The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

11 FLIGHT

Ed Snowden went underground after hastily checking out of the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong. His local legal team, barrister Robert Tibbo and solicitor Jonathan Man, knew where he was. So did someone else. Snowden had a mystery guardian angel – a well-connected Hong Kong resident. The American’s interest in China was long-standing, dating back to his time with the CIA in Geneva and his support for the Free Tibet movement.

The precise details are murky. But it appears this benefactor invited Snowden to stay with one of his friends. Another lawyer, Albert Ho, says that Snowden shifted between several homes, staying in at least one house in the New Territories area, close to the border with mainland China. He was lost in a densely packed metropolis of seven million people.

Tibbo, a human rights lawyer, was used to dealing with clients in bad situations. A Canadian by nationality, with a pleasant manner, a smart blazer and a receding hairline, Tibbo represented the vulnerable and the downtrodden – Sri Lankans facing deportation, Pakistanis wrongly denied asylum, abused refugees.

One of his cases dated back to the darkest chapter of the Tony Blair era. In 2004, the Libyan Islamist Sami al-Saadi arrived in Hong Kong with his wife and family. He thought he was travelling back to the UK, his old home. Instead, MI6, working closely with Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence services, bundled him on a plane back to Tripoli. There, Saadi was interrogated, tortured and imprisoned. Shortly afterwards, Blair, the then British prime minister, struck a deal with the Libyan dictator. MI6’s discreditable role in the affair emerged after Gaddafi’s 2011 fall.

Like Saadi, Snowden was another client whom, he feared, western intelligence services would render and then imprison in a dark, damp hole. Tibbo and Snowden first met after he slipped out of the Mira Hotel. The lawyer refuses to talk about the details, citing client confidentiality. But he evidently considered Snowden to be bright, a rational actor who was making his own conscience-driven choices. And a young man in a whole pile of trouble. Over the next two weeks Tibbo would juggle his regular case-load while working on Snowden’s behalf, often through the night.

The lawyers were soon sucked into Snowden’s cloak-and-dagger world. Albert Ho describes a rendezvous. He got into a car one night at an agreed spot and found Snowden inside, wearing a hat and sunglasses. Snowden didn’t speak, the lawyer told the Washington Post. When they arrived at the home where Snowden was staying he whispered that everyone had to hide their phones in the refrigerator. Over the next two hours the lawyers went through his options with him. Ho brought dinner: pizza, sausages and chicken wings, washed down with Pepsi. ‘I don’t think he ever had a well-thought-out plan. I really think he’s a kid,’ Ho said afterwards.

The lawyers’ assessment was negative. It was possible that Snowden might eventually prevail in a battle against US extradition. But in the meantime the most likely option was that he would sit in jail while the Hong Kong courts considered his asylum claim. This legal tussle could drag on for years. Snowden was horrified to discover that behind bars he would have no access to a computer.

He didn’t mind being confined in a small room. But the idea of being exiled from the internet was repugnant to him. ‘He didn’t go out, he spent all his time inside a tiny space, but he said it was OK because he had his computer,’ Ho told the New York Times. ‘If you were to deprive him of his computer, that would be totally intolerable.’

After the meeting, Ho was asked to take soundings from the Hong Kong government. Would Snowden get bail if arrested? Could he somehow flee the country? The whistleblower presented a dilemma for Hong Kong’s administrators. The territory is part of China but governed under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework; it has notional autonomy but Beijing retains ultimate responsibility for foreign affairs.

On the one hand, China’s spies would certainly be interested in keeping Snowden, if they could get access to his tens of thousands of highly sensitive NSA documents, revealing the ambit and protocols of American surveillance. On the other hand, if Hong Kong refused to repatriate him, this would place Sino–American relations under great strain. Already the US was piling on the pressure. A major international row would be an unwelcome distraction.

There were other factors, too. Snowden’s case might raise uncomfortable questions at home for the Chinese authorities. Many Chinese citizens were unaware that their own security services also engaged in domestic spying, with phone hacking, email and postal interception rampant, not to mention censorship. Holding on to Snowden could set off an uncomfortable internal debate over matters currently under the table.

Hong Kong’s chief executive Leung Chun-ying held numerous meetings with his top advisers, it was reported, struggling to decide what to do over a thorny US request for Snowden’s detention.

Public opinion in Hong Kong was largely pro-Snowden, boosted by some carefully targeted disclosures. On 12 June Snowden gave an interview from hiding to the South China Morning Post. In it, he revealed that the US hacked millions of China’s private text messages. ‘The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese mobile phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,’ he told the paper. The agency had also, he alleged, attacked China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, the hub of a major digital network from which the data on millions of Chinese citizens could be harvested.

For years, Washington had complained bitterly about Beijing’s industrial-scale stealing and spying in cyberspace. In numerous documents GCHQ and NSA identify China and Russia as the two nations responsible for most cyber-espionage. Now it appeared the NSA did the same thing, only worse.

Snowden must have hoped that in the wake of his leaks the Hong Kong government would treat his case sympathetically. After Ho’s approach to the authorities, an intermediary contacted Snowden. The intermediary delivered a message. The message was that Hong Kong’s judiciary was independent. And, yes, it was possible he would spend time in jail. But – and this was the crucial bit – it also said the government would welcome his departure.

Ho sought further assurances. He told the Guardian’s Beijing correspondent Tania Branigan, who had flown to Hong Kong: ‘I talked to government officials seeking verification of whether they really wanted him to go, and in case they really wanted him to go, whether he would be given safe passage.’

On Friday 21 June the US government formally indicted Snowden with espionage. It sent an urgent official extradition request. ‘If Hong Kong doesn’t act soon, it will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong’s commitment to the rule of law,’ a senior Obama administration official said.

With his legal options shrinking by the hour, Snowden made a fateful decision. He would leave.

Six thousand miles away, someone else in hiding had been taking a close interest in these developments. Julian Assange had been frantically trying to make contact with the fugitive NSA contractor. Assange is the self-styled editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. He had been holed up in the tiny Ecuadorean embassy in London for over a year.

Assange had taken refuge inside the apartment building – Flat 3b, 3 Hans Crescent – after his own legal options ran out. In summer 2012, Britain’s supreme court ruled that an extradition warrant served by authorities in Sweden was valid. Assange should be extradited to answer complaints from August 2010 that he sexually assaulted two Swedish women, the court said.

Assange promptly walked into the embassy and was granted political asylum by Ecuador’s leftist government. The tactic seemed extravagant to some. During the cold war, Hungary’s dissident Cardinal Mindszenty spent 15 years in the US embassy. But this was 2012, not 1956. There were few signs of state brutality amid the penthouses of London’s Knightsbridge; instead of Soviet tanks there were Bentleys and Ferraris. Thanks to his going to ground in this way, WikiLeaks had released little of significance for some time. Assange, as the New York Times’s David Carr put it, ‘looked like a forgotten man’.

Now, Assange barged his way into Snowden’s drama. Much is mysterious. But it is known his approaches came via intermediaries and through his Hong Kong lawyers. These pre-dated Snowden’s video confession, and they grew more intense after it.

From Assange’s perspective the approach was logical. Snowden was another anti-US whistleblower in trouble, apparently just like him. In 2010, Assange had leaked the thousands of classified documents obtained from the US private Chelsea Manning. Their publication, in collaboration with the Guardian and other newspapers, had caused a global furore. Manning was jailed and a grand jury reportedly investigated Assange over the leaks. Assange’s woes with Swedish women were a separate matter, though the former hacker would frequently – and some would say cynically – confuse the two. But Assange did have some claim to specialised expertise in asylum issues. And the Snowden story also opened up a chance for him to step back into the limelight.

Ideologically, the two had much in common: a passionate commitment to the internet and transparency, a libertarian philosophy when it came to information, and strong digital defence skills. Snowden had at one point considered leaking his NSA files to Assange. He later reconsidered on the grounds of risk. Assange’s confined situation at the embassy in London, right under the nose of the British authorities and their NSA allies, meant inevitably that he was bugged and constantly monitored.

In terms of temperament, Snowden was nothing like Assange. He was shy, allergic to cameras, and reluctant to become the focus of media attention. He never sought celebrity. The world of journalism was utterly alien to him. Assange was the polar opposite. He liked the public gaze. Charming, he was capable of deadpan humour and wit, but could also be waspish, flying into recrimination and anger. Assange’s mercurial temperament spawned both groupies and ill-wishers: his supporters saw him as a radical paladin fighting state secrecy, his enemies as an insufferable narcissist.

Assange hatched a plan with two key elements. The first was to secure the same sort of asylum for Snowden as he had himself, from Ecuador’s populist president Rafael Correa, one of a string of leftist Latin American leaders unfriendly to US power. The second was to help get Snowden physically from Hong Kong to Quito. This was no easy thing, given that the CIA and practically every other intelligence agency on the planet were on his trail.

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 hours 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.’

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:

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:

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:

The letter set out cardinal Snowdon themes: love of country, civic duty, a desire to protect the constitution. Its tone was high-minded and in parts melodramatic: ‘If history proves that to be so, I will not shy…’ But it left no doubt that Snowden was aware of the peril from hostile foreign intelligence agencies, and that he had taken extreme steps to keep his material safe.

Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, one of Snowden’s few early interlocutors, says that he believes Snowden had put the data beyond reach. ‘I think he rendered himself incapable of opening the archive while he is in Russia,’ Gellman told US radio network NPR. He added: ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t have the key any more. It’s that there is nothing to open any more. He rendered the encryption information impossible to open while he is in Russia.’

But none of this, of course, meant the Kremlin was uninterested in the contents of Snowden’s laptops. The FSB was adept at electronic surveillance. Like its KGB predecessor, its procedures involved bugging, hidden video cameras and entrapment. Unlike the NSA, the FSB also used what might be called ‘suspicion-ful’ surveillance. With western intelligence agencies, the idea was to monitor a target without him or her ever knowing about it. The FSB, by contrast, also engaged in ‘demonstrativnaya slezhka’, demonstrative pursuit.

Using tactics perfected by the 1970s Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, the FSB would break into the homes of so-called enemies. Typically these were western diplomats and some foreign journalists. But the FSB also played a leading role in the suppression of internal dissent, and targeted Russians too, including those working for US or British embassies. A team of agents would break into a target’s flat. They would leave clues that they had been there – open windows, central heating disconnected, mysterious alarms, phones taken off the hook, sex manuals by the side of the bed.

These methods of psychological intimidation became more pervasive during Putin’s second 2004–2008 presidential term, as Kremlin paranoia at the prospect of a pro-reform Orange-style revolution grew. In 2009 the then US ambassador John Beyrle wrote a frank cable to the US State Department, one of several thousand written from Russia and leaked by Chelsea Manning. It read: ‘Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy staff have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more common and bold, and activity against our locally engaged staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.’

This, then, was the FSB. Ironically, the Kremlin’s security services also carried out widespread NSA-style surveillance on the Russian population.

Russia’s nationwide system of remote interception is called SORM. The KGB developed SORM’s technical foundations in the mid-1980s; it has been updated to take account of rapid technological change. SORM-1 captures telephone and mobile phone communications, SORM-2 intercepts internet traffic, and SORM-3 collects data from all communications including content and recordings, and stores them long-term.

The oversight mechanism in the US may have been broken, but in Russia it didn’t exist. Snowden’s documents showed that the NSA compelled phone operators and internet service providers to give information on their customers. Secret FISA court orders made this process legal. The companies could – and would – contest these orders in court, and argued they should be allowed to reveal more detail of what the government agencies were demanding.

In Russia FSB officers also needed a court order to eavesdrop on a target. Once they had it they didn’t need to show the warrant to anybody. Telecoms providers weren’t informed. According to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, the FSB doesn’t need to contact the ISP’s staff. Instead, the spy agency calls on the special controller at the FSB HQ that is connected by a protected cable directly to the SORM device installed on the ISP network. This system is copied all over the country: in every Russian town there are protected underground cables, which connect the local FSB department with all providers in the region. The result is that the FSB is able to intercept the email traffic of opposition activists and other ‘enemies’ without oversight.

The wheels of Russian bureaucracy turn slowly. In this case, however, the reasons for delay weren’t official inertia. Putin was carefully weighing up the likely fall-out from granting Snowden asylum. On 24 July, Kucherena said Snowden’s status was still unresolved. In the meantime, Snowden would stay at the Moscow airport.

The lawyer indicated that Snowden was now thinking long-term about a life and possibly a job in Russia: that he intended to stay in the country and to ‘study Russian culture’. He had apparently picked up a few words of Russian: ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you doing?’ Snowden had even tried khatchapuri, Georgian cheese bread.

On 1 August 2013 – 39 days after he flew into Moscow – Snowden strolled out of the airport. Russia had granted him one year’s temporary asylum. The state channel Rossiya 24 showed a photo of Snowden’s departure. He was grinning, carrying a rucksack and a large holdall, and accompanied by a delighted Harrison. Out of the transit zone at last, he exchanged a few words with Kucherena on the pavement. Snowden climbed into a grey unmarked car. The car drove off. Snowden disappeared.

Kucherena showed reporters a copy of Snowden’s new temporary document, which allowed him to cross into Russia. His name, ‘SNOWDEN, EDWARD JOSEPH’, was printed in Cyrillic capitals. There was a fingerprint and fresh passport photo. Security officials said Snowden had left the transit zone at about 3.30pm local time. Russia had apparently not informed the US beforehand.

Kucherena said he wasn’t giving any details about where Snowden was going since he was the ‘most wanted man on the planet’. A statement from WikiLeaks said that he and Harrison were headed to a ‘secure confidential place’. It quoted Snowden as saying: ‘Over the past eight weeks we have seen the Obama administration show no respect for international or domestic law, but in the end the law is winning. I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with its laws and international obligations.’

US reaction was bitter. The White House announced that Obama was cancelling his bilateral meeting with Putin scheduled to take place during September’s G20 summit, which Russia was hosting in St Petersburg. The president’s spokesperson Jay Carney said the White House was ‘extremely disappointed’. Carney effectively accused Snowden of gifting US secrets to a rival power: ‘Simply the possession of that kind of highly sensitive classified information outside of secure areas is both a huge risk and a violation. As we know he’s been in Russia now for many weeks. There is a huge risk associated with… removing that information from secure areas. You shouldn’t do it, you can’t do it, it’s wrong.’

It was left to the Republican senator John McCain to twist the knife further. McCain, whom Snowden, writing as TheTrueHOOHA, had admired, was a long-standing critic of the White House’s efforts to ‘reset’ relations with Moscow – an accommodationist policy which in McCain’s view merely encouraged Putin’s more obnoxious behaviour. McCain tweeted: ‘Snowden stays in the land of transparency and human rights. Time to hit that reset button again #Russia.’

Where did Snowden go? Red Square and the Kremlin are an ensemble of high ochre walls and golden orthodox towers. At the end of Red Square are the surrealistic onion domes of St Basil’s cathedral.

If you walk up the hill from here past the Metropole Hotel and a statue of Karl Marx you reach a large, forbidding, classically cut building. This is the Lubyanka. Once the headquarters of the KGB, it is now the home of the FSB. Inside, the answer to that question is certainly known. Meanwhile, Russian journalists would speculate Snowden was staying at a presidential sanatorium somewhere near Moscow.

The hacker turned whistleblower had got his asylum. But the longer he stayed out of public view the more it appeared that he was, in some informal way, the FSB’s prisoner.