HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019739.jpg

CHAPTER 24 Off to Moscow They talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s great. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2015 EFORE FLYING TO Moscow, I arranged to have dinner with Oliver Stone at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of New York. I had greatly respected Stone’s ability as a film director after watching him work on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a film in which I had a cameo role. I had also debated Stone about the his- torical accuracy of his 1991 movie JFK at Town Hall in New York. When we dined, he had just written, produced, and directed Snowden, an independently financed film depicting Snowden, as Stone put it, as “one of the great heroes of the twenty-first century.” In preparing for it, Stone had seen Snowden in 2013 and 2014 and had had a six-hour meeting with Putin. I wanted to talk to Stone not to learn about the film but to learn how he had gained access to Snowden in Moscow. I knew from the documents taken from Sony Pictures Entertainment—allegedly by North Korea—that Stone had paid The Guardian $700,000 for the film rights to The Snowden Files, a book written by Luke Harding. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 251 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019739