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106 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tacted the consulate of Iceland while he was in Hong Kong. “We had heard nothing from Snowden,” an Iceland government official told Vanity Fatr. Snowden also did not contact the government of Ecuador while in Hong Kong. In mid-June, while Harrison was laying down false tracks for Snowden in Hong Kong, Assange in London asked Fidel Narvaez, who was a friend of his and the legal attaché in the Lon- don embassy of Ecuador, to issue a document that Snowden could use. But this document was not delivered to Snowden in Hong Kong (and it was later invalidated by Ecuador). There are no direct flights to Ecuador from Hong Kong. If Snowden had really planned to go to Ecuador without stopping in a country allied with the United States, he would have had to fly to Cuba. He would need a Cuban travel document to do that, which he could have obtained from the Cuban consulate anytime during his month in Hong Kong. But he did not obtain it. Nor did he acquire a visa to go to any other country in Latin America or elsewhere while in Hong Kong. So where was he headed? ) Whatever foreign government with which Snowden was deal- © ing earlier presumably did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Almost all other countries that did not have active extradition treaties with the United States could not be directly reached by air. With three notable exceptions, the flights to most of these countries had stopovers in a country that was an ally of the United States, where officials could seize Snowden. The three excep- tions were China, North Korea (via China), and Russia. The only one of these three countries that Snowden is known to have had contact with directly during his thirty-three-day stay in Hong Kong was Russia. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, revealed these contacts in a televised press briefing in September 2013. Putin did not provide the date of these contacts, but he pro- vided an intriguing clue. Snowden was identified to him, according to Putin, not by name but merely as an “agent of special services.” If his name was not given to Putin, it might have been because Snowden’s first meeting with the Russians had taken place before Snowden became a household name on June 9, 2013. For his part, Snowden was evasive when discussing his con- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 106 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019594