Edward Snowden

Moscow, Aug. 2 (Reuters): After nearly six weeks in hiding at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, Edward Snowden walked calmly out of the transit area, ducked into a car and was driven away unnoticed.

It was an anti-climactic end to one chapter of a saga watched by the world in which the American, wanted in Washington for leaking details of secret US surveillance programmes, stayed out of sight for almost 40 days and nights.

Hardly any pictures of him appeared in that time. One showed the 30-year-old meeting human rights activists at the airport, another showed him about to leave the airport.

But by the time that photograph was shown on Russian state television yesterday evening, Snowden was long gone.

Many questions remain about the former US spy agency contractor’s time in the transit area, a no-man’s-land for those with connecting flights who normally stay, at most, a few hours.

But a picture is emerging of a man who had become physically and mentally exhausted, increasingly anxious for some certainty about his future and desperate for something resembling normality after two months on the run.

“During his time there it was very difficult, psychologically difficult, because when someone’s waiting he doesn’t understand what will happen,” his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said.

“His first desire was to gulp the fresh Moscow air.”

Snowden was at first incredulous when Kucherena told him Russia had granted him a year’s temporary asylum, and then delighted. Kucherena said he left the airport with a backpack, a string bag and a sense of relief.

“Imagine yourself daily (having to listen to) ‘Dear passengers, the flight to New York, the flight to Washington, the flight from Rome’,” Kucherena said.

“He needs a period of rehabilitation, or adaptation, because he is very tired and morally exhausted.”

Kucherena, who serves on a board that advises Russia’s FSB security service, a successor of the KGB, is one of the few people who have had direct contact with Snowden since he arrived at Sheremetyevo from Hong Kong on June 23.

The others include Sarah Harrison, a legal researcher for the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group, and a few airport officials. Kucherena said American friends, with whom he said Snowden would now stay, had also visited him at the airport.

Kucherena is giving little away about how Snowden managed to avoid the hordes of journalists who tried for weeks to catch a glimpse of him, but he said he spent at least some of the time at a hotel for transit passengers at Terminal E.

Airport sources said he had slept at least some of the time in the Capsule Hotel, with its grey rooms and sparse, basic but clean interiors. But one added: “He made sure that none of the ordinary people working there saw him.”

Hotel sources said Snowden and a female companion, thought to be Harrison, had checked out prices soon after his arrival but then left without checking in.

To relieve Snowden’s boredom, Kucherena brought him Russian literature including Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 19th-century novel Crime and Punishment, in which the main character is racked by guilt over a crime he has committed — an old woman’s murder.

He also brought Snowden changes of clothes, pizza and a Russian-English dictionary as he prepared for the next stage of his life, learning the Russian for “Hi”, “Bye-bye” and “I’ll give you a call.”

Snowden’s trail went cold as soon as he landed at Sheremetyevo on a flight from Hong Kong, where he had feared he would be arrested after lying low there for two weeks.