Snowden's Post‑Leak Escape: Lawyers, Hotel Payments, and Unidentified Benefactors

102 subsequently disputed some his more dramatic claims, such as his assertion that he had the authority at the NSA “to wiretap anyone, even the President,” the press largely accepted his claims as established facts. As for American surveillance, he declared “I don’t want to live in a society that does those sorts of things.” He had succeeded in defining himself for the public. The Guardian story accompanying the video carried the headline, “EDWARD SNOWDEN: THE WHISTLE BLOWER BEHIND THE NSA SURVEILLANCE REVELATIONS.” Snowden’s identity as a whistle-blower was now established in the media. Overnight, Snowden became a global celebrity and, to much of the world, a hero. Snowden, in fact, did not sacrifice him. He vanished from public view after the release of the video. He provided Poitras and Greenwald with thumb drives on which he had loaded the documents he wanted them to use. The next morning he packed his belongings into a backpack and moved, without notifying the front desk, to the room Poitras had rented at the Mira. Complicated schemes, especially when they involve transferring state secrets to unauthorized parties in a foreign country, do not necessarily go as planned. On the morning of June 10", 2013, Snowden’s escape plan apparently ran into a problem. Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Mann, the lawyers who, along with Albert Ho, had been retained for Snowden by an unidentified party, received an emergency phone call early in the morning telling them to help Snowden move to a safe location. Although Tibbo would not identify the person who had called, the message had been relayed to Mann and him through Ho’s office. He told Tibbo over the phone, “I can make myself unrecognizable” Tibbo and Mann immediately proceeded to the mall adjacent to the Mira hotel, where they met Snowden. After he signed a document appointing Ho’s law firm as his “legal adviser,” they slipped out of via the mall exit. As his credit card had been frozen, it is not clear who paid his $3,300 hotel bill. According to hotel records, it was paid by another credit card. Poitras, who taken a room at the hotel may have used her credit card or Snowden may have had another benefactor in Hong Kong. In any case, the lawyers escorted Snowden to a pre-arranged residence. “I am in a safe house for now,” Snowden wrote Greenwald on June 11". The situation may not have been totally under his control, since he added: “But I have no idea how safe it is.” Greenwald flew back to Brazil that day. Soon afterward, he would resign from the Guardian and in February 2014 become the co-founding editor of Zhe Intercept, an online publication dedicated to adversarial journalism which was backed by Internet billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Poitras remained in Hong Kong, where she moved, along with Guardian reporter MacAskill, to the five-star Sheraton Hong Kong Tower, which, like the Mira hotel, was on Nathan Road in Kowloon. Her next task was to set up what was to be Snowden’s final interview in Hong Kong. It was scheduled for June 12th. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020254