But maybe Harding isn't as paranoid or gullible as he appears. After all, the "self-deleting paragraph" episode is only the latest in a string of self-aggrandizing promotional "likely stories" he has penned. As Richard de Lacy points out in his article "Face It, the FSB Is Just Not That Into You," an earlier Harding book on Russia was announced with another article in The Guardian where the author constructed an elaborate Russian secret police conspiracy against him from such telltale signs as problems with his screen saver, stiff door handles and bouncing emails. The article was called -- with characteristic immodesty -- "Enemy of the State."
Bullshitter's Guide
This kind of breezy approach to facts is reflected throughout the volume. The persecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake by the U.S. Justice Department -- so central to this story -- is summarized clumsily and then forgotten. And even I know that Namco's "Tekken" is not -- as Harding claims -- a "role-playing game."
We are left with a "Bullshitter's Guide" to the world of the world's most wanted man. It is a book by someone who wasn't there, doesn't know, doesn't belong and doesn't understand.
Where the book is accurate, it is derivative. And where it is not derivative, it is not accurate. In the chapter on Snowden's exit from Hong Kong, I discover that I had been "frantically trying to make contact with Edward Snowden" and that I had "barged [my] way into [his] drama."
I was present at these events (Harding was not), and it was Edward Snowden who contacted me for help, not the other way around. This is something Snowden will happily confirm, at least to those who have access to him. The entire chapter is irredeemably specious. "Much is mysterious, but..." writes the self-styled journalist Harding, a polite way of saying that what follows has been made up.
Clues abound that Harding is filling in the blanks himself. All too often, we are presented with sentences such as "Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile," reminding us of the paucity of actual content. The result is a story that is a non-story -- a generic rendition of the Snowden cycle where lifeless bromide and imagined melodrama stand in for authentic human narrative.
There is no attempt to make the arguments consistent, either. American newspapers are "deferential to authority," but The Guardian is brave because it emerged from the "Darwinian" publish-or-perish London arena, supposedly a breeding ground for apex predators in the journalist food chain.
But later on, claims Harding, The Guardian holds out alone against the U.K. government while the rest of the London press cowers before a draconian Defense Advisory notice. It is hard to reconcile these stories, except insofar as they dignify The Guardian.
In reality, The Guardian also caved to government pressure--something it continues to do. Originally, the paper wasn't even going to publish the Snowden leaks -- Glenn Greenwald had to force its hand. On request of the government, the paper later voluntarily destroyed its copies of the Snowden documents -- and the computers they were saved on -- in the basement of its London offices, under the supervision of [Britain's electronic spying headquarters] GCHQ.
Greenwald eventually broke with The Guardian over reported censorship issues, which were later confirmed by Alan Rusbridger, keen to demonstrate the Guardian's "patriotism" to a U.K. Home Affairs Select Committee, when he boasted that "there's stuff in there about Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not even going to look at it."
Solidarity with The Guardian from the U.K. press was, indeed, thin on the ground in 2013, but this was not, as Harding wants us to believe, because the rest of the London press was trembling in its boots. It was because the holier-than-thou Guardian had rounded on the News of the World in 2011, something for which it is still loathed within the industry.
And it is certain that more papers would have run Snowden stories in the U.K. if The Guardian had shared its material with the rest of the London press. Who wants to recycle someone else's scoops?
Cliche After Cliche
As you'd expect from a serial plagiarist, the book is a stylistic wasteland. There are no regular impasses in here, only the more refined kind of "impasse we can't get past." Never simply "deny" when you can "categorically deny." Sympathetic characters are always either "wry" or "calm"; that is their entire emotional repertoire.
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