Speculative claims about Russian leadership’s role in Edward Snowden’s exfiltration and asylum

113 Snowden himself came to realize that those assisting him, including Assange and Harrison, were taking serious risks. “Anyone in a three-mile radius [of me] is going to get hammered,” he later explained to a reported from Vogue. (After finally leaving Snowden in Moscow on November 3, 2013, Harrison moved to Berlin, where she set up an organization to provide, as she termed it, “an underground railroad” for other fugitives who have provided documents exposing government secrets.) Snowden meanwhile received sanctuary in Russia. His public statements in Hong Kong that he was willing to go prison so that others could live freely in a democratic society were, as it turned out, mere rhetoric. Instead of risking prison, he had successfully escaped to a country in which he would be treated as a hero for defying the US government. He had not sacrificed himself, he had transformed himself. He had risen from being a lowly technician in Hawaii whose talents went largely unrecognized, to the status of an international media star in Moscow. In his new messianic role, he could make Internet appearances via Skype to prestigious gathering such as the TED conference where he would be roundly applauded as an Internet hero. He could be beamed into dozens of ACLU meetings where he would be celebrated as a defender of American liberty. He could describe to sympathetic audiences in Germany, Norway and France the unfairness of the American legal system, asserting that it was denting him a “far trial.” He could now make front page news by granting interview to the New York Times, Washington Post, Nation and other elite newspapers. He could join Poitras and Greenwald on the Board of Directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He could be the subject of both an Oscar- winning documentary, the hero of the 2016 Hollywood movie “Snowden.” directed by Oliver Stone and a consultant to the 2015 season of the television series “Homeland.” He could also be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. His could also attract over one-half million followers to his tweets on Twitter in 2015. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished. I already won,” he informed the Washington Post in his first live interview in Moscow. It was a mission that involved a very high stakes enterprise: taking America’s state secrets abroad. How he managed to succeed in this extraordinary undertaking is another story and one which may not lend itself to an innocent explanation. Whistle-blowers do not ordinarily steal military secrets. Nor do they flee to the territory of America’s principle adversaries. A fugitive, especially one lacking a Russian visa, does not wind up in Moscow by pure accident. A Russian President, especially one with the KGB background of Putin, does not lightly give his personal sanction to a high-profile exfiltration from Hong Kong without weighing the gain that might proceed from it. Part of that calculus would be that the defector had taken possession of a great number of classified documents from the inner sanctum of the NSA. To be sure, the practical value of this stolen archive would require a lengthily evaluation by its intelligence services. Finally, a defector who put himself in the palm of the hand of the FSB in Moscow would be expected to cooperate with it. Even if such a defector did not carry these files with him to Moscow, intelligence services have the means to recover digital files, even if after they are erased from a computer or if they are HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020265