Mystery surrounds Snowden's secret Moscow life

MOSCOW — After a dramatic arrival and a prolonged confinement at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is wanted by the United States government on espionage charges, has quietly vanished into a life of seclusion.

Nobody seems to know exactly where one of the most wanted and famous men in the world lives, who protects him or how he spends his days — beyond learning Russian and reading Dostoyevsky. Such glimpses into his life have been offered to the public by his Russian lawyer and de facto spokesman, Anatoly Kucherena.

With the exception of rare, coordinated appearances and updates by Kucherena, Snowden has all but disappeared as the consequences of his revelations about the NSA's massive spying program continue to unravel. 

After a brief visit by his father last month, the asylee's public life plunged back into silence, except for the announcement that he had taken a job at a large, undisclosed Russian website, an alleged photo of him on a tourist boat published by a local tabloid website, and unconfirmed reports of a new girlfriend.

Attempting to portray a life as normal as a global phenomenon of Snowden's magnitude can expect, these sporadic snippets of his exile have instead prompted the widely held conviction that every detail of his stay in Russia is carefully orchestrated.

"We know at this point that he's not free," said Yuri Felshtinsky, a Russian scholar who has written extensively about the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Felshtinsky, who believes the FSB controls Snowden, called the American exile a "Christmas gift" for President Vladimir Putin's "public relations war" with the United States.

In the same way that the showdown between the U.S. and Russia over Snowden’s arrival in Moscow prompted commentators to dust off Cold War rhetoric, his life in exile also inspired comparisons with the often unhappy stories of a long list of American defectors to the former Soviet Union.

In the 1930s, many disappeared in gulags or were executed. With rare exceptions, those who defected in the following decades fared no better, often living out their expatriate lives battling alcoholism, killing themselves or dying in unusual circumstances. William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, two NSA cryptologists, defected to the Soviet Union in the 1960s but later regretted their decision and tried to leave. Victor Norris Hamilton, a former code analyst with the NSA, resurfaced in the 1990s at a Moscow psychiatric hospital, where he spent 21 years.

“For the most part, Americans who came to Russia believing they found the promised land have been left bitter and personally destroyed,” Savodnik said.

Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, spent four years in Russia before returning to the United States and assassinating President Kennedy. He had worked at an electronics factory in Minsk, in today’s Belarus, and married a Russian woman before changing his mind and returning to Texas with the help of a repatriation loan from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

Any similarity between Snowden and Oswald barely stretches beyond their shared country of birth. But Savodnik sees a pattern in the history of disillusioned Americans seeking refuge in Russia — most defector narratives start with idealism and end in a harsh confrontation with the reality of surveillance in Russia.

“There’s just a great irony and sad naivete about both Snowden and Oswald,” Savodnik said. “I think that both journeys are or were prompted by a great deal of ignorance.”

The fact that a champion of privacy such as Snowden would choose a country where NSA-like surveillance is the norm was not lost on critics.

“The irony is that Snowden, who was fighting for freedom of information, actually became a major tool in hiding this information,” said Felshtinsky, the FSB scholar. “He is going to keep quiet now about what he knows and about what he told to the FSB.”

“He has probably no appreciation of just how absurd the idea of going to the Russian Federation is in light of his whole background,” Savodnik said.

Snowden and his lawyer deny that he is under surveillance.

Sarah Harrison, a journalist with WikiLeaks who has been by Snowden’s side since he was in Hong Kong, including during his five weeks at Sheremetyevo, recently left Russia and said in a prepared statement that she stayed with him “until our team was confident that he had established himself and was free from the interference of any government.”

When speaking with The New York Times last month, Snowden declined to discuss his living conditions, but said he was “not under Russian government control and was free to move around.” As rumored press conferences and appearances on Russian talk shows failed to materialize, many started to wonder whether the whistle-blower is truly free to speak.

“The only way to show that he’s independent is to show him to journalists, which has never happened,” said Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and Russian security services expert. “The interview of him by The New York Times was conducted via exchange of emails, and it was impossible to determine if he was under control or who was actually in the room with him.”