HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020295.jpg

143

had released this document, it would be consistent with Kucherena’s assertion that Snowden had access to the archive.

Adding to the intrigue, Poitras was apparently caught by surprise when the Merkel story broke in Der Spiegel. She urgently texted Snowden on what she called “background” (which ordinarily means that a journalist will not attribute information to a source.) She asked him in the text to explain the NSA’s actions. Snowden explained to her that Merkel was listed by her true name (and not by a codename) in the NSA document because the German chancellor was a NSA “target not an asset.” Presumably, Poitras would have already known that distinction if she had the document referred to in Der Spiegel. If the Merkel document was not among the data given to Poitras in Hong Kong , how did it get to the authors of the Der Spiegel article?

One of the authors, Appelbaum, as discussed earlier, had been in contact with Snowden before he went public. He had served as Poitras’ co-interrogator of Snowden while he was still working at the NSA in May 2013. Appelbaum also, was one of the leading supporters of Wikileaks. Since he was famously an advocate of revealing government secrets, it seems unlikely that he would have delayed releasing such a bombshell about Merkel’s phone if Snowden had given him this document before he had left Hong Kong in June 2013. Why would Appelbaum kept it secret for more than four months? The same pressure to publish would also apply to the journalists Snowden had dealt with in Hong Kong. If Snowden had given Poitras, Greenwald, Lam or MacAskill the Merkel document, or even told them about it in their interviews with him in Hong Kong, the Guardian would have certainly rushed out such a scoop.

According to source with knowledge of the Snowden investigation, there was no document referencing any spying on Merkel’s phone among the 58,000 documents on the thumb drive that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. That absence would explain why Poitras had to send a text to Snowden in Moscow to ask for an explanation after the story broke. Further confirmation of the absence of this document in the material Snowden provided journalists in Hong Kong comes from James Bamford, a well-respected expert on the NSA. In the course of researching his 2014 article on Snowden for Wired magazine, he was given access to all the documents Snowden gave to Poitras, Greenwald and Gellman. Bamford used a sophisticated indexing program to search through the database specifically for The Merkel material. , Even so, he did not find any. He reported that no document that even mentioned Merkel given to journalists in Hong Kong mentioned Merkel. It therefore appeared that the Merkel document was provided to Der Spiegel after Snowden went to Moscow in June. If so, some party had access to NSA documents after Snowden arrived in Russia and provided the authors of the Der Spiegel story with the scoop. In that context, it may have not been a pure coincide that Kucherena’s disclosed that Snowden had access to documents which he had not given to journalists in Hong Kong shortly before just such a document was [published in Germany.

For his part, Bamford explored the possibility that there might be another mole in the NSA. Was it possible another person in the NSA was stealing documents? He wrote Poitras and asked

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020295