that he starts these bulk downloads. So I think the recipe of sort of the sauce here of Snowden's decision, I think really matters a lot. And my view is that it's kind of three things, right? Number one, you have a guy who has this incredible certainty in his own beliefs, his own kind of worldview that feels like he's been put down by the system.

wronged by the system that he should be way ahead of where he is. He should probably have his boss's job or his boss's boss's job. And so I think you do at the base level have this kind of

revengers tale that has the ideology this kind of you know free internet privacy thing layered on top but in in my view the facts the chronology of sort of when he starts down this journey show it to be very much motivated by revenge

I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. All right. Well, that was Edward Snowden, also from his memoir, Permanent Record. And we're back with episode two of the Edward Snowden journey.

Well, I think that's my third deadly sin, Gordon, is that he doesn't avail himself of these channels. And I agree with you that you could look at Thomas Drake, you could look at these case studies of NSA folks who had tried and it had not gone well for them. But what I find... Interesting is that Snowden is perfectly willing throughout his career to go to the IG. The Inspector General.

To go to superiors with all manner of grievances, complaints, issues that have... been detrimental to his career. And so, number one, I think given the nature of the information that he's going to leak, there are protections for this. There's a 1998 Whistleblower Protection Act that would have covered contractors. There are DOD regs that cover this.

He could have gone to any number of House Intel or Senate Intel Committee staffs with specific documents and brought them to their attention, right? But he doesn't. For someone who has shown himself willing to go to those authorities in the past, I think there's a level of irresponsibility, right, with this material. This is material that is funded by the U.S. taxpayer.

So to not go through some of those channels, I just think, man, that's an irresponsible decision.

Well, and I'll just again, add to my, Deadly sin number one on Edward Snowden's track record of fabrication was one of the documents that he's going to take or one set of documents he's going to take in this 2012 period, mid 2012. He's going to steal the test and the answer key for a job inside a group at NSA called TAO, Tailored Access Operations, which is essentially in that era.

is the NSA's elite hackers, the guys and girls who go out and try to access, really hard to access networks of our foreign adversaries. And Snowden applies for this job, but he's already, I mean, this is where I think you do get this kind of jumbled set of motives

for why he's taking all these documents because I guess he could have chanced upon this and then thought, well, I've got the test, I might as well apply. But he also does have some very mercenary potential motives for some of these document thefts. But he takes this test and... of course, passes it with flying colors, right? Because he's got all the answers.

And then he gets offered, and again, I think this is a great insight into his personality, because he gets offered a job working inside TAO, which by the way is a premier, inside NSA is a premier job to have. Gets offered a GS-12, government scale 12 role inside TAO and turns it down Because he felt he should have been offered a GS-15 salary.

And this, again, it's absolutely fascinating because you just... Let's get into some of these facts around how this guy behaved and who he is. He's 29 at that point. And I mean, it's a little bit different kind of depending on the agency. But... It would probably have taken a really competent – no, he joins when he's 23. He gets into the secret world.

It would have taken 14, 15 years, something like that, for a competent person to rise to the level of GS-15. Yeah. He's been in for six and he's already thinking, well, I should have my 15. Anyway, he turns down the TA role and stays in Hawaii. But there's some really interesting aspects to this guy's character that I think get left out of the geography.

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. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd use the jihadist term.

I believe that he's told them who he is. Yeah. Right. These journalists, because he up until this point, he'd been using. Yeah.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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...

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... He says to Poitras and Greenwald, he's a senior 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 stepped in and given a few lectures once when someone got sick.

You know what I mean? 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 kind of 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.

They were flummoxed at the addition of a credible journalist. Well, yeah. To the soup that Edward Snowden was...

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 his 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 U.S. 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 Sona 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.

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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.

It's not actual alligator skin.

It feels like a really great way to stand out in the middle of a hotel. Yeah. 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.

He's probably watching them from somewhere else.

After having seen the documentary, I'm not sure I would describe him as chic nerd glasses.

Greenwald also says that Snowden looked like he had only recently started shaving. Yeah. Perhaps new at the practice.

I wonder why they thought he was going to be so much older.

He's back in his parents' basement playing Tekken.

He should have sprung for the suite.

You wrote here, Gordon, in this...

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 yeah i didn't understand that in my notes i wrote wtf is this yeah what is that i don't know it's something to do with like if the water falls on the soy sauce then it you get a pattern and you can i don't know i didn't understand an elaborate soy sauce drip machine and set up yeah triggered by the door

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 and job description. And Ewan's like, no, what's your name? Yeah. It stalled at the beginning. 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. Yeah.

Well, I don't know.

It's interesting because obviously that is a huge deal for Ewan, 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-

I think it's an interesting question from a journalistic perspective, but you could make the same parallel if, and 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 snowed in. in the hands of these journalists.

again, to take kind of the lens of, to some degree, the journalist, to some degree, he's a volunteer here. To some degree, the journalists are recruiting him. There'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 police 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 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 a nice little sign of Edward Snowden's subterranean 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.

Because they're literally writing stories like in the room.

You've got to actually contact people in the NSA or the intelligence community to start, I mean, at least saying we have something and we're going to run it.

Also, Snowden, and you can even see this in the documentary, is he's dealing with personal stuff back home too, right? Because 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 kind of see him troubled by this in the documentary, right?

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.

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 bad written. 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.

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 rumor 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?

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. Okay. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.

Well, I mean, honestly, in the documentary about Snowden, Citizen Four, 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 character. 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.

Is that a normal thing, Gordon, is to have someone who could be legit or could be a total whack job encrypting? Reaching out with some, you know, sort of tantalizing hint that they've got a great story for you. I mean, that must happen some frequency.

And she's based in Berlin.

And that, unfortunately, dear listeners, was yet another reading from Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record. And we are now, for those who have been listening to this wonderful series about... Edward Snowden.

Critically, both of these journalists are outside of the US.

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.

It does make me think a little bit of... the series we did earlier in the year on Adolf Tolkachev, where he reaches out to the CIA four, five, six times and essentially gets the cold shoulder.

She's actually received a stolen document from the National Security Agency at this point.

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. Snowden, up to this point, he's been a CIA officer, technical officer. He's been a contractor for the NSA.

If you put yourself, Gordon, in Greenwald or Poitras' 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 you to go meet me in Hong Kong. There's probably no playbook here.

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.

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 it, at first blush, could make it look like he's under the control of or sort of being influenced by maybe the Chinese intelligence services.

I think it also does show a bit of Snowden's naivete 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 color a lot of the stories – The movement out of the United States really casts a pall over him, right?

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 kind of defend him.

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 up front 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.

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?

I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. Together, we're the hosts of another Goal Hanger show, The Rest is Classified, and we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies.

It was 2011 when Snowden shocked the world by revealing that the American government was bulk collecting data on its own citizens and even spying on our allies.

We will take you through the whole story from Snowden's early career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia.

I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. Together, we're the hosts of another Goalhanger show, The Rest is Classified, and we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. June 5th, 2013, this first article drops, and it's a massive one.

There is a... tremendous gap between the understanding of this program, I think, inside the upper reaches of Congress and the intelligence community in the White House and what the American people think is happening. And that's where this article is such a bombshell because Americans prior to this, ordinary people, did not have an understanding that any of this was authorized. Exactly.

He absolutely is. So one of the presenters is a former CIA analyst who now writes spy novels, and that's David McCloskey. But the man who is also presenting it, a man very close to my heart, is Gordon Carrera.

uh so bbc security correspondent but more germainly massive enthusiast for pigeons who first alerted me to the massive role that pigeons have played in history you will then remember i nagged you for days weeks months was it a year no there was no nagging required to do a whole episode on pigeons which i think everyone would agree was a complete triumph i bargained them down from a series

And Gordon alerted us to the pigeon gap, the fact that China is way ahead of us when it comes to pigeons, pigeon communications. And it'd be interesting to find out from him whether he thinks that we've managed to close the pigeon gap. But more germainly, Gordon, welcome to the show and congratulations on The Rest Is Classified. Clearly, both of you were massive experts on the world of espionage.

But how did you come to find yourselves doing this podcast? Gordon

So after your virtual visit, Amazon will deliver your prescriptions directly to your door.

Very Kingsman.

Because, Gordon, I guess the... The question is, does spying matter? Does it influence history? And for so long, the ability to answer that question has been locked up in archives or governed by the Official Secrets Act. But that's slightly changing, isn't it? And I guess that you and David, of all the people in the world, are the best qualified to tease that question out.

So you're going to have Alistair Campbell as a guest on your show.

As touches our own podcast, of course, we all know and love you as a great enthusiast for the role of pigeons in espionage. Can we just end by asking you, is Britain closing the pigeon gap?

Maybe the rest is classified could become a great campaigning podcast. Campaigning podcast, yeah.