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35 CHAPTER FIVE Contractor “Private contractors don’t clear employees. The government does.”-- Admiral Michael McConnell, Vice Chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton Snowden, age 26, returned from Europe and moved into his mother’s condo. He was not only unemployed now, having resigned the CIA without qualifying for any benefits, but his financial state had been hurt by the huge losses he had suffered playing the options market in Geneva. His vision of himself as a secret agent, the unstoppable “Wolfking Awesomefox” may have also suffered. According to the narrative he later supplied to the Guardian, he had become deeply concerned about the immoral way in which the CIA conducted its intelligence operations in Switzerland. "Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good," Snowden told the Guardian. By way of example, he said he learned that the CIA had gotten a Swiss banker drunk enough arrested to be arrested when he drove, so the CIA could compromise him. Snowden, who did not drink himself, was appalled at this ploy. Despite his growing antagonism towards the US government, he had not given up on, if not becoming a secret agent, working in the netherworld of secret intelligence. Although Snowden’s career had abruptly ended at the CIA, there still was a backdoor through which he could re-enter the spy world. It was private corporations that hired civilian technicians to work for spy agencies as independent contractors. By 2009, The CIA, NSA and other US intelligence services had outsourced much of the job of maintaining and upgrading their computer systems to these private companies. They supplied the NSA with most of its system administrators and other information technology workers. This arrangement allowed the NSA to effectively bypass budget limits and other restrictions limiting how many NSA technicians it could recruit. Instead, of putting these workers on its own payroll, they nominally worked for, and received their paychecks from, private employers. In fact, many of these outside contractors worked full-time for the NSA. Snowden applied in April 2009 to one of these private companies, Dell SecureWorks. It was a subsidiary of the Dell computer company. To diverse out of manufacturing computers, Dell had recently gone into the business of managing government computer systems for the NSA and other intelligence services. As a leading specialist in the field of corporate cyber security, Dell had no problem obtaining sizable contracts for from the NSA’s Technology Directorate. In 2008, the NSA had in effect outsourced to Dell the task of re-organizing its back-up systems at its regional bases. Now Dell had to find thousands of independent contractors to work at these bases In 2009, when Snowden applied, Dell was seeking to fill positions at the NSA’s regional base in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020207