The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (6 page)

Friends likened him teasingly to Edward Cullen, the vampire played by Robert Pattinson from the
Twilight
saga. Snowden was pale, enigmatic, solemn and seldom seen by day. He hardly ever appeared at social gatherings. ‘He would barely say anything and hang out on the side, sort of hovering. So it became a sort of game to involve him, like “Go Team Edward!” ’ recalls one. ‘At a birthday party one night we prodded him into making an actual speech. It was about five words.’

Snowden did describe his life in Hawaii as ‘paradise’. This, certainly, was how the
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
also tells it, declaring on its masthead: ‘The pulse of paradise.’ What passed for news headlines – ‘Officials contemplate weekend harbor hours’, ‘Pacific aviation museum honors daredevil’, ‘Bush blaze doused on Maui’ – tended to boost the image of a tropical idyll.

But for Snowden there were few outwards signs of fun. No surfing, no golf, no lounging on the beach. ‘He was pale, pale, pale, pale, as if he never got out in the sun,’ the friend says. (In contrast, Barack Obama, who has a sister on Oahu, gives every impression of savouring the beaches, the surf and the shave ice, the local version of a snow cone.)

Compared to Snowden, glued to his laptops, his partner Lindsay Mills was a social butterfly. After arriving
in Hawaii she joined Pamela and the Pole Kats, a group that trained and performed using poles. It was not stripping – they did athletic performances at the Mercury, a hipster bar in downtown Honolulu, once a month. Mills also participated in street performances on the first Friday of each month.

Despite her outward sociability, though, Mills remained a puzzle to some acquaintances in Hawaii. She half-hid behind huge sunglasses. She did not volunteer much personal information. Many were unaware she even had a boyfriend. She didn’t appear to have a job – that is, beyond her photography and dancing – yet drove a new SUV. The source of her prosperity was another riddle.

Pam Parkinson, who founded the pole group, introduced Mills to the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe, a dozen or so dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, fire-breathers and hula-hoopers who gathered a few times a week.

On Sundays they practised till sunset at a park overlooking the beach in Waikiki. Mills thrived among this bohemian bunch, though by the standards of her new friends she was straight-laced. ‘She wouldn’t laugh at a sex joke,’ one recalled. Terryl Leon, co-ordinator of the troupe, said Mills was new to acrobatics but determined to improve. ‘She was working a short acrobatic sequence. I’d give her tips on form and technique. She was a bit reserved. Very pretty, attentive, alert, focused and co-operative.’

Snowden on occasion collected Mills from practice but seldom got out of the car or spoke to her friends. ‘She didn’t really talk about him,’ one said. One exception
was when Snowden was away for a prolonged spell and Mills lamented the difficulty of long-distance relationships. The troupe gossiped about her friendship with her ‘acro-partner’, a young muscular man named Bow. But, as Mills’s blog made clear, she remained devoted to E.

E himself, meanwhile, was still biding his time at the NSA. Behind his quiet, unassuming surface, his disenchantment and anger with his employers was growing.

Ed Snowden was not the first person from inside the NSA to be disillusioned by what he discovered there, and by the dark trajectory of US security policy after 9/11. Snowden had watched closely the case of Thomas Drake. Drake, a US air force and navy veteran, was an executive at the NSA. After the 9/11 attacks, he became unhappy with the agency’s secret counter-terrorism programs – in particular, an intelligence-collecting tool called TRAILBLAZER. Drake felt it violated the fourth amendment against arbitrary searches and seizures.

Drake decided to raise his concerns through all the right channels. He complained to his NSA bosses. Using a prescribed framework for whistleblowers, he also testified to the NSA’s inspector general, the Pentagon and before the House and Senate congressional oversight committees. Finally, in frustration, he went to the
Baltimore Sun
. This ingenuous approach didn’t work. In 2007 the FBI raided his home. Drake faced 35 years in jail. Only in 2011, after four years of anxiety, did the government drop the major charges, with Drake pleading guilty to a minor misdemeanour. He was put on probation.

For Snowden, Drake was an inspiration (the two would later meet). The punitive way the authorities hounded Drake convinced Snowden, moreover, that there was no point in going down the same path. He knew others who had suffered in similar circumstances. They included an NSA employee who jokingly included a line in an email that said: ‘Is this the PLA or the NSA?’ Snowden told James Risen that inside the NSA ‘there’s a lot of dissent – palpable with some even.’ But that most people toed the line through ‘fear and a false image of patriotism’, construed as ‘obedience to authority’.

As an outside contractor, working for Dell, Snowden wasn’t entitled to the same whistleblower protections as Drake. Even if he had reported his concerns over NSA surveillance nothing would have happened, he later told Risen. He believed his efforts ‘would have been buried forever’, and that he would have been discredited and ruined. ‘The system does not work. You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.’

Snowden had lost faith in meaningful congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Instead, Congress was part of the problem, he felt. In particular he was critical of the ‘Gang of Eight’, the group of congressional officials who are notified about the most sensitive US intelligence operations.

By December 2012, he had made up his mind to contact journalists. Asked at what moment he had decided to blow the whistle, Snowden says: ‘I imagine everyone’s experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of
lies from senior officials to Congress – and therefore the American people – and the realisation that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper – the director of national intelligence – baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.’

In March 2013, Clapper told the Senate intelligence committee that the US government does ‘not wittingly’ collect data on millions of Americans. The statement was untrue, as Snowden would reveal and Clapper would himself later admit. It was also perhaps a felony.

By his account, one document in particular pushed Snowden over the edge. He stumbled upon a classified 2009 report by the NSA’s inspector general – the same person to whom Drake had complained. Snowden had been carrying out a ‘dirty word search’: he was spring-cleaning the system to remove material that shouldn’t have been there. When he opened the document he couldn’t stop himself from reading it.

The report was a detailed 51-page account of how the Bush administration had carried out its illegal wiretapping program following 9/11. The program, codenamed STELLAR WIND, involved the collection of content and metadata from millions of Americans without a warrant. Some of the facts about the wiretapping scandal had emerged a few years earlier, but nothing like the whole story. For Snowden this was incontrovertible proof that senior US officials were breaking the law. Without, he
learned, any repercussions at all. ‘You can’t read something like that and not realise what it means for all of the systems we have,’ he told the
New York Times
.

In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden’s sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. To get access to a final tranche of documents Snowden required greater security privileges than he enjoyed in his position at Dell. Clapper made his ill-fated appearance before the Senate in March. The same month Snowden took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to
Forbes
, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency’s Tailored Access Operations, a group of elite hackers. He had entered the final tense weeks of his double life.

Snowden’s last workplace was in downtown Honolulu. It is a shiny, corporate contrast to the RSOC bunker. It occupies the 30th floor of Makai Tower, on Bishop Street, in the financial district. The reception has beige furnishings, framed vintage maps and a television, volume low, tuned to Fox News. Instead of a windowless canteen filled with buzz-cut soldiers, Booz Allen Hamilton staff in suits and Hawaiian shirts stroll through a sunlit courtyard of fountains and choose from dozens of restaurants. The nearest pub, Ferguson’s, isn’t exactly rowdy: it offers bacon-wrapped dates, baked Brie and red pepper tzatziki.

Booz Allen Hamilton’s chairman and president, Ralph Shrader, made complacent assurances about security on
the company blog: ‘In all walks of life, our most trusted colleagues and friends have this in common. We can count on them. No matter what the situation or challenge, they will be there for us. Booz Allen Hamilton is trusted in that way. You can count on that.’

Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile. He was counting on his new employer not to suspect anything. Snowden was reaching the point of no return. Elements in the US government, he knew, would see his actions as a cyber version of Pearl Harbor, a sneak attack. For it to come from within, from a supposed ‘traitor’, would make the wrath all the worse. That Snowden saw it as an act of patriotism, a defence of American values, would soften Washington’s vengeance not a bit.

Snowden’s own name was an apposite one for a man engaged in such risky enterprises. In the 1590s in Britain, John Snowden, a Catholic priest, became a double agent working for Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s lord treasurer. The historian Stephen Alford describes this Snowden as ‘subtle, intelligent and self-assured’. His job was to spy on Catholic emigrés on the continent who were consorting with the Spanish and plotting against Elizabeth. Snowden used ciphers, secret letters and other tricks. The Elizabethans called such men ‘intelligencers’ or ‘espials’; what they got up to was espiery. (The French term
espionage
only came into use from the 18th century onwards.)

But Edward Snowden, the modern-day espial, could not use his true name if he was to reach out to the US reporters who worked on national security, and who so
far had no clue that Snowden existed. To make contact with them he would need a codename. Given the gravity of what he was undertaking, TheTrueHOOHA seemed jejune. Snowden came up with something new. He chose the handle ‘Verax’, a classical Latin adjective meaning ‘truth-telling’. The word
verax
is rather rare. It crops up in Plautus, Cicero and Horace. It is used particularly of oracles and supernatural sources.

Snowden intended to become just such a prophetic voice from deep inside the intelligence community. As with his real surname, his codename had a history: two obscure British dissenters also called themselves ‘Verax’. One was Henry Dunckley, a 19th-century Baptist social critic who used the nom de plume in the
Manchester Examiner
. The other was Clement Walker, a 17th-century Somerset parliamentarian during the English civil war who was eventually locked up and died in the Tower of London. Significantly,
verax
is also an antonym of
mendax
. Mendax means ‘deceiving’ and was the handle used by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks when he was a young Australian hacker. WikiLeaks, with their electronic mass-leaking of US army files from Afghanistan, and of State Department diplomatic cables from all over the world, had recently plunged the US administration into uproar. Perhaps Snowden’s allusion was deliberate.

Outwardly, his life continued as before. Read with hindsight, his girlfriend’s blog entries seem poignant. On 1 March, Mills writes that she will be an ‘international woman of mystery’ and that her Friday show later the same evening has a ‘007’ theme.

The performance goes well. Three days later she writes: ‘When I was a child most of my friends would play dress up and fantasize about being a princess, superman or pickle rancher (I have some weird friends). I would imagine being a spy. Running down sewer tunnels to escape treacherous enemies, eavesdropping on important adult conversations, and giving a full report to General Meow. So getting the opportunity to play a Bond and a babe for even a few minutes during my performance on Friday was very fulfilling. And the spy high of Friday night must have subconsciously stuck in my brain, for the following evening E and I randomly pick
Skyfall
for our date night movie.’

Eleven days later, on 15 March, there is news: ‘We received word that we have to move out of our house by May 1. E is transferring jobs. And I am looking to take a mini trip back East. Do I move with E, on my own, to Antarctica? … For now I’ll spin my magic ball and see where I land.’

On 30 March, in the evening, Snowden flies off to the US mainland. Over the next couple of weeks he attends training sessions at Booz Allen Hamilton’s office near Fort Meade; various intelligence agency contractors have offices next door to SIGINT city. His new salary is $122,000 a year plus a housing allowance. On 4 April he has dinner with his father. Lon Snowden says his son seemed preoccupied and nursing a burden. ‘We hugged as we always do. He said: “I love you, Dad.” I said: “I love you, Ed.” ’

In mid-April, Mills and Snowden get the keys to their new Hawaii home. It’s two streets away from their old one.

Mills writes: ‘My favourite part of moving is the pre-unpacking stage where I can roll around big empty rooms in soft window light (I may have been a cat in my former life). We took time to envision what each room could look like once we crammed our things in them. And even discussed hanging silks in the two-story main room.’

Snowden makes a valedictory appearance in her photo-blog. The pair arrange themselves on the bare floor of their home. Mills, in a striking blue dress, lies on her back and smiles at him; as ever, Snowden’s thoughts are inscrutable since the camera only records the back of his head. His glasses are abandoned several feet away. What is going through his mind?