We begin by coveting what we see every day.
—HANNIBAL LECTER, The Silence of the Lambs
IN HAWAII IN 2012, Snowden was living a very comfortable life. He was earning just over $120,000 a year from Dell. His housing allowance covered the rent and the lease on his car. He worked five days a week at the NSA base. The commute, as I timed it, took only ten minutes. Driving past a sign marked “Restricted Area: Keep Out,” and the security booth where NSA guards checked his credentials, he left his car in the outdoor lot for the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center. (When I drove into the base in 2016, I was detained nearly two hours at the security booth before being turned back.)
Snowden worked in a three-story reinforced concrete building called “the tunnel,” even though it was above the ground. It had been built during World War II to serve as an aircraft assembly plant. During the war, it was entirely covered with earth and shrubbery to proof it against Japanese bomber attacks. In 1980, the NSA converted it to its regional base in Hawaii for its intelligence gathering. Its lack of windows and the dirt covering gave it the appearance, when I viewed it in 2016, of an oblong-shaped anthill. Workers, both military and civilian, entered through an exterior staircase in the center of the mound. Snowden said in describing the atmosphere, “You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.” He said that to relieve the tediousness of the work, every two months or so his fellow workers would circulate a picture of a naked person that showed up on their screens as part of the NSA’s surveillance of foreign suspects. He explained, “You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who have] suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across…an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position.”
He knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a violation of NSA rules. But he did not report this illicit activity to the NSA, even though he later claimed that it occurred regularly. He joked in his Moscow interview with The Guardian that some of the nudes were “extremely attractive” and that viewing them was, as he put it, “the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”
Snowden identified with the Libertarian Party, and at the NSA he made no effort to conceal his political support of its causes. He became an active partisan of Congressman Ron Paul, the leading figure in the party in 2012. “He’s so dreamy,” Snowden posted on the Ars Technica site in March 2009 (just after he registered to vote in North Carolina, though he no longer lived there). Paul was running in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, and Snowden made a contribution of $500 to his election committee. Snowden’s attraction to Paul’s libertarian ideology was not that surprising. At the core of Paul’s worldview was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the government into private lives. Snowden shared this hostility, as was clear from his Internet postings. Like other Libertarians, Snowden believed that citizens should not be “shackled” by federal law. He later addressed from Moscow via an Internet hookup a libertarian gathering at which Ron Paul also spoke. “Law is a lot like medicine,” he said. “When you have too much it can be fatal.” Like Paul, Snowden ardently opposed any form of gun control, as did Lindsay Mills in her online postings.
Like other Libertarians, Snowden, a contractor for the government, saw the government as an adversary. “The [American] government,” he later said, “assumed upon itself, in secret, new executive powers without any public awareness or any public consent and used them against the citizenry of its own country to increase its own power, to increase its own awareness.” Most relevant to his future activities at the NSA, Snowden wholeheartedly agreed with Paul’s position on the dangers inherent in government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Paul described the CIA, the organization that had forced Snowden out, as nothing short of a “secret government” and said that “in a true Republic, there is no place for an organization like the CIA.” He also railed against NSA surveillance.
As is clear from Snowden’s Internet postings, he, like Ron Paul, had doubts about the competence of the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. Snowden’s own disillusionment about the government might have begun with his rejection and perceived mistreatment by the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. It was almost certainly reinforced by his ouster from the CIA. He later told The Guardian that he was disillusioned as early as 2007 when he learned about the CIA’s methods in compromising Swiss citizens. His critical view of the U.S. government only hardened during the years he worked at the NSA. He described his NSA superiors as “grossly incompetent,” as he later explained to a journalist from Wired magazine in Moscow. At the NSA, he said employees were kept in line by “fear and a false image of patriotism.” He said that he saw his fellow workers cowed into “obedience to authority” and his superiors induced to break the law. He became particularly concerned with what he called the “secret powers” of the NSA. He saw them as “tremendously dangerous.” By this time, Snowden was fully aware that the NSA conducted domestic surveillance because he had used his privileges as a system administrator in 2012 to read the NSA inspector general’s report on a 2009 surveillance program.
Nevertheless, Snowden continued to work at the NSA, where he was, as he put it, “making a ton of money.” Mills joined him in his “paradise” in June 2012, shortly before his twenty-ninth birthday. Just before leaving Annapolis for Hawaii, Mills posted a seminude picture of herself on her blog, L’s Journey. In it, her face was covered with a blanket. The caption under it read, “Trying to avoid the changes coming my way.” In Honolulu, she found “E.,” as she called Snowden in her blog, “elusive.” She found that he preferred to stay at home and avoided meeting other people to the point that her friends “were not quite sure that E. existed.” Lindsay’s fellow performers in the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe told me in 2016 that they rarely, if ever, saw Snowden at the practice sessions. Andrew Towl, a juggler with the group, did briefly meet Snowden once. It was on a hike with Lindsay in Oahu. Towl said he asked Snowden what he was doing in Hawaii and Snowden answered tersely, “I work with computers,” and continued walking. Even though Mills had dated Snowden for eight years, most of her other friends, except for Jennie and Joe Chamberlin in Japan, had not met him. Next door neighbors I spoke to caught brief glimpses of him entering or leaving his house but did not engage him in a conversation as Snowden tended to avoid eye contact. If he had other social interactions in Hawaii, no one he met came forward and spoke of meeting him, even after he became world famous.
Two days after his twenty-ninth birthday dinner on June 21, Mills described him playfully as a “goof.” She wrote in her blog, “The universe is telling me something and I’m pretty sure it’s saying get out, Fuck you Hawaii.” In early July, she summed up her shaky situation with Snowden in another blog, writing, “I moved to Hawaii to continue my relationship with E. [but] it has been an emotional roller coaster since I stepped off the plane.” She diverted herself by organizing a pole-dancing studio in the four-hundred-square-foot garage of the house. She also found her own friends in physical fitness and dance groups. She joined a New Age yoga studio called Physical Phatness, as well as a local acrobatic performance group, and, on Friday nights, pole danced at the Mercury lounge in downtown Honolulu. Unlike Snowden, she enjoyed socializing, writing in her blog, “We lovingly crammed a large group into a small corner of a delicious Japanese restaurant and filled our bellies with sushi, tempura, and good conversation.”
That same July, Snowden had other things on his mind, including an attempt to advance himself. Although his position at Dell as a system administrator was a well-compensated one, especially for a twenty-nine-year-old with no formal education, it carried little prestige. He sat from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in a windowless room watching a bank of monitors in the so-called tunnel. Many of those who worked with him were, as he described them, “eighteen year old soldiers.” Presumably, they had little interest in discussing with him the weightier issues of the world. Working as an outside contractor was also a dead-end job that hardly matched the vision he had of himself in his Internet postings. In real life, in a cubicle in the NSA, he was decidedly not the Wolfking Awesomefox heroic image he had of himself in his dream vision.
Snowden now decided to apply for a position in the NSA itself. He apparently believed that if he scored high enough on its entrance exam, the NSA would invite him to join it as a Senior Executive Service officer, or SES, which was the civilian equivalent in rank and pay to a flag officer in the U.S. armed forces. “I’m still amazed that a twenty-eight-year-old thought he could get an SES position,” a civilian contractor working for the NSA during the same period told me, “Snowden had a very overinflated view of his self-worth.” To enhance his chances of getting the SES job, Snowden in the summer of 2012 illicitly hacked into the NSA’s administrative files and stole the answers to the NSA exam. As the NSA’s subsequent postmortem would determine, it was the first known document that Snowden took without authorization at the NSA.
It was not the first time, however, that he had used his hacking skills to attempt to advance himself. At the CIA in 2009, as he later said in Moscow, he had added text to his annual CIA evaluation in what he termed “a non-malicious way” to prove a point. His CIA superior took a much darker view of that incident when the hack was detected, calling for an investigation. It was the threat of that investigation that, it will be recalled, in effect ended Snowden’s CIA career. At the NSA, his intrusion was not detected for almost a year. “He stole the [NSA] test with the answers, and he took the test and he aced it,” the former NSA director Michael McConnell recounted in a 2013 interview. “He then walked into the NSA and said you should hire me because I am this good on the test.”
The reason why he attempted to gain entry into the upper ranks of the NSA in the late summer of 2012 is less clear. If his Internet posting and libertarian riffs are an indication of his state of mind then, he was hostile to the surveillance activities of the NSA. If so, it made little sense that he would seek a permanent career there. If this is considered in light of the career move he made six months later (in March 2013), which, as he himself admits, was for the express purpose of getting at tightly held documents stored on computers that were not available to him in his job at Dell, then he might have been seeking wider access in 2012 for a more nefarious purpose than an NSA job.
In any case, despite the near-perfect scores, the NSA did not offer him a Senior Executive Service job. “It was totally unrealistic for Snowden to expect to get an SES position,” a former senior NSA officer told me. Snowden’s ambitions might have been disappointed in this instance, but it did not prevent him from later claiming that he had been a senior adviser to the CIA and also a senior adviser to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Instead of an SES position, the NSA offered him a lowly G-13 job as an information technology worker, which was not an improvement on his job at Dell. He took this slight as evidence of the NSA’s incompetence, subsequently joking to a reporter in Moscow that his ability to steal the test answers should have been seen as a qualification for the NSA job. In September 2012, he turned down the NSA offer. If he was to advance himself now, he had to find a new way.