Epstein Secrets

am headed by Richard “Rick” Ledgett, who was then director of the NSA’s Threat Opera- tions Center at the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Ledgett was the logical choice to head the damage assessment inves- tigation because the center’s regional branch in Hawaii was under his command. Ledgett fl

n camera in his Hong Kong interview in June 2013 that NSA investi- gators would have “a heart attack” when they discovered the extent of the breach. Ledgett, the NSA official who had conducted the damage assess- ment, while not having a heart attack, confirmed that Snowden had taken a massive number of do

@ tions he held with the CIA and the DIA, but no effort was made by @ the team of journalists to verify the information. Instead, MacAskill wrote to Janine Gibson in New York, “The Guinness is good.” It was a prearranged code by which MacAskill certified Snowden’s cred- ibility for The Guardian. Gibson told Gre

ell was transferring files held at Fort Meade to backup computers in Hawaii. He “was moving copies of that data there for them,” said Deputy Director Ledgett, “which was perfect cover for stealing the [NSA] data” through the fall and winter of 2012. The security mea- sures at the Hawaii base presented no o

ks documents.) As the days ticked away while Snowden was waiting for Green- wald in Hong Kong, Greenwald was awaiting a green light to go there from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who was based in New York. Under Gibson’s leadership, The Guardian's website had effectively “gone into the busi

position since the top- secret unit was responsible for discovering and countering the threats posed by Chinese, Russian and other adversary nations. Ledgett was also the logical choice to head the damage assessment investigation since the Center’s regional branch in Hawaii was from where highly-sensitive

to 2014, first learned about the impending story in the Guardian on June 4, 2013 while he was in Germany meeting with its top intelligence officials. Janine Gibson, the Guardian’s American website editor had notified the NSA it intended to break a story based on NSA the next day. It took NSA counterintelligence