Dark Mirror

by Barton Gellman

  Ed grew especially close in those years with Jodon Bellofatto, a fellow enthusiast for bloodthirsty electronic games. They wasted demons by the thousands, side by side, in hundreds of hours of Diablo II and Warcraft III. In real life, in a nearby dojo, they became serious students of Jow Ga kung fu, working through combat set pieces and competing in tournaments. When they moved together to an empty condominium owned by Snowden’s mother, Bellofatto wrote about “Edo begging every last fool who walks in the door to play Tekken with him.”

  The Japanese fighting game was Snowden’s best-documented obsession. In the Tekken universe, one man must decide the fate of a clan in trials by single combat. The symbolism, looking back, is hard to resist. Snowden became a Tekken star by digging down into the logic of the silicon chips that powered the game. He calculated move-by-move reaction times, measured in frames per second. “Tekken runs at 60fps,” he explained to one advice seeker. “Every move takes a certain amount of frames to execute, and a certain amount of frames to ‘recover’ from.” After learning the time cost of each combination, he lured opponents into attacks that left them frozen long enough for his fatal riposte. In pursuit of millisecond advantages, he experimented with the most efficient finger patterns, settling on use of “the index and middle fingers of both hands in an alternating fashion.” He wrote out and practiced attack sequences such as “1,2~f[f,f]..1,2~f[f,f]..1,2~f[f,f] 3, 4.” This was not entirely normal behavior, even among Tekken masters.

  Armed with this granular knowledge, Snowden reckoned there were only three people in Maryland who could take a game from him. Ed Blakslee, who watched a fair share of Snowden’s estimated ten thousand matches, wrote, “I have a buddy who is a Tekken GOD. He smokes EVERYONE who has ever played against him.” Snowden had lately devised another hack, Blakslee reported in 2003. He learned to control a Tekken character with his feet on a Dance Dance Revolution floor pad. “I once saw him play at an arcade by standing backwards to the machine and . . . watching the reflection from a mirror,” Blakslee added.

  Tekken was not all entertainment for a man of Snowden’s disposition. It was a kind of rehearsal, honing an approach he could use against adversaries elsewhere. In U.S. military argot, Snowden’s Tekken victories were based on superior “intelligence preparation of the battlefield.” He learned the terrain, scouted his opponent, and planned for countless scenarios ahead. He could not yet have anticipated a contest with the NSA, but his gaming style foreshadowed some of his moves to come.

  During the same period, just after turning twenty, Snowden began digging into privacy tools called anonymous proxies, which disguise the origin or destination of an internet link. “I wouldn’t want God himself to know where I’ve been, you know?” he wrote. Some Arsians offered instruction. Others had their doubts. “Unless this is for troubleshooting or a prank, it sounds like it might be illicit activity,” one of the latter wrote. “What the hell [are] you so paranoid about here?” asked another. Snowden responded curtly, “Patriot Act.” He elaborated. “If they misinterpret the actions I perform, I could be a cyb4r terrorist and that would be very fucking bad,” he wrote. “It’s not about what’s said, it’s about what’s done and what will be understandable in text logs. My goal is in the worst case . . . they see my IP as a computer in madagascar.” Much the same approach, carried out with greater sophistication, guided him a decade later as he passed classified information to me and other journalists. What he had in mind in the fall of 2003 remains unknown.

  * * *

  —

  Even as he spoke of eluding the Feds, Snowden dreamed of enlisting in the Army. His parents pushed back hard. “I was really swept up in the post–September 11 climate,” he told me. “I really believed the government. I mean, I was drinking the Kool-Aid. . . . And when they said, we want to liberate people in Iraq, that resonated with me.” He had grown up in a federal family, steeped in the courts and armed services, but nobody wanted him pounding boots in Baghdad. His family begged him to stay in school, join the Air Force or Navy if he absolutely must, but for the love of God keep away from the infantry. Snowden was unmoved. He had learned of an irresistible hack, a side channel that might let him skip years of requirements and enlist directly in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Each year, in a little-publicized program known as 18X, the Army accepted a few recruits as “Special Forces candidates.” If Snowden was tough and smart enough, the compressed training regimen could place him in an elite unit, wearing sergeant’s stripes, in under a year. “I liked the idea of the 18X program because it was very merit oriented,” he said. “If you just totally demolished their test—their academic test, their fitness test—before you went into basic, you’ve got a shot at SF. It wasn’t guaranteed, but you got a shot. And that was attractive to me.”

  Lon Snowden threatened to call in Pentagon connections to stand down the Army recruiters. That was bluster talking, a father’s fear. After twenty-five years in uniform, he knew he had no say in the decision. In the first week of May 2004, not long before Edward Snowden’s twenty-first birthday, Lon Snowden found a note under his door. “Dad, I know you’re going to be upset,” it began. His son had signed his enlistment papers. “I feel this is vital to my personal growth,” Snowden wrote.

  At the recruiter’s office, Snowden blew through the Armed Forces Qualification Test, the Army’s measure of general aptitude and intelligence. He got only one question wrong, he told me, and it still chafed him: “Where in your body are the Eustachian tubes?” Then came the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, a linguistic logic game so well suited to Snowden that he would probably play it online for fun. After instruction in the grammar and vocabulary of a fictional language, he had to apply the rules to increasingly complex phrases and sentences. He crushed that one, too. Unfamiliar patterns resolved themselves easily for him. When he passed the physical fitness battery, the Army gave him a contract and a ticket to Fort Benning, Georgia.

  On June 3, 2004, Private First Class Edward Snowden reported for duty at E Company, Second Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment as a Special Forces recruit. At five feet ten, Snowden began his infantry training at a skeletal 127 pounds. He had the muscle tone of a martial artist, but “there are supermodels fatter than me,” he said. Drill sergeants, for a laugh, paired him in buddy-carry drills with a bodybuilder who weighed twice as much. Snowden just managed to drag his fellow recruit out of a simulated kill zone. Like everyone else, he ran mile after mile in boots and battle gear. He ignored the agony in his legs, spurred on by trash talk from the instructors. (“What the fuck’s wrong with you, Mary? You got sand in your vagina?”) Near the end of the first fourteen-week stage, Snowden landed awkwardly after jumping off a downed tree trunk during a march through the woods with a fifty-pound rucksack. The next day he tried to stand and fell to the floor. X-rays showed full bilateral tibial fractures. Two broken legs. The next scheduled training stage, a few weeks away, was Airborne. “If you jump out of an airplane like that, your legs are going to turn into powder,” an Army doctor told him. Melodramatic, but he got the message. According to Snowden, he could have chosen to “recycle” into a subsequent basic training class, but he would have lost his chance for accelerated promotion and assignment to the Special Forces. He accepted an administrative discharge and flew home on September 28, 2004, not quite five months after enlisting. Flight attendants wheeled him off the plane at Dulles Airport, a cast on each leg.

  Three months later, this time by happenstance, Snowden stumbled onto the career hack that enabled all the rest. After an interlude of recovery in North Carolina, he returned to Ellicott City, signed up again for community college, and started looking for work. It was a dispiriting time, ill suited to ambition. When the University of Maryland offered a post as security guard for $29,000 a year, Snowden had nothing better on his plate. Beginning on January 28, 2005, he stood vigil at the front desk of the Center for Advanced Study of Language. Still under construction, the facility included classified spa
ces for secret NSA research. Even as lobby hero, Snowden needed a TS/SCI clearance and a clean polygraph. The clearance came through alongside a July 7 letter from Q223, the NSA’s counterintelligence awareness office. “Dear Contractor Staff Security Officer,” it said. “This form is for your records to verify that the person stated below has been indoctrinated in counterintelligence.” However humble the position, the clearance ushered Snowden into the national security establishment. At twenty-two, he had yet to reach even the bottom rung, but he was eligible now to apply for thousands of classified jobs in the Washington area alone.

  Overnight shifts at “the Castle,” as everyone pronounced CASL, the language center’s initials, offered scant diversion. Snowden did not have much to do apart from checking locks and alarms from time to time. One night, he and his partner plugged a laptop into an Ethernet port in the lobby, hoping to pass some time browsing the web. The network in this part of the building was unclassified, but default settings offered no connection to an unknown machine. Irritating. Snowden pulled up a command line and pinged the router, confirming that the physical link was good. All he lacked was a network identity. He fiddled with the host control settings, assigned himself an IP address on the subnet, and the internet lay before him in its glory.

  Two or three weeks passed before anyone noticed unauthorized machines in the logs. By then, there were a lot of them. Many of the guards had learned Snowden’s trick. Members of the Castle’s IT staff, alarmed at first, asked Snowden how he had managed to bypass network controls. It was not a security offense, exactly: Snowden was breaking out of the building, not trying to break in. When he finished explaining, as he recalled later, “they were like, ‘Why are you working at the front desk? Do you want to join the network team?’” He would like that fine, but the position required a college degree. Go to the job fairs for security-cleared personnel, one man suggested. Some of those companies don’t care about degrees. Snowden’s all-important TS/SCI offered entry into the lucrative world of Beltway bandits, where contractors did the work of intelligence agency employees at double or triple the salary.

  * * *

  —

  Snowden attended his first classified job fair, TECHEXPO Top Secret, in the winter of 2005. He approached the booth of COMSO, a small contractor based in Greenbelt, Maryland, which offered him a job on the spot. The Microsoft certificate, the clearance, and a satisfactory interview were all he needed. Snowden’s client, the contractor told him, would be the Central Intelligence Agency. When he first swiped into the George Bush Center for Intelligence, the CIA headquarters in Langley, he was twenty-two years old. Only two years earlier, he had been an unemployed dropout, spending, by his own account, eight hours a day surfing the web, four in the dojo, and two playing Tekken. Now he was doing the work of a systems engineer, joining a team that handled the care and feeding of a CIA network that spanned northern Virginia, Washington, and southern Maryland. What separated Snowden from his agency peers was an email address that included “CTR,” for contractor, and a paycheck signed by a private employer in Greenbelt. The jobs were substantially the same.

  Again he had the night shift, which suited his vampiric sleep cycle. “The daystar, it burns,” Snowden wrote in an Ars post in April 2006. He mainly performed standard maintenance—“building the network, expanding the network, taking care of the network,” he told me. By this point, he thought of himself as a Windows whisperer, anticipating a server’s shifting moods and heading off meltdowns. He loved the quiet of the graveyard shift, with only a skeleton crew for company. From 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., at a desk in Room 2P20 of the New Headquarters Building or the server vault in 1D04, Snowden said, he and one other guy were “masters of the universe for all of the Washington metropolitan area network.”

  Late at night, Snowden wandered empty basement corridors of painted cinder block. Motion-sensing lights “just kind of follow you,” he said, shadows pooling ahead and behind. It was not lost on him that, as domain administrator, he had “incredible access, ridiculous access.” What he did with that access is unclear. Snowden and I discussed this time in detail during my second visit to Moscow in the summer of 2015. He told me then that he could have browsed widely in the CIA’s files but resisted the temptation, terrified of laying eyes on something forbidden. “My crayon stayed within the lines at all times,” he said. In his 2019 memoir, he described “hours and hours every night” of browsing secret internal web pages of “top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still unfolding.” He implied, but did not write explicitly, that he dug beyond the dispatches themselves to look for the identities of their human sources. Case files containing the “true name and complete personal history” of those CIA sources, he wrote, “would be only a few clicks away.” Whether or not he had sufficient clearances for that kind of material, Snowden certainly lacked the requisite “need to know.” By the memoir’s account, he was coloring far outside the lines.

  A senior technical officer paid a call on Snowden after a few months on the job. The older man borrowed him for a project or two, sizing him up, and they developed a rapport. Eventually, the officer asked Snowden how he would feel about working overseas. That was not a hard sell. In a 2002 Ars post about IT jobs in Japan, Snowden had written, “I want to expatriate! I want to expatriate with flair and clandestine meetings!” The wish came true on August 26, 2006. Snowden added “STF,” or staff, to his email address, swapped a green contractor’s badge for a blue one, and received agency identification number 2339176. He was a full-time employee now, soon to be deployable as a telecommunications information security officer. The official designation was TISO, but agency folk, old-timers especially, called the job “commo.” Snowden swallowed a five-figure pay cut to take what he saw as a dream job.

  The CIA’s public affairs staff answers no questions about Snowden’s job duties or performance, leaving former officials to say what they like without accountability to the documentary record. Michael Morell, who served as deputy director and acting director until August 2013, sat down with me early the following year at an outdoor café overlooking Arizona’s Dove Mountain. After the public disclosures began, three months before he retired, he had asked around about Snowden. It would be absurd, Morell said, to portray him as a young hotshot or some kind of high-powered recruit. Snowden was the lowest of the low-level staff and poorly qualified even for the job he had. He owed his hire to the CIA’s desperate need for commos as it ramped up its operational tempo around the world. Snowden slipped through the gate, he suggested, under hiring standards diminished by necessity. Some of that is demonstrably wrong. Historic snapshots of the CIA’s employment page show no substantive changes in the job requirements. The qualifications of Snowden’s cohort, in comparison to previous years, cannot plausibly be a national security secret. Straight answers about Snowden’s own performance reviews would settle other questions. Morell’s account, so comprehensively disparaging, is hard to credit in the face of Snowden’s steady climb.

  Snowden joined the next class in a six-month training course called the Basic Telecommunications Training Program at an unadvertised CIA facility near Warrenton, in northern Virginia. New operations officers, the agency’s spies, learned their trade at a better-known site, nicknamed “the Farm.” Snowden, like other science and technology officers, went to “the Hill.”

  It is tempting to imagine a James Bond film scene with Q, the guru, tech-splaining how to fire missiles from a remote-controlled luxury car. In the Hill’s syllabus, there were fewer Aston Martins, more broken radios. “You learn how to deal with basically any piece of infrastructure that could be at an embassy,” Snowden said. He practiced taking apart and reassembling routers, telephones, firewalls, and ventilation units. He learned fundamentals of cryptography, contemporary and historical. Along with state-of-the-art systems, he had to become proficient with outdated gear that old-school ambassadors and station chiefs might keep on hand. Firefly keys, box
y old KG-84 encryption devices with knobs and dials—these were actual museum pieces now, but Snowden had to know his way around them. A lot of time was devoted to “living your cover,” he said. He and his classmates learned basic tradecraft for CIA officers under likely foreign surveillance. They spent equal time on maintaining an identity inside the embassy itself. Some diplomatic colleagues would be unaware of his true employer. “You went through a special course to pretend to be State Department, to understand how it works. Basically, to masquerade as if you’re a State Department person. Because they have their own language. They’ve got their own acronyms. . . . And you’ve got to be able to blend in.”

  Snowden learned how to spot a tail. How to detect tampering on a car. How to lie convincingly. What not to tell a spouse (many things) or children (anything). There was a class on cable writing from the field, with special instructions for CRITIC reporting. The latter referred to intelligence of such import that it must be recognized, written, and flash routed to the president within ten minutes. The CRITIC designation was reserved, according to a classified briefing, for matters that “could imminently and materially jeopardize vital U.S. political, economic, informational or military interests.” An instructor told a cautionary tale of the hapless trainee who once transmitted a practice CRITIC message for real. On the other hand, a slide admonished new commos, in large capital letters, “WHEN IN DOUBT, PUT IT OUT!” One example in the briefing came from the CIA station in Baghdad at 2:31 a.m. on August 2, 1990. “Iraqi troops in Kuwait City,” it said. “Small arms fire is taking place within a thousand yards of the U.S. Embassy.”

  Before the course ended, Snowden taught the CIA something, too. He was willing to make a spectacle of himself when he thought a principle was at stake. His classmates groused about their housing in a crumbling Comfort Inn and the CIA’s refusal to pay for overtime. Snowden regarded those failings as violations of labor, health, and safety laws. He filed a formal complaint, and when the head of school blew him off, he took his grievance to the director of the CIA’s Field Services Group—and then to the director’s boss. He won a change of housing and a reprimand for insubordination. The latter did not impress him. Unlike others around him, Snowden recalled, he was willing to bear the “cost of escalation.”