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30 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Snowden still had his security clearance, despite his highly problematic exit from the CIA, because the agency had instituted a policy a few years earlier that allowed voluntarily retiring CIA officers to keep their 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. This accommodation, in turn, made it easier for the CIA to downsize to meet its budget.

Not only did Snowden retain his clearance, but unlike when he had applied for his job at the CIA in 2006, he could now list on his résumé two years of experience in information technology and cyber security at the CIA. Dell could check only a single fact: that Snowden was 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 because of government privacy regulations. Even though the CIA had "security concerns" about Snowden, it could not convey them to either Dell or the NSA without violating the privacy rules. "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 [IC] before CIA could inform the rest of the IC about its worries," Michael Morell, then CIA deputy director, explained. "He even got a pay raise."

Obviously, this was a glitch in the security system. As a result of it, though, Snowden entered the secret world of the NSA only five months after being forced out of the CIA.

For the next forty-five 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 U.S. Yokota Air Base, which is about two hours by car from downtown Tokyo. He moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in Fussa, just outside the sprawling base.

His initial job for Dell was teaching cyber security to army and air force personnel. In this capacity, he instructed U.S. 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 U.S. military networks by China, Russia, and other adversary nations. It was not a challenging or interesting job.

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