Alleged Extended Secret Stay of Edward Snowden in Moscow Airport Transit Zone

256 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Because the Aeroflot flight to Cuba was the only means of get- ting directly from Moscow to Latin America, Russian reporters, encouraged by WikiLeaks posts, continued taking the daily eleven- hour flight to Cuba until August 1. The charade only ended when Kucherena said in a press conference at the airport that Snowden would be taking up residency at an undisclosed location in Moscow and walked out of the airport with Snowden. Sarah Harrison, Snowden’s companion on the plane to Moscow, told Vogue that she and Snowden for thirty-nine days had shared a windowless room in the transit zone of the airport where they watched TV, washed their clothes in a sink basin, and ate meals from the nearby Burger King. The only hotel with windowless rooms in the transit zone in 2013 was the Vozdushny V-Express Capsule Hotel, located next to a newly opened Burger King. The polite V-Express desk clerk, who spoke English, showed me the standard windowless double room. It was approximately twenty- four square feet in area. Most of the floor space was taken up by twin beds. Across from the bed, behind a plastic curtain, was a stall with © a shower, a toilet, and a sink. It would be very cramped quarters for © two people to share for such an extended period. It cost 850 rubles an hour (about $18 in 2013). For thirty-nine days, that hourly charge would have added up to $16,600. Snowden claimed to the BBC that he brought a large cache of cash to Russia, which he could have used to pay the hotel. But such a long stay was not allowed, according to the desk clerk. The maximum stay allowed by the hotel was twenty- four hours. So either the rule was waived for Snowden, or Harrison did not tell the full truth. I learned from a former KGB officer that there are VIP quarters beyond the confines of the airport, including suites at the four- hundred-room Novotel hotel, which is located about seven miles away, that are used for debriefing and other purposes by the security services. According to him, the security services are not restricted from entering and leaving the transit zone. The possibility that Snowden was staying elsewhere would help explain the futile search for him by a large number of reporters over those thirty-nine days. When they learned from tweets that Snowden was not aboard the plane to Havana on June 24, for weeks | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 256 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019744