Given the number of vehicles, the dearth of people or buildings – just a few cabins – is puzzling, until you realise everyone is underground. They enter via a long, curious-looking, rectangular structure with an orange roof built into a steep hillside of brown earth. The gradient is so steep it’s a wonder the structure doesn’t slide down. Steps lead up the dark mouth. ‘The doors inside are huge. It’s like something out of King Kong. It takes ages just to get in,’ said a former air force officer who worked here.
Exfiltrating secret material from here would be a high-risk undertaking. It would require quite remarkable nerve.
In the regular blog written by Snowden’s partner, Lindsay Mills, Snowden makes the odd oblique appearance. She calls him E. He is very much an off-stage presence – a loyal boyfriend, certainly, but one who is prone to mysterious absences and disappearances. As in Switzerland, Hawaii Snowden is a man with a mask.
On just a couple of occasions, E poses with Mills in her weekly portraits, posted to Instagram. You don’t see his face. In one shot Snowden is on a beach, bent over, trousers rolled up to his knees. A flapping black winter coat hides his face. Probably he’s laughing, but it’s difficult to tell, and he reminds one of a Richard III impersonator. ‘A world where people move like ravens,’ Mills writes on her blog, noting: ‘a rare shot of E’. Someone points out that Snowden looks a bit like Quasimodo. Mills shoots back: ‘Don’t mess with E!’
Mills described the motivation for her blog: ‘Been shooting daily self portraits for several years now. They’re not just for mothers. 
I find it helps me work out my emotions and document my life. Not that anyone would be interested in it, but someday I may thank myself for these shots. Or hate myself 
– either way I’ll feel something. 
’ The portraits are done in bright colours – a sort of artist’s diary – with Mills dressing up to capture a mood or an emotion. Many are coquettish. She meditates, hangs from trees or watches the Hawaii sunset.
Snowden kept himself apart from other staff during the 13 months he spent in Hawaii. He was by nature reserved but he had special reason to be guarded. If it came off, his leak would be the most significant since the Pentagon Papers, eclipsing the 2010 release of US diplomatic cables and warlogs by a disaffected US army private, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. It would lift the lid on mass surveillance, not just of millions of Americans but the entire world. But it was a big if. A slip on his part, a careless word, an unusual work request, a rogue flash drive, could arouse questions, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Snowden was surrounded by spies dedicated to detecting hidden codes and patterns, to discovering secrets. If they discovered his, he would likely be quietly tried, convicted and jailed for decades, an anonymous geek who tried and failed to steal data from his employers. Little wonder Snowden appeared buttoned up.
Friends likened him teasingly to Edward Cullen, the vampire played by Robert Pattinson from the Twilight saga. Snowden was pale, enigmatic, solemn and seldom seen by day. He hardly ever appeared at social gatherings. ‘He would barely say anything and hang out on the side, sort of hovering. So it became a sort of game to involve him, like “Go Team Edward!”’ recalls one. ‘At a birthday party one night we prodded him into making an actual speech. It was about five words.’
Snowden did describe his life in Hawaii as ‘paradise’. This, certainly, was how the Honolulu Star-Advertiser also tells it, declaring on its masthead: ‘The pulse of paradise.’ What passed for news headlines – ‘Officials contemplate weekend harbor hours’, ‘Pacific aviation museum honors daredevil’, ‘Bush blaze doused on Maui’ – tended to boost the image of a tropical idyll.
But for Snowden there were few outwards signs of fun. No surfing, no golf, no lounging on the beach. ‘He was pale, pale, pale, pale, as if he never got out in the sun,’ the friend says. (In contrast, Barack Obama, who has a sister on Oahu, gives every impression of savouring the beaches, the surf and the shave ice, the local version of a snow cone.)
Compared to Snowden, glued to his laptops, his partner Lindsay Mills was a social butterfly. After arriving in Hawaii she joined Pamela and the Pole Kats, a group that trained and performed using poles. It was not stripping – they did athletic performances at the Mercury, a hipster bar in downtown Honolulu, once a month. Mills also participated in street performances on the first Friday of each month.
Despite her outward sociability, though, Mills remained a puzzle to some acquaintances in Hawaii. She half-hid behind huge sunglasses. She did not volunteer much personal information. Many were unaware she even had a boyfriend. She didn’t appear to have a job – that is, beyond her photography and dancing – yet drove a new SUV. The source of her prosperity was another riddle.
Pam Parkinson, who founded the pole group, introduced Mills to the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe, a dozen or so dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, fire-breathers and hula-hoopers who gathered a few times a week.
On Sundays they practised till sunset at a park overlooking the beach in Waikiki. Mills thrived among this bohemian bunch, though by the standards of her new friends she was straight-laced. ‘She wouldn’t laugh at a sex joke,’ one recalled. Terryl Leon, co-ordinator of the troupe, said Mills was new to acrobatics but determined to improve. ‘She was working a short acrobatic sequence. I’d give her tips on form and technique. She was a bit reserved. Very pretty, attentive, alert, focused and co-operative.’
Snowden on occasion collected Mills from practice but seldom got out of the car or spoke to her friends. ‘She didn’t really talk about him,’ one said. One exception was when Snowden was away for a prolonged spell and Mills lamented the difficulty of long-distance relationships. The troupe gossiped about her friendship with her ‘acro-partner’, a young muscular man named Bow. But, as Mills’s blog made clear, she remained devoted to E.
E himself, meanwhile, was still biding his time at the NSA. Behind his quiet, unassuming surface, his disenchantment and anger with his employers was growing.
Ed Snowden was not the first person from inside the NSA to be disillusioned by what he discovered there, and by the dark trajectory of US security policy after 9/11. Snowden had watched closely the case of Thomas Drake. Drake, a US air force and navy veteran, was an executive at the NSA. After the 9/11 attacks, he became unhappy with the agency’s secret counter-terrorism programs – in particular, an intelligence-collecting tool called TRAILBLAZER. Drake felt it violated the fourth amendment against arbitrary searches and seizures.
Drake decided to raise his concerns through all the right channels. He complained to his NSA bosses. Using a prescribed framework for whistleblowers, he also testified to the NSA’s inspector general, the Pentagon and before the House and Senate congressional oversight committees. Finally, in frustration, he went to the Baltimore Sun. This ingenuous approach didn’t work. In 2007 the FBI raided his home. Drake faced 35 years in jail. Only in 2011, after four years of anxiety, did the government drop the major charges, with Drake pleading guilty to a minor misdemeanour. He was put on probation.
For Snowden, Drake was an inspiration (the two would later meet). The punitive way the authorities hounded Drake convinced Snowden, moreover, that there was no point in going down the same path. He knew others who had suffered in similar circumstances. They included an NSA employee who jokingly included a line in an email that said: ‘Is this the PLA or the NSA?’ Snowden told James Risen that inside the NSA ‘there’s a lot of dissent – palpable with some even.’ But that most people toed the line through ‘fear and a false image of patriotism’, construed as ‘obedience to authority’.