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

Epilogue: Exile

For nine weeks Edward Snowden was mostly invisible. There was the odd photo – of a young man pushing a shopping trolley across a Moscow street. (Surely a fake? The man looked nothing like him!) Another leaked image was more convincing. It showed Snowden on a tourist boat cruising along the Moscow River. It’s summer. He’s wearing a cap, and has a beard. In the distance, a bridge and the golden domes of Christ the Saviour cathedral, blown up by Stalin and rebuilt by Yeltsin. Just out of shot are the high walls of the Kremlin.

These leaks to the Russian media were designed to give the impression Snowden was leading a ‘normal’ life. Given his circumstances, that seemed unlikely. Clues pointed in the opposite direction. The news agency that got the Snowden picture, Lifenews.ru, is known for its ties to Russia’s security agencies. Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, meanwhile, said his client was settling in, learning Russian and had got a new job with a large internet firm. But VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, and others said this wasn’t so.

It was in October that Snowden definitively re-emerged. Four Americans travelled to Moscow to meet him. All were fellow whistleblowers who had spent their careers in US national security and intelligence. They were Thomas Drake, the former NSA executive whose case Snowden had followed, one-time CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, who worked in the Justice Department, and Coleen Rowley, ex-FBI.

It was an unusual trip. Before setting off from Washington DC the four hired a lawyer in case they had problems re-entering the US. They also left behind their electronics. As Radack noted, the US might geolocate their whereabouts from mobile phones or laptops, and thus find out Snowden’s hiding place. The authorities could search and confiscate their devices when they flew back.

In Moscow, the four were driven in a van with darkened windows to a secret location. There was Snowden. WikiLeaks released a video. The oil paintings, chandelier and pastel colours in the background suggest an upmarket hotel, of which Moscow has plenty. More probably, though, this was a government guesthouse. The Americans found him well, relaxed, good-humoured and – as McGovern put it afterwards – at peace with himself and his decision to speak out. Snowden joked darkly that he could not have been a Russian spy: he said Russia treats its spies much better than to leave them trapped in the Sheremetyevo transit zone for over a month.

The group presented him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. They also delivered a message: that in contrast to official US vitriol, many Americans back home warmly supported him, including inside the intelligence community. According to Radack, Snowden – brilliant and humble, in her words – was concerned not about himself but what might happen to Greenwald, Poitras and the young WikiLeaks activist Sarah Harrison, who had stuck with him since Hong Kong.

Snowden had been following events. Over dinner, he explained why he had done what he did. The relationship between the governing and the governed in America had come ‘increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic people’, he told his guests. He contrasted his fate for telling the truth – exile and vilification – with that of Clapper, who had received no punishment whatsoever.

And he returned to his chief theme: that the programs of NSA mass surveillance he exposed ‘don’t make us safe’. In his words: ‘They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and to live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely… There’s a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement where it’s targeted, based on reasonable, individualised suspicion and warranted action, and a sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of an eye that sees everything, even when it’s not needed.’

His father Lon Snowden flew to Moscow at the same time. They had a private reunion.

Three weeks later Snowden had another public visitor. This time it was Hans-Christian Ströbele, a flamboyant Green member of Germany’s parliament and radical lawyer, now aged 74. Over in Germany, the Merkel bugging affair had shaken the political class. Ströbele bore an invitation: for Snowden to testify before a parliamentary committee of the Bundestag investigating US spying. Ströbele sat with Snowden and Harrison around a table; there was discussion, moments of laughter, and a group photo.

Snowden gave Ströbele a typed letter to deliver to Frau Merkel and the German parliament. In it he said he felt ‘a moral duty to act’ after witnessing ‘systematic violations of law by my government’. As a result of reporting these concerns, he had faced ‘a severe and sustained campaign of persecution’. Snowden also wrote that ‘my act of political expression’, as he termed it, had led to a heartening response around the world, including ‘many new laws’ and a growing knowledge for society.

In Snowden’s view, the White House’s campaign to criminalise his behaviour and pile on felony charges was an injustice. He was prepared to say as much before the US Congress – if it would let him. ‘Speaking the truth is not a crime.’

One paragraph caught the eye. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, it seemed Snowden hoped to leave Russia at some future point. He signed off: ‘I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us.

Days later, Harrison said goodbye to Snowden and flew to Berlin. She had been with him in Moscow for four months. On what was said to be legal advice, she declined to return to the UK. The German capital and East Berlin in particular was now a hub for a growing number of Snowden exiles: Poitras, journalist Jacob Appelbaum and Harrison. For anyone with a sense of history this was ironic. Stasiland had become an island of media freedom.

Greenwald, meanwhile, announced his resignation from the Guardian to join a new media venture backed by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

What were Snowden’s prospects of exiting Moscow for a new life in western Europe? Left-leaning politicians, intellectuals and writers called on the German government to grant him asylum. There was even a campaign to rename a Berlin street next to the US embassy ‘Snowden Strasse’. (An artist erected a new street sign, and posted the video on Facebook.) But Germany’s strategic relationship with America was more important than the fate of one individual, at least in the probable view of Merkel, now chancellor for a third time.

So it was in Moscow that Snowden remained. The lawyer Kucherena gently reminded the world that if he did try and leave he would forfeit his asylum status. He was a guest of the Russian Federation, whether he liked it or not. And in some sense its captive. No one quite knew how long his exile might last. Months? Years? Decades?