U.S. Blasts Russia for Granting Asylum to Snowden

Russia granted asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on Thursday, defying and embarrassing an Obama administration that threatened to scale back diplomatic relations between the two countries.

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has received asylum for a year in Russia and has left Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, his lawyer said. WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman and Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation discuss the implications for U.S.-Russian relations. Photo: AP.

NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, says the U.S. has left him “stateless”. Is that the case? What happens when the U.S. revokes an American’s passport? How often does that happen? How do you renounce your citizenship? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.

Reuters
Fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, center, talks with Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, second from right, in front of a car at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on Thursday in this handout image broadcasted by Rossiya 24 TV Channel.

In the U.S., lawmakers across the spectrum heaped scorn on Moscow, branding the move as a slap in the face and calling for retaliatory measures from the White House.
“We are extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful request” to have him expelled, said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “Mr. Snowden is not a whistleblower—he is accused of leaking classified information.”
In one sign of U.S. anger, Mr. Carney directly acknowledged for the first time that the administration was considering pulling out of a planned September summit meeting in Moscow between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is scheduled to come ahead of a Group of 20 meeting in St. Petersburg.

U.S. officials had viewed the bilateral meeting as an important moment in a monthslong drive to find common ground with Russia on foreign-policy aims, such as ending the war in Syria. “We are evaluating the utility of a summit,” Mr. Carney said.
Moscow’s decision raised the prospect that the U.S. fugitive will remain in Russia for the foreseeable future, providing a persistent strain on already turbulent U.S.-Russian relations.
The Obama administration stopped short of announcing immediate punitive measures, reflecting the U.S.’s reluctance to jeopardize cooperation with Russia in other areas, and underscoring the limits to its international leverage.
Thursday’s diplomatic maelstrom started when Russia granted Mr. Snowden so-called temporary asylum, which lasts for one year but is renewable. It allows him to live, work and travel in Russia and seek citizenship if he stays in the country for half a decade.
Armed on Thursday with his new Russian document, Mr. Snowden departed from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport—where the high-profile U.S. leaker had been stuck since arriving there on June 23 from Hong Kong—according to his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena.
“He has left for a safe place,” Mr. Kucherena said, declining to say where in Russia his client would go.
“He will choose,” Mr. Kucherena said later on state television. “He can live in a hotel or rent an apartment. Seeing as he is the most wanted person on earth, he today will also be focusing on questions of his own security.”

For the 30-year-old former security contractor, who is wanted by U.S. authorities for leaking documents related to the NSA’s foreign and domestic surveillance operations, Russia’s hospitality could prove a mixed blessing.

Americans who achieved refuge in the Soviet Union suffered from the challenges of adapting to an alienating life in exile, though Russia now boasts more modern conveniences than it did then. More centrally for Mr. Snowden, the Kremlin has demanded he cease his “political activities” in order to stay in the country, curtailing his potential options for work.
Mr. Snowden has already leaked highly classified information about U.S. eavesdropping on foreign government officials.
Officials are concerned that Mr. Snowden has additional and potentially more damaging information about how the U.S. penetrates foreign government computers. Officials say he could now decide to make that information public or provide details to the Russian government as a condition of his asylum deal.
A U.S. official said the potential for “bartering” with U.S. intelligence is a real risk.
“That’s something everyone’s been worried about,” the U.S. official said. “What does he have to trade to stay there?”
The U.S. is concerned the information that Mr. Snowden has could help Russia and other governments circumvent U.S. surveillance measures.
Such worries were stoked this week when the Guardian newspaper issued a new report about an NSA data-collection tool known as XKeyscore. Mr. Kucherena emphasized that those revelations were the product of documents leaked by Mr. Snowden prior to his arrival in Moscow.
“He didn’t give any documents to anyone while at the airport,” Mr. Kucherena said.
Mr. Snowden expressed gratitude to Russia in a statement released by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, which has been aiding his escape from U.S. authorities.
“Over the past eight weeks we have seen the Obama administration show no respect for international or domestic law, but in the end the law is winning,” he said. “I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with its laws and international obligations.”

Mr. Kucherena said Mr. Snowden is currently focusing on staying in Russia and has no immediate plans to leave. That echoes Mr. Snowden’s comments to a group of civil-society figures here last month that he wants to remain in Russia temporarily until he can secure safe passage to Latin America—where countries including Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have offered him asylum.
Ecuador has said it would consider granting it to him if he can reach Ecuadorean territory.
Still, Mr. Snowden will face difficulty reaching these countries, given his lack of a valid international travel document and U.S. efforts to deny him asylum or transit to Latin America.
Maryland Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called the asylum decision a “slap in the face to the United States.” But he said the U.S. is in a tough spot because it needs Russian cooperation on issues, including addressing the bloodshed in Syria.
Mr. Ruppersberger said he believes Mr. Snowden has already provided all his information to both the Chinese and Russian governments, which is why they allowed him to go free, and that information will help them evade U.S. spying efforts in the future.
The Snowden case provided fresh evidence of the limits of U.S. influence, said current and former U.S. officials. Russia rejected U.S. appeals to hand over Mr. Snowden. Many in the administration were caught by surprise by the announcement, an administration official said.
The Kremlin has become more confrontational with the White House in particular since late 2011, when the largest protests to threaten Mr. Putin’s government erupted on the streets of Moscow. Mr. Putin quickly accused the U.S. of aiding the protests—an allegation reiterated by Mr. Putin as recently as June and denied by the State Department. The mistrust led to a low in U.S.-Russian relations, as the U.S. late last year passed sanctions against alleged Russian human-rights abusers and Russa countering with a ban on adoptions by U.S. families.
U.S. frustration with Mr. Putin has also been building over Moscow’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including a recent Russian transfer of advanced antiship missiles over U.S. and Israeli objections, U.S. officials say.
The White House is evaluating more punitive actions that the U.S. could take to underline its displeasure with Moscow’s decision in the Snowden case. But officials say U.S. options are limited.
U.S. officials said Thursday that a four-way meeting between Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry and their Russian counterparts, tentatively scheduled for early in August, was being “re-evaluated.”
But senior State Department officials said they don’t expect the meeting to be canceled because the U.S. wants to address with the leaders a “broad range of topics that are important to U.S. national security interests,” including Afghanistan.
Another option, officials say, would be to scale back the Pentagon’s use of transport routes to and from Afghanistan that bisect Russia. But such a move would be unlikely to deal a meaningful financial blow to Russia. It would also increase U.S. reliance on Pakistan, which, like Moscow, has proved a fickle partner of the U.S.
Officials say that the U.S. can push Moscow only so far without jeopardizing U.S. interests in other areas. The U.S. needs Russia to help keep pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, including maintaining sanctions, for example. “We can’t go overboard,” a senior administration official said.
Though both the White House and the Kremlin have emphasized that they don’t want the Snowden affair to hurt U.S.-Russian relations, it has come to overshadow recent efforts to patch up tattered ties.
Kremlin foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov immediately played down the impact of the decision to harbor Mr. Snowden. “This situation is too insignificant to affect political relations,” he said. He added that the Russian government has received no indication from U.S. officials that the September summit between Messrs. Obama and Putin might be cancelled. He reiterated Mr. Putin’s hope that the incident doesn’t affect relations.
U.S. politicians saw the matter otherwise. “Russia’s stabbed us in the back and every day that Snowden is allowed to be free they twist the knife further,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) told reporters. “Now that Snowden has been set free, I don’t think the G-20 should be meeting in Russia and I think we should not participate if they do.”
Mr. Obama plans to attend the G-20 summit, Mr. Carney said.
U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Russia’s move “a disgrace and a deliberate effort to embarrass the United States,” adding, in a statement, that the U.S. should step up advocacy of human rights and civil liberties in Russia, accelerate European missile-defense programs and press for an expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including membership for the Republic of Georgia. “Now is the time to fundamentally rethink our relationship with Putin’s Russia,” he said.
Mr. Putin, a former agent of the KGB—an agency with a fundamentally dim view toward leaking—has refrained from expressing support for Mr. Snowden’s actions or using the affair to hit out at U.S. dominance, as many leaders have done in Latin America. The Russian president has urged Mr. Snowden to go elsewhere and emphasized that the U.S. fugitive’s arrival came as an unwanted surprise to the Kremlin.
Still, his assertion of Russia’s strength internationally is sure to play well at home. In a July 31 poll published by Moscow’s Levada Center, 43% percent of Russians said the government should grant Mr. Snowden political asylum, while 29% said the government should deny his request. In the poll, 51% of respondents viewed Mr. Snowden positively.
—Siobhan Gorman andJared A. Favole in Washington contributed to this article.
Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com

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