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before departing to Moscow, and Assange accommodated him by laying down a smoke screen of decoy flights to facilitate his escape from Hong Kong and sending him a helper.

Taken together, these actions show that Snowden was determined to succeed where others before him had failed. He not only wanted to take full credit for stealing files from the NSA but he wanted to escape any American retribution for his act. His decision suggests to me a highly-intelligent, carefully calculating man who was hell-bent on finding a new life for himself in a foreign country. There is a common thread that runs through these four choices. It is a willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve this new life, including disregarding his oath to protect secrets and instead transporting them on thumb drives to a foreign country. To protect himself, he was also willing to rely on the influence of an adversary intelligence services in Hong Kong and put himself of the hands of Russian authorities in Moscow. He also was willing to use some of his classified documents as a medium of exchange, if not bait, with journalist to get the public attention he sought. These choices paid off for him. The video presentation he partly authored changed his status in the eyes of the public from a document-stealer to whistle blower. Against all odds, Snowden succeeded in transforming himself from a low-level computer technician working, without any public recognition at the NSA into an internationally-acclaimed spokesman against the NSA’s surveillance. And in Moscow, he could enjoy a safe life, free from the threats of a CIA rendition team dropping from the sky or extradition proceedings. He was now under the protection of Putin’s Russia. As far as Snowden was concerned, as he told Gellman of the Washington Post on December 21, 2013 in Moscow, “The mission’s already accomplished.”

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