Snowden’s alleged CIA role reduced to junior telecom support officer in Geneva

51 CHAPTER FOUR Secret Agent “Sure, a whistleblower could use these [computer vulnerabilities], but so could a spy.” --Edward Snowden in Moscow The sudden transformation of Snowden in 2006 from a night watchman on a university campus to secret agent for the CIA provided him with a powerful new identity and one much closer to the avatars he adopted for his fantasy games. It was burnished so deeply in his self- image that he cited it eight years in Moscow. When Brian Williams, then a NBC anchorman, began an hour-long NBC television interview with Snowden in 2014 by saying, “It seems to me spies probably look a lot more like Ed Snowden and a lot less like James Bond these days," Snowden approvingly smiled and told him, “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word.” Snowden further confirmed his interviewer’s point, sating “I lived and worked undercover overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not, and even being assigned a name that was not mine." In reality, Snowden’s employment at the CIA was more prosaic. When he joined the CIA in 2006, he did not have the required experience in maintaining secret communication systems. So the CIA sent him to its information technology school for six months to train as a communications officer, not aspy. After completing his training, he was dispatched to the CIA station in Geneva, Switzerland. He worked there for the next two years as one of dozens of Information Technologists servicing the CIA’s communication channels in Switzerland. He was stationed there, according to Swiss registry records, under his own name from March 2007 to February 2009. He was identified as a US State Department employee in Geneva because Switzerland does not allow any intelligence officers to operate in that country. So officially he was attached to the permanent U.S. mission to the United Nations which employed hundreds of US government functionaries in Switzerland. It was a thin cover, since the Swiss government was aware that the CIA maintained its base in Geneva and posted it employees at the US mission, Although he would later claim in the video he made in Hong Kong that he had served as a “senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he was merely a telecommunications support officer, or TSO in CIA parlance, which was a junior level job at the CIA. He worked as part of a 12 man team of information technologists under the supervision of senior CIA officers, according to a former CIA officer in Geneva. The job of these TSOs was to protect the security of the CIA’s computer systems through which the CIA station in Geneva sent and received its secret communications. As far as is known, Snowden made very few friends at the 800-person mission. The only person there to have publicly reported knowing him in Geneva during this HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020203