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treaty with the US. As the Russian officials in Hong Kong might well have informed him, Russia had no extradition treaty with the US, It was also one of the few places in the world that he could reach from Hong Kong without flying through airspace in which he might be intercepted by a US ally. Moreover, Putin himself had approved his exfiltration, which meant that, even without a valid passport or visa, Snowden could take the direct Aeroflot flight to Moscow. Snowden’s choice was going to Russia or going to prison.
The Russians could have used this leverage in the Hong Kong scenario to extract a quid pro quo. The price of admission in that guid pro quo was proving all his documents and putting himself in the hands of Russian intelligence. To be sure, Snowden might have refused this leverage in Hong Kong, and Putin may have decided the terms of the deal could better be negotiated in Moscow.
The Moscow Scenario
The final possibility is that Snowden did not come under Russian control until after he arrived in Moscow. Certainly, the Russian intelligence service could afford to wait in Hong Kong before tightening the vice on Snowden. It knew that Interpol and the US would be pursuing him throughout the world and that Snowden had no valid travel documents to go anywhere else. It could also have determined that his credit cards had been frozen. So it could afford to wait until his plane landed in Russia.
After the Russians took him in a “special operation” from the plane at the airport, he was informed by Russian authorities that he would not be allowed to go to Cuba, Venezuela, Iceland, Ecuador, or any other country without the permission of Russian officials, which would not be immediately forthcoming. So he never even showed up for the flight to Cuba (which Assange had “leaked” to the media he would be aboard.) He was now at the mercy of the Russian authorities. There was good reason for keeping him in a virtual prison in Russia. "He can compromise thousands of intelligence and military officials,” Sergei Alexandrovich Markov, the co-Chairman of the National Strategic Council of Russia and an adviser to Putin, pointed out, “We can't send him back just because America demands it."
So Snowden was consigned to the transit zone of the airport, which is a twilight zone neither inside nor outside of Russia, a netherworld that extends beyond the confines of the airport to include safe houses and other facilities maintained by the FSB for the purposes of interrogation and security. Stranded at the Moscow airport, Snowden had no place to go except into the waiting arms of the FSB. No matter what he had believed earlier in Hong Kong, he would quickly realize that he had only one viable option: seeking sanctuary in Russia.
Even though the FSB is known by US intelligence to run a strict regime over present and
former members of foreign intelligence services, Snowden may not have realized the full extent of the FSB’s interest in him. He naively told the Washington Post in December 2013 in Moscow, “I
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