The Snowden Files

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The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man is a 2014 book by Luke Harding, published by Vintage Books. It tells the story of Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of NSA documents and what happened afterward.

Some reviewers called it the first single-book account of the leaks, though Greg Miller of The Washington Post noted its British angle and that it may miss some U.S. developments and other journalists’ work. He still found it clearly written and highly engaging.

The book received positive reviews from The Guardian and the London Review of Books, which praised it as a readable, thriller-like account of how the documents were reported. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times likened it to a Le Carré novel crossed with Kafka. The Daily Telegraph’s David Blair praised the writing but said it sometimes lacked nuance around the real dilemmas of intelligence work.

Glenn Greenwald, initially critical of the book when he had only read extracts, later stated that it does not attack Snowden. He said Harding spoke with him for research, and the Financial Times later revised its article to reflect Harding’s research efforts.

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and a backer of Snowden, harshly criticized The Snowden Files, calling it a “fraud” and exploitative.

The Snowden Files, together with the fictional Time of the Octopus by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, helped form the basis of the Oliver Stone film Snowden (2016).