Epstein Secrets

ct, Snowden had stolen a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their monitoring of adversaries, which was their job. By the time

on authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the con- dition that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had confidence, the Scottish-born Ewen MacAskill, a sixty-one-year-old veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for The Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the bona fides of

, the other intelligence services, and the Department of Defense deemed what was relevant for national security. Even though the NSA remained part of the Department of Defense, its job went far beyond providing military intelligence. It also acted as a service agency to other American intelligence services. They pre- pared

he need for a face-to-face meeting with Snowden. Even after he had revealed his true identity to Poitras and Greenwald on June 3, the Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill offered him the option of remaining an unnamed source for the stories. He said, as he later told Vanity Fair, “You should remain anonymous; the stori

that he compromised contained many other secret sources and methods. The full extent of the damage Snowden did may never be fully known, even though the Department of Defense spent the better part of a year, and tens of thousands of investigative man-hours, trying to sort out just the compromised sources and methods per- t

inor subterfuge: Hosenball, “NSA Contractor Hired Snowden Despite Concerns About Resume Discrepancies.” 76 “playing with fire”: Spencer Ackerman and Ewen MacAskill, “Snowden Calls @ for Whistleblower After Claims by New Pentagon Source,” Guardian, May 22, @ 2016. 76 establish a paper trail: Director of Nationa