Wolff: The curious case of Edward Snowden and Russian hacks

Michael Wolff, Special to USA TODAY 7:02 p.m. ET Jan. 8, 2017

In this Feb. 14, 2015 file photo, former National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden appears on a live video feed broadcast from Moscow at an event sponsored by ACLU Hawaii in Honolulu.(Photo: AP)

The Edward Snowden story wont go away. One reason for its persistence is that everybody who has given it a seconds further thought surely sees something astonishingly weird about it: For goodness sake, Snowden, the mastermind of the greatest theft of U.S. intelligence in history lives in comfort and security in Russia where hes protected from pursuit by the U.S. government. This is a tear in our heros tale that, in liberal society, we aren't supposed to pay attention to.

This heroism, it is important to note, derives from Snowdens own version of his story. The Guardian and The Washington Post effectively partnered with Snowden in publishing his documents and telling his tale (the Guardian, making a big financial bet on Snowden in its expansion into the American market, overtly went into the Snowden promotion business), with The New York Times joining later. Citizen 4,the Oscar-winning documentary about Snowden made by Laura Poitras, one of Snowdens collaborators in the release of the documents, puts Snowden at the center of the film with him as the single source of his heroic narrative. Snowden,the feature film made by Oliver Stone, basically dramatizes the making of that documentary as well as Snowdens own telling of the events. Current media sources for information about Snowden are almost exclusively limited to Snowdens circle of advisers and defenders and to Snowdens own tweets.

Nobody, except the federal government which arrived at the exact opposite conclusion from the media regarding Snowdens actions and motives has meticulously scrutinized the Snowden tale, and the federal government is seen not as the rightful protector of the nations secrets, but as the party exposed by them.

But thats the rub. While the government might be fairly tarred for its surveillance overreach by a few of the Snowden documents, there are yet millions more documents in the Snowden heist, according to the government, with secrets that are now in unknown hands. Its the fate of those secrets thats at the heart of Edward Jay Epsteins new book, How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, The Man and the Theft,the first independent investigation of the Snowden affair, to be published by Knopf next week.

Epstein is a legend in the world of secrets in his own right. His first book Inquest,featuring an exclusive set of interviews with most of the players on the Warren Commission, shattered confidence in the commissions report and opened the door for decades of conspiracy theory. Hes the biographer of the CIAs legendary counter-intelligence chief, James Angleton, and, too, of the Russian-connected billionaire and businessman, Armand Hammer.

Epstein in his new book retraces Snowdens route around the world, deconstructing each of the key, and widely accepted, givens in his account: 1) that he acted alone in his extraordinary theft of NSA documents; 2) that his flight to Hong Kong was happenstance; 3) that his escape to Russia and sanctuary there were more happenstance; 4) that he somehow dispatched his millions of documents before his flight to Moscow and that the Russians were gentlemenenough to allow him to arrive empty handed.

At the heart of the book is not only the finding that Snowden gave his secrets to Putins Russia is it possible to imagine a scenario in which Putin and Russian intelligence would not have wrangled the greatest cache of U.S. secrets ever available to them? but that, in every epistemological sense, Snowdens actions and motivations, idealistic or not, track the long history of men and women we regard as having betrayed their countries.

It is, as Epstein vividly shows, a story seen through the topsy-turvy politics of this particular moment. Snowden is a hero to liberals everywhere, except to the liberals who have the maximum amount of information about his actions: almost all members of the Obama administration and every liberal Democrat involved in congressional intelligence oversight, see Snowden as a dangerous national security malefactor (there is, among Snowden defenders, a tacit belief that the intelligence establishment has brainwashed everybody in the Obama administration and all Democrats in Congress).

Trumps election provides an even more peculiar development. The same liberal media that now decries Trump for his purported friendliness toward Putin has been perfectly sanguine about Snowden residing comfortably in Moscow. As confusing, the so-called Kremlin-directed interference by Russian hackers in the U.S. election aided by Wikileaks, now a core liberal media point of outrage, exists side by side with a worshipful acceptance of Snowden, likely Russias greatest hacker, one also assisted by Wikileaks. (In the moral universe of hacking, even without the implicit connection, how are Snowdens hacks different from Russian hacks?)

Snowden has served several intersecting agendas the big-data industrys battle over government interference, the lefts decades-long fight with the national security establishment, and the medias love of leaks and look-the-part heroes without anyone wanting to dig too far into his bona fides.

But then there is Edward Epstein. Throughout his long career his specialty has been to rescue facts obscured or tangled by political bias, self-interest, or plain incompetence (and often all three). The enemy of journalism is journalism, that collection of conventional wisdom, easy log-rolling, popular prejudice, and controlled sources. Epstein, not only exposes Snowden as a callow self-aggrandizer who, in the interests of his own liberal virtue, has made a Faustian deal, but the media as his protector.

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Wolff: The curious case of Edward Snowden and Russian hacks