102 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
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 intel- ligence 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 des- tination. 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 USS. 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 min-
® ute. 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.
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