My source and I had devised what seemed, at the time, a novel and safe way to communicate. We avoided the phone completely. At first, we had been in touch by regular email. But at some point, worried about government surveillance, he and I had set up a joint email account using a German provider. We both had the log-in and password, which meant that we never had to send each other a message. Instead, as former CIA director David Petraeus and his mistress would do years later, we wrote emails and left them in the drafts folder, where each of us could log in and read them.
