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.