When Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong with thumb-drives full of damning US government documents, he assumed his freedom was forfeit: he didn’t even make an escape plan.
But after the explosive revelations of mass, illegal US spying, people around the world determined that they would save Snowden from the fate of Chelsea Manning: years of torture, decades of imprisonment. Among them was a Canadian human rights lawyer, Robert Tibbo, who had represented many of the teeming masses of refugees crammed into Hong Kong’s asylum-seeker ghetto. Tibbo and his clients shuttled Snowden from shanty to shack to cramped apartment for days, hiding him in plain sight in Kowloon’s Lai Chi Kok district among Vietnamese, Indonesian, Filipino, African and Sri Lankan asylum seekers who endure years of grinding poverty in their bid to make new lives away from their home countries.
Canada’s National Post conducted a long, wide-ranging interview with Tibbo about Snowden’s unlikely escape, filling in the blanks with information from Wikileaks volunteers, other lawyers, Laura Poitras, and Snowden himself. The tale of the vulnerable people who selflessly hid Snowden is the main meat of the story, but perhaps more salient – given the oft-repeated smear that Snowden was a Russian spy – is the story of how Snowden ended up in Moscow.
