Spy, Get Out!

The “When will they let Edward Snowden out of the airport?” epic tale is over. This does not mean the affair is over in general, but that the tension among those interested should drop to a certain extent. The intrigue, if it continues to thrive, will revolve not around the former CIA analyst and the state secrets that he’s revealed — even though it’s likely that there’s still space left for all sort of speculation in this area — but around the diplomatic consequences. How will the U.S. respond to Snowden receiving political asylum; how will Russia react; will the sword-play be purely rhetorical, or will more names be added to the Magnitsky Act? There are more questions along these lines, for now without an answer.

But then, all this will become a routine; today, everybody was concerned with other issues. Snowden has left Sheremyetevo, just like Tom Hanks’s hero in Spielberg’s “The Terminal.” He has become a free citizen of free Russia.

There are so many versions of what happened next that it could make you dizzy. We don’t even know who Snowden left the airport with. “RIA Novosti” states that he left alone in an ordinary taxi. The Twitter account of WikiLeaks names Sarah Harrison, an employee of that organization, as Snowden’s escort. But on the whole, it’s a mystery.

Where is he now?! Anatoly Kucherena, a famous lawyer and member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation (and, in a way, Snowden’s lawyer), has announced that he has given Snowden a document granting him temporary political asylum for one year. He even showed photocopies of Snowden’s documents and, while on air for the channel “Russia 24,” he added that Snowden has left the airport and gone to a “safe location.” “I can guess, but I cannot say due to security reasons. Today, he is one of the most searched after people in the world,” the lawyer said.

Where is the safest place for the most sought-after person? Journalists have tried to answer that question. The former CIA employee is on his way to the club “Hungry Duck,” according to the Twitter account which supposedly belongs to him. “I am headed to the Hungry Duck. Who wants to dance?” the message said, according to the news agency Interfax.

Here it is, the safest place — a club with pretty bodies and drunk, potential singletons or sex partners! Well, extensive publicity for the narrow, targeted audience of this club is perhaps secured. All that’s left for pretty journalists is to put on a nice dress and go find Snowden in this lair of debauchery and vice. Even though the Twitter account is probably not his, what’s left is advertisement for the club. We can only hope that the journalists who have waited for Snowden many weeks in the airport will at least be able to relax at the expense of the editors (though the hope is minimal, seeing as it would be difficult to convince the editors to pay for four Long Island Iced Teas if Snowden weren’t at the club).

Where is this safe place? “Former employee of the CIA Edward Snowden has crossed the Russian border,” a source familiar with the situation told Interfax-AVN on Thursday. “‘Today, Edward Snowden has crossed the Russia border and is now on the territory of our country’ said a spokesperson for the news agency.” Sure, Russia’s a very safe place. More specifically, choose any place from Kamchatka to Chechnya, passing through Mordovia. You could also add, “On the territory of our biggest, boundless country, taking up one-eighth of the mainland,” and everyone would understand. On the other hand, it’s nice that we’ve established that our country’s territory is safe. Well, for Snowden, at least.

On the whole, everyone understands that, in the near future, Edward Snowden will appear, maybe not in a club after informing about it in a blog, but in a public space. And a brutal thought creeps up: Maybe the safest place for Snowden is a building of the External Intelligence Service? Maybe it was all a daydream — Kucherena, WikiLeaks, Snowden in a terminal at Sheremyetevo? Maybe all this time he was sitting talking to colleagues who a few years earlier were his enemies? But, of course, it isn’t so — we all saw Kucherena, the scan of the document, WikiLeaks’ announcements in Twitter (after all, they wouldn’t lie). It’s only Snowden that we almost didn’t see.

And then, some Edward Snegov or — so it’s not so obvious, it’s an intelligence service after all — Petr Terentyev would calmly walk out of the building. And he would calmly live somewhere in Ryazan or Tula. He’d become Russified; he would learn the language and all that. But, of course, that’s just us having read too many spy novels.

Yet all the same, Snowden is a myth. For the U.S., he’s a myth of the danger of cyber-attacks and of the “country surrounded by enemies.” For us, “the U.S. is claiming the role of world leader and we cannot allow this.” And so forth. The myth is treated in different ways by different target audiences, especially lobby groups. Snowden has turned out to be quite useful.