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:
‘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.’