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32 CHAPTER TWO The Crime Scene Investigation “Any private contractor, not even an employee of the government, could walk into the NSA building, take whatever they wanted, and walk out with it and they would never know.” Edward Snowden, Moscow 2014 About 15 miles northwest of Honolulu on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, adjacent to the sprawling Wheeler Air Force Base, is a 250,000 square foot man-made mound of earth and reinforced concrete surrounded by an electrified fence. Inside the mound is a three story structure originally built by the Air Force in the Second World War as a bomb-proof aircraft repair facility. In the Cold War, it was modernized to withstand an enemy chemical, biological, radiological or Electrical Magnetic Pulse attacks, and used by the Navy’s operation center for its Pacific fleet. After the Cold War ended, the huge edifice was turned over to the NSA, which had been created as an intelligence service to intercept the communications and signals of foreign countries after World War II, a mission which included vacuuming into its giant computer arrays telephone messages, missile telemetry, submarine signals and virtually everything on the electro-magnetic spectrum of interest to the US defense department and US intelligence agencies. Because it provided a valuable window on the activities of adversary nations in the Pacific region, it was able to monitor the ballistic missile tests and submarine activities of China, North Korea and Russia. As the NSA developed it, this Hawatian base became one of its primary regional bases for gathering Asian communications intelligence. By 2013, the Kunia base, also called “the tunnel” by its NSA workers, had a vast array of state-of-the-art technology, including 90 Cray supercomputers arranged in a horseshoe configuration, used to decipher and make sense of the intercepted signals from China, Russia and North Korea. At the heart of the Hawaiian complex was a unit with both military and civilian employees. A large share of the civilians who ran the computers worked under two-year contract to the NSA’s leading civilian contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton. Keith Alexander, the four-star general who headed the NSA from 2005 to 2014, first learned about the impending story in the Guardian on June 4, 2013 while he was in Germany meeting with its top intelligence officials. Janine Gibson, the Guardian’s American website editor had notified the NSA it intended to break a story based on NSA the next day. It took NSA counterintelligence less than 48 hours to determine that a civilian employee at the base from which documents were stolen had not reported back to work on June 3rd, 2013. It also determined he had lied on his application of a two-week medical leave and had flown to Hong Kong. The missing man was Edward Joseph Snowden, a 29-year civilian employee of Booz Allen Hamilton. At the time of the theft in May 2013, he was still being trained as an analyst at the Threat Operations Center. Personnel records further showed that he had worked there for less HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020184