Permanent Record(91)

27



Moscow





For a coastal country at the northwestern edge of South America, half a globe away from Hong Kong, Ecuador is in the middle of everything: not for nothing does its name translate to “The Republic of the Equator.” Most of my fellow North Americans would correctly say that it’s a small country, and some might even know enough to call it historically oppressed. But they are ignorant if they think it’s a backwater. When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, as part of a tide of so-called democratic socialist leaders who swept elections in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela, he initiated a spate of policies intended to oppose and reverse the effects of US imperialism in the region. One of these measures, reflecting President Correa’s previous career as an economist, was an announcement that Ecuador would consider its national debt illegitimate—technically, it would be classified as “odious debt,” which is national debt incurred by a despotic regime or through despotic imperialist trade policies. Repayment of odious debt is not enforceable. With this announcement, Correa freed his people from decades of economic serfdom, though he made not a few enemies among the class of financiers who direct much of US foreign policy.

Ecuador, at least in 2013, had a hard-earned belief in the institution of political asylum. Most famously, the Ecuadorean embassy in London had become, under Correa, the safe haven and redoubt of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. I had no desire to live in an embassy, perhaps because I’d already worked in one. Still, my Hong Kong lawyers agreed that, given the circumstances, Ecuador seemed to be the most likely country to defend my right to political asylum and the least likely to be cowed by the ire of the hegemon that ruled its hemisphere. My growing but ad hoc team of lawyers, journalists, technologists, and activists concurred. My hope was to make it to Ecuador proper.

With my government having decided to charge me under the Espionage Act, I stood accused of a political crime, meaning a crime whose victim is the state itself rather than a person. Under international humanitarian law, those accused in this way are generally exempt from extradition, because the charge of political criminality is more often than not an authoritarian attempt at quashing legitimate dissent. In theory, this means that government whistleblowers should be protected against extradition almost everywhere. In practice, of course, this is rarely the case, especially when the government that perceives itself wronged is America’s—which claims to foster democracy abroad yet secretly maintains fleets of privately contracted aircraft dedicated to that form of unlawful extradition known as rendition, or, as everyone else calls it, kidnapping.

The team supporting me had reached out to officials everywhere from Iceland to India, asking if they would respect the prohibition against extradition of those accused of political crimes and commit to noninterference in my potential travel. It soon became evident that even the most advanced democracies were afraid of incurring the wrath of the US government. They were happy to privately express their sympathies, but reluctant to offer even unofficial guarantees. The common denominator of the ad vice that filtered back to me was to land only in non-extradition countries, and avoid any route that crossed the airspace of any countries with a record of cooperation with or deference to the US military. One official, I think from France, suggested that the odds of my successful transit might be significantly increased if I were issued a laissez-passer, a UN-recognized one-way travel document typically issued to grant safe passage to refugees crossing borders—but obtaining one of those was easier said than done.

Enter Sarah Harrison, a journalist and an editor for WikiLeaks. The moment the news broke that an American had unmasked a global system of mass surveillance, she had immediately flown to Hong Kong. Through her experience with the website and particularly with the fate of Assange, she was poised to offer me the world’s best asylum advice. It didn’t hurt that she also had family connections with the legal community in Hong Kong.

People have long ascribed selfish motives to Assange’s desire to give me aid, but I believe he was genuinely invested in one thing above all—helping me evade capture. That doing so involved tweaking the US government was just a bonus for him, an ancillary benefit, not the goal. It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to know, a battle he will do anything to win. It’s for this reason that I regard it as too reductive to interpret his assistance as merely an instance of scheming or self-promotion. More important to him, I believe, was the opportunity to establish a counterexample to the case of the organization’s most famous source, US Army Private Chelsea Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to whistleblowers everywhere. Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation gave him a chance to right a wrong. There was nothing he could have done to save Manning, but he seemed, through Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me.

That said, I was initially wary of Sarah’s involvement. But Laura told me that she was serious, competent, and, most important, independent: one of the few at WikiLeaks who dared to openly disagree with Assange. Despite my caution, I was in a difficult position, and as Hemingway once wrote, the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.