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Enter Assange | 101
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 commu-
nity. She also had an older brother, Simon, who headed Avra, a ship
brokerage and commodity trading company, headquartered in Sin-
gapore, but he frequently traveled to Hong Kong on business.
Like Poitras, Sarah Harrison took great care to shield her move-
ments. 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
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