Epstein Secrets

and they are very grateful” American intelligence officers knowledgeable about the operations of the FSB, agreed with Kalugin’s assessment. General Hayden, for example, who served both as director of the NSA, CIA, and Air Force counterintelligence, told me in an interview that he saw no other possibilit

mestic Surveillance Under Obama.” Along with it was the FISA warrant to Verizon. The PRISM story broke hours later in the Washington Post. Written by Gellman and Poitras, it claimed that the NSA and FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S, Internet companies which were knowin

e name and provided his credit card, but he was he in contact with three high-profile journalists, two well-known hacktavists and, as he suggested to Gellman, a foreign diplomatic mission. Even if Snowden had failed to persuade the Washington Post to publish a coded identifier, the mission’s interest would

arfare, conventional defensive rules do not apply. “There are no rivers or hills up here. It’s all flat. All advantage goes to the attacker,” General Hayden said in an inter- view in 2015 with the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. His point was that because there are no defensive positions, the United

ts that could undo the NSA’s intelligence gathering as “the single point of failure.” While still shielding his own identity in May 2013, he wrote to Gellman that U.S. intelligence “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them

. Unlike the telephone program that Snowden revealed, the PRISM program produced actionable intelligence until the time when Snowden blew it. General Hayden, who was NSA director during the three years following the 9/11 attack, wrote that these surveil- lance powers, among other things, “uncovered illici

”: Shils, Torment of Secrecy. 47 “|The elites] know everything”: Roy, “Edward Snowden Meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack.” 47 “What do you think”: Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months of NSA Rev- elations, Says His Mission’s Accomplished.” 48 violate U.S. espionage laws: Michael Hayden, interview wit

e-piping.” One result was that the NSANet, which Snowden had access to at Dell in 2012, became a shared network. It had common access points. General Hayden described them to me as the equivalent of “reading rooms” in a library. They served as a means for NSA workers to exchange ideas about the problems t

s for his journalistic event. He was also apparently in contact with at least one foreign mission during this period, according to what he written to Gellman on May 25". In that email concerning when and how his story was to be published by the Washington Post, Snowden even asked Gellman to include in it s

RSIGHT_020405 254 10. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Did Snowden Act Alone? > “Totality of Snowden’s Actions,”— Author’s interview with Michael Hayden. Also, “Hayden interview,” Meet The Press, NBC, December 15, 2013 “Maclean stole immensely valuable. ..”—See Appendix A, Donald Maclean “Whistle blower Bradley Bi

ed rendezvous with a journalist. As previously mentioned, when he left Hong Kong not a single journalist had agreed to meet him in Hong Kong. Indeed, Gellman considered Hong Kong, as he put it, “in the jurisdiction of a country that’s unfriendly to the United States,” and notified Snowden that he would not