Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed
David Miranda and I are debating whether or not to take off our shirts in the middle of a throbbing dance floor inside the heart of gay Rio de Janeiro. Silvery blue lights and men the size of sparrows swirl around us as we gauge the euphoria of the crowd. "It's not that kind of party, honey!" Miranda shouts hoarsely over the Brazilian dance mix of Ke$ha's "Die Young."We opt instead to gulp the night air. We pound our cocktails and bound out of the split-level nightclub to chat and smoke on the cracked Portuguese-style pavement. A thin white man in his mid-thirties with birdy lips, piss-water blonde hair, and uncool jeans follows us out the door. Miranda and I bullshit with some fellow revelers on the patio: a pudgy art dealer, a redhead, and a bespectacled line cook who has a "thing" for Rhoda Morgenstern. The man with the bird lips lingers close by. Miranda, 28, dusky, pillow mouthed, chiseled, with dark wine eyes, is too fine a specimen not to be cruised tonight, but Bird Lips is standing a little too close and appears, by the jutting of his chin and the self-conscious tilt of his head, to be eavesdropping on our conversation.
Miranda and I shoot each other a wary glance and move back inside. Just as we are about to lose ourselves in a Cher dubstep-banger, Bird Lips perches behind us, unmoving, and begins to stare. We traverse the dance floor; he follows.
What do you call someone who believes they are being spied on? Paranoid? What if that person's not only been spied on, but also already detained by an intelligence agency? When they hush their voice in a crowd or hold a waiter, cabbie, or a stranger at a dance club in a prolonged gaze of suspicion, do you chalk it up to being traumatized or just overcautious?
If you are David Miranda, then on Nov. 3, the British government classified you in legal brief as a terrorist and a conduit for espionage. You've been detained in a Heathrow Airport bunker under the Terrorism Act of 2000 and interrogated for nine hours without a lawyer by unnamed U.K. officials for transporting classified documents between Berlin and Brazil. If you are David Miranda, there's reason to believe the CIA has broken into your house and stolen your laptop. You've been called a spy, a hero, a lawn boy, and a drug mule. Your husband is Glenn Greenwald, MI5 agents have the passwords to your smartphone, and British border agents have probably logged on to your Skype account, so you have every reason in the world to worry why this guy is standing so fucking close to you.
Miranda whips around, squares his shoulders, thrusts his face to Bird Lips' ear, and demands to know: "What are you doing? Are you following us?" Bird Lips gets ruffled and bolts out of the club not to be seen again. "That wasn't just me, right? He was following us!" Miranda insists over the pounding techno, "I'm not crazy, right?"
Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed
When news of Miranda's nine-hour detention at Heathrow broke on Aug. 19 and turned him into a household name overnight, cable news pundits and thousands of tweets percolated with speculation and far-flung theories about how willing a player Miranda was in the Glenn Greenwald–Edward Snowden surveillance scandal that had been making headlines for months.
One of those theories posited that the gaping social chasm between Miranda's and Greenwald's backgrounds suggested that the highly educated American lawyer turned whistle-blowing journalist with a background in the ruthless world of New York corporate law had cynically manipulated his younger, slum-raised, hunky, ostensibly ignorant boyfriend into being an unwitting human courier dispatched on a highly dangerous mission.
"I don't mean to be unkind, but he was a mule," Jeffrey Toobin, chief legal analyst for CNN, told Anderson Cooper in the days following Miranda's detention. "He was given something — he didn't know what it was — from one person to another at the other end of an airport." Toobin said he believed the U.K. government was totally justified in detaining Miranda and that the Brazilian native "was lucky that they used the terrorism law" because he was ultimately not arrested.
After I spent several weeks with Miranda and Greenwald in and around their home in the upscale, artist-friendly Rio neighborhood of Gavea over the last month, one thing has become very clear: David Miranda knew exactly what he was doing. To believe he was played as some type of dupe or mule by Greenwald not only ignores the real nature of their relationship but also assumes that there's some safer way to transport sensitive documents across the globe. Is there any device more fail-safe and secure than the person you love the most? Does Apple make that sort of product?
Miranda knew very well that he was traveling from Rio to Berlin to see Greenwald's reporting partner, documentarian Laura Poitras, and that he would be returning through the U.K., all the time carrying a heavily encrypted flash drive directly related to the trove of documents that former and now notorious CIA employee Edward Snowden had vacuumed from the National Security Agency and had given to Greenwald earlier in the year.
As to the relative risk of this adventure, Greenwald and Miranda knew that others who made the same trek were, in the eyes of the authorities, much "hotter" and more conspicuous than Miranda. "Numerous Guardian employees who have worked heavily on this story flew in and out of Heathrow multiple times without incident," Greenwald says, "including when they were carrying materials." Three weeks before Miranda's detention, Poitras herself — who met with Snowden in Hong Kong and wrote numerous articles about the documents — flew to London, entering the U.K., and had no problems. Why would they stop someone much more peripheral like Miranda? the couple reasoned.
"I have been involved in every aspect of Glenn's life, why wouldn't I be a part of this?" Miranda asserts over lunch at a fashion mall in Rio's São Conrado neighborhood the next afternoon. "I think what Snowden did was heroic. Glenn and Laura's reporting is so important. It caused a serious debate about privacy and internet freedom in my country and around the world. I'm so proud to be able to play any role at all in that. I'd go to jail for that."
His already throaty voice is a little huskier from singing along to Justin Timberlake the night before. Miranda has the day off from a cramped school week that includes a major group project on branding and marketing for a local café. Miranda is in his final year at university, where he is majoring in communications. He would ideally like to become a marketing and communications specialist for a major media company, particularly one with a thriving video game department.
"Glenn and I have talked all the time about what doing these stories would do to our lives. Since we met, I've pushed him and supported him," Miranda says. He starts counting on his fingers: "I've helped him negotiate contracts; I make sure he gets paid what he deserves — Glenn just wants to work and sometimes will do it for cheap." Miranda's list continues with ascending urgency. "When Glenn publishes NSA stories in foreign countries, I help reach out to press so the stories get the most exposure. For a while we considered starting our own website to publish the NSA documents; when Glenn thought The Guardian was taking too long to publish the first NSA story, I told him he had to make them know he would go somewhere else to publish if they delayed too much."
"I was in Hong Kong," Greenwald says, referring to his first meeting with Snowden in early June. "We were eager to have the world learn about this spying as soon as possible. And we didn't want any fear-driven institutional constraints getting in the way." Greenwald credits Miranda with pushing him to hold The Guardian's feet to the fire and not delay on this bombshell publication.
"I had my chat box open on my laptop while talking to Guardian editors, and I had David on the phone in my ear, and he's dictating what to write to them word by word. It was something like, 'Please consider this my resignation if the article is not published by 5 p.m. today,' and I was like, 'Oh my god, David, I cannot say that!'" But Miranda kept pushing. Greenwald sent a more compromising, though still firm message. Before 5 p.m. that day, the first NSA story was published on The Guardian's website.
"David is a grown, 28-year-old man," Greenwald says, visibly bristling at the accusation that Miranda was an exploited errand boy. "He is the most insanely willful person I have ever met; it makes me crazy sometimes. He was an orphan and had to take care of himself very early on in a way few people do. So it's absurd to think that I could manipulate him into anything he didn't want to do. A lot of this is pure racism, classism, and ethnocentricity: Some white Americans see a nonwhite Brazilian who grew up poor and doesn't speak perfect English, and so disgustingly assume that he's dumb, naïve, and easily manipulated."
Miranda's life has been totally transformed and taken a radically different course since he laid his beach towel down next to Greenwald's on a Rio de Janeiro beach eight years ago. "We knew we were fucking with power," Miranda says.
But what has shocked both men is that somebody engaged in a journalistic endeavor like Miranda could be labeled a terrorist by the U.K. "I guess we should have known," says Greenwald. "This is a country with a history of repressing press freedoms, that has no constitutional guarantee of a free press. I mean, they still have a queen. Is there anything more primitive and authoritarian than a fucking monarchy?"
Just how much bad blood simmers between these two men and the British government comes to the fore as Miranda recounts here, for the first time, the granular details of his Kafkaesque detention in Heathrow Airport. The news of this detention flashed globally on Aug. 19, but the chain of events that led to this incident began in an unkempt Hong Kong hotel room months earlier.
Photograph by Jimmy Chalk for BuzzFeed
