How Edward Snowden hid with asylum seekers
Whistleblower was put up with clients of his lawyers for several weeks in Hong Kong
HONG KONG— When the 42-year-old Filipino woman opened the door of her tiny Hong Kong apartment three years ago, two lawyers stood outside with a man she had never seen.
They explained that he needed a place to hide, and they introduced him as Edward Snowden.
“The first time I see him, I don’t know who he is,” the woman, Vanessa Mae Bondalian Rodel, recalled in an interview. “I don’t have any idea.”
Rodel is one of at least four Hong Kong residents who took in Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, when he fled the U.S. in June 2013. Only now have they decided to speak about the experience, revealing a new chapter in the odyssey that riveted the world after Snowden disclosed that the NSA had been monitoring the calls, emails and web activity of millions of Americans and others.
In an interview recorded in a hotel room at the time, Snowden identified himself and revealed he was in Hong Kong. Then he went into hiding. About two weeks later he turned up in Moscow.
It was never clear where Snowden was holed up in those critical days.
As it turns out, he was staying with Rodel and others like her — men and women seeking political asylum in Hong Kong who live in cramped, substandard apartment blocks in some of the city’s poorest districts.
They were all clients of one of Snowden’s Hong Kong lawyers, Ca- nadian Robert Tibbo, who arranged for him to stay with them.
Rodel said Snowden slept in her bedroom while she and her year-old daughter moved into their apartment’s only other room. “My first impression of his face was that he was scared, very worried,” she recalled.
On Snowden’s second day there, he asked Rodel whether she could buy him a copy of the South China Morning Post, the city’s main English-language newspaper, she said. When she picked up the paper, she saw his picture on the front page.
“Oh my God, unbelievable,” she recalled saying to herself. “The most wanted man in the world is in my house.”
Tibbo said he turned to these clients for help in part because he expected them to understand Snowden’s plight. “These were people who went through the same process when they were fleeing other countries,” he said.
After a few days with Rodel, Snowden spent a night with Ajith Pushpakumara, 44, who said he fled to Hong Kong after being chained to a wall and tortured for deserting the army in his native Sri Lanka.
Pushpakumara said he had listened to radio broadcasts about Snowden and was surprised to suddenly find him in the dingy apartment he shared with several men. He realized Snowden was in the same situation he was, hiding in a small room. “I was worried about him,” he said.
Supun Thilina Kellapatha and his wife, Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, said they were not worried about hosting Snowden. “I don’t think I take the risk,” he said. “He is the one who take the big risk.”