Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains free.
—JULIAN ASSANGE, Newsweek, 2015
JULIAN ASSANGE had made a brilliant career of trafficking in state, military, and corporate secrets. Born on July 3, 1971, in Queensland, Australia, Assange began his hacking career while still a teenager. Using the alias Mendax (“the untruthful one”), he had hacked into the computers of the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy, NASA, Citibank, Lockheed Martin, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission before he was twenty. At the age of twenty-five, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges of hacking in Australia but was released on a good behavior bond. In 2006, with the spread of Tor software, he co-founded WikiLeaks, a website in which secret documents could be anonymously sent and posted. The site received little public attention until Bradley Manning sent it several hundred thousand lowly classified U.S. military and State Department documents in April 2010. With these stolen documents, WikiLeaks became a media sensation, and Assange, the runner-up for Time’s Man of the Year for 2010, became a leading figure, along with Appelbaum, in the global hacktivist underground.
In November 2010, however, he ran into a legal problem in Sweden. A judge in Stockholm ordered his detention on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion. He denied the charges but was arrested in London on a European arrest warrant. In December, he was released on a $312,700 bail deposit (supplied by his supporters) and confined to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England. While awaiting the outcome of the extradition proceedings, he lived there with Sarah Harrison, his twenty-eight-year-old deputy at WikiLeaks. A graduate of the elite Sevenoaks School in Kent, Harrison served as Assange’s liaison with the outside world. Although she was officially given the title “investigative editor” of WikiLeaks, she worked so closely with Assange during this period that the British press carried stories saying she was his paramour. Harrison worked on a WikiLeaks documentary titled Mediastan, which concerned WikiLeaks’s exposure of U.S. secret operations in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. It was a project that took her to Russia and provided her with a multi-entry Russian visa.
In June 2012, after the extradition order was upheld, Assange jumped bail and fled to the Ecuador embassy in London. For the next year, his only visible means of income was a weekly program from the embassy. It was sponsored in 2012 by RT television, a Moscow-based, English-language news channel funded by the Russian government, which would also finance and release Mediastan. This sponsorship suggests that the Russian government saw potential value in the document-gathering activities of WikiLeaks.
Snowden telephoned Assange at his refuge at the Ecuador embassy on June 10, 2013. According to Assange, Snowden needed help for his exit plan. He wanted Assange to use WikiLeaks’s “resources” to get him out of Hong Kong. Assange considered it a surprising request, because Snowden had not given any of the stolen documents to WikiLeaks. In their discussion, according to Assange, Snowden claimed that one reason he decided to take the secret NSA documents was the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning after he was arrested in 2010 by the U.S. government. “Snowden told me they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his decision to become a whistle-blower,” Assange said in an interview in 2015.
If Manning’s mistreatment was Snowden’s motive, it was a sharp departure from the position Snowden had taken in his postings on the Ars Technica site in January 2009. He complained in a post there about the detrimental consequences to U.S. intelligence of leakers’ revealing “classified shit” to The New York Times, and he suggested as punishment “those people should be shot in the balls.” Either he had a change of heart, or he was telling Assange what he believed he wanted to hear.
Assange counseled Snowden to go directly to Russia. “My advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences,” he told the London Times in 2015. He said, “Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia.” So a story would be released presumably by WikiLeaks, coinciding with his departure, asserting that Snowden was “bound for the republic of Ecuador via a safe route.” When Snowden asked how he would carry out the plan, Assange told him that he would immediately dispatch one of his senior staff members to help him engineer his escape to Russia. That senior staff member was Sarah Harrison.
After speaking to Snowden, Assange called Harrison, who was in Melbourne. She had gone there a month earlier to help organize Assange’s somewhat quixotic election campaign for president of Australia. Assange told her to forget the campaign and go to Hong Kong. She was to use WikiLeaks’s resources to save Snowden from “a lifetime in prison.” Presumably, Assange told her that he had advised Snowden to proceed to Russia. Harrison later said that she didn’t even bother to pack her clothing after hearing from Assange. She caught the next plane to Hong Kong and arrived there on June 11—the same day that Snowden texted Greenwald he was in a safe house and before Snowden’s explosive interview with Lam. Harrison had her own connections in Hong Kong. Her two younger sisters, Kate and Alexandra, lived there and were part of the expatriate community. She also had an older brother, Simon, who headed Avra, a ship brokerage and commodity trading company, headquartered in Singapore, but he frequently traveled to Hong Kong on business.
Like Poitras, Sarah Harrison took great care to shield her movements. She did not have a Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media account. She did not own a cell phone for fear of being tracked by an intelligence service. When she traveled, she bought “burner” phones locally and disposed of them before any calls could be traced back to her. Upon arriving in Hong Kong, she avoided meeting Snowden face-to-face out of concern about the surveillance of American intelligence there. Instead, for thirteen days in Hong Kong she worked through intermediaries. Her task was not only to arrange Snowden’s escape route but also to create diversions to camouflage his real destination. Under Assange’s tutelage, she had made deceptive ploys an integral part of her tradecraft. “We were working very hard to lay as many false trails as possible,” she later told an interviewer in Berlin.
According to Assange, she booked decoy flights for Snowden to Beijing and New Delhi. She also used Snowden’s credit card number to pay for the flight to India; because the card was blocked, she knew there was a high probability that it would come to the attention of U.S. intelligence. According to Harrison, she booked no fewer than a dozen such decoy tickets to confuse Snowden’s possible pursuers in U.S. intelligence. The only actual ticket she bought for Snowden, according to an Aeroflot official, was one to Moscow at the last minute. She bought a ticket for herself on the same flight, leaving on June 23.
The source of the money for the Assange-Harrison operation is unclear. Subsequently, Harrison said she was setting up secret bank accounts to help organize such transborder escapes. Assange said she was using “WikiLeaks’s resources.” Harrison said the “WikiLeaks team” helped fund Snowden’s flight to Russia from Hong Kong, as well as her own flight there. But WikiLeaks was not an organization with spare cash in June 2013. Assange had forfeited his own bail by fleeing to the embassy of Ecuador, offending many of his financial supporters in Britain. He had also all but exhausted his bank account. Aside from money that dribbled in from Poitras’s six-month-old Freedom of the Press Foundation, the only steady source of funds for WikiLeaks in 2013 was the previously mentioned payments Assange received from the Russian government’s RT television.
Mounting pressure was brought on the Hong Kong government to take action against Snowden. On June 16, the U.S. government informed the Hong Kong authorities that it had filed a criminal complaint against Snowden and would be seeking his extradition. Because Hong Kong had a vigorously enforced extradition agreement with the United States, as mentioned above, it was expected that Snowden would be taken into custody. But China had the final say in any extradition decision. In fact, China had explicitly been given the right of vetoing any extraditions for any reason in the formal 1999 agreement between Hong Kong and the United States. Because the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, had just met with President Obama in California, China also had an interest in avoiding embarrassing public demonstrations on behalf of Snowden. According to a well-placed official in Hong Kong, China’s liaison office in Hong Kong told the Hong Kong Authority in no uncertain terms that Snowden had to be out of Hong Kong by June 23.
On June 19, Snowden had a meeting with Tibbo, the barrister who would handle any eventual court case, and Man and Ho, the Hong Kong solicitors who had been retained for him. It took place in a small apartment where, according to Ho, they ate pizza while they discussed Snowden’s options.
Tibbo wanted Snowden to remain in Hong Kong, allow himself to be arrested, seek bail, and fight extradition in court. Tibbo said he planned to mount a powerful legal defense against extradition by using a provision in Hong Kong’s extradition treaty with the United States that protects fugitives from persecution on political grounds. After he told Snowden that it would entail a long court battle, Snowden asked him if he could avoid even being arrested.
Tibbo explained that Hong Kong courts, which closely follow British law, would certainly issue an arrest warrant for him immediately after the United States formally filed charges against him. Those charges could come within hours, he reckoned. Soon afterward, Snowden would be temporarily jailed, and his computers, electronic gear, and thumb drives would be seized and placed in the custody of the court. Tibbo would immediately seek his release on bail but could not guarantee an outcome because Snowden, who had fled U.S. jurisdiction, might be considered a flight risk. If so, Snowden could remain incarcerated during the long court battle. During the litigation, Snowden would have a platform to make his case against U.S. surveillance. Indeed, Tibbo’s strategy involved building massive public support for Snowden’s cause. Once the U.S. government filed charges, though, Snowden could further expect it would invalidate his passport to go anywhere except for his return to the United States, and Interpol would issue a red alert to all its members. Because his case involved national security secrets, he had also to consider that the Hong Kong court could deny him any use of the Internet until his extradition case was settled. If Snowden wanted to leave Hong Kong, he had to act swiftly.
Tibbo, although evasive on the point when I interviewed him, might not have known about the escape Harrison was planning. He did not know that Snowden’s other alternatives were not good. He had no money, and his credit card had been blocked. He had no visas to go to any other country, and Interpol would issue its own border alert as soon as the United States filed its charges. At that point, Hong Kong airport authorities would be officially notified and could prevent him from leaving the city. Even if he somehow got out, he would be an international fugitive. Tibbo counseled Snowden to seek redress in the Hong Kong courts.
Snowden, though, had no intention of allowing himself to be arrested. Despite what he had told Lana Lam only one week earlier, at least for publication, about his determination to seek justice in the Hong Kong courts, he had not planned to use Hong Kong as anything more than a temporary stopover on his escape route. Two months later and safely in Moscow, he made this point clear in a lengthy interview with Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. He told him that it had never been part of his plan to use Hong Kong to escape the legal consequences of his act. “The purpose of my mission [to Hong Kong] was to get the information to journalists.” If so, he had merely been using Tibbo, Man, and Ho to provide him with temporary cover while, following the instructions of Assange, Harrison laid down the smoke screen for his escape to Moscow.