65 available to him in his job at Dell, he may have been seeking wider access in 2012 for a more nefarious purpose than a NSA job. In any case, despite the near-perfect high grades he scored, the NSA did not offer him a position in the senior executive service job. While Snowden may have believed such results would elevate him, the NSA’s offer did not meet his expectations. “It was totally unrealistic for Snowden to expect to get a SES position,” a former senior NSA officer told me. Snowden ambitions may 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 the Defense Intelligence Agency. Instead of an SES position, the NSA offered a lowly G-13 job as an information technology worker, which was not an improvement 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 qualification 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. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020217