Luke Harding - The Snowden Files

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?

In the second half of April, Mills travels home to the east coast of the US herself. She cruises antique shops with her mother, helps redecorate her family house and sees old friends. In early May she returns to Honolulu. She blogs about feeling torn between two different worlds. Snowden, meanwhile, is settling into his new job at Booz.

Or so it appears. In reality, Snowden is probably scraping the NSA’s servers. ‘My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked,’ Snowden told the Washington Post , adding that that was exactly why he’d accepted it.

Months later, the NSA was still trying to puzzle out what exactly happened; Snowden hasn’t fully explained how he carried out the leak. But as a systems administrator Snowden could access the NSA’s intranet system, NSAnet. This was set up following 9/11 to improve liaison between different parts of the US’s intelligence community.