‘How America Lost Its Secrets,’ by Edward Jay Epstein

On June 6, 2013, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published an explosive story revealing it had obtained official documents showing that the super-secret National Security Agency had been engaging in the “bulk collection” of phone bill records of millions of Americans.

Three days later, in a video posted on the Guardian’s website, a 29-year-old employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a firm contracted to provide tech support to the NSA, declared that he was the source of the documents.

From a Hong Kong hotel room, Edward Joseph Snowden claimed the NSA was undermining privacy and democracy around the world.

Snowden, already the subject of books, a documentary and a feature film, has been hailed as a hero.

Epstein concedes that some of Snowden’s disclosures had positive results but contends that ultimately Snowden was no whistle-blower but was at the least a defector and, wittingly or unwittingly, even part of an elaborate Russian spy operation.

(That seemed unlikely to start, and this week Obama commuted the prison sentence of former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning for leaking military secrets but did not act on Snowden’s request.) The book is also timely given the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and newly inaugurated President Trump’s controversial comments about both Russia and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Epstein is a veteran investigative journalist whose previous books have delved into the murky world of intelligence agencies, examining what he calls “the envelope of circumstances surrounding” events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In Snowden, he employs this methodology in an effort to “walk back the cat,” in spy parlance, and solve the mystery of how a young analyst for the NSA pulled off “the largest theft of secret documents in the history of American intelligence.”

Posting under his alias TheTrueHooHa, he boasted that he precision-shaped his body with weight lifting, practiced martial arts and had blond hair “with volume.”

In May 2004, at age 20, Snowden enlisted in the Army Reserve as a special forces recruit.

Epstein says he did not meet minimum CIA standards and suggests he got the job through his grandfather, a career Coast Guard man and top intelligence official.

Rather than face a security investigation, Snowden resigned, which left his top secret security clearance intact.

The CIA did not share personnel information with private firms, so Dell didn’t know why he’d left the CIA.

Snowden decided to apply for a senior job in the NSA, hacked into the system and stole the entrance exam, a breach that went undetected for a year.

(The NSA would say it had no record of that.) He began wearing a jacket to work with a modified insignia that showed the NSA eagle clutching AT&T phone lines.

[...] order, Snowden managed to get passwords to 24 separate compartments of Level 3 documents so sensitive NSA officials call them “the Keys to the Kingdom.”

The documents Snowden purloined from the NSA would be the basis for a spate of stories revealing an astonishing range of electronic spying not only by the NSA but by its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

According to Epstein, Snowden had obtained no visas, “strongly” suggesting he was headed to Moscow all along.

[...] this spy story leaves us with the most obvious facts — and troubling questions.

The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), winner of the 2013 American Book Award.