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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Did Snowden Act Alone?

“When you look at the totality of Snowden's actions certainly one hypothesis that jumps out at you, that seems to explain his ability to do all these things, is that he had help and had help from somebody who was very competent in these matters.”

--General Michael Hayden, Former Director of the NSA and CIA

Snowden describes himself a whistle-blower, and, according to the polls, the vast majority of the American public, accept this definition of him. But the operational distinction between a whistle-blower and a spy is not always clear. A whistle-blower enters the enterprise of stealing state secrets for reasons of conscience, but so do many spies. Such conscience-driven spies are called, in CIA parlance, “ideological agents.” For instance, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, who was one of the most important Russian spies in the Cold War, was an ideological recruit. Maclean stole immensely valuable US nuclear secrets for the Russian intelligence service without receiving any monetary compensation and later defected to Moscow to avoid arrest.

As it turns out, the acceptance of money is also necessarily a meaningful distinction when it comes to espionage. To be sure, many spies get paid, but some whistle-blowers also receive paid a rich bounty for their work. Indeed, under federal laws, whistle-blowers can qualify for multi-million dollars bounties for exposing financial malfeasance. The whistle blower Bradley Birkenfeld, for example, after he himself was paroled from prison in 2012, received an award of $104 million for providing data that exposed illicit tax sheltering at the Swiss UBS bank. Assange also offered political whistle-blower six-figure cash bounties from money he raises on the Internet. In 2015, for instance Wikileaks offered S100, 000 bounties to any whistle-blowers who provided the site with secret documents exposing details of the Pacific Trade Agreement.

Nor is acting alone necessarily a line that divides whistle blowers from spies. In many cases, whistle-blowers have accomplices that help them carry out their mission. For example, in 1969, the celebrated whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst at the RAND Corporation, had an accomplice, Anthony Russo, who also had worked at RAND. (Both were indicted by the government.) Acting in concert, they copied secret documents that became famously known as the Pentagon Papers.

Whistle-blowers also can, like conventional spies, enter into elaborate conspiracies to carry out a penetration operation, For example, on the night of March 8, 1971, eight whistle-blowers working together with burglary tools, broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole

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