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Snowden himself came to realize that those assisting him, including Assange and Harrison,
were taking serious risks. “Anyone in a three-mile radius [of me] is going to get hammered,” he
later explained to a reported from Vogue. (After finally leaving Snowden in Moscow on
November 3, 2013, Harrison moved to Berlin, where she set up an organization to provide, as she
termed it, “an underground railroad” for other fugitives who have provided documents exposing
government secrets.)

Snowden meanwhile received sanctuary in Russia. His public statements in Hong Kong that
he was willing to go prison so that others could live freely in a democratic society were, as it
turned out, mere rhetoric. Instead of risking prison, he had successfully escaped to a country in
which he would be treated as a hero for defying the US government. He had not sacrificed
himself, he had transformed himself. He had risen from being a lowly technician in Hawaii whose
talents went largely unrecognized, to the status of an international media star in Moscow. In his
new messianic role, he could make Internet appearances via Skype to prestigious gathering such
as the TED conference where he would be roundly applauded as an Internet hero. He could be
beamed into dozens of ACLU meetings where he would be celebrated as a defender of American
liberty. He could describe to sympathetic audiences in Germany, Norway and France the
unfairness of the American legal system, asserting that it was denting him a “far trial.” He could
now make front page news by granting interview to the New York Times, Washington Post,
Nation and other elite newspapers. He could join Poitras and Greenwald on the Board of
Directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He could be the subject of both an Oscar-
winning documentary, the hero of the 2016 Hollywood movie “Snowden.” directed by Oliver
Stone and a consultant to the 2015 season of the television series “Homeland.” He could also be
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. His could also attract over one-half million
followers to his tweets on Twitter in 2015. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the
mission’s already accomplished. I already won,” he informed the Washington Post in his first live
interview in Moscow. It was a mission that involved a very high stakes enterprise: taking
America’s state secrets abroad.

How he managed to succeed in this extraordinary undertaking is another story and one which
may not lend itself to an innocent explanation. Whistle-blowers do not ordinarily steal military
secrets. Nor do they flee to the territory of America’s principle adversaries. A fugitive, especially
one lacking a Russian visa, does not wind up in Moscow by pure accident. A Russian President,
especially one with the KGB background of Putin, does not lightly give his personal sanction to a
high-profile exfiltration from Hong Kong without weighing the gain that might proceed from it.
Part of that calculus would be that the defector had taken possession of a great number of
classified documents from the inner sanctum of the NSA. To be sure, the practical value of this
stolen archive would require a lengthily evaluation by its intelligence services. Finally, a defector
who put himself in the palm of the hand of the FSB in Moscow would be expected to cooperate
with it. Even if such a defector did not carry these files with him to Moscow, intelligence services
have the means to recover digital files, even if after they are erased from a computer or if they are

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