Dark Mirror

by Barton Gellman

  On the last day of training, Snowden and his classmates ranked their preferences for a first assignment. Snowden wanted a war zone. After Iraq or Afghanistan, his first choices, he asked for Geneva as a fallback. He had heard it was technically challenging, a big station with complex network infrastructure in a city with more spies per capita than most. That is where the agency sent him in March 2007. His bright red diplomatic badge featured a head shot of the baby-faced twenty-three-year-old in a blue suit, maroon dress shirt, and striped club tie. As far as the outside world was concerned, Snowden was a diplomatic attaché in the U.S. mission to the UN Geneva headquarters, State Department employee number 64554. Inside the embassy, he worked in the top-floor Information Technology Center. Alongside the CIA commo shop, each in its own gated space, were the State Department’s communications team and the Special Collection Service personnel who eavesdropped on local targets for the NSA. In written communications, Snowden signed as “Dave M. Churchyard.” That precaution, adopted after the sacking of the Tehran embassy in 1979, made it harder to identify him as an intelligence employee if someone broke into the classified records.

  The CIA salary and subsidies sufficed to rent a four-bedroom apartment with a view of Lake Geneva. Snowden lived large. He bought a Ford Explorer and played the stock market. He had his complaints about Switzerland—“nightmarishly expensive and horrifically classist,” he assessed in an Ars chat—but overall things were “pretty cool.” The work was not so different from the network management he had done as a contractor at Langley. Hoping for more, he volunteered for temporary duty assignments, or TDYs, under which the Geneva station lent personnel to others. In the spring of 2008, he traveled TDY to the U.S. embassy in Bucharest, Romania, where President George W. Bush would soon attend a NATO summit. Snowden joined an advance team that, among other things, transmitted CIA risk assessments to the Secret Service. “The threat reporting was ridiculous,” he remembered. “Some keyboard warrior in a forum saying he’s going to run Bush over with a car.” He saw the leads as implausible, wondered how they were generated and taken seriously. But he laughed it off, he said. The government wasted time and resources. What else was new?

  Back in Geneva, Snowden saw things that troubled him. One involved a pair of case officers who encouraged a Saudi wealth manager to drive home drunk, then tried to recruit him as an agent with the leverage of his arrest. “We deal with some really ugly people, just some nasty people, as a tool,” said an intelligence colleague who worked with Snowden later. “Some of the means you’re using, I feel dirty being involved in this.” Another source of disillusion for Snowden was the pervasive U.S. espionage against UN diplomats. He worked with three CIA case officers, he told me, who consulted him informally when they had to break into a foreign official’s computer. “They’d be like, we’ve got a thumb drive we’re supposed to put in. What do I need to do? What are the tricks? What do I need to be worried about? What do I not want to fuck up? How would I get caught? How do I explain it? Coming up with plausible things like that.” Snowden said he understood the advantage gained by spying on allies, but he did not like the policies it served. His libertarian politics had turned him by then against the war in Iraq, against secret rendition of alleged terrorists, and against Bush’s handling of the 2008 stock market crash. Why should America keep trying to be the world’s policeman and corporate safety net? Mavanee Anderson, a legal intern at the Geneva mission who knew Snowden between 2007 and 2009, remembered him as an introspective computer genius with a tendency to brood. He was having a crisis of conscience, she said. Snowden later said he first considered blowing a whistle in Geneva but held back for fear of harming flesh-and-blood case officers and their agents. He also hoped the newly elected president, Barack Obama, would change some of the policies that troubled him. On Ars in early 2009, he did not sound like a man prepared to spill secrets. Anonymous officials who leak classified information, he wrote, should be “shot in the balls . . . that shit is classified for a reason.”

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  Around that time, the CIA and its twenty-five-year-old employee began heading toward a breach. There are three competing accounts of Snowden’s departure. The first came from “two senior American officials” who were paraphrased in the New York Times. They said Snowden’s Geneva supervisor suspected him of trying to open files he was not authorized to read. The supervisor placed a “derog”—a derogatory memo—in his personnel file. In an unusual response to the Times the following day, the CIA Office of Public Affairs said the story was untrue. There was a derog in Snowden’s file, but the reason was much less serious. Snowden’s explanation fits more closely with the second, official account. While filling out his annual self-evaluation, he said, he identified a vulnerability that would allow any employee to inject malicious code into the agency’s online human resources app. Snowden proposed to demonstrate the flaw by taking command of the system without doing damage, a commonly used procedure in security research. He thought about creating a scary pop-up message, but his boss persuaded him to settle for something less flashy. So when Snowden filled out his self-evaluation, he proved he could “own” the web app by changing all the colors on the page. The boss’s boss, the senior technology officer for Europe, was embarrassed and angry, according to Snowden. It was he who filed the derog, effectively closing Snowden’s path to promotion. A retired CIA official told Vanity Fair that Snowden was “too smart to be doing the job he was doing.” The conflict arose, the official thought, because “I think he would have liked to have been a player.”

  A third version of Snowden’s departure, not necessarily in conflict with the others, comes from two sources close to his family. In December 2008, they said, Snowden flew home to attend his father’s Coast Guard retirement ceremony. His parents noticed with alarm that their son had a chronic hacking cough that never seemed to stop. Commos are sometimes called upon to destroy classified data by grinding electronic components into small particles. Lon Snowden came to believe that CIA negligence had exposed his son to dangerous concentrations of silica dust. He insisted that Ed see a doctor. Snowden lingered in the Washington area to consult respiratory specialists. He never returned to duty. The Geneva station packed up his apartment and shipped the contents home.

  Snowden’s resignation letter, addressed to his “dear friend and supervisor” on April 16, 2009, said that “looking back on my time here will always be a happy experience.” Closing the one door opened another. Since his teens, he had “dreamed of being able to ‘make it’ in Japan,” his pop culture fountainhead. When his lungs recovered sufficiently, Dell came along with the first of three employment contracts he would sign in coming years. In mid-2009, he reported as a systems administrator to the NSA’s Pacific Technical Center on Yokota Air Base, outside Tokyo. Occasionally, he was allowed to take small forays into the spy-versus-spy world he craved. In August 2010, the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy held a three-day classified conference at Yokota, called “Counterintelligence Threat Seminar: China.” Then based in Elkridge, Maryland, JCITA was the Defense Department’s lead entity for training clearance holders on how to protect U.S. secrets from foreign spies. Shortly before the conference began, organizers learned that they had lost their cyber instructor. Intelligence personnel from all over Asia were descending on Yokota, and there was no one to teach them digital self-defense.

  “My team and I were standing around in that secure space, [saying] ‘What are we going to do?’” recalled Danielle Massarini, who ran the conference that year. A young man in khakis and T-shirt wandered over. “He piped in and said, ‘Hey, I have given briefings on that before.’ We thought, what the hell. We’ll give him a shot.” Snowden must have stayed up all night preparing, Massarini said, because he submitted a set of Top Secret teaching slides by morning. Massarini had spent her career on Chinese counterintelligence, with stints in the office of the secretary of defense and the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence G
roup. What Snowden handed her that morning, she said, “was without question the best cyber briefing on China intel we’d ever had.”

  Two days later, Snowden faced a class full of officers and analysts from around the intelligence community: FBI, NSA, Department of Homeland Security, Navy Criminal Investigation Service, Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He guided them on a virtual tour of Chinese hacking consortia, illustrating a range of attacks from simple phishing emails to sophisticated “intrusion sets” of computer code that burrowed into an exposed machine and stayed there. The Beijing government often exploited previously unknown security flaws to gain entry. That kind of flaw was called a Zero Day because attackers used it before the first day, Day 1, that anyone else became aware of the threat. Despite the stealth of that kind of attack, Snowden showed participants how to work and communicate safely in an untrusted environment. One of the habits he taught them became a signature moment in the Laura Poitras film Citizen Four. Cover your keyboard with a blanket, he said, when typing your password.

  “He came across as brilliant,” Massarini said, with a gift for conveying complex material in conversational language. Goggle-eyed avatars, captioned “Be Afraid,” danced across his final slide. When he called for questions, Massarini was astonished to see hands raised all around her. The students wanted more. That never happened in cyber class. In an ordinary year, she said, participants “were stabbing themselves in the eye with a pencil” by the end of the two-hour seminar. “I can’t articulate to you enough how good a presenter he was.” In feedback for the three-day conference, Snowden’s presentation received by far the best reviews. “That guy’s tripping me out with his paranoia,” one student wrote. Immediately after returning to Maryland, Massarini invited Snowden to teach again. In the next two years she flew him half a dozen times to Elkridge, Quantico, or Dublin, California, where he earned a stipend of $1,500 per class. He might look like a basement-dwelling hacker, but he could be outgoing and funny when he wanted to. “I worked with those people,” Massarini said. “He could answer the detailed technical questions, but he could shoot the shit and have a beer with you too.”

  As usual, Snowden automated the larger part of his routine work in Japan. The free time permitted him to propose a new venture on the side. Nobody had asked him for it, but he was bored and looking for a project worth his time. The seeds of EPICSHELTER, as he named it, had been planted when Snowden watched from Geneva as Serbian protesters set fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. Damage to the CIA station there prompted speculation in Snowden’s office that important intelligence materials had been lost. He began to think about the problem of disaster recovery. Where, if anywhere, did the Belgrade station preserve real-time copies of its files? How would a well-designed backup system transmit and store data efficiently? It was idle curiosity at the time, but the questions stayed with him. In Yokota, Snowden took them up in earnest. He envisioned a backup and recovery system that could start small and scale up to cover as much of the NSA’s digital realm as desired. Some of the features he contemplated were available in the commercial world, but they were not easy to reproduce across interlocking classified networks. “De-duplication” would save storage space by backing up each file only once, even if there were multiple copies on the source networks. “Block level” updates would save bandwidth by synchronizing only new bits and bytes when a source file changed, rather than sending a new copy of the whole file. Snowden drew up conceptual designs and hardware specifications for a global array of network storage appliances. As EPICSHELTER gained currency with his bosses in Japan, Snowden prepared a white paper and briefing slides. In late 2009 or early 2010, organizers of the NSA’s Pacific technical conference asked for a presentation, then a draft proposal. Someone arranged for Snowden to brief Lonny Anderson, the NSA’s chief technical officer, when Anderson passed through Yokota. That meeting, in turn, brought an invitation to Fort Meade, by Snowden’s account, and the NSA’s Technical Directorate took ownership of the project. It became a large undertaking of design, engineering, testing, and evaluation. How much it owed to Snowden’s early work is difficult to assess. When a proof-of-concept budget came through, the NSA chose Hawaii as the pilot site. Snowden claimed paternity when he saw the prototype up and running at Kunia in 2012.

  It is hard to judge how swiftly Snowden’s doubts grew in Japan. He wrote abstractly on Ars in February 2010 that “society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types.” His administrative privileges exposed him to a wide swath of information about NSA policy and operations, and he began to read more of it. Meanwhile, he polished his résumé with new training courses and certifications. That year he added credentials as an advanced malware analyst, computer hacking forensic investigator, certified network defense architect, and project management professional. He also used vacation days for travel to India, where courses came cheaper, and scored 96 out of 100 on the test for certified security analyst. One more credential, the EC-Council’s certified ethical hacker, was especially consequential. Under DoD Directive 8570, that one completed Snowden’s eligibility for Level III access to the innermost security layer, known as the Enclave, of Defense Department networks.

  In the summer of 2010, soon after Snowden turned twenty-seven, Dell offered him a transfer home and a return to the CIA in a much more substantial role. It is unclear whether the initiative came from Dell or Snowden. One family confidant said Snowden asked to leave Japan for personal reasons involving his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. In the new job, his business card named him a Dell “solutions consultant / cyber referent.” The latter was important in contractor-speak. It designated him as the man to see for all things cyber in Dell’s intelligence contract portfolio.

  EPICSHELTER, by Snowden’s account, had been good for business. Dell had sold hardware and services for the prototype. Snowden had proved he could think through technical problems with the propeller-heads and translate them for nontechnical folks in operations and sales. As Dell’s cyber liaison to the CIA and sister agencies, he drove a round-robin commute across northern Virginia to CIA headquarters in McLean, the National Counterterrorism Center in Liberty Crossing, and the Global Communications Service’s New Dominion compound in Reston. Agency representatives described their needs. Snowden helped devise Dell-branded solutions. One day the CIA’s Information Operations Center, which is more or less an NSA in miniature, asked for bids on a cluster of password-cracking computers. The agency wanted the fastest number-crunching machines that would fit the power, space, and cooling constraints of the shielded vault that would house them. Snowden selected the hardware, drawing upon components and expertise from Dell’s high-performance computing and fabric networking teams. He played a role as well in preparing a far larger bid: “Project Frankie,” Dell’s joint proposal with Microsoft for a half-billion-dollar cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA. (A rival bid from Amazon won the contract.) Snowden was still a young man, but he was beginning to move in rarefied circles. He regularly sat down with chiefs and deputy chiefs of the CIA’s technical branches, representing Dell in meetings with Jeanne Tisinger, the CIA’s chief information officer, and Ira “Gus” Hunt, the agency’s chief technology officer. Hunt liked to brainstorm, and Snowden told me he pitched one blue sky proposal after another. How about a self-contained, globally deployable data center, sized to fit a standard shipping container? How about a network switch with built-in “separation kernels,” or secure hardware enclaves, to guard the digital boundaries between differently classified data flows?

  Snowden’s career seemed to be thriving, but he was already looking for a change. Interesting problems, the kind that combined technical and operational challenges, attracted him more than access to the executive suites at Dell and its client agencies. In May 2011, he approached Massarini with a proposal. Snowden asked for help to land a job of his own design with the contractor Booz Allen, which supplied personnel to the counterintelligence school where Ma
ssarini worked. Snowden would assemble a set of best practices for digital counterintelligence from around the agencies, “harden” a test system, then invite “a multi-disciplinary pool of attendees” to try to break in. “Each time they succeed, you identify an important, critical vulnerability that needs to be addressed,” he wrote to Massarini. “Each time they fail, you’ve got a quantifiable, increasing body of data to illustrate where we’re successfully countering CI threats from ‘skill level 3’ type actors.” Snowden would not only teach advanced cyber defense but help improve the state of the art. The job called for someone who could “1) credibly converse with [intelligence agency] executive leadership & most elite technical folks, 2) generate the trust necessary to get an inter-agency representative read into special-methods programs, 3) hot-seat within their offices to understand their methods, 4) still be paranoid enough to then translate all of that into a curriculum without degrading security posture.” Standing up such a program from scratch, he wrote, would also require “the people skills to manage the political relationships necessary to open those inter-agency doors.”

  Someone, as Snowden saw it, very much like him. “I don’t want to sound arrogant here,” he wrote, “but at the risk of coming off as such, I honestly believe there are very few people who have the necessary background to actually achieve success in building that kind of program.” He had two personal requirements. First, he did not want to punch a time card at headquarters; he needed flexibility to work from any office with a secure terminal. Second, he had to have full access to network accounts “with all of the relevant IC orgs and offices, so I can actually go in and work alongside them.” Those were ambitious and unorthodox requests, but they fit the interagency mission he had sketched. In retrospect, through the lens of an FBI investigation, Snowden’s proposal took on a more suspicious cast. He was asking for the keys to a lot of kingdoms and information about how the gates were secured. In any case, the proposal went nowhere. The job that he wanted did not exist, and Booz Allen turned him down.