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I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20" 2014— the same day that Snowden had arrived there the previous year. I checked into the five-star Mira Hotel. It was in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon, a 10-minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong island, where most of the foreign consulates are located. I chose the Mira because it was the hotel in which Snowden stayed and made the celebrated video admitting his role in taking the NSA documents. I asked at the front desk for room 1014, the same one that Snowden had occupied in 2013. Snowden had told the journalists from the Guardian that that he had been at Mira Hotel since he first arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th until he left on June 10". My motive in taking the room during that period was not journalistic nostalgia; I wanted access to the hotel’s service and security personnel who may have had contact with Snowden a year earlier. Unfortunately, that room was occupied. Even so, I was given a nearby room that served my purpose. The rate was $330 a day with taxes, although I received a journalist’s discount of 30 percent. My first surprise was that Snowden had not arrived at the Mira until 11 days after he arrived in Hong Kong. He told the Guardian reporters that he hid out at the Mira hotel since his arrival because he feared that he might be captured by the CIA. But, as I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had actually registered there under his real name and used his own passport and credit card to secure the room. Even more surprising was the date he checked into the Mira Hotel. It was not May 20" but June 1, 2013. Since he checked out on June 10, 2013, he was there for only nine days. The question that could not be answered by the registry of the Mira Hotel was: where was Snowden staying for the eleven days between from May 20" to June 12 Wherever he was, he apparently considered himself safe enough to take another irrevocable step in his defection. He sent journalist Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian a “welcome package,” as he called it, of 20 top-secret NSA documents on May 25, 2013. He had now not only downloaded documents but, in a violation of his oath, he provided them to an unauthorized party. He also in Hong Kong, for the first time, directly contacted via email Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. Indeed, it was during these first 11 days during which he was staying someplace other than the place he claimed to be staying that he made almost all the arrangements for his journalistic event. He was also apparently in contact with at least one foreign mission during this period, according to what he written to Gellman on May 25". In that email concerning when and how his story was to be published by the Washington Post, Snowden even asked Gellman to include in it some text that would help him with this mission. But which country was he approaching? Clearly his whereabouts during these missing 11 days was a gap that needed to be filled in. It could shed light on why he came to Hong Kong. I next called Keith Bradsher, a prize-winning journalist who had been the New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong in 2013, who had written a well-researched report about Snowden’s HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020161