But these media conspiracists have gotten away
with this fable of the Missing Eleven Days in
Hong Kong and similar tales because their core
assertions were deliberately designed to
be insusceptible to being
affirmatively disproven. Because their
accusatory story rests on claims of invisible
and hidden events, they could not be exposed as
frauds with definitive documentary evidence —
until now.
Newly obtained documents
conclusively prove that the central tale
invented by these Snowden-accusing
commentators is a wholesale fabrication. These
documents negate the edifice on which this
entire fiction has been based from the start.
The campaign to depict Snowden as a
Russian or Chinese spy has centrally depended
upon the accusation that he is lying about how
he spent his first 11 days in Hong Kong.
Snowden’s version of events has never changed
from the
very first interview we published with him
at the Guardian: on May 20, 2013, he boarded a
flight from Honolulu to Hong Kong, checked into
the Mira Hotel on May 21 under his own name, and
then stayed continuously in Room 1014 at the
Mira as he waited for the arrival of the
journalists with whom he was working, paying for
the room with his own credit cards.
As the journalists working on the Snowden
documents, Laura Poitras and I arrived in Hong
Kong on June 2, and spent the next eight days
working with Snowden in Room 1014 at the Mira.
Snowden thus stayed continuously at the Mira
from May 21, the day after he arrived Hong Kong,
until June 10, when he left due to the media
craze triggered by
our Guardian article revealing his identity.
But this group of accusatory journalists has
repeatedly accused Snowden of lying about this
time-line. They insist that Snowden checked into
the Mira Hotel for the first time only on June
1: eleven days after he claims he did. They have
thus spent years discussing the significance of
what they ominously refer to as “The Missing
Eleven Days.” This sinister Missing Eleven Days
has become key to the tale they have woven to
prove Snowden is a spy.
But that claim is an outright lie, and always
has been. Documents now provided by the Mira
Hotel to Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong prove
the truth of exactly what Snowden has always
said: that he checked into the Mira Hotel on May
21 and stayed there, under his own name,
continuously through June 10.
Snowden’s original reservation, made through
booking.com, confirms that the check-in date was
always May 21, and the reservation was
originally scheduled for 10 nights (check-out on
May 30). The hotel records confirm he arrived
and checked-in on May 21, staying continually
for the full reservation. Once that reservation
ended, he extended it for one more day, then
made another 10-day reservation through
booking.com with a check-out date of June 13,
and stayed continually through June 10, when he
checked out.
These newly obtained documents (all of which
are available
here and
here) thus conclusively prove that the
accusatory fable repeated and circulated over
and over in U.S. mainstream media outlets — that
Snowden did not check into the Mira prior to
June 1 and thus cannot account for the
mysterious Missing Eleven Days in Hong Kong — is
a falsehood.
Despite its utter falsity, it is hard to
overstate how continually this lie was repeated
in mainstream outlets until it metastasized into
Truth among a certain set of journalists and
pundits obsessed with the claim that Snowden
worked for the Russians and/or Chinese
governments. Editors at leading U.S. media
outlets continually allowed this tale to be
published even though there was never any
evidence to suggest that Snowden was lying. It
became their
give-us-the-real-birth-certificate
foundation for the conspiracy web about Snowden
they have spent years spinning.
That Snowden checked into the Mira
only on June 1 was first asserted by
a Wall Street Journal article published on
June 10, 2013 — the day after we first revealed
Snowden’s identity in the Guardian. The article
made this claim in passing, with no basis
identified.
It did not remotely suggest that Snowden had
lied: to the contrary, it seems to be a case
where reporting on rapidly unfolding events
sloppily but innocuously misstated what seemed
at the time to be an ancillary fact: the date on
which Snowden checked into the Mira Hotel.
Alternatively, the reporter may have spoken with
a clerk who looked only at Snowden’s most
recently renewed reservation form (which began
on June 1) rather than the first one Snowden
signed upon checking in on May 21.
Either way, nobody ever tried to vest the
WSJ’s misreporting about the check-in date with
significance until a year later when the paper’s
op-ed page writer, Edward Jay Epstein, seized on
what he thought was a critical discrepancy to
build a sprawling, accusatory conspiracy theory
that he ultimately parlayed into a book, a
central theme of which is that Snowden
systematically lied about this key event.
Epstein repeatedly cited this Missing Eleven
Days to suggest that Snowden could have been in
cahoots with a foreign government. The first
time he implied this was in
a June 29, 2014 WSJ column, when he made
these claims:
From May 20, the day he landed, to May
31, according to a source familiar with the
Defense Intelligence Agency report on the
Snowden affair, U.S. investigative agencies
have been unable to find any credit-card
charges or hotel records indicating his
whereabouts. …
Mr. Snowden would tell Mr. Greenwald on
June 3 that he had been “holed up” in his
room at the Mira Hotel from the time of his
arrival in Hong Kong. But according to
inquiries by Wall Street Journal reporter
Te-Ping Chen, Mr. Snowden arrived there on
June 1. I confirmed that date with the
hotel’s employees. A hotel security guard
told me that Mr. Snowden was not in the Mira
during that late-May period and, when he did
stay there, he used his own passport and
credit card.
So where was Edward Snowden between May
20 and May 31?
All of these claims are outright lies, as proven
by the documents we are publishing today.
Snowden arrived at and checked-into the Mira on
May 21, not June 1. He paid for the room with
his credit cards. It defies belief that some
anonymous official told Epstein that “U.S.
investigative agencies have been unable to find
any credit-card charges or hotel records
indicating his whereabouts” given that the hotel
records and credit cards were all in Snowden’s
name. The whole story is false.
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Actual journalists — ones who are careful
with and care about facts — fully recognized the
baselessness of this key accusation. The New
York Times’ reporter Charlie Savage, recipient
of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, wrote a devastating
denunciation last month of Epstein’s book in the
New York Review of Books, featuring the
issue of the check-in date discrepancy in
indicting Epstein’s conspiracy theories as
hollow:
It is unfortunate that Epstein builds his
imagined scenarios upon allegations that may
not be real facts.
For example, Epstein gives sinister
significance to the “fact” that Snowden
arrived in Hong Kong eleven days before he
checked into the hotel where he met the
journalists, leaving his activities during
that period a mystery. Snowden has insisted
that he was in that hotel the whole time,
waiting for the journalists to arrive. In
one of his columns written in 2014, Epstein
first claimed that there was an eleven-day
mystery gap, citing his conversation with an
unnamed hotel security guard. I am aware of
no independent verification of this
allegation. So as things stand, this “fact”
appears to be vaporous.
In
subsequent correspondence between
Epstein and Savage, the New York Times
reporter repeatedly points to the lack of any
persuasive or substantive basis for Epstein’s
Missing Eleven Days claim, while noting how
central this claim has become to the accusatory
herd that has assembled around this theory:
I remain unaware of any other place in
the public record except Epstein’s work
where this June 1 claim independently
appears, ranging from numerous other news
articles about Snowden’s time in Hong Kong
to a September 2016 report by the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
which — seeking to counter the premiere of
Oliver Stone’s movie — scoured the
government’s investigative file for material
to portray Snowden as a liar.
Perhaps someday the Mira’s records will
emerge into public view and we will have
more solid information to evaluate this
question. Either way, my central point
remains unchanged: Epstein treated the
check-in claim as a factual anchor for his
insinuations about what Snowden might have
been doing earlier, but at the time he wrote
his book (and still today) the evidence for
this claim was insufficient to establish it
as a proven fact. This is part of a
recurring pattern with his methodology.
Those Mira records have indeed now “emerged
into public view,” and they prove what was clear
all along: this whole theory was invented from
whole cloth. As Savage argued: “wherever one
falls in the spectrum of views about Edward
Snowden’s actions, Edward Jay Epstein’s book
about him is not credible because it indulges in
speculation, treats questionable claims as
established facts, and contains numerous
inaccuracies about surveillance.”
Unfortunately, large parts of the U.S. media
do not adhere to the basic standards of
journalism Savage applied to these claims. Here,
for instance, is Epstein spinning his tale
on the podcast of Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes,
who concluded the published podcast with
people literally applauding Epstein:
All of that was totally false. But as a result
of this type of uncritical treatment, this utter
fiction for which there was never any evidence —
that Snowden checked into the Mira 11 days after
he claims, thus leaving almost two weeks of
unaccounted-for time in Hong Kong — was
laundered over and over in service of
casting Snowden as a liar and a traitor.
This lie about the Missing Eleven Days
was repeated so often, in so many venues, that
chronicling them all is impossible. Flagging
some of the most flagrant, typical offenders
will thus have to suffice.
One of the most aggressive disseminators of
this lie is the Yahoo News reporter Michael B.
Kelley, formerly of Business Insider, who has
spent years repeating and mainstreaming this
Missing Eleven Days fable.
On July 20, 2014, Kelley wrote
an article for Business Insider under the
headline “There’s An 11-Day Hole In Snowden’s
Story About Hong Kong.” It began this way:
Edward Snowden says that he wanted the
U.S. to know where he was after he arrived
in Hong Kong.
But U.S. authorities still don’t know
what he did for the first 11 days after his
arrival.
Kelley then added this sentence, in which he
called a total falsehood a fact that had
been “confirmed”: “But Edward Jay Epstein of The
Wall Street Journal went
to Hong Kong and confirmed that Snowden
didn’t check into the Mira Hotel until June 1.”
Illustrating the slimy insinuations constantly
attached to this falsehood, Kelley ended his
article this way:
“To answer the question in three words: I
don’t know where he was for these 11 days,”
Epstein
said in an interview. “It’s very
important because if we knew where he was,
then we’d know who he went to see in Hong
Kong.”
Strangely, no one seems to know — even
though Snowden says he made it obvious.
Snowden did exactly this: “made it obvious”
where he was in Hong Kong by checking into the
Mira under his own name and using his own credit
cards — precisely to prevent smear artists from
retroactively insinuating that he must be a spy
given his untraceable activities. Yet none of
that stopped Epstein or Kelley from making the
claim anyway.
Kelley, during his time at Business Insider,
spent years claiming that Snowden lied about
these eleven days. He was rewarded with a new
job working for Yahoo News chief investigative
correspondent Michael Isikoff. Kelley continued
to spread this lie under the banner of Yahoo
News.
On September 13, 2016, Yahoo News published
what it called a “Fact Check”, written by
Kelley, of Oliver Stone’s film “Snowden.” In its
headline, Yahoo purported that the article
documents “5 key parts of Oliver Stone’s
‘Snowden’ biopic that don’t match reality.”
Yahoo continued: “As with many Stone movies that
are based on real events, the director took
multiple liberties with the known facts. Here
are five significant inaccuracies in ‘Snowden.'”
The second purported “inaccuracy” was titled “‘3
weeks’ at the Mira Hotel.” Citing Epstein,
Kelley wrote: “Snowden didn’t
check into the Mira Hotel until June 1, despite
having arrived in the Chinese
special-administrative region on May 20″ He then
drew this conclusion: “If Snowden didn’t check
into the Mira until June 1, he initially visited
someone else in Hong Kong. Albert Ho, one of
Snowden’s Hong Kong lawyers,
referred to the unidentified person as
Snowden’s ‘carer.’ This person’s crucial role in
Snowden’s escape has never been explained.”
In sum, Kelley’s editors at both Business
Insider and Yahoo News allowed him to repeatedly
label as “confirmed” and “fact” and “known” a
claim that was, in fact, a complete falsehood.
He then used that fiction as the basis to
construct an elaborate conspiracy that he has
spent years pushing.
Then there’s Slate, which also purported to
fact-check Stone’s film in the form of
a column by its national security columnist
Fred Kaplan, who also peddled this fable. “This
much is definitely known,” proclaims Kaplan:
Snowden “flew to Hong Kong on May 20 after
telling his bosses that he needed to undergo
tests for epilepsy, and on June 2 checked in at
the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong.” Kaplan began the
review by announcing that “Stone’s Snowden
is a bad movie, stuffed with myth,” but it is
Kaplan’s own column which is guilty of that.
Then we have the Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss
and former NSA employee John Schindler, who has
recently become a favorite of liberals for his
frenzied conspiracies about Russia. Here is how
this duo took this utter lie, presented it as
fact, and then used it to imply that Snowden was
a Russian agent:
On June 11, 2016, Schindler wrote
an article headlined “Edward Snowden is a
Russian Agent.” He featured this Missing Eleven
Days lie from the start: “Snowden left his job
in Hawaii with the National Security Agency in
May 2013 and appeared at Hong Kong’s Mira Hotel
on June 1,” Schindler asserted. He continued:
“significant questions remain. Where was Snowden
from 21 to 31 May 2013? His whereabouts in that
period are unknown.” In June, 2015, the former
NSA operative similarly
wrote in the Interpreter:
Where was Snowden during the last ten
days of May 2013, after he left Hawaii but
before he checked into Hong Kong’s Mira
Hotel on June 1? It smacks of naïveté to
think Beijing did not expect something in
return for giving Snowden sanctuary en
route to Moscow.
This factually false claim was so laundered
and sanctioned by journalists and editors who
were either malicious or reckless that it ended
up getting repeated as fact even by those who
meant well.
In Gizmodo, for instance, Adam Clark Estes
urged readers to see CitizenFour, but criticized
the film for what he regarded as important
omissions, such as: “Where exactly was Snowden
for the 11 days
before he checked into the Mira Hotel in
Hong Kong?”
Upon release earlier this year of Epstein’s
book — which was overwhelmingly denounced by
reviewers as filled with unproven conspiracy
theories — this claim about Snowden’s Missing
Eleven Days was repeated as fact over and over.
This mixed
review of Epstein’s book in the San
Francisco Chronicle was typical:
On May 18 [Snowden] flew to Hong Kong,
where he hid at a still-unknown location for
11 days before meeting the journalists at
the Mira Hotel. Epstein emphasizes how
carefully Snowden arranged things, as if
“pulling strings.” He insinuates there may
have been a hidden hand.
The lie traveled internationally, as
highlighted by this sentence in
one of the few favorable reviews of
Epstein’s book, from Brazil’s largest newspaper,
Folha de S.Paulo, written by Igor Gielow: “The
fact that [Snowden] had disappeared for 11 days
in Hong Kong, carrying secrets before divulging
some of them to the press, remains a mystery.”
Note that Snowden’s 11-day disappearance is now
“a fact.”
All of this culminated with this falsehood
being embraced by George W. Bush’s chief of the NSA
and CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden. In an
unsurprisingly gushing review of Epstein’s book,
Hayden cites Epstein asking: “where was
Snowden during those unaccounted-for first 11
days in Hong Kong”?
Where “Snowden was” during this time
is exactly where he said, from the start, that
he was: at the Mira Hotel (the only exception to
his unbroken stay at the Mira was the very first
day when Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, having
made no advanced hotel reservations before
leaving the U.S. so as to not alert authorities,
and thus grabbed the first hotel he found
online: the Icon Hotel. After staying there the
first night, he moved to the Mira on May 21 and
remained there for the next 21 days).
Yet again we find that the same U.S. media
that loves to decry Fake News and mock “the Arab
World” and “Russian-state media” and InfoWars
for wallowing in baseless conspiracy theories
routinely peddle their own as long as the
targets are the right ones. The Economist, for
instance,
hailed Epstein’s screed as “a meticulous and
devastating account.” This episode once again
shows how easily and how often mainstream media
outlets in the U.S. circulate and affirm
complete fictions using the most authoritative
tones, and how the journalists and editors
responsible for it never pay any price for doing
so.
For three years, we watched as this lie was
launched, then took root, then spread until it
became unquestionable truth, notwithstanding the
fact that it lacked any basis all along, as the
NYT’s Savage noted. Now that the documents have
emerged proving it to be a lie, the next steps
are obvious for any media outlet with integrity:
retractions and accountability for those who
spread such false and toxic claims so
recklessly. But that qualifier — “media outlet
with integrity” — is a significant one, and for
that reason, it is just as likely that they will
allow their falsehoods, and those who spread
them, to fester, unmolested by corrective
action.
UPDATE: Three quick
updates to this story:
1) I should have known that
MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, never one to be excluded
from disseminating wild conspiracy theories,
publicly endorsed the Missing Eleven Days
tale:
