Washington: While working for the CIA, Edward Snowden was suspected of trying to break into files he did not have access to, but a report from his supervisor on this went unheeded, a newspaper has said.
The New York Times on Thursday said Snowden`s supervisor wrote a derogatory report on him in 2009 as he was preparing to leave a CIA job in Geneva. The paper quoted two senior American officials.
Snowden, now living under asylum in Russia, left the CIA and became a contractor for the National Security Agency. This summer he leaked thousands of classified documents on the NSA`s covert programmes to spy on telephone calls and Internet traffic at home and abroad.
The supervisor`s note and the CIA`s suspicions do not appear to have been forwarded to the NSA, the Times said.
They surfaced only after investigators started probing Snowden`s records once he began to spill the beans on the surveillance programmes, the paper said.
In the derogatory report on Snowden, the supervisor wrote that he had detected a distinct change in the computer technician`s behaviour and work habits, the paper said.
That report and the CIA`s suspicions may have been the first warning of what Snowden might have in mind for the future, and a chance to review Snowden`s top-secret clearance or put his work at the NSA under closer surveillance, the paper said.