Now the US government seems to think Snowden had help from
Russia. Why else, they ask, should he have fled there?
Because I love conspiracy theories, here’s one of my own. I don’t
think Snowden had help from Russia. I think he had help from….
First, that name. Edward Snowden. Try saying that aloud. Try saying that aloud in a proper British
accent. Then ask: have I ever heard of any American called “Edward Snowden”? Ed,
maybe. Eddie, most definitely. Eddy, if he’d been influenced by hippies.
Eduardo, perhaps. Ediah, if he was feeling Biblical or had just joined a rap
group.
But Edward Snowden?
Then there’s Hongkong. Most Americans who flee the country
flee down South to Mexico, or they head up north to Canada. Isn’t Hongkong a little
out of the American cultural trajectory?
But it is right at the heart of British spy thriller
territory, of course. That breathless mix of East and West, where the British
empire played out most of its nineteenth century “The Sun never sets” drama.
Then there’s David Cameron, and his most insistent insistence
that the British have no issues whatsoever with surveillance, that he and
Britain are totally 100 percent behind the Americans, and so on, and so forth. I
hope you caught that BBC segment on TV, it was a masterpiece. While all the
rest of the European leaders exuded gloom and glum, Mr. Cameron was practically
falling out of his seat, insisting that surveillance was the greatest thing
since sliced bread. Or the British equivalent thereof. Which awoke the Miss
Marple in me, who said: Now isn’t that
interesting?
Or as Shakespeare may have said: “Methinks the gentleman
doth protest too much.”
Then there’s the British dislike of snooping. Now if the
American security establishment hired people who read British children’s books,
they would go back to the Mallory Tower series, written by a certain Enid
Blyton, and find out there is a character in there who is blacklisted for her propensity for “snooping.”
For the Anglophones amongst us who grew up reading this author of great renown,
the word “snooping” brings up shivers. As
a child, we all understood this was a very bad thing to do.
Then of course there’s the British public, who’s lost no
time in berating their leader as well as GCHQ. GCHQ, they say, has been collaborating
too closely with the Americans. They have taken millions of dollars and quietly
agreed to implement sweeping surveillance tactics on Europeans and the British.
Shocking, said the public.
Now the Hercule Poirot in me awoke and wanted to know: “Are zees
gentlemen as in cahoots with the NSA as zey appear?” Because lets think about
it. You can buy a few people at the top with a few million bucks, but then
there are a few hundred at the bottom who may be holding on to fierce ideas of
freedom and personal liberty that goes back to John Stuart Mill. And those young
men may be quietly creating a breathless thriller expose of the greatest story
of the century.
Never forget, the British are masters of drama. And masters
of subterfuge.
The British have disappointed me about a lot of things, but
they have never disappointed me about their drama. And doesn’t the Snowden
story seem to come with a lot of breathless cliffhangers that leave you hanging
for the next episode and the next revelation—rather than a welldone episodic
drama?
The British also ran an empire whose sun never set for a few
centuries. Surely some of that DNA is still alive. (see, I knew the junior year
history class I took in “The Great World Powers in 1914” was going to come in
useful in writing this blog post.)
By the way, my favorite detail of this whole story is how
Snowden walks out with a million documents on his…thumb drive? I have a thumb
drive that holds about 20 documents at the most. Can someone tell me what kind
of thumb drive this is? This is almost as believable as the boxcutter
mythology. I call this the “miniaturization of detail”—the way in which details
are gracefully simplified, in almost the same way as you would simplify a theme
in a film. The Rosebud detail in Citizen Kane, and so on and so forth.
Then of course there’s The Guardian, which exposed everything.
Where else to end this thrilling plot but by sending our
hero to that greatest of all spy territory, Russia? All those Cold War novels
that we read as children feature Russia in great literary and imaginative
detail. It would have been a pity not to use it as a destination for Edward
Snowden.
Vladimir Putin must be sitting there slooki-ing his vodka and
looking at his typewriter and thinking: “But vait, they are blaming us? I must start
to write the next “War and Peace” to prove our innocence.”
Of course, you should understand that this conspiracy theory
is fiction, thought up by a fiction writer with a rather large imagination.
But I can’t wait for the book. And the movie. Lets hope it gets made by the British film
industry.
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