by Luke Harding
From the leftist nations of Latin America there were expressions of outrage. Bolivia’s vice-president Alvaro Garcia announced Morales had been ‘kidnapped by imperialism’. Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and others issued protests. From the airport’s VIP lounge Morales made telephone calls, seeking to have the airspace bans overturned. His four pilots crashed out on red leather chairs and got a few hours’ sleep. Morales was marooned for 15 hours before he eventually took off again. Once home, he denounced the forced rerouting of his plane as an ‘open provocation’ of ‘north American imperialism’.
It was an ignominious episode. In Washington, the State Department conceded that it had discussed the issue of flights by Snowden with other nations. The US’s cack-handed intervention demonstrated that the caricature of the US as an aggressive playground bully prepared to trample on international norms was on this occasion perfectly correct. But it also demonstrated that Snowden’s plan to get to Latin American wasn’t really viable – unless, perhaps, he was prepared to travel there smuggled aboard a Russian nuclear submarine.
Three weeks after Snowden flew into Russia, Tanya Lokshina received an email. Lokshina is the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Moscow. Her job is a tough one – defending Russian civil society from a hostile and often aggressive Kremlin. Since Putin’s return to the presidency in May 2011, the job had got even tougher. The president had launched the worst crackdown on human rights since the Soviet era. This came in response to mass protests against his rule in Moscow and, to a lesser degree, in other big cities. The protests began in late 2011, following rigged Duma elections. Lokshina was feisty, fun and fluent in English and Russian. She was one of a defiant band of rights activists.
The email was scarcely believable. Signed ‘Edward Joseph Snowden’, it asked Lokshina to report to the arrivals hall of Sheremetyevo airport. There, ‘someone from the airport staff will be waiting to receive you with a sign labelled G9’. Surely this was some kind of practical joke? ‘The invitation, supposedly from one of the world’s most sought-after people, had a whiff of Cold-War-era spy thriller to it,’ she blogged. She fed her baby with mashed carrots, while juggling calls from the world’s media.
It became clear that the invite was genuine. Airport security phoned up and asked for her passport number. Lokshina got on the airport express train; en route, the US embassy rang her up. An American diplomat wanted her to give a message to Snowden. It said that in the opinion of the US government he wasn’t a human rights defender but a law-breaker who had to be held accountable for his crimes. She agreed to pass this message on.
At Sheremetyevo, Lokshina spotted the man with the ‘G9’ sign. At least 150 reporters had found him too, desperate for any sighting of Snowden. ‘I am used to crowds, and I am used to journalists, but what I saw before me was madness: a tangle of shouting people, microphone assaults and countless cameras, national and international media alike. I feared I might be torn apart in the frenzy,’ she wrote.
The G9 man was wearing a black suit. He announced: ‘Invited guests come with me.’ He led her down a long corridor. There were eight other guests. They included the Russian ombudsman, an MP and other representatives from human rights groups – most independent, but a handful with ties to the Kremlin and its FSB spy agency.
Lokshina was put on a bus and driven to another entrance. And there was Snowden, seemingly in good spirits, and wearing his crumpled grey shirt. With him was Sarah Harrison. ‘The first thing I thought was how young he looks – like a college kid,’ Lokshina wrote. There was also an interpreter.
Standing behind a desk, Snowden read from a prepared statement, his voice rather high and in places croaky. He seemed shy and nervy; this was his first public press conference. It was also a bizarre one. For years, the Kremlin had denigrated human rights organisations for being spies and lackeys of the west. Now they were being courted. The Kremlin was keen to make a political point.
Snowden began: ‘Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant of law to search for, seize, and read your communications.’
He read on: ‘Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution of my country, article twelve of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance …’
At this point there was a loud bing-bang-bong! The airport tannoy burst into Russian and English; it announced the business lounge could be found on the third floor, next to gate 39. Snowden folded his body and smiled; his small audience laughed with him. When he resumed, another blaring message sawed him off. ‘I have heard this many times over the last couple of weeks,’ Snowden said croakily. Harrison joked she knew the announcements so well, she could practically sing along to them.
Snowden’s substantive points were interesting. He said that secret US FISA court rulings ‘somehow legitimise an illegal affair’ and ‘simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done’. He also traced his own actions back to the Nuremberg trials of 1945, quoting: ‘Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience.’ And he defended himself from criticism that he had deliberately set out to hurt, or even irreparably damage, US national security:
‘Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign governments to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice. The moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.’
Snowden interpreted the US government’s global pursuit of him as ‘a warning to all others who might speak out as I have’. No-fly lists, the threat of sanctions, the ‘unprecedented step of ordering military allies to ground a Latin American president’s plane’ – all were what he called ‘dangerous escalations’. He then praised countries that had offered him support and asylum in the face of ‘this historically disproportionate aggression’. Snowden cited Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador:
‘[They] have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful against the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation they have earned the respect of the world. It is my intention to travel to each of these countries to extend my personal thanks to their people and leaders.’
And then an announcement: Snowden said he was requesting asylum from Russia. He made clear this was a temporary move, forced upon him by circumstances, and until such time as he could travel to Latin America. He said he wanted the activists to petition the US and Europe not to interfere with his movements. The meeting broke up after 45 minutes.
‘Mr Snowden is not a phantom: such a man exists,’ Genri Reznik, a defence lawyer, said afterwards, as he and the other guests were reunited with the media scrum in Terminal F. ‘I shook his hand. I could feel skin and bones,’ Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s human rights commissioner, told Russian TV, ‘He [Snowden] said that of course he is concerned about freedom of movement, lack of it, but as for the rest, he is not complaining about living conditions. As he said: “I’ve seen worse situations.” ’
Snowden’s prolonged stay in Russia was involuntary. He got stuck. But it made his own story – his narrative of principled exile and flight – a lot more complicated. It was now easier for critics to paint him not as a political refugee but as a 21st-century Kim Philby, the British defector who sold his country and its secrets to the Soviets.
Other critics likened him to Bernon F Mitchell and William H Martin
, two NSA analysts who defected in 1960 to the Soviet Union, and had a miserable time there for the rest of their lives. Martin and Mitchell flew to Cuba and then boarded a Soviet freighter, popping up in Moscow several months later at a press conference in the House of Journalists. There, they denounced their former employer, and revealed that the US spied on its allies and deliberately sent aircraft into Soviet airspace to trigger and capture Soviet radar patterns.
The analogies were unfair. Snowden was no traitor. He wasn’t a Mitchell or a Martin or a Philby. But, for better or worse, the 30-year-old American was now dependent on the Kremlin and its shadowy spy agencies for protection and patronage.
For anyone who knew Russia – its brutal wars in Chechnya, its rigged elections, its relentless hounding of critics – part of Snowden’s speech struck a tin note. Russia may have stood against human rights violations in Snowden’s case. But this wasn’t because the Russian government believed in human rights; it didn’t. Putin frequently talked of human rights in disparaging terms. Rather, he saw Snowden as a pawn in a new great game, and as a golden opportunity to embarrass Washington, Moscow’s then-and-now adversary.
The very day before Snowden’s unlikely press briefing, one of the most surreal moments in legal history had taken place. In scenes that could have been written by Gogol, Russia had put a dead man on trial. The 37-year-old auditor Sergei Magnitsky died in prison in 2009. Magnitsky had uncovered a massive tax fraud inside Russia’s interior ministry. The corrupt officials involved arrested him; in jail he was refused medical treatment and tortured. The case had become a totemic one for the Kremlin and the White House, after the US and some EU states banned the Russian officials involved and froze their overseas assets. Where the defendant should have been was an empty cage. It was a Dadaist spectacle.
A week later, Russia’s vocal opposition leader Alexei Navalny also appeared in court. A lawyer and anti-corruption blogger, with a substantial middle-class following, and sometimes darkly nationalist views, Navalny was Putin’s best-known opponent. (Putin was unable to bring himself to utter Navalny’s name, and referred to him disparagingly as ‘that gentleman’.) Navalny was jailed for five years for ‘stealing’ from a timber firm. Nobody really believed the charges. The sentence was later suspended in what looked like a moment of Kremlin in-fighting.
Russia’s direction of travel, then, was becoming murkier; corruption, show trials and political pressure on the judiciary were everyday facts of life. In a very KGB twist, Putin had passed a new law requiring all nongovernmental organisations that received western funding to register as ‘foreign agents’. Ahead of the 2014 winter Olympics, to be held in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the Duma had enacted legislation against ‘gay propaganda’. These moves were part of a wider political strategy in which Putin appealed directly to his conservative base – workers, pensioners, state employees – over the heads of Moscow’s educated and restive bourgeoisie.
According to the activists who met him at Sheremetyevo, Snowden had several new minders. Who were they? All of Moscow assumed they were undercover agents from the FSB.
The FSB is Moscow’s pre-eminent intelligence agency. It is a prodigiously resourced organisation that operates according to its own secret rules. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the KGB was dissolved. But it didn’t disappear. In 1995 most of the KGB’s operations were transferred to the new FSB. Nominally it carries out the same functions as the FBI and other western law enforcement agencies – criminal prosecution, investigations into organised crime and counter-terrorism. But its most important job is counter-espionage.
One of the lawyers invited to Snowden’s 12 June press conference was Anatoly Kucherena. Afterwards Snowden sent an email to Kucherena and asked for his help. Kucherena agreed. He returned to Sheremetyevo two days later and held a long meeting with Snowden. He explained Russian laws. He also suggested Snowden abandon his other asylum requests. ‘I don’t know why he picked me,’ the lawyer says.
The following day Kucherena visited again, and put together Snowden’s application to Russia’s migration service for temporary asylum. Suddenly, Kucherena was taking the role of Snowden’s public advocate, his channel to the world. ‘Right now he wants to stay in Russia. He has options. He has friends and a lot of supporters … I think everything will be OK,’ he told reporters.
It’s unclear why Snowden reached out to Kucherena. But the defence lawyer had connections in all the right places. A Kremlin loyalist, he publicly supported Putin’s 2011 campaign to return as president. Bulky, grey-haired, bonhomous, the 52-year-old Kucherena was used to dealing with celebrities. (He had represented several Russian stars including the Kremlin-friendly film director Nikita Mikhalkov.)
But as well as high-society contacts, Kucherena has other useful connections. He is a member of the FSB’s ‘public chamber’, a body Putin created in 2006. The council’s mission is nebulous, given that it involves a spy agency: it is to ‘develop a relationship’ between the security service and the public. The FSB’s then director Nikolai Patrushev approved Kucherena’s job; he is one of fifteen members. Fellow lawyers say he is not an FSB agent as such. Rather, they suggest, he is a ‘person of the system’.
Few, then, believe Kucherena is an independent player. He was one of very few people allowed to visit Snowden. During his trips to the airport he brought gifts. They included a Lonely Planet guide to Russia, and a guide to Moscow. The lawyer also selected several classics ‘to help Snowden understand the mentality of the Russian people’: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a collection of stories by Anton Chekhov, and writings by the historian Nikolai Karamzin. Snowden quickly polished off Crime and Punishment. After reading selections from Karamzin, a 19th-century writer who penned the first comprehensive history of the Russian state, he asked for the author’s complete works. Kucherena also gave him a book on the Cyrillic alphabet to help him learn Russian, and brought a change of clothes.
Snowden was not able to go outside – ‘he breathes disgusting air, the air of the airport,’ Kucherena said – but remained in good health. Nonetheless, the psychological pressure of the waiting game took its toll. ‘It’s hard for him, when he’s always in a state of expectation,’ Kucherena said. ‘On the inside, Edward is absolutely independent; he absolutely follows his convictions. As for the reaction, he is convinced and genuinely believes he did it first of all so the Americans and all people would find out they were spying on us.’
As soon as Snowden arrived in Russia, one question began to be asked with increasing intensity: had the Russians got hold of Snowden’s NSA documents? On 24 June, the New York Times quoted ‘two western intelligence experts’ who ‘worked for major government spy agencies’. Without offering any evidence, the experts said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops Snowden brought to Hong Kong.
Snowden categorically denies these media claims, which spread rapidly. He also insists he has not shared any NSA material with Moscow. ‘I never gave any information to either government and they never took anything from my laptops,’ Snowden told Greenwald in July in two interviews. Greenwald would furiously defend Snowden against the charge.
Snowden was extremely good at digital self-defence. When he was employed by the CIA and NSA one of his jobs was to teach US national security officials and CIA employees how to protect their data in high-threat digital environments. He taught classes at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which provides top-grade foreign military intelligence to the US Department of Defense. Paradoxically, Snowden now found himself in precisely the kind of hostile environment he had lectured on, surrounded by agents from a foreign intelligence agency.
Snowden corresponded about this with Gordon Humphrey, a former two-term Republican senator from New Hampshire. In a letter to ‘Mr Snowden’, Humphrey wrote: ‘Provided you have not leaked information that would put in harm’s way any intelligence agent, I believe you have done the right thing in exposing what I
regard as a massive violation of the United States constitution.’ (Humphrey also called Snowden a ‘courageous whistleblower’ who had unearthed the ‘growing arrogance of our government’.)
Snowden’s reply is worth quoting in full:
Mr Humphrey
Thank you for your words of support. I only wish more of our lawmakers shared your principles – the actions I’ve taken would not have been necessary.
The media has distorted my actions and intentions to distract from the substance of constitutional violations and instead focus on personalities. It seems they believe every modern narrative requires a bad guy. Perhaps it does. Perhaps in such times, loving one’s country means being hated by its government.
If history proves that be so, I will not shy from that hatred. I will not hesitate to wear those charges of villainy for the rest of my life as a civic duty, allowing those governing few who dared not do so themselves to use me as an excuse to right these wrongs.
My intention, which I outlined when this began, is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. I remain committed to that. Though reporters and officials may never believe it, I have not provided any information that would harm our people – agent or not – and I have no intention of doing so.
Further, no intelligence service – not even our own – has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specialisations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest-threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China).
You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.
