THE LATEST TWISTS IN THE SNOWDEN AFFAIR
For almost four weeks, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractorresponsible for leaks about the U.S. secret-surveillance system, has dominated the news cycle and preoccupied the world’s most powerful people. The American government has waged an energetic campaign in order to minimize the damage done by Snowden’s disclosures, and allies such as France and Germany have expressed their disaffection over the monitoring of their diplomatic missions.
In Russia, the Snowden situation interfered with the agenda of a forum of gas-exporting countries several days after Snowden got stuck in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. A number of attending leaders, those of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, were watched with suspicion and curiosity: Were they secretly planning to smuggle Snowden away on board their Presidential planes? The Bolivian leader’s response to the question of whether his country might give shelter to the whistleblower—“Why not?”—must have sounded too nonchalant to the ears of the Obama Administration. In any case, France and Portugal barred the Bolivian President from their airspace, and—in what looks like unprecedented coercion of a sovereign leader—his jet was forced to land in neutral Austria, where it was (or was not) searched for Snowden. The searchers found no trace of him.
The Russian President’s spokesman said that the Snowden issue is not “on the Kremlin’s agenda,” but Putin, very soon thereafter, speaking to the press at the gas conference, said that Russia will not hand over Snowden to the United States. Putin added, “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: he must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners, as strange as that sounds coming from my lips.”
Though relations between Russia and the United States are anything but friendly, they are not defined by the Cold War logic in which just anyone who would announce himself the enemy of the American establishment would automatically become a friend of Russia. Years ago, the anti-nuclear activist Charles Hyder was a frequent guest on Soviet TV, and the seventies radical Angela Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, to cite just a couple of examples. These days, relations are more complex. Putin certainly would not want to be seen delivering to America what it seeks, but he would arguably prefer just to get rid of Snowden rather than keep him around as a permanent annoyance. On Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov made it clear that Snowden was unwelcome, saying that “he needs to choose a place to go.”
Yet with no country anxious to harbor Snowden, the situation is becoming a diplomatic impasse. In the meantime, the man himself, who has remained out of sight—reportedly still in Sheremetyevo airport—is increasingly looking like a comic figure. The latest twist: Snowden’s possible marriage to Anna Chapman as a way to resolve the diplomatic and personal stalemate. Yesterday, on Twitter, Chapman apparently proposed that Snowden marry her. Chapman was repatriated to Russia in 2010 in a “swap”: a team of about a dozen dormant Russian agents in the United States was exchanged for a Russian scientist who had been serving his term in a prison camp, convicted (unlawfully, many think) of espionage against his motherland. This experience makes Chapman a natural sympathizer with Snowden, as it were. And, as a mate, she’s anything but stale: at the time of the swap, Chapman’s photographs—some of them showing the shapely redhead in a tight, bright-red dress, appeared in the media all over the world.
The historical irony here is that during the late-Soviet decades, marriage was a common way to avoid the tight constraints on freedom of travel. In the nineteen-seventies, when the U.S.S.R., under international pressure, allowed Jews to emigrate, marrying a Jew helped many to escape from the confines of the Communist world. Some marriages were real, but many were fictitious. As a cynical joke of the time had it, “A Jewish wife is not luxury, it’s a means of transportation.” Marriage to a “real foreigner” was also an option, but such arrangements were relatively few—appropriate foreigners were scarce, and those willing to serve as “means of transportation” were even harder to find. Still, it’s no surprise that the idea of marriage as a way out of the Snowden impasse would occur to somebody in Russia. Today, a fake Snowden Twitter account that has operated since mid-June posted a “response” to Chapman’s offer: “I would have married Chapman regardless of the rest. Goddamn, just look at her.” The real Snowden may soon discover that accepting Chapman’s generous proposal is his only chance to break from the Sheremetyevo limbo.
Photograph by Alexander Zemlianichenko, Jr./AP.
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