How America Lost Its Secrets Page 2

  After we ordered drinks, he told me in a soft voice about the American reaction to Snowden’s revelations in Hong Kong. “All hell broke loose,” he said, describing the atmosphere at the U.S. mission after Snowden’s video was posted on The Guardian’s website on June 9.

  I asked about an assertion that Snowden had made concerning the U.S. consulate in that extraordinary video. Snowden had said that he could be seized at any moment by a CIA rendition team based at the U.S. consulate “just down the road” from the Mira hotel.

  “Was that true?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes and said, “Snowden has a pretty wild imagination. For one thing, the U.S. consulate is not down the road from the Mira in Kowloon; it is here on Hong Kong Island. And there was no CIA rendition team in Hong Kong.”

  My next question concerned a second period during which Snowden’s whereabouts are clouded—the period between the time he left the Mira hotel on June 10 and the day he left Hong Kong for Russia on June 23. When I asked my consulate source whether the U.S. mission took any action to track Snowden during these thirteen days, he explained that the FBI had long maintained a contingent of “legal attachés” based at the consulate to pursue many possible violations of U.S. law including video piracy. In addition, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had retained a handful of “China watchers” under diplomatic cover in Hong Kong. This group constituted the “intelligence mission,” as he referred to it. It had developed informal relations with the Hong Kong police that, along with the NSA’s electronic capabilities abroad, allowed it to track Snowden’s movements after he had outed himself on the video. Because Snowden, his lawyers, and the journalists in his entourage frequently used their cell phones to text one another, it was fairly easy for the U.S. intelligence mission to follow Snowden’s trail after he left the Mira hotel. He said that the Hong Kong police also knew where he was during this period. My source further suggested that the massive Chinese intelligence contingent in Hong Kong also knew, because it had close relations with the Hong Kong police.

  “So everyone knew Snowden’s whereabouts as he moved every few days from apartment to apartment,” I interjected. He answered that it was no secret to anyone except the media and the public. “Of course we knew,” he said, adding that there were also photographs of Snowden entering the office building that housed the Russian consulate. I mentioned that there was a report in a Russian newspaper that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate in late June in connection with the flight he later took to Moscow. “All we know is he entered the building,” he answered, with a shrug.

  That Russian consulate visit did not come as a complete surprise to U.S. intelligence. After Snowden left the Mira, his interactions with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services in Hong Kong had been closely monitored by “secret means,” a term that in that context likely indicated electronic surveillance. A former top intelligence executive in Washington, D.C., subsequently confirmed this monitoring to me. All of Snowden’s stealth in exiting from the Mira hotel, which included wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, thus proved ineffective in hiding him from U.S. intelligence and presumably other intelligence services seeking the treasure trove of documents he had taken from the NSA.

  As for his next destination, I could find no evidence that Snowden had made any arrangements during his monthlong stay in Hong Kong to go to any Latin American country. Before he went public on June 9, he could have easily gotten a visa in Hong Kong with his still-valid passport to go to almost any country in the world, including Cuba (for which a U.S. passport was not necessary), Bolivia, and Ecuador. Yet he did not apply for visas during this time period. Even as late as June 8, after meetings with Greenwald and Poitras, his name had still not been revealed, no criminal complaint had been issued against him, and there was no Interpol red alert for his detention. He could have walked out of the Mira hotel, caught a taxi to the Hong Kong airport, and gone on Swiss International Air Lines via Zurich to any country in South America or to Iceland. But, as in the oft-cited Sherlock Holmes clue of the dog that did not bark, Snowden’s inaction in not obtaining visas during this thirty-day period suggests that he had no plans to go anyplace but where he went: Moscow.

  However, the mystery that most concerned me was not where Snowden was housed in the interim between when he went public and when he went to Moscow. It was where, and in whose care, Snowden had been before he checked into the Mira on June 1. When I asked my source about this period, he said that as far as he knew, neither the FBI nor the Hong Kong police could find a trace of him during the period between May 20, when he passed through Hong Kong customs, and June 1, when he first used his credit card and passport to check into the Mira hotel. Other than those transactions, they could not find any credit card charges, ATM withdrawals, telephone calls, hotel registrations, subway pass purchases, or other clues to Snowden’s activities. As far as a paper trail was concerned, Snowden was a ghost during this period.

  “Could an American just vanish in Hong Kong for eleven days?” I asked.

  “Apparently, he did just that,” my source replied.

  Snowden’s whereabouts during these eleven days was not a mystery I was going to solve on this first trip to Hong Kong. I needed to know more about his activities before he got there. After all, Snowden was not, as he himself pointed out from Moscow, an “angel descending from the heavens.” He had been working for the U.S. government for the previous seven years. During that period, he had been part of America’s secret intelligence regime and held a clearance for sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. Such SCI material is considered so sensitive that it must be handled within formal access control systems established by the director of national intelligence.

  Nor did Snowden’s breach begin with his handing over classified documents to the Guardian reporters in Hong Kong in June 2013 or, for that matter, in the eleven days prior to his meeting with journalists. He had, as the NSA quickly determined, begun illicitly copying documents in the summer of 2012. Such a dangerous enterprise is not born of a sudden impulse. It was, as his actions suggested, nurtured over many months. Even if he had managed to elude American intelligence from late May to early June 2013, he could not hide all the history that led to his decision to come to Hong Kong. There had to be an envelope of circumstances surrounding it, including Snowden’s motivation, associates, movements, finances, and activities prior to his fleeing to Hong Kong. What was missing was not just Snowden’s first eleven days in Hong Kong but the context of the alleged crime.

  I first needed to find out who Edward Snowden was.

  PART ONE

  SNOWDEN’S ARC

  I woke this morning with a new name. I had had a vision. A dream vision. A vision righteous and true. Before me I saw Gamers, Gamers shrouded in the glory of their true names.

  Step forth, and assume your name in the pantheon. It’s always been there, your avatar’s true name. It slips through your subconscious, reveals itself under your posts, and flashed visibly in that moment of unrestrained spite; in the indulgent teabag. You’ve felt it, known it, recognized it.

  Now realize it.

  I woke this morning with a new name. That name is Wolfking.

  Wolfking Awesomefox.

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Geneva, June 12, 2008

  CHAPTER 1

  Tinker

  It’s like the boiling frog. You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty…you can come to justify it.

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014

  EDWARD JOSEPH SNOWDEN was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His parents were Lon Snowden and Elizabeth “Wendy” Barrett. According to their marriage records, they wed when they were both eighteen in 1979. The following year they had a daughter, Jessica.

  Lon Snowden, like his father before him, served in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was stationed at its main aviation base, where his father-in-law, Edward Joseph Barrett, was an officer and risi
ng star of the Coast Guard. While Edward Snowden was still a child, his maternal grandfather would become not only an admiral but also head of the Coast Guard’s entire aviation service.

  When Lon was transferred to a Coast Guard base near Baltimore in 1992, he bought a two-story house in Crofton, Maryland, a residential community very close to the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade. Edward, who was nine, and Jessica, who was twelve, were enrolled in local public schools in Crofton.

  Jessica was a top student. After she obtained her degree at the University of Maryland, she went on to law school, graduating with honors. Unlike his sister, Edward Snowden experienced a string of failures in his education. In 1998, after only one year of classes, he dropped out of Arundel High School; according to school records, he stopped attending classes at the age of fifteen. He later attributed his absence from school to a medical problem, mononucleosis, but according to Robert Mosier, a spokesman for Anne Arundel County public schools, there is no record of any illness. Brad Gunson, who knew Snowden before he dropped out of high school, recalled in an interview with The Washington Post only that he had a high-pitched voice, liked magic cards, and played fantasy video games.

  Instead of completing a formal education, Snowden went his own way. Still in his teens, he became the product of a broken home. His parents were entangled in messy divorce proceedings until he was seventeen. By this time, Jessica had her own apartment. When his parents separated, Snowden’s mother bought a two-bedroom condominium in Ellicott City, Maryland. She moved Edward, along with his two cats, into the condominium, while she remained in the family house awaiting its sale. According to a condominium neighbor, Joyce Kinsey, Snowden stayed home alone almost all the time. From what she could observe, he spent long hours in front of a computer screen.

  At the age of eighteen, while other teens his age went to college, Snowden was still living by himself, now devoting a large part of his time to playing fantasy games on the Internet. Posting under the alias TheTrueHooHa on a website called Ars Technica, he showed himself to be a passionate gamer. He was especially drawn to anime, a graphically violent style of Japanese animation. These anime games had by 2002 achieved a fanatic following in both Japan and the United States. He claimed special skills at Tekken, a martial arts fighting game. He even went to anime conventions in the Washington, D.C., area. When he became a webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a website running these anime-based games, he described himself somewhat fancifully as a thirty-seven-year-old father of two children. The only truth in his description was that he was born on “the longest day of the year” (June 21).

  He wrote Internet posts under his TrueHooHa alias about how he used weight lifting and intensive training to precision shape his body. He bragged to his online followers that he had reduced his “body fat percentage to between 9.5% and 10.5%” (which was less than half of the average for his age). He wrote that he wore “cool” purple sunglasses, practiced martial arts, and was a fan of Japanese cuisine. He described himself at one point, as if advertising his virtues, as having a “head of vibrant, shimmering blond hair (with volume).”

  He appeared somewhat restless with his solitary life in his almost daily postings. He expressed a longing to go to Japan. “I’ve always dreamed of being able to ‘make it’ in Japan. I’ve taken Japanese for a year and a half,” he wrote in 2002. Despite his claim of learning Japanese, there is no record of his taking any courses in Japanese. But it was perhaps part of his yearning. In pursuit of an employment opportunity in Japan, he posted, “I’d love a cushy gov job over there.” Eventually, he gave up on the idea of relocating himself to Japan because, as he explained in a post, he would have to put his cats in quarantine for six months.

  Snowden’s father meanwhile moved to Pennsylvania with his new wife-to-be. This left Snowden with only one male family member in the area, his maternal grandfather, Admiral Barrett, who was now in the top echelon of U.S. intelligence working at the Pentagon. Barrett was there when a plane piloted by terrorists crashed into it on 9/11. He emerged unscathed.

  Snowden sought to join the Special Forces through the 18X program, a U.S. Army Reserve program created in 2003 that allowed individuals who had not served in the military or completed their education to train to be a Special Forces recruit. He listed his religion on the application as Buddhist because, as he explained in a sardonic post on Ars Technica, “agnostic is strangely absent” from the form.

  He enlisted in the army reserves on May 7, 2004, according to U.S. Army records. He reported for a ten-week basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, which was standard for all enlistees in the infantry. In August, he began a three-week course in parachute jumping but did not complete that training. As Snowden put it in his Internet postings, he “washed out.” He was discharged on September 29, 2004, ending his nineteen-week military career. Snowden would later claim on the Internet that he returned to civilian life because he had broken both legs. An army spokesman could not confirm that Snowden injured his legs or that he was in fact dropped from the program for medical reasons.

  Under his TrueHooHa alias, Snowden wrote that “they [the army] held onto me until the doctors cleared me to be discharged, and then after being cleared they held onto me for another month just for shits and giggles.” He attributed this treatment in the army, as he would later attribute his problems in the CIA and the NSA, to the inferior intelligence of his superiors. He wrote in his post, “Psych problems = dishonorable discharge depending on how much they hate you. Lots of alleged homos were in the hold unit, too, but they only got a general discharge at best.”

  If he had broken his legs, it was not evident to Joyce Kinsey, his next-door neighbor, who told me that she never saw Snowden on crutches when he returned to his mother’s condominium in September 2004. Army records show that he did not receive a medical discharge. He received an “administrative discharge.” Unlike a medical discharge, which is given because a soldier has sustained injuries that prevent him from performing his duties, an administrative discharge is a “morally neutral” form of separation given to a soldier when he or she is deemed for nonmedical reasons inappropriate for military service. Snowden preferred to cite a medical explanation for his severance, just as he had claimed a medical reason for dropping out of high school (and would later claim he needed medical treatment for epilepsy at the NSA).

  When he returned home from Fort Benning, Georgia, he was twenty-one. He remained unemployed for several months before taking a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, where he was given his first security clearance. Snowden had to take a polygraph exam to get the job. According to his Ars Technica postings, he worked the night shift from six in the evening to six in the morning. He had higher ambitions than being a campus security guard.

  He wanted to become a male model. He did not seem overly concerned about his privacy, posting pictures of himself on the Internet “mooning” for the camera. He also posted provocative modeling pictures of himself on the Ars Technica website. He commented on his own beefcake-style pictures, “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girlish figure that attracts girls.” He approached a model agency called Model Mayhem, which recommended a photographer. He had some concern about that photographer because he, as Snowden wrote in a post, “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said he was “a little worried he might, you know, try to pull my pants off and choke me to death with them, but he turned out to be legit and is a pretty damn good model photographer.” He posted the photographs on the Internet. The lack of any paid job offers dashed Snowden’s hopes for a modeling career.

  Around this time, he began dating Lindsay Mills, an extremely attractive nineteen-year-old art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father, was an applications developer at the Oracle Corporation. According to him, Snowden met his daughter on an Internet dating site. Snowden and Mills had much in common. They both had divorced parents who gave them a great deal of latitude
in conducting their personal lives. Both of them were keenly interested in perfecting their bodies through exercise and diet regimes. Mills’s only paid employment over the next eight years would be as a fitness and yoga instructor in Maryland. When they first met, they both had ambitions to be models, and neither of them had inhibitions about posing provocatively for photographers. They both also had a desire to travel to exotic places, including cities in Asia. Mills had spent four months in Guilin, China, before meeting Snowden.

  As bleak as his prospects as a high-school dropout might have seemed, Snowden had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the spring of 2006. The CIA offered him a $66,000-a-year job as a CIA communications officer. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. In fact, I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Snowden boasted in May 2006 on the website Ars Technica under his alias. He added, with only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.”

  How did Snowden get the job? The CIA’s minimum requirements in 2006 for a job in its clandestine division included a bachelor’s or master’s degree and a strong academic record, with a preferred GPA of 3.0 or better.

  The CIA needed technical workers in 2006. But even if Snowden applied only in this capacity, which entailed a five-year employment agreement, the minimum requirement for an intelligence technology job was an associate’s degree awarded by a two-year community college in electronics and communications, engineering technology, computer network systems, or electronics engineering technology. Candidates had to have had a final GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale from a fully accredited technical school or university. Snowden, as we’ve seen, did not meet these standards. If a candidate lacks these qualifications, the CIA can make an exception only if he or she has at least two years’ civilian or military work experience in the telecommunications and/or automated information systems field that is comparable to one of the requisite degree fields. Snowden in no way qualified in this way either.