Waterloo Region Record
MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor wanted by the United States for leaking classified documents about global U.S. surveillance, fled his Hong Kong hideout for Moscow on Sunday aboard a commercial Russian jetliner, in what appeared to be the first step in an odyssey to seek political asylum in Ecuador.
In a day of frustrated scrambling by U.S. officials who are seeking Snowden’s extradition — and had annulled his passport in attempts to foil any escape — he boarded an Aeroflot jet in Hong Kong that reached Moscow on Sunday afternoon. The Russian Foreign Ministry said Snowden was in a Moscow airport transit area, apparently awaiting a connection to another country.
Ecuador’s foreign minister said that Snowden had submitted a request for asylum, an assertion corroborated by WikiLeaks, the organization that discloses government secrets and has come to the assistance of Snowden. In a statement on its website, WikiLeaks said “he is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.”
Snowden’s disclosures of far-reaching U.S. government snooping into internet and telephone records around the world has set off a wide debate in the United States over government invasion of privacy. Snowden and his allies, including WikiLeaks, have called him a whistleblower. U.S. officials, who say the surveillance is necessary to thwart terrorist plots, have called his actions criminal and last week announced they had charged him with violations of espionage laws.
The director of the National Security Agency said Sunday that Snowden’s disclosures had caused “irreversible damage” to U.S. intelligence. Speaking on ABC’s This Week after the news of Snowden’s departure from Hong Kong had broken, the director, Gen. Keith Alexander, said: “This is not an individual who in my opinion was acting with noble intent.”
The U.S. asked Hong Kong authorities to find and detain Snowden, where he had been in hiding for the past few weeks, but the Hong Kong government said Sunday that it had requested clarifications about the request and legally could not stop him from boarding the flight to Moscow. A statement by the Hong Kong government — the first official word that Snowden had fled the territory — said it had informed the U.S. of his departure.
Russia’s Interfax news service reported that Snowden would remain at an airport in Moscow for “several hours” pending an onward flight to Cuba on Monday, and would therefore not formally cross the Russian border or be subject to detention.
Ricardo Patiño Aroca, the foreign minister of Ecuador, said “the government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J. Snowden” in a Twitter message. But Russia’s Interfax quoted an unidentified person close to Snowden as saying he planned to continue to Caracas, Venezuela.
Both Venezuela and Ecuador have long expressed antipathy toward what they consider arrogant U.S. policies in Latin America.
WikiLeaks said in a statement on its Twitter feed that it had “assisted Mr. Snowden’s political asylum in a democratic country, travel papers” and safe exit from Hong Kong.
His departure from Hong Kong punctuated a day of frustration and embarrassment for U.S. officials whose so-far unsuccessful quest to have him arrested has now placed the United States in awkward situations with governments on at least three continents.
Hong Kong’s decision to allow him to leave was an especially troublesome setback for the U.S., which had been pressing Hong Kong to surrender him to U.S. law enforcement officials. The Hong Kong government said on Sunday, in its first detailed statement about Snowden, that the U.S. had made a legal request for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Snowden, but that the Hong Kong government had concluded that the request “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.”
The statement said that Hong Kong had requested more information from the United States but had not received it. Because the government “has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr. Snowden from leaving Hong Kong,” the statement said.
A Justice Department spokesperson in Washington, Nanda Chitre, confirmed that the Hong Kong authorities had informed the U.S. government of Snowden’s departure.
“We will continue to discuss this matter with Hong Kong and pursue relevant law enforcement co-operation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel,” Chitre said in a statement.
The State Department had apparently revoked Snowden’s passport in an effort to thwart his escape without explicitly acknowledging the fact.
“As is routine and consistent with U.S. regulations, persons with felony arrest warrants are subject to having their passport revoked,” the department’s spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said in a statement. “Such a revocation does not affect citizenship status. Persons wanted on felony charges, such as Mr. Snowden, should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States.”
David Laufman, a former federal prosecutor in the U.S., said it appeared that the Obama administration had flubbed Snowden’s case in at least two ways.
“What mystifies me is that the State Department didn’t revoke his passport after the charges were filed” on June 14, Laufman said. “They missed the opportunity to freeze him in place.”
He also said he was puzzled by the decision to unseal the criminal charges Friday, possibly prompting Snowden to flee. The standard practice in such cases is to unseal the charges only after the defendant is in custody, he said.
The statement from the Hong Kong government also said it had written to the U.S government to ask for clarification about media reports that Snowden had released documents showing that U.S. government agencies had hacked computer systems here, adding that the Hong Kong government, “will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.”
Late Saturday, a Hong Kong newspaper, The South China Morning Post, reported additional details of the NSA’s spying on Hong Kong and China, apparently based on an interview with Snowden on June 12. Snowden told the newspaper that the NSA had tapped into Chinese mobile phone companies to read millions of text messages, hacked dozens of computers at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing and other computers operated by Pacnet, a major telecommunications company with headquarters in Hong Kong and Singapore.
While there was no independent confirmation of the claims, all the operations described by Snowden are consistent with the NSA’s aggressive monitoring of foreign communications. And the newspaper’s report could win Snowden more public support in China and Hong Kong.
Snowden’s presence on Russian territory deals a fresh blow to a bilateral relationship that has deteriorated sharply over the past year, as Russia ratcheted up its support for Syrian president Bashar Assad and accused Western governments of trying to destabilize Russia’s political system.
As the story unfolded, however, Russian leaders seemed to be making efforts to keep his visit relatively quiet.
Fyodor Lukyanov, a top foreign policy analyst and editor of Russia in Global Affairs, said Russian leaders may seek to limit the damage, especially if Snowden transited through Russia and does not remain. He said Russia did not seem eager to offer him asylum.
“It just sends the message that ‘We pay with the same coin as you do’ — you protect our dissidents and human rights people, so you also have some of these,” Lukyanov said. “The scandal around him is so big, since he emerged in Hong Kong, that of course it could not be just an accident. Of course there was all kinds of advance work to allow him to through Russia to somewhere else.”
Dmitri Peskov, a spokesperson for President Vladimir Putin of Russia, said late Sunday that Kremlin officials were not aware of Snowden’s flight plans.
“We have nothing to do with this story,” he said.
A Russian law enforcement official quoted anonymously by Interfax said that Russian authorities had taken unusual measures to protect Snowden.
“This was done so that nothing threatened Edward Snowden, so that he could spend the night calmly in a capsule hotel and fly to Russia without problems,” the official was quoted as saying.
Snowden is reportedly carrying four laptop computers with a cornucopia of U.S. intelligence documents that he downloaded to a thumb drive this spring while working in Hawaii for the National Security Agency as an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton. The Guardian newspaper of Britain disclosed a week ago that Snowden provided the newspaper with documents showing that during a conference in London in 2009, the U.S. was able to access the communications of Dmitry Medvedev, then the Russian president and now the prime minister — a disclosure that will almost certainly cause Russia to review its codes and other procedures for top leaders.
Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said he considered it likely that Snowden would remain in Russia, a country that is increasingly positioning itself as a protector of people like Assange, whom Western governments wish to prosecute.
“Russia is turning into a haven — virtually, intellectually and physically — for those who have an axe to grind with the West, who are whistleblowers or have problems with Western authorities,” he said. “It’s the only country in the world that at this point can afford it, or thinks it can afford it.”
Trenin said that even if Snowden continues to another destination like Havana or Caracas, Russia will still have played a central role in his flight from prosecution.
“The minute Aeroflot got the information that a certain person by the name of Snowden is about to buy a ticket, this information would be immediately transferred to the quote-unquote competent authorities,” he said. “It would be a political decision to give him a ticket or deny him a ticket.”
Snowden’s departure could limit any damage to Chinese-American relations from his sojourn here, although U.S. officials are likely to press ahead with their inquiries into what role, if any, China may have played in his initial choice of Hong Kong, the former British colony that was returned to Chinese control in 1997.
Snowden’s departure means that Hong Kong can avoid a painful tug-of-war over whether to surrender him, with the U.S. demanding him back while nationalists in mainland China and some human rights activists in Hong Kong were calling for him to be allowed to remain.
Regina Ip, a legislator and former secretary of security in Hong Kong, predicted that the U.S. would initially be annoyed with Hong Kong for letting Snowden leave.
“I think your government will be upset for a while, but I hope that they will shrug it off, because our government acted in accordance with the law,” she said. “Our government officials can breathe a sigh of relief.”
Even though Snowden left Hong Kong, he may still have handed China a considerable diplomatic and public relations coup. The state-run news agency Xinhua said in a commentary Sunday, before news of his flight from Hong Kong, that Snowden’s disclosures had undermined Washington’s argument that the Chinese government was guilty of widespread computer hacking.
His claims “demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyberattacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age,” the commentary said.
Snowden, in Russia, reportedly seeking asylum in Ecuador
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