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254 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS vious meetings with Bamford. So I sent Kucherena, via Zamir, ten questions that I wanted to ask Snowden. I next obtained a multi-entry Russian visa from the Russian con- sulate in New York and booked myself a room in the Hotel National. My night flight from New York to Moscow took just less than eight hours and landed at Terminal D of Sheremetyevo Interna- tional Airport at 7:40 a.m. on October 29, 2015. I did not immedi- ately proceed through passport control, in part because I wanted to explore the transit zone in which Snowden was supposedly trapped for six weeks. Sheremetyevo Two, where all international flights land, was built in the waning days of the Cold War for international passengers arriving for the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics. It was modern- ized in 2010, including opening a walkway that connects Terminals D, E, and F for transit passengers. Snowden had vanished, at least from public view, in this com- plex of terminals for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013. His explanation to journalists, as will be recalled, was two part. First, he ) said he had planned to board the next fight to Cuba and from there © proceed to Ecuador. He said that he was unable to board this flight because his passport had been invalidated by the U.S. government while he was flying to Russia. Second, after discovering his passport had been revoked, he stayed in a capsule hotel in the transit zone for the next thirty-nine days. To better understand the plausibility of his version of those events, I proceeded through the transit passage to Terminal F, where Snowden’s plane from Hong Kong had landed at 5:15 p.m. Moscow time on June 23, 2013. Snowden did not go through passport control upon arrival. Before any of the other passengers were allowed to disembark from the plane, Russian plainclothes officers from the special services boarded the plane and asked both Snowden and Sarah Harrison, his WikiLeaks-supplied “ninja,” to accompany them to a waiting car that whisked them away. According to the account in Izvestia, “A special operation was conducted for his reception and evacuation.” It further said, “Snowden’s flight to Moscow was coordinated with the Russian authorities and intelligence services.” If not for the “special operation,” he could have easily gone by foot | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 254 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019742