The Sunday Times published a big bombshell (here’s the full text) yesterday, reporting that Edward Snowden’s cache of documents has been decrypted by Russian and Chinese officials, and that MI6 agents have actually been pulled out of ongoing operations because their identities are now compromised. It’s a story that, if it’s true, has enormous ramifications for the intelligence community and for real people’s lives, particularly when added to the impact of the OPM hack that was just revealed last week. But here’s the thing: the Times article is thin, and I mean razor thin. The piece quotes exactly one named source, former GCHQ director David Omand, who seems to be reacting to the Times reporting and not actually adding anything to it:
Sir David Omand, the former director of GCHQ, said the news that Russia and China had access to Snowden’s material was a “huge strategic setback” that was “harming” to Britain, America and their Nato allies.
That bit that I highlighted is a really weird bit of phrasing. If Omand actually knew that Russia and China had access to Snowden’s material then he wouldn’t be reacting to “the news” that they had it, right? Everybody else in the piece is anonymous, and there’s no firm evidence apart from those anonymous quotes for anything in the piece. It struck me as I read the piece that Seymour Hersh’s investigation into the Bin Laden raid actually had as much, if not more, substance going for it than this piece does (particularly since Hersh was countering the government’s narrative where this piece is simply parroting it), yet I’d be willing to bet that the same crowd currently waving this Times report around as evidence of Snowden’s villainy were also among the first to reject Hersh’s piece because it lacked conclusive, on-the-record sources.
Greenwald really let the Times have it today, but there’s a problem with Greenwald talking the lead on debunking a story like this: he’s got a direct personal interest in how this all shakes out. He’s right that the Times reporting suffers for its anonymity and he’s able to pick apart some other important factual problems with the Times piece (crucially, the Times has already just up and deleted a part of the story that claimed that Greenwald’s husband, David Miranda, met with Snowden in Moscow in 2013. But he’s also asking his readers to trust him, and Snowden, when he says that Snowden didn’t take any documents with him when he left Hong Kong, and that whatever he had while he was in Hong Kong didn’t somehow fall into Chinese possession. He’s also asking us to trust his Intercept colleague, Ryan Gallagher, who says he’s reviewed Snowden’s documents and found nothing in there that would put any MI6 agents’ identities at risk.
On the other hand, the Times has to support its own claims, and it’s not doing that very well. For example, the story about Miranda meeting Snowden in Moscow was important to the overall piece because it was the only “evidence” establishing that Snowden still had documents with him when he got to Moscow, so now that they’ve excised that part of the story a major part of the overall narrative has no facts behind it. There’s also the article’s bizarre dual assertion from the anonymous UK government sources that Snowden has “blood on his hands,” but that there’s “no evidence of anyone being harmed.” Both of these things cannot be true, and in combination they have the effect of sounding like some sloppy, overeager official trying to really smear Snowden (and, to be fair, the US and UK governments have been trying to paint Snowden in as negative a light as possible since he originally leaked the documents he stole) and then the government being forced to walk the smear back because there’s no evidence to support it.
Overall the Times report includes too little evidence and too many of these written oddities (like the reporters were trying so hard to write around the lack of evidence that they wound up having to make some very strange choices) to stand on its own merit. There’s no hard evidence in the piece that any MI6 agents have been pulled out at all, let alone that they were pulled out because of something the Russians or Chinese saw in Snowden’s documents. We ought to know after last week’s OPM news that there are any number of ways that Russian and Chinese officials could have uncovered the identities of a group of MI6 agents, and the people who talked anonymously to the Times seem frankly just a little too sure that Snowden’s files are responsible for whatever allegedly happened. And those weaknesses in the Times piece were magnified last night when one of its co-authors, Tom Harper, was interviewed about the story by CNN and couldn’t respond to even basic questions about his own reporting:
George Howell: How do senior officials at No. 10 Downing Street know these files were breached?
Tom Harper: Well, uh, I don’t know, to be honest with you, George. All we know is that this is effectively the official position of the British government…
Howell: How do they know what was in them if they were encrypted? Has the British government also gotten into these files?
Harper: Well. Um, I mean, the files came from America and the UK. So, uh, they may already have known for sometime what Snowden took. Again, that’s not something that we’re clear on, so we don’t go into that level of detail in the story. We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment.
…
Howell: So essentially you’re reporting what the government is saying, but as far as the evidence to substantiate it, you’re not really able to comment or to explain that at this point. Right?
Harper: No… obviously when you’re dealing with intelligence, you know, it’s the toughest nut to crack. And, um, unless you actually have leaked intelligence documents, like Snowden had, it’s very difficult to say anything with certainty.
“How do you know that your reporting is accurate?” “Buh, well, that’s what the government told us, and, uh, we don’t know anything durrrrr.” I mean, come on. if Snowden’s documents really are putting people’s lives at risk, then that is a huge story that demands some serious journalistic effort to get right. Unfortunately, what the Times produced was not a serious journalistic effort, it was more like a press release.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 