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42 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

That same July, Snowden had other things on his mind, including an attempt to advance himself. Although his position at Dell as a system administrator was a well-compensated one, especially for a twenty-nine-year-old with no formal education, it carried little prestige. He sat from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in a windowless room watching a bank of monitors in the so-called tunnel. Many of those who worked with him were, as he described them, “eighteen year old soldiers.” Presumably, they had little interest in discussing with him the weightier issues of the world. Working as an outside contractor was also a dead-end job that hardly matched the vision he had of himself in his Internet postings. In real life, in a cubicle in the NSA, he was decidedly not the Wolfking Awesomefox heroic image he had of himself in his dream vision.

Snowden now decided to apply for a position in the NSA itself. He apparently believed that if he scored high enough on its entrance exam, the NSA would invite him to join it as a Senior Executive Service officer, or SES, which was the civilian equivalent in rank and pay to a flag officer in the U.S. armed forces. “I’m still amazed that a twenty-eight-year-old thought he could get an SES position,” a civilian contractor working for the NSA during the same period told me, “Snowden had a very overinflated view of his self-worth.” To enhance his chances of getting the SES job, Snowden in the summer of 2012 illicitly hacked into the NSA’s administrative files and stole the answers to the NSA exam. As the NSA’s subsequent postmortem would determine, it was the first known document that Snowden took without authorization at the NSA.

It was not the first time, however, that he had used his hacking skills to attempt to advance himself. At the CIA in 2009, as he later said in Moscow, he had added text to his annual CIA evaluation in what he termed “a non-malicious way” to prove a point. His CIA superior took a much darker view of that incident when the hack was detected, calling for an investigation. It was the threat of that investigation that, it will be recalled, in effect ended Snowden’s CIA career. At the NSA, his intrusion was not detected for almost a year. “He stole the [NSA] test with the answers, and he took the test and he aced it,” the former NSA director Michael McConnell recounted

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