Snowden’s retained top‑secret clearance enabled a back‑door contractor role at NSA Japan base

56 Japan. It first had to find technicians willing to go to Japan. Since Snowden had a long-time interest in going to Japan, he was more than willing to relocate to Japan. He had little problem obtaining the job. Aside from his family connections, he had a single compelling qualification for the job—a top secret clearance. For an outside contractor such as Dell, such a security clearance was pure gold. If a potential recruit lacked a top secret clearance, before Dell could deploy him or her at the NSA, it needed a wait for the completion of a time- consuming background check. Ifa recruit already had one, as Snowden did, he could begin working immediately. The reason that Snowden still had his secrecy clearance, despite his highly-problematic exit from the CIA, was that the CIA had instituted a policy a few years earlier that allowed voluntarily- retiring CIA officers to keep their secrecy clearance for two years after they left. This “free pass,” as one former CIA officer called the two year grace period, had been intended to make it easier for retiring officers to find jobs in parts of the defense industry that required secrecy clearance. This accommodation, in turn, made it easier for the CIA to downsize to meet its budget. Not only did Snowden retain his security clearance, but unlike when he had applied for his job at the CIA in 2006, he now could list on his resume two years experience in information technology and cyber security at the CIA. All Dell could check was a single fact: Snowden was indeed employed at the CIA between 2006 and 2009. His CIA file, which contained the “derog,” was not available to Dell or any other private company. Even though the CIA had “security concerns” about Snowden, as CIA Deputy Director Morell noted, it could not convey them to either Dell or the NSA. “So the guy with whom the CIA had concerns left the Agency and joined the ranks of the many contractors working in the intelligence community before CIA could inform the rest of the IC about its worries,” Morell explained. “He even got a pay raise.” Obviously, this was a glitch in the security system but, as a result of it, Snowden entered the NSA by the back door only five months after being forced out of the CIA. For the next 45 months Dell assigned him various IT tasks at the NSA. In June 2009, he was sent to Japan to work in the NSA complex at the Yokota air base outside Tokyo. He moved into a small one bedroom apartment in the nearby town of Fussia. His initial job for Dell was teaching cyber security to Army and Air Force personnel. In this capacity, he instructed US military officers stationed at the base in how to shield their computers from hackers. Such security training had been required for military personnel dealing with classified material after several successful break-ins to US military networks by China, Russia, and other adversary nations. Although it finally brought him to Japan, it was not a challenging or interesting job. But Snowden found diversions in Japan. In July 2009, he was joined in Japan by Lindsay Mills. She had become an amateur photographer, specializing in arty self portraits. She also saw herself as a global tourist, writing in her blog after arriving in Japan that had she travelled to 17 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020208