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178 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS interviews. In the case of Stone’s movie Snowden, Wizner asked for the right to veto any shots featuring Snowden in the film. In it, he would tell handpicked journalists that he had given all his docu- ments to Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong and took none of them to Russia. Wizner could then argue that documents such as the FISA court order were improperly classified secret and that disclos- ing them served the public good. The government might not be able to contest his claim without further revealing NSA sources. Under these circumstances, it might be induced to agree to a plea bargain for Snowden. Changing the narrative would also help enhance his public image as a whistle-blower. Snowden’s new narrative that he had destroyed all the documents he had in his possession before coming to Moscow and had no access to any NSA documents, not even those that he had distributed to journalists, was reinforced in a series of interviews that Wizner helped arrange. “I went the first six months without giving an inter- view,” Snowden later said. “It wasn’t until December 2013 that I gave my first interview to Barton Gellman.” (Snowden did not count ® his Internet exchange with Risen in October as an “interview”.) ® In late December 2013, Snowden met with Barton Gellman. It was his first face-to-face meeting with a journalist since he had arrived in Russia in June. Snowden turned his laptop toward Gellman and, as if proving his point, said to him, “There’s nothing on it.... My hard drive is completely blank.” That his computer had no files stored on it at that moment of course meant very little. Just six weeks earlier, Snowden had met with the former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who had been invited to meet him in Moscow along with three other American whistle-blowers. At that meeting, he told McGovern that he had stored all the NSA data he had taken on external hard drives. Gellman asked about the precise whereabouts of the files, but, as he reported, Snowden declined to answer that question. He would only say that he was “confident he did not expose them to Chinese intel- ligence in Hong Kong.” That answer did not nail down the issue, so Wizner arranged for Vanity Fair, which was preparing an article on Snowden, to submit questions. In his reply to them, Snowden wrote that he destroyed all his files in Hong Kong because he didn’t | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 178 ® 9/30/16 11:09 AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019666