"How a Snowdenista WikiLeaks Editor Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport" --Vogue
Magazine
How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport
Since spiriting NSA leaker Edward Snowden to safety in Russia two years ago, activist and WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison has lived quietly in Berlin. Sara Corbett meets the woman some regard as a political heroine—others as an accomplice to treason.
Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport is, like so many international airports, a sprawling and bland place. It has six terminals, four Burger Kings, a sweep of shops selling duty-free caviar, and a rivering flow of anonymous travelers—all of them headed out or headed in or, in any event, never planning to stay long. But for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013, the airport also housed two fugitives: Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who had just off-loaded an explosive trove of top-secret U.S. government documents to journalists, and a 31-year-old British woman named Sarah Harrison, described as a legal researcher who worked for the online organization WikiLeaks.
It was a tableau sprung from a spy novel—a turncoat intelligence contractor on the lam with an enigmatic blonde by his side. Snowden had based himself in Hong Kong for several weeks as his disclosures about government surveillance ripped across the global media. When the U.S. charged him under the Espionage Act on June 14, an extradition order was sent to Hong Kong. But it came too late: Before anybody made a move to capture him, Edward Snowden—led by Sarah Harrison—had quietly boarded a flight to Moscow and basically vanished.
Their whereabouts at Sheremetyevo became a mystery. There was no sign of them at the lone hotel inside the terminal area, which rented out tiny “capsule” rooms for about $15 per hour. Nor did they turn up for a flight they’d booked to Havana, where reportedly they had planned to catch a plane to South America. In the meantime, the United States revoked Snowden’s passport. Word quickly spread that the world’s most wanted man was stuck inside the airport’s transit zone, unable to leave Russia and also, without a visa, unable to stay.
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If her job was to help keep Snowden safe and hidden, she did it masterfully. For 39 days, the two managed to camp out in the airport transit zone, foiling the media hordes trying to find them. TV crews patrolled the restaurants and pay-to-enter VIP lounges. Reporters grilled airport staff about what they knew, which was invariably nothing. “I’ve spent up to eighteen hours a day beyond passport control and security looking for Snowden,” an ABC News employee reported glumly in a blog post a week into the hunt. “There is an irrational fear, even late at night, that the moment I call it quits he’ll come strolling down the hall
http://www.vogue.com/11122973/sarah-harrison-edward-snowden-wikileaks-nsa/
= new reply since forum marked as read
that you thought it might show how they escaped all the Intel Agencies and the Press in the Airport.
But, I did like the read because it was very "Low Key" and not quite what one would expect and still thought it was a "Good Read for other insights into her experience with Snowden." 
Different thoughts for Different Folks...
I mean, really--unless the government gave them a little internal break room somewhere in the airport, they had to stay in one of those cubicles (and maybe threaten the desk clerks to keep the secret). Alternatively, they went to a government safe house and that whole "Burger King" business is smoke blowing.
The article itself is fine, my irritation lies with the fact that the headline falsely implies that we're going to learn where Snowden hid out in the airport, and we never learn that~!
I'll bet there's more than one way to get into that cubicle area without tromping through the public areas, and he may have been slid in that way. Impossible to know for sure--maybe the government keeps a few of those on standby for their purposes, and the desk clerks never get involved with keys and occupancy and so forth? We don't find any of that out, though. There's a promise in the headline, and no delivery! Oh well...
?itok=n9ELi8nT
http://skift.com/2013/06/27/what-it-is-like-to-spend-time-at-snowden-airport-in-moscow/#/0
“We only saw lots of journalists, that’s for sure,” said Maxim, a waiter at the Shokoladnitsa diner not far from Air Express. He declined to give his last name because he wasn’t allowed to talk to reporters.
Places to hide
The departure and transit area is huge and has dozens of small rooms, some labeled “authorized personnel only,” where one could potentially seek refuge with support from airport staff or security personnel. And security forces or police patrolling the area can easily whisk a person out of this area though back doors or corridors.
Article says based on Luke Harding's Book. Will be interesting to see how he handles it.
From your link:
"Stone is also adapting the screenplay with Kieran Fitzgerald, from Luke Harding's The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man and Anatoly Kucherena's Time of the Octopus."
have to be good.
