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6 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

no known appointments there. Even so, Snowden carried to Hong Kong digital copies he had made of the top secret NSA documents. As General Michael Hayden, who served as the head of both the NSA and the CIA, told me, “It’s very mysterious why Snowden chose Hong Kong.” We can assume he had a compelling enough reason for him to take the risk that he would be arrested there by Hong Kong police after U.S. authorities invoked the detention provision of its extradition treaty. It was of course possible that Snowden had traveled there to see someone he believed could protect him.

I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2014—exactly one year after Snowden had arrived there aboard a Japan Airlines flight. I checked in to the Mira hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon, a ten-minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong Island, where most of the foreign consulates are located.

I chose the Mira because it was the five-star hotel in which Snowden had stayed and where he had made the celebrated video admitting his role in taking the NSA documents. I asked at the front desk for room 1014, the same one that Snowden had occupied in 2013, because I wanted easy access to the hotel’s service and security personnel responsible for the room who might have had contact with Snowden a year earlier. Unfortunately, that room was occupied, but I was given a nearby room that served my purpose.

Snowden had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the Guardian reporters he met in Hong Kong, that he had hidden out at the Mira hotel since his arrival in Hong Kong because he feared that the CIA might capture him. My first surprise was that Snowden had not arrived at the Mira until eleven days after he arrived in Hong Kong. As I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had registered there under his real name and used his own passport and credit card to secure the room, an odd choice if he was hiding out. He had checked in to the hotel not on May 20, as he had told the reporters, but on June 1, 2013. He checked out on June 10.

Wherever Snowden stayed from May 20 to June 1, he apparently considered it a safe enough place from which to send Greenwald a “welcome package,” as he called it, of twenty top secret NSA docu-

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