In May 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked classified documents about government surveillance to a select group of journalists, Barton Gellman was among them. Even though the level of trust Gellman and Snowden had to extend to each other was considerable, as Gellman explains in “Dark Mirror,” his engrossing account of their fraught relationship and his own reckoning with the American surveillance state, it wasn’t absolute.
The two men wouldn’t meet in person until seven months later, at a garish casino hotel in Moscow. Snowden was willing to talk about his source of income (donated bitcoin) and what he missed most from home (milkshakes), but he clammed up when asked about a kitchen appliance. “Snowden,” Gellman writes, “refused to confirm or deny possession of a blender.”
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