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.
Snowden was one of around 1,000 NSA ‘sysadmins’ allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren’t allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a ‘ghost user’, able to haunt the agency’s hallowed places. He may also have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him. GCHQ trustingly shares its top-secret British material with the NSA, which in turn makes it available to an army of outside contractors. This meant Snowden had access to British secrets, too, through GCHQ’s parallel intranet, GCWiki.
Although we don’t know exactly how he harvested the material, it appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents onto thumbnail drives. The method is the same as that used by Manning, who downloaded and sent to WikiLeaks a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables on a CD marked ‘Lady Gaga’ while working in a steamy field station outside Baghdad.
Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff. But a ‘sysadmin’ could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile, and needed a backup. The thumb drive could then be carried away to bridge the ‘airgap’ that existed between the NSA system and the regular internet.
Why did nobody raise the alarm? Was the NSA asleep? Sitting in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA’s servers, some 5,000 miles away in Fort Meade, through what was known as a ‘thin client’ system. Most staff had already gone home for the night when Snowden logged on, six time zones away. His activities took place while the NSA napped. Plus Snowden was extremely good at what he did – he was an ‘IT genius’ in the words of Anderson, his friend from Geneva – so he was able to move undetected through a vast internal system.
After four weeks in his new job, Snowden tells his bosses at Booz he is feeling unwell. He wants some time off and requests unpaid leave. When they check back with him he tells them he has epilepsy. It is the same condition that affects his mother Wendy, who uses a guide dog.
And then, on 20 May, he vanishes.
Mills’s blog reflects some of the pain and anguish she felt on discovering that E had walked out of her life. By 2 June it becomes clear something has gone very wrong.
She writes: ‘While I have been patiently asking the universe for a livelier schedule I’m not sure I meant for it to dump half a year’s worth of experience in my lap in two weeks’ time. We’re talking biblical stuff – floods, deceit, loss… I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation.’
Five days later Mills removes her blog. She also wonders publicly about deleting her Twitter account. A creative body of work stretching back over several years, it includes dozens of photos of herself, and some of her E.
‘To delete or not to delete?’ she tweets. She doesn’t delete.
3
THE SOURCE
‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’
From the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the city of Rio de Janeiro appears as a precipitous swirl of greens and browns. In the sky, black vultures turn in slow spirals. Below – far below – is downtown and a shimmer of skyscrapers. Fringing it are beaches and breakers frothing endlessly on a turquoise sea. Standing above, arms outstretched, is the art deco statue of Christ the Redeemer.
Rio’s famous beaches, Copacabana and Ipanema, lie at either side of a claw-shaped stretch of coast. Copacabana has long enjoyed a louche reputation. And yes, there are lewd sand sculptures of skimpily dressed women with big buttocks, next to green-yellow-blue-white Brazilian flags. But these days Copacabana is more of a hangout for the geriatric rich. Few others can afford to live in the luxury flats overlooking this dreamy Atlantic coast.
On weekday mornings, residents emerge, stretch, and walk their pampered pooches. Skateboarders trundle along a cycle lane; there are juice bars, restaurants, pavement cafes. Over on the beach tanned locals play football – Brazil’s national obsession – or volleyball. Much of human life is here, sitting in the balmy days of winter under the rubber trees. But the girl from Ipanema is a rare sight. You are more likely to encounter her granny.
From Rio’s south-western district of Gávea, the road twists sharply up into Floresta da Tijuca, the world’s biggest urban forest, home to capuchin monkeys and toucans. It’s usually several degrees cooler than the sea-level beaches. Keep going and you eventually arrive at a secluded mountain home. Is it some sort of dog sanctuary? A sign on the metal gate proclaims ‘Cuidado Com O Cão’: beware of the dog. The warning is superfluous: from the house comes a wild yapping and yowling. The dogs – small ones, big ones, black ones, dun ones – greet visitors by pawing at their legs; dog droppings litter a tropical yard; a mountain stream gurgles alongside. If there is mutt heaven, this is surely it.