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| Light shines through a cabin window on seat 17A, the empty seat that an Aeroflot official said was booked in the name of former CIA technician Edward Snowden, shortly before Aeroflot flight SU150 takes off from Moscow to Havana, Cuba, Monday, June 24, 2013. Snowden, who has admitted to leaking National Security Agency secrets, was expected to fly from Russia to Cuba and Venezuela en route to possible asylum in Ecuador, but AP reporters on the flight never saw him get on board. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The U.S. grasped for help Monday from both adversaries and
uneasy allies in an effort to catch fugitive National Security Agency
leaker Edward Snowden. The White House demanded that he be denied
asylum, blasted China for letting him go and urged Russia to "do the
right thing" and send him back to America to face espionage charges.
Snowden
was believed to be in Russia, where he fled Sunday after weeks of
hiding out in Hong Kong following his disclosure of the broad scope of
two highly classified counterterror surveillance programs to two
newspapers. The programs collect vast amounts of Americans' phone
records and worldwide online data in the name of national security.
Snowden
had flown from Hong Kong to Russia, and was expected to fly early
Monday to Havana, from where he would continue on to Ecuador, where he
has applied for asylum. But he didn't get on that plane and his exact
whereabouts were unclear.
The founder of
WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling organization that has embraced Snowden,
said the American was only passing through Russia on his way to an
unnamed destination to avoid the reach of U.S. authorities.
Julian
Assange said Snowden had applied for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland and
possibly other countries.
Despite its
diplomatic tough talk, the U.S. faces considerable difficulty in
securing cooperation on Snowden from nations with whom it has chilly
relations.
The White House said Hong Kong's
refusal to detain Snowden had "unquestionably" hurt relations between
the United States and China. While Hong Kong has a high degree of
autonomy from the rest of China, experts said Beijing probably
orchestrated Snowden's exit in an effort to remove an irritant in
Sino-U.S. relations. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi
Jinping met earlier this month in California to smooth over rough
patches in the countries' relationship, including allegations of hacking
into each other's computer systems.
Secretary of State John Kerry urged Moscow to "do the right thing" amid high-level pressure on Russia to turn over Snowden.
"We're
following all the appropriate legal channels and working with various
other countries to make sure that the rule of law is observed," Obama
told reporters when asked if he was confident that Russia would expel
Snowden.
Obama's spokesman, Jay Carney, said
the U.S. was expecting the Russians "to look at the options available to
them to expel Mr. Snowden back to the United States to face justice for
the crimes with which he is charged."
Carney was less measured about China.
"The
Chinese have emphasized the importance of building mutual trust," he
said. "And we think that they have dealt that effort a serious setback.
...This was a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive
despite a valid arrest warrant, and that decision unquestionably has a
negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship."
Snowden
has acknowledged revealing details of top-secret surveillance programs
that sweep up millions of
phone and Internet records daily. He is a
former CIA employee who later was hired as a contractor through Booz
Allen to be a computer systems analyst. In that job, he gained access to
documents - many of which he has given to The Guardian and The
Washington Post to expose what he contends are privacy violations by an
authoritarian government.
Snowden also told
the South China Morning Post that "the NSA does all kinds of things like
hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data," and is
believed to have more than 200 additional sensitive documents.
Assange
and attorneys for WikiLeaks assailed the U.S. as "bullying" foreign
nations into refusing asylum to Snowden. WikiLeaks counsel Michael
Ratner said Snowden is protected as a whistleblower by the same
international treaties that the U.S. has in the past used to criticize
policies in China and African nations.
The
U.S. government's dual lines of diplomacy - harsh with China, hopeful
with the Russians - came just days after Obama met separately with
leaders of both countries in an effort to close gaps on some of the
major disputes facing them. Additionally, State Department spokesman
Patrick Ventrell said the U.S. has made demands to "a series of
governments," including Ecuador, that Snowden be barred from any
international travel other than to be returned to the U.S.
Ventrell
said he did not know if that included Iceland. Icelandic officials have
confirmed receiving an informal request for asylum conveyed by
WikiLeaks, which has strong links to the tiny North Atlantic nation. But
authorities there have insisted that Snowden must be on Icelandic soil
before making a formal request.
Ecuador's
president and foreign minister declared that national sovereignty and
universal principles of human rights - not U.S. prodding - would govern
any decision they might make on granting asylum to Snowden.
Ecuador
has rejected some previous U.S. efforts at cooperation and has been
helping Assange avoid prosecution by allowing him to stay at its embassy
in London.
Formally, Snowden's application
for Ecuadoran asylum remains only under consideration. But Foreign
Minister Ricardo Patino made little effort to disguise his government's
position. He told reporters in Hanoi that the choice Ecuador faced in
hosting Snowden was "betraying the citizens of the world or betraying
certain powerful elites in a specific country."
Patino said late Monday he did not know Snowden's exact whereabouts.
President
Rafael Correa said on Twitter that "we will take the decision that we
feel most suitable, with absolute sovereignty." Correa, who took office
in 2007, is a frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America
and is an ally of leftist president Evo Morales of Bolivia. Correa also
had aligned himself with Venezuela's late leader, Hugo Chavez, a chief
U.S. antagonist in the region for years.
In
April 2011 the Obama administration expelled the Ecuadorean ambassador
to Washington after the U.S. envoy to Ecuador, Heather Hodges, was
expelled for making corruption allegations about senior Ecuadorean
police authorities in confidential documents disclosed by WikiLeaks.
American
experts said the U.S. will have limited, if any, influence to persuade
governments to turn over Snowden if he heads to Cuba or nations in South
America that are seen as hostile to Washington.
"There's
little chance Ecuador would give him back" if that country agrees to
take him, said James F. Jeffrey, a former ambassador and career
diplomat.
Steve Saltzburg, a former senior
Justice Department prosecutor, said it's little surprise that China
refused to hand over Snowden, and he predicted Russia won't either.
"We've
been talking the talk about how both these countries abuse people who
try to express their First
Amendment rights, so I think that neither
country is going to be very inclined to help us very much," said
Saltzburg, now a law professor at George Washington University in
Washington. "That would be true with Cuba if he ends up there."
The
United States formally sought Snowden's extradition but was rebuffed by
Hong Kong officials who said the U.S. request did not fully comply with
their laws. The Justice Department rejected that claim, saying its
request met all of the requirements of the extradition treaty between
the U.S. and Hong Kong.
Snowden had been
believed to have been in a transit area in Moscow's airport where he
would not be considered as entering Russian territory. Assange declined
to discuss where Snowden was but said he was safe. The U.S. has revoked
his passport.
