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period is Mavanee Anderson, a young and attractive summer intern at the US 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.
During his time in Geneva, he received no promotions or commendations for his work. In
December 2008, he received an unfavorable evaluation from his superior and a “derog,” the
CIA’s shorthand for a derogatory comment. He was also threatened with a punitive investigation
unless he agreed to quietly resign from the CIA. “It was not a stellar career,” Tyler Drumheller,
former CIA station chief told me in 2014.
The job in Geneva did have its benefits, however. It provided him a generous housing and
travel allowance. In many ways, it was the “cushy government job” he had said he was seeking in
his Internet posts. He rented a four room apartment and had his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, now 21,
join him there.
According to his posts on the Ars Technica web site, he took full advantage of his
compensation to live the high life. He gambled on financial developments in the option markets,
losing and making substantial sums of money. He also bought a BMW sports car. While these
BMW had a speed control to keep the car within the speed limit, he wrote that he illicitly disabled
it so he could exceed this legal limit. He described in his posts other pursuits, including racing
motorcycles it Italy and traveling around Germany with an Estonian rock star (who he did not
further identify.) He also continued his fantasy life in Internet gaming. The gaming alias he
chose was “Wolfking Awesomefox.” He even indulged in a fantasy gun sport called Airsoft, a
variation of paint ball, in which participants used realistic looking pistols to splatter each other
with paint.
His good fortune came to an abrupt end in 2008. He suffered a massive loss in his options
speculations. He wrote in a post that he had "lost $20,000 in October [2008] alone;” a sum which
represented a substantial part of the $66,000 a year CIA salary. He blamed the US financial
system, posting on Ars Technica that Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was a
“cockbag.” He also bet against any further rise in the stock market index, asking a user with
whom he was chatting on the Ars Technica site in December 2008 to “pray” for a collapse of
stock prices. When his correspondent asked him why he wanted him to pray for a decline,
Snowden responded “because then I’Il be filthy fucking rich.” The stock market, however,
continued to rise, and Snowden also lost this bet.
Snowden lashed out at others on the Internet over these setbacks. He termed those who
questioned his financial judgment as “fucking retards.” As with other setbacks, he blamed them
on government officials. He even advertised them in Ars Technica, a closely-watched Internet
forum, while serving in the CIA. Since the CIA was engaged in 2008 in highly sensitive
operations to gather banking data in Switzerland-- one of which Snowden later disclosed to the
Guardian—any Internet discussion by a CIA employee of financial losses could serve as a beacon
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