The Edward Snowden Travel Agency

[Geee]

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The absurdities of the Where’s-Edward-Snowden guessing game have by now reached such heights that it would be no great surprise to see reports of the NSA leaker popping up in Tehran, or perhaps transiting the Pyongyang airport. Yes, I’m making that up. But a lot of the recent reports read like scenes from some latter-day version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 satire of the news trade, Scoop. Traveling on what is presumably a revoked U.S. passport, Snowden departs Hong Kong for Moscow. Speaking from Finland, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin says that Snowden arrived unexpectedly in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and is still hanging around the transit hall — though journalists hunting high and low in the transit area can’t find him. Maybe he’s enroute to Ecuador? Or points between? On a tip that he was booked aboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Cuba, some two dozen journalists board the plane — only to discover as it heads for Havana that he’s not there.

And with the U.S. demanding his return, and not getting it, the diplomatic fictions multiply. Speaking from Delhi, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says that if China had adequate notice and willfully let Snowden go, “It would be deeply troubling.” Would be? It seems that it’s a done deal. Or is it? Forgive me, I’m not going to go through every report of Snowden’s doings since he left U.S. jurisdiction. But if anyone cares to do so, one place to begin would be to look for the last time anyone with no stake in this game last reported laying eyes on Edward Snowden. And where. As it is, three governments with some of the most powerful surveillance machineries on the planet seem unable to sort out precisely where he is, when he left, or where he’s going.