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String Puller | 71
Snowden had now laid the groundwork for at least two possible
outlets. Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing
Greenwald in on the plan. Like Snowden, she did not trust writing
to him in unencrypted e-mails, and because Greenwald lived in Bra-
zil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting
with him.
That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown
to the United States to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers,
New York, sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Rela-
tions, a pro-Muslim civil rights organization. He had delivered the
keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California, where
his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State”
received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to
speak at this award dinner for its East Coast chapter.
Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19,
2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of
the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When Greenwald
arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him
© that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a micro- ©
phone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation. She told him to
go back to his room and leave his phone there. When he returned,
phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change
tables several times. Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as he
later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.”
When they finally settled at a table in the nearly empty restau-
rant, she showed Greenwald e-mails she had received from Citizen
Four. Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection” to the
“long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the
alias Cincinnatus. Reading the e-mails that Snowden had sent to
Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous
correspondent.
When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen Four’s mission state-
ment in which he said his motive was to end the U.S. “surveillance
state,” Greenwald was further impressed with the source. The sur-
veillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the sur-
veillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech
at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012. Of
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