He arrived on the volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific with a plan. The plan now looks insane. It was audacious, but – viewed dispassionately – almost certainly going to result in Snowden’s incarceration for a very long time and possibly for the rest of his life.
The plan was to make contact anonymously with journalists interested in civil liberties. Proven journalists whose credentials and integrity could not be doubted. And – though quite how this would happen was a little hazy – to leak to them stolen top-secret documents. The documents would show evidence of the NSA’s illegality. They would prove that the agency was running programs that violated the US constitution. To judge by what he later said, Snowden’s aim was not to spill state secrets wholesale. Rather, he wanted to turn over a selection of material to reporters and let them exercise their own editorial judgement.
To corroborate his claims about the NSA to a sceptical Fourth Estate would not only require lots of documents, Snowden realised. It would also take a preternatural degree of cunning. And a cool head. And some extraordinary good fortune.
Snowden’s new post was NSA systems administrator. This gave him access to a wealth of secret material. Most analysts saw much less. But how was he supposed to reach out to reporters? Sending a regular email was unthinkable. And meeting them in person was difficult, too: any trip had to be cleared with his NSA superiors 30 days in advance. Also, Snowden didn’t ‘know’ any reporters. Or at least not personally.
His girlfriend of eight years, Lindsay Mills, joined him in June on Oahu, which means ‘the gathering place’. Mills grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art, and had been living with Snowden in Japan. Aged 28, she had worked in a number of jobs – ballet dancer, dance teacher, fitness instructor and pole-dance specialist. Her biggest passion was photography. Mills took a regular photograph of herself – often wearing not much – and posted it on her blog. It was titled: ‘L’s journey. Adventures of a world-travelling, pole-dancing superhero.’
Snowden and Mills rented a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow at 94-1044 Eleu Street, a sleepy, tree-lined neighbourhood in Waipahu, which was a former sugar plantation 15 miles west of Honolulu. It was a blue wooden property, comfortable but not luxurious, with no view of sea or mountains. The front yard had a small lawn, a Dwarf Bottlebrush shrub, some palm trees and a neighbour’s avocado leaning in. The rear had more palm trees, concealing it from the street and a knoll where teenagers furtively smoked.
A sticker on the front door – ‘Freedom isn’t free’, adorned with a Stars and Stripes – hinted at Snowden’s convictions. Neighbours seldom, if ever, spoke to him. ‘A couple of times I’d see him across the street and he nodded and that was it. My impression was that he was a very private person. He did his own thing,’ said Rod Uyehara, who lived directly opposite. A retired army veteran, like many in the neighbourhood, he assumed the young man with short hair was also military.
The island’s surroundings would have given Snowden plenty to brood about during his daily commute up Kunia Road. To the west of his bungalow cocoon lie the Wai’anae Mountains, the remains of an ancient volcano. The peaks are inhabited by menacing, bruised clouds: they have a tendency to suddenly replicate, blacken the sky and hammer the valley with torrential rain.
Behind him, to the south, was Pearl Harbor, the target of Japan’s surprise attack on 7 December 1941. A day of ‘infamy’, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, which caught America’s spymasters with their pants down and brought the US into the second world war.
At the time, ramping up intelligence capabilities, the chastened spooks built a vast tunnel complex in the middle of Oahu, and called it ‘the hole’. Originally intended as an underground aircraft assembly and storage plant, it was turned into a chamber to make charts, maps and models of Japanese islands for invading US forces. After the war it became a navy command centre and was reinforced to withstand chemical, biological and radiological attack.
Today it is known as the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center (RSOC) and hosts the US Cryptological System Group, an agency staffed by specialists from each branch of the military as well as civilian contractors. At some point the facility’s nickname changed to ‘the tunnel’.
Snowden’s bungalow was seven miles away, on the nearest housing estate – just 13 minutes, door to door. Largely deserted countryside stretches in between. It is not a beautiful drive. The two-lane highway dips and rises, flanked by high mounds of earth and tangles of weeds, which obscure the landscape. It is easy to feel boxed in. Occasionally you glimpse corn seed plantations and yellowing fields.
‘The tunnel’ had two main spying targets: the People’s Republic of China and its unpredictable, troublesome Stalinist satellite, North Korea. It was clear to everyone – not just NSA analysts – that China was a rising military and economic power. The NSA’s mission in the Pacific was to keep a watchful eye on the Chinese navy, its frigates, support vessels and destroyers, as well as the troops and military capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Plus the PLA’s computer networks. If penetrated, these were a rich source of data.
By this point Snowden was a China specialist. He had targeted Chinese networks. He had also taught a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence, instructing senior officials from the Department of Defense how to protect their data from Beijing and its avid hackers. He was intimately familiar with the NSA’s active operations against the Chinese, later saying he had ‘access to every target’.
The Japanese were no longer the enemy. Rather, they were among several prosperous East Asian nations whom the US considered as valuable intelligence partners. The NSA co-ordinated its SIGINT work with other allies in the region. Visitors to the subterranean complex included the new defence chief of South Korea’s security agency, the incoming boss of Thailand’s national security bureau and delegations from Tokyo. ‘The tunnel’ also tracked Thailand and the Philippines, supporting counter-terrorism operations there, as well as in Pakistan.
According to an NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes magazine, Snowden was a principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric, colleague. Inside ‘the tunnel’ he wore a hoodie featuring a parody NSA logo. Instead of a key in an eagle’s claws it had a pair of eavesdropping headphones covering the bird’s ears. His co-workers assumed the sweatshirt, sold by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was a joke.
There were further hints of a non-conformist personality. Snowden kept a copy of the constitution on his desk. He flourished it when he wanted to argue against NSA activities he felt violated it. He wandered the halls carrying a Rubik’s cube. He also cared about his colleagues, leaving small gifts on their desks. He almost lost his job sticking up for one co-worker who was being disciplined.
The RSOC where Snowden worked is just one of several military installations in the area. Displays of US power abound. A giant satellite dish peeks from a hillside. CH-47 Chinook helicopters whump overhead. Camouflage trucks trundle by. Young men and women in uniform drive SUVs, sports cars and motorbikes. They go fast. As one Dodge Convertible’s bumper sticker put it: ‘Get in. Sit down. Shut up. Hold on.’
The RSOC is almost invisible from the road, the complex set back behind dogwood trees and a 10-foot-high metal fence topped with barbed wire. There is just one small, generic sign – ‘Government property. No trespassing’ – to indicate this is an official facility. Take the turn off and you roll down a hill to a guardhouse containing two navy guards in blue camouflage with pistols strapped to their thighs. Beyond the security barrier is a car park with more than a hundred vehicles, as well as several billboards warning against drunk driving. ‘006 days since the last accident,’ says one.