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108 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

According to one Aeroflot official, ordinarily all international passengers are required to have a valid passport as well as a visa to the country of final destination. Snowden had neither a valid passport nor a visa. Still Snowden was able to board the flight to Moscow. Aeroflot, a state-controlled airline, presumably responds to the Russian government on matters where Putin has given his approval.

Snowden first met Harrison in person on June 23. She was waiting for him in the car that Jonathan Man had arranged to take him to the airport that morning. Snowden was dressed in a gray shirt and khaki slacks. Harrison was dressed in jeans and flip-flops. She said she had chosen this dress style so that they would blend in at the airport with vacationing tourists. She had financed the trip, and she was apparently now calling the shots. Harrison’s concern was that they might be arrested at the airport, so Man accompanied them through passport control. He was able to do this because he bought a ticket on the cheapest available international flight. Harrison had given Man a phone number to call if they got arrested. When she and Snowden boarded the flight at 12:45 p.m., Harrison effectively became Snowden’s second “carer”—a job that would require her presence in Moscow for the next four months.

Snowden had pretty much remained silent until the plane took off. The first full proper sentence she heard from him as they headed for Moscow, as she recalled, was “I didn’t expect that WikiLeaks was going to send a ninja to get me out.”

Meanwhile, Assange continued creating “distractions,” as he put it. On June 24, a booking was made for Snowden on an Aeroflot flight to Cuba, and this information was relayed to the foreign press organization in Moscow, resulting in over a dozen reporters flying to Havana on the flight. Snowden, of course, never showed up for it. “In some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that [flight] on open lines to lawyers in the United States,” Assange said. One subsequent piece of his misinformation was that Snowden was flying to Bolivia on the private plane of the Bolivian president, Evo Morales (who was then in Moscow for a meeting). That misinformation had the desired effect. U.S. allies in Europe, including France, Spain, and Portugal, refused to allow that plane to fly through its airspace, forcing the plane to land in Austria. This misinformation

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