by Luke Harding
Assange began personal discussions with his friend Fidel Narvaez, Ecuador’s London consul. The two had become close. The goal was to secure Snowden some kind of official paper – a temporary travel document, or better still a diplomatic passport, that would speed him to the cool and grey Andes. Eventually, Assange dispatched his sometime girlfriend Sarah Harrison to Hong Kong, carrying safe-conduct papers for Ecuador signed by Narvaez. A 31-year-old would-be journalist and WikiLeaks activist, Harrison was thoroughly loyal.
Snowden’s first choice for exile had always been Iceland. He believed the island had some of the most progressive media laws in the world. But reaching Reykjavik from Hong Kong would require passage through the US, or through European states which might arrest him on the US warrant. Ecuador, on the other hand, could safely be reached via Cuba and Venezuela, who were unlikely to obey US instructions.
Unfortunately, the trip also apparently required transit through Russia.
Whose idea was it for Snowden to go to Moscow? This is the million-rouble question. Tibbo, Snowden’s lawyer, won’t answer. He says merely that the situation was ‘complicated’. Harrison says she and Snowden wanted to avoid flying over western Europe. Most connections also involved changing planes in the US, clearly not an option. Snowden’s itinerary does, however, seem to bear the fingerprints of Julian Assange.
Assange was often quick to criticise the US and other western nations when they abused human rights. But he was reluctant to speak out against governments that supported his personal efforts to avoid extradition. This was especially true of Russia. US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks paint a dismal portrait of Russia under Vladimir Putin. They suggest that the Kremlin, its powerful spy agencies and organised crime have grown practically indistinguishable, with Russia in effect a ‘virtual mafia state’.
And yet in 2011 Assange signed a lucrative TV deal with Russia Today (RT), Putin’s English-language global propaganda channel. The channel’s mission is to accuse the west of hypocrisy while staying mute about Russia’s own failings. The fate of Russia’s own whistleblowers was grimly evident. The list of Russian opposition journalists killed in murky circumstances is a long one. It includes the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya (shot dead in 2006) and the human rights activist Natalia Estemirova (abducted in Grozny in 2009 and murdered).
Assange’s view of the world was essentially self-regarding and Manichaean, with countries divided up into those that supported him (Russia, Ecuador, Latin America generally) and those that didn’t (the US, Sweden and the UK). As Jemima Khan, one of many demoralised former WikiLeaks supporters, put it: ‘The problem with Camp Assange is that, in the words of George W Bush, it sees the world as being “with us or against us”.’
On Sunday 23 June 2013, Snowden’s lanky figure, wearing a grey shirt and carrying a backpack, arrived at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport. With him was the young WikiLeaks worker, Sarah Harrison. It was a hot and humid morning. The pair were nervous. They checked in at the Aeroflot counter for flight SU213 to Moscow, and made their way through normal departure channels. Snowden was holding the safe-conduct pass issued by Narvaez, Assange’s friend, and couriered to him by Harrison. Several plain-clothes Chinese officials observed them closely. For any CIA officers watching, this departure must have been exasperating.
In theory, Snowden’s audacious exit should have been impossible. The previous day US authorities had annulled Snowden’s US passport. They had also faxed over extradition papers to the Hong Kong authorities, demanding his immediate arrest. But Hong Kong claimed that there were ‘irregularities’ in the American paperwork, and they were powerless to halt Snowden’s departure until the errors were rectified.
Shortly afterwards, some 40,000 feet in the air, Snowden and his companion tucked into the first of their two airline hot meals. Aeroflot was working hard to overcome its past Soviet reputation for non-existent customer service. On the ground was a scene of international mayhem, as American officials discovered that Snowden had escaped the net and was en route to Moscow. The bastard had got away! For the world’s greatest superpower, Hong Kong’s not-very-plausible legalistic explanation was humiliating stuff. Not only had Snowden vamoosed, but he now appeared to be heading straight into the embrace of Washington’s adversaries – Russia, Cuba, Venezuela!
Capitol Hill made little secret of its rage. ‘Every one of those nations is hostile to the United States,’ Mike Rogers, chair of the House intelligence committee, fumed. ‘The US government must exhaust all legal options to get him back. When you think about what he says he wants and what his actions are, it defies logic.’ Democrat senator Charles Schumer was equally scathing: ‘Vladimir Putin always seems eager to stick a finger in the eye of the United States, whether it is Syria, Iran and now, of course, with Snowden.’
General Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director and Snowden’s former boss, was no happier: ‘[Snowden] is clearly an individual who’s betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him. This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent.’
The Chinese, however, were unapologetic. By way of reply the official Xinhua news agency lambasted the US for its ‘hypocritical’ spying: ‘The United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber-attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain of our age.’
With Snowden safely on board the Airbus A330-300, Assange put out a statement. He claimed personal credit for the entire rescue operation. He said WikiLeaks had paid for Snowden’s ticket. While in Hong Kong, the organisation had also given Snowden legal advice. Assange would subsequently liken his role, in an interview with the South China Morning Post, to that of a ‘people smuggler’.
Proprietorially claiming Snowden as the latest star player for Team WikiLeaks, the statement said: ‘Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally. He is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks.’
Moscow journalists dumped their Sunday leisure plans and scrambled to Terminal F of Sheremetyevo International Airport, where Snowden was due to transit. The airport was named after Russia’s most celebrated aristocratic dynasty, the Sheremetevs. The Sheremetevs served numerous tsars, grew fabulously rich, and built two Moscow palaces, Ostankino and Kuskovo. Count Nikolai Sheremetev fell in love with and secretly married his former serf, Praskovya. The romance had spawned a thousand cultural histories.
A large scrum of Russian and international correspondents gathered in front of a small door. It was from here that arriving passengers would emerge; the cleverer reporters had brought pictures of Snowden to show his fellow travellers from Hong Kong.
Plain-clothes Russian agents also trawled the terminal, deflecting questions about which state agency they represented by pretending to be businessmen from Munich and journalists from state-run NTV. A Venezuelan contingent was also said to be there, fuelling speculation that Caracas could be Snowden’s eventual destination. Ecuador’s ambassador turned up, arriving at the airport in his 7-series BMW. He appeared lost as he wandered around the terminal, asking one group of journalists: ‘Do you know where he is? Is he coming here?’ A reporter replied: ‘We thought you did.’
When the plane landed in Moscow at 5pm local time, Russian security vehicles were waiting. From Vietnam, Ecuador’s foreign minister Ricardo Patino tweeted that Snowden had sought political asylum in his country. But where was he? The news agency Interfax announced that Snowden was booked on an Aeroflot flight to Cuba the following day. He appeared to be holed up in Moscow’s transit zone. An Aeroflot source claimed – wrongly, it would turn out – he was staying in a small overnight hotel ‘capsule’ room in Terminal E.
What did the Kremlin know of Snowden’s arrival? President Putin claimed that he was informed of Snowden’s presence on a Moscow-bound flight just two hou
rs before he landed. He observed that by cancelling his passport the Americans had made an elementary mistake in tradecraft, making his onward flight options impossible.
In characteristic fashion, mixing sarcasm and scarcely sincere ruefulness, Putin labelled Snowden ‘an unwanted Christmas present’. The Russian authorities did seem to have been genuinely surprised by Snowden’s eventual stranding in Russia. The normally reliable Kommersant newspaper, however, would claim that Snowden had secretly spent two days at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong. Snowden himself vehemently denies this.
Putin’s own attitude towards whistleblowing activities was undoubtedly negative. He later described Snowden as a stranniy paren – a strange bloke. ‘In effect, he condemned himself to a rather difficult life. I do not have the faintest idea what he will do next,’ he said.
Putin was a KGB officer who served in communist East Germany in the 1980s, and was the former head of the KGB’s main successor agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB. He took a dim view of traitors. In 2006 the renegade FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko died in London after drinking radioactive polonium in what the British government believes was a Russian state plot. The KGB’s spy code of omerta was absolute.
After 13 years in power, Putin was paranoid, mistrustful, prone towards conspiratorial explanations at home and abroad, and more convinced than ever of his own unparalleled abilities. He viewed relations with the west, and the US especially, through the prism of Soviet xenophobia. Given his KGB academy training, he must have wondered whether Snowden was an American deception exercise, a classic cold war ploy.
But in reality, Snowden really was a gift. He presented a perfect opportunity for the Kremlin to highlight what it regarded as Washington’s double standards when it came to human rights, state snooping and extradition. Putin must also have enjoyed the frisson of superpower parity with the United States. The idea underlay his view of a resurgent Russia, an oppositional pole to the US in global affairs. The Americans would have to beg to get Snowden back!
Within hours of Snowden touching down, pro-Kremlin voices were busily suggesting that the Russian Federation should offer him asylum.
The next day, the media circus resumed at Sheremetyevo. Several enterprising reporters had bought flight tickets and were scouring the transit zone for any sign of Snowden; some camped out there for days. Others obtained Cuban visas and booked onto the same Aeroflot flight to Havana. It was generally assumed that Snowden would be on the plane.
The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Miriam Elder waited at the gate to get on. Something was afoot. The Aeroflot staff were even ruder than usual. They stopped TV crews from filming the plane through a window. Burly security guards hung around.
Elder failed to get on the flight: she didn’t have a visa. Other journalists trooped on board and walked the aisles hunting for the refugee. Snowden and Harrison were booked into seats 17A and C, adjacent to the window. Jussi Niemeläinen, a correspondent with the Finnish newspaper Heisingen Sanomat, was across in 17F – close enough perhaps to grab a few words with the world’s most wanted man, and to secure a glorious front-page story. Minutes before take-off there was still no sign of Snowden. His seat was empty. The last four passengers were expected.
And then a whisper spread across the aircraft: ‘Ne uletayet, ne uletayet!’ – Russian for ‘not flying’. Snowden wasn’t coming. Some of the Russian journalists broke into a chant of ‘champagne trip, champagne trip’. The purser solemnly announced that the 12-hour flight to Cuba was non-alcoholic: soft drinks would be served. ‘You could only laugh,’ Niemeläinen said. ‘During the journey I watched The Muppets. It felt right for the occasion.’
Snowden was in extra-territorial limbo. Over the next few weeks the Kremlin would maintain the fiction that Snowden had not entered Russian territory – he didn’t have a Russian visa, after all – and that they had little to do with him. At the same time Moscow would milk his stay for all it was worth. Snowden’s location was a mystery. In theory he remained in Sheremetyevo’s transit zone. But no one could find him there. Probably, the authorities regarded ‘transit’ as an elastic concept, a sort of wiggly line that could, if necessary, be stretched across a map. Perhaps he was in the heavily guarded airport Novotel. Or somewhere else.
In the wake of Snowden’s arrival, US–Russian relations plunged. One of Obama’s foreign policy priorities had been to ‘reset’ ties with Moscow; these had grown strained under President George W Bush following the war in Iraq and Russia’s 2008 invasion of US-backed Georgia. The ‘reset’ was already in trouble, with disagreements over a plethora of issues including Syria, the US’s missile defence plans in central Europe, recriminations over NATO’s military action in Libya and the imprisonment in the US of the Russian arms dealer and alleged former KGB agent Viktor Bout.
Obama had tried to cultivate President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s temporary successor, a less hawkish figure. In fact, Medvedev was never an autonomous entity. In 2011 Putin elbowed him aside and returned as president for the third time. In a leaked cable, one US diplomat reported that Medvedev played Robin to Putin’s Batman. The comparison irritated Putin. It was, he said, an example of American arrogance.
Now Obama called for Russia to hand Snowden over. Russia’s veteran foreign minister, the wily Sergei Lavrov, parried by saying that Snowden wasn’t actually ‘in’ Russia and had never crossed the border. Putin ruled out an extradition of Snowden. He pointed out that there was no bilateral treaty with the US. He also claimed – implausibly – that Russia’s security services had no interest in him. Two days later Obama announced that he wouldn’t expend geopolitical capital in getting Snowden back.
Behind the scenes, however, the administration was doing everything it could to close down Snowden’s onward journey: pressuring allies, placing him on no-fly lists, cajoling the South Americans. Having initially been supportive of his asylum claim, Ecuador grew lukewarm. US Vice President Joe Biden called Correa, laying out what the consequences would be if Quito took him in. Correa revoked Snowden’s safe-conduct pass, saying it had been issued in error. Ecuador also seemed exasperated with Assange, with its ambassador in Washington noting that WikiLeaks seemed to be ‘running the show’. On 30 June, Snowden applied for asylum in 20 countries. They included France, Germany, Ireland, China and Cuba.
The following day, 1 July, Snowden issued a statement via WikiLeaks, the first of several. He said he had left Hong Kong ‘after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for telling the truth’, and thanked ‘friends new and old, family and others’ for his ‘continued liberty’.
Snowden then attacked Obama for using Biden to ‘pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested asylum to deny my asylum petitions’. The president had previously promised not to get involved in any diplomatic ‘wheeling and dealing’. This claim now looked like something of a lie.
Snowden continued: ‘This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.’
The White House had defended the ‘human right to seek asylum’ but was now denying him that option, Snowden said, complaining: ‘The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon … In the end [it] is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.’
The statement concluded: ‘I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.’
The reference to ‘constitutional government’ seemed to be authentic Snowden; his motive for blowing the whistle was the NSA’s infringement of the US constitution. Other parts of the text, though, seemed suspiciously Assangian, especially the second-person line: ‘No,
the Obama administration is afraid of you.’ Snowden had previously asked Greenwald to help draft his personal manifesto. Greenwald had declined, though remained Snowden’s most fierce public champion. Now it appeared he had a new literary collaborator. This was J Assange.
On 2 July, the Kremlin hosted a summit of major gas exporters. One of those who flew in for the event was Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. An indigenous Indian, who had struggled to read his inauguration speech, Morales was no fan of US power. In an interview with the Spanish-language service of RT, Morales was asked about Snowden. Speaking off the cuff, the president said he hadn’t received an asylum request from the NSA whistleblower. But if he did, Bolivia would receive it favourably.
Later that day Morales and his entourage took off from Moscow for home. A couple of hours into the flight the pilot passed on some troubling news: France and Portugal were refusing to allow the presidential plane to use their airspace. The news got worse. Spain and Italy also cancelled air permits. In desperation, the pilot got in touch with the authorities in Austria and made a forced landing in Vienna. What the hell was going on?
Someone in the US intelligence community had tipped off Washington that Morales had smuggled Snowden aboard his jet. An exemplary piece of real-time reporting! They had got him! The only problem was that Snowden was not on board. The White House had pressed the panic button with its European allies because of an intelligence blunder. This may have been the result of clever Russian disinformation. Or a classic CIA goof-up.
In Vienna, the president of Bolivia and his defence secretary Ruben Saavedra sat on an airport couch, aggrieved that the US had had the audacity to humiliate a small sovereign nation. Asked whether Snowden had been smuggled aboard, Saavedra turned white. ‘This is a lie, a falsehood. It was generated by the US government,’ he said. ‘It is an outrage. It is an abuse. It is a violation of the conventions and agreements of international air transportation.’
