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CHAPTER 3

Contractor

Private contractors don't clear employees. The government does.
—ADMIRAL MICHAEL MCCONNELL,
former vice-chairman, Booz Allen Hamilton

SNOWDEN, aged twenty-five, returned from Europe and moved into his mother's condo. Not only was he unemployed now, having resigned from the CIA, but his financial state had been hurt by the huge losses he had suffered playing the options market in Geneva and by the fact that he did not qualify for any CIA benefits. His vision of himself as a secret agent, the unstoppable Wolfking Awesomefox, might have also suffered. According to the narrative he later supplied to The Guardian, he had become deeply concerned about the immoral way in which the CIA conducted its intelligence operations in Switzerland.

"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good," Snowden told The Guardian. By way of example, he said he learned that the CIA had gotten a Swiss banker drunk enough to be arrested when he drove so the CIA could compromise him. Snowden, who did not drink himself, was appalled at this ploy. Despite his

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