Some clues about his activities exist from posts he made on the Ars Technica website and in related chatrooms, under the pseudonym TheTrueHOOHA.[74] His views seem muddled rather than treasonous. He wrote of surveillance: ‘we love that technology… helps us spy on our citizens better.’ He was furious with administration sources who leaked classified information to reporters: they ‘should be shot in the balls’, he wrote. But in February 2010 his views had changed. He wrote: ‘Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop, or was it an relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?’
All this is odd (and not only because of his triple mixed metaphor). The CIA does not encourage its officers to spend time in online forums mulling the issues of the day or chatting about their private lives. The reason is simple: it is a beacon to the other side. Intelligence officers work on their targets with what is known in the trade as MICE—Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego. Any sign of an erratic personal life, of ideological dissatisfaction, or of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ offers an opening. If the target is unhappy, wanting to behave one way but forced to do something different, his mental stress can be exploited.
Russian intelligence keeps a close eye on the staff of adversary countries’ foreign missions. They are particularly interested in junior employees, trying to spot which are just officials and which are intelligence officers. So it is highly likely that the Russian intelligence rezidentura in Geneva would have noticed the arrival of the young Snowden and would have spotted his real job, working for the CIA. They also as a routine measure would have tried to see what he did in his free time. They would have tried to monitor his use of the internet on his unclassified home computer in the hope of seeing a weakness—drugs, online sex, gambling—which might be a potential avenue of approach. It is likely they would have identified him as TheTrueHOOHA and observed his patchy work record, his erratic private behaviour, and his voluble and increasingly dissatisfied stance online. According to John Schindler, the former NSA analyst and specialist in counter-intelligence, Snowden would have presented the perfect target to the Russians: ‘intelligent, highly naïve and totally uninformed’.[75]
The next question is how they could have approached him. Clearly an overt approach would be risky and probably futile. Snowden showed no sympathy for Russia. It is therefore likely that they would have used what in spy parlance is called a ‘false flag’ operation. Russian intelligence, like the Soviet KGB before it, has a particular expertise in this. During the Cold War, they would identify disgruntled Western officials with strongly anti-communist views. These people would have access to secrets and grievances—perhaps because they were overlooked for promotion, or perhaps because they felt their governments were not vigorous enough in resisting the Soviet empire. The KGB officer would then make a delicate approach, showing no sign of any East European connection, but pretending instead to be from South Africa’s intelligence service, the Bureau of State Security. The hapless Westerner would think he was talking to a like-minded friend. Gradually he would be coaxed into handing over small secrets, and eventually big ones. Once he was past the point of no return, the case officer might identify himself as KGB. Or he might maintain the ruse. Often it was only when (or if) the breach was discovered that the Western official would realise that far from helping a friend, he had betrayed his favourite cause to the worst enemy imaginable. A similar kind of false flag operation involved approaching Jewish or pro-Israeli officials in the guise of a Mossad officer. The target would be reproached for his country’s half-hearted support for the Jewish state and believe that he was helping its security by handing over vital information.
The beauty of false flag operations is that they can be precisely tailored to fit a target’s initial vulnerability, and can then deepen and extend it. They can go through multiple stages: one intelligence officer identifies the first set of weaknesses, drawing up a detailed personality profile and a thorough picture of the target’s private life and interests. Then another begins to exploit them. A third deepens the cooperation and a fourth turns the screws hard. Only when it is far too late, if at all, does the victim realise what is going on.
If the Russians indeed spotted Snowden as a potential target for recruitment, the best false flag approach would have been in the guise of campaigners for privacy and government openness. They would have been patient; carefully massaging his ego and making him feel that he was a lone crusader for justice, whose vindication would lie outside the system, not inside it. There is no proof of this. But it would certainly help explain what happened later.
Snowden left the CIA in 2009 and moved to Dell, the computer hardware company, working as a contractor at an NSA base in Japan. Two oddities stand out. One is that he abruptly ceased posting material on Ars Technica, and contributing to its chatrooms. His last substantive contribution read as follows:
It really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behaviour bothers those outside of technology circles. Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types.
I wonder, how well would envelopes that became transparent under magical federal candlelight have sold in 1750? 1800? 1850? 1900? 1950? Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop, or was it an relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?[76]
His views were getting more radical, not less. So why did he desist from sharing them? One explanation would be that he was worried about attracting the attention of his bosses or colleagues; another is that someone warned him that this could be a danger. Such a break in a pattern of activity can be a revealing clue in the counter-intelligence world. During the Cold War, Britain’s spy-catchers achieved some notable success following a tip-off about readership of the Daily Worker. This was the Communist Party newspaper (later renamed the Morning Star). People sympathetic to Communism in the 1930s tended to be readers of the Daily Worker. But if approached by Soviet intelligence officers, they would be told to stop subscribing: it would be more useful to abandon overt Communist sympathies and instead get jobs within the British establishment.
Many years later, this led to some useful breakthroughs. Diligent study of newsagents’ old records revealed people who had subscribed to the Communist paper for some time and then stopped. Some of them indeed turned out to have been active Soviet spies.
Along with Snowden’s puzzling silence is another oddity: why did he give up the CIA so quickly? Although he had long wanted to live in Japan, a glamorous job involving intelligence operations in Geneva might seem more fun than checking computers on a military base. One explanation for this could be that Snowden was worried about the CIA’s security screening. This involves repeated polygraph (lie-detector) tests and can be quite intrusive. It might reveal that he was hanging out with WikiLeaks sympathisers, for example—which would mean a speedy end to his career. Repeat screening for contractors to American intelligence (who make up an astonishing third of the 1.4m people with top-secret security clearances) is bureaucratic and onerous, but not so revealing. Another further explanation could be that he realised that being a small cog in the CIA’s station in Geneva did not give him access to the secrets that would prove his contention of widespread and sinister government misbehaviour.
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http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=503777#p503777. He made two more contributions, one about a computer game in November 2011 and the other a rather cryptic one about a ‘Dead Man’s Switch’ in May 2012: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=22878085#p22878085