© Guardian
GCHQ technicians watched as journalists took angle grinders and drills to computers after weeks of tense negotiationsNew video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.
The bizarre episode in the basement of the
Guardian's London HQ was the climax of Downing Street's fraught interactions with the
Guardian in the wake of Snowden's leak - the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book -
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man - by the
Guardian correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the
Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.
In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the
Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.
Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."
Downing Street insiders admit they struggled to come to terms with Snowden's mega-leak, and the fact that the 29-year-old American was able to upload top secret British material while working at an NSA facility in faraway Hawaii. Snowden wasn't even a full-time NSA employee, but a private contractor, one of 850,000 Americans with access to top secret UK information. "We just sat up and thought: 'Oh my God!'" one Downing Street insider said.
Comment: Propaganda Alert! Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, as portrayed in the 'left-wing, liberal' British press