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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Fugitive

“If I end up in chains in Guantanamo, I can live with that.”

■ —Edward Snowden, Hong Kong

During his interview with Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden said stoically “If I am arrested, I am arrested.” His fatalistic words notwithstanding, Snowden had made plans to seek a haven from American justice well before his meeting with journalists in Hong Kong. As early as May 24, 2013, Snowden had suggested to Gellman that he was making arrangements with a foreign government. To that end, he asked Gellman to insert an encrypted key in Internet version of the NSA expose that Snowden proposed he write for the Washington Post. He told him the purpose of the encrypted key was to assist him with a foreign government. Snowden did not identify that foreign government to Gellman so Gellman knew that Snowden wanted to “seek asylum” overseas. He decided against assisting him. “I can’t help him evade U.S. jurisdiction—I don’t want to, and I can’t,” he later explained. “It’s not my job. It’s not the relationship. I am a journalist.”

Although Gellman suspected that Iceland might be the foreign government in question, Snowden, as it turned, had not ever contacted the consulate of Iceland while he was in Hong Kong. “We had heard nothing from Snowden,” an Iceland government official told Vanity Fair.

Snowden also did not contact the government of Ecuador in Hong Kong. In late June, while Harrison was laying down false tracks for Snowden in Hong Kong, Assange in London asked Fidel Narváez, who was a friend of his and the legal attaché in the London embassy of Ecuador, to issue a document that Snowden could use. But this document was not delivered to Snowden in Hong Kong (and later it was invalidated by Ecuador.) If Snowden had really planned to go to Ecuador from Moscow, it would require him first going to Cuba. Cuba did not even require a U.S. passport (as, in 2013, U.S, citizens were not supposed to travel to Cuba.) He did require a Cuban travel document, which he could have obtained from the Cuban consulate any time during his month in Hong Kong. Yet he did not ever obtain it. Nor did he acquire a visa to go to any other country in Latin America or elsewhere. So where was he headed?

Whatever foreign government with which Snowden was dealing earlier in May presumably did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Yet few other foreign governments, which did not have active extradition treaties with the United States, could be directly reached by air.

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