| ® | Thief | 43 in a 2013 interview. “He then walked into the NSA and said you should hire me because I am this good on the test.” The reason why he attempted to gain entry into the upper ranks of the NSA in the late summer of 2012 is less clear. If his Internet posting and libertarian riffs are an indication of his state of mind then, he was hostile to the surveillance activities of the NSA. If so, it made little sense that he would seek a permanent career there. If this is considered in light of the career move he made six months later (in March 2013), which, as he himself admits, was for the express purpose of getting at tightly held documents stored on computers that were not available to him in his job at Dell, then he might have been seeking wider access in 2012 for a more nefarious purpose than an NSA job. In any case, despite the near-perfect scores, the NSA did not offer him a Senior Executive Service job. “It was totally unrealistic for Snowden to expect to get an SES position,” a former senior NSA officer told me. Snowden’s ambitions might have been disappointed in this instance, but it did not prevent him from later claiming that © he had been a senior adviser to the CIA and also a senior adviser to re) the Defense Intelligence Agency. Instead of an SES position, the NSA offered him a lowly G-13 job as an information technology worker, which was not an improve- ment on his job at Dell. He took this slight as evidence of the NSA’s incompetence, subsequently joking to a reporter in Moscow that his ability to steal the test answers should have been seen as a qualifica- tion for the NSA job. In September 2012, he turned down the NSA offer. If he was to advance himself now, he had to find a new way. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 43 © 9/2916 5:51PM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019531