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Secret Agent | 23 him to its information technology school for six months to train as a communications officer, not a spy. After completing his training, he was dispatched to the CIA station in Geneva. 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 U.S. State Department employee in Geneva because Switzerland does not allow any intelligence officers to operate in its country. Offi- cially, he was attached to the permanent U.S. mission to the United Nations, which employed hundreds of U.S. government functionar- ies in Switzerland. It was a thin cover; the Swiss government was aware that the CIA maintained its base in Geneva and posted its employees at the U.S. mission. Although Snowden would claim in a video he made in Hong Kong that he had served as a “senior adviser for the Central Intelli- gence 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 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 eight- hundred-person mission. The only person to have publicly reported knowing him in Geneva during this period is Mavanee Anderson, a young and attractive summer intern at the U.S. mission from May to August 2007. She described befriending Snowden, who, according to her, said that he was in the CIA and also demonstrated to her his martial arts skills. She later recalled in interviews that he was “a bit” prone to brooding and voiced growing dissatisfaction with the CIA. The job in Geneva did have its benefits, however. It provided him with a generous housing and travel allowance. In many ways, it was the “cushy government job” he had said he was seeking in his Inter- net posts. He rented a four-room apartment and had his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, now twenty-one, join him there. According to his posts on the Ars Technica website, he took full | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 23 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019511