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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 | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 101 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019589