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MOSCOW — Even as asylum options appeared to narrow on Tuesday for Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor, the very rumor that he might be on the run again triggered tensions across continents.
It began as a seemingly offhand remark by the president of Bolivia, who suggested during a visit to Moscow that he might be happy to host Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former security contractor who is desperate to find asylum. It escalated into a major diplomatic scramble in which the Bolivian president’s plane was rerouted on Tuesday because of suspicions that Mr. Snowden was aboard.
Late Tuesday, Bolivia’s foreign minister told news outlets that France and Portugal had both blocked airspace access to the Bolivian presidential plane on suspicion that Mr. Snowden might been on board. President Evo Morales of Bolivia had been visiting Russia, where Mr. Snowden was said to be holed up in a wing of Moscow’s international airport for the past nine days, and in a television interview there said his country might consider granting asylum.
By day’s end, outraged Bolivian officials, insisting that Mr. Snowden was not on the plane, were accusing France and Portugal of acting under American pressure to rescind permission for President Evo Morales’s plane to traverse their airspace on the way back to Bolivia. Low on fuel, the plane’s crew won permission to land in Vienna.
Hours later, Mr. Morales’s plane had diverted to Vienna after being denied access along its original flight plan. Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, vehemently denied that Mr. Snowden had boarded the plane, and leveled harsh criticism at the European governments that had turned it aside.
“They say it was due to technical issues, but after getting explanations from some authorities we found that there appeared to be some unfounded suspicions that Mr. Snowden was on the plane,” the Bolivian foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, told reporters after the touched down in Vienna, where Mr. Morales was spending the night.
“We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,” Mr. Choquehuanca said in an interview quoted by The Associated Press.
“We don’t know who invented this lie,” the foreign minister said at a news conference in La Paz. “We want to express our displeasure because this has put the president’s life at risk.”
After spraying requests for asylum across dozens of countries, Mr. Snowden found his potential avenues dwindling on Tuesday, with only Venezuela and Bolivia holding out any hope they would take him. The Kremlin said he had withdrawn his application to Russia after President Vladimir V. Putin placed strict behavioral limits as a condition for asylum, and at least nine other countries had signaled they would not welcome him.
Rubén Saavedra, the defense minister, who was on the plane with Mr. Morales, accused the Obama administration of being behind the action by France and Portugal, calling it “an attitude of sabotage and a plot by the government of the United States.” There was no immediate response by officials in Paris, Lisbon or Washington.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, visiting Russia, said that while he had not yet received an application from Mr. Snowden and would not use his plane to ferry Mr. Snowden home with him, he held out the possibility that Venezuela might ultimately agree to shelter Mr. Snowden.
“We were in flight; it was completely unexpected,” Mr. Saavedra said on the Telesur cable network. “The president was very angry.”
Speaking to legislators and reporters at the Russian Parliament, Mr. Maduro said that Mr. Snowden deserved protection under international law.
Speaking by telephone with Telesur, Mr. Saavedra said that Mr. Snowden was not on the plane. But given the aura of mystery that has surrounded Mr. Snowden’s odyssey to escape American prosecutors who are seeking his extradition for disclosing classified intelligence information, there was no independent way to know for sure.
“He did not kill anyone and he did not plant a bomb,” Mr. Maduro said, according to Russian news services. “He only said a big truth to prevent wars.”
Bolivian officials said they were working on a new flight plan to allow Mr. Morales to fly home. But in a possible sign of further suspicion about the passenger manifest, Mr. Saavedra said that Italy had also refused to give permission for the plane to fly over its airspace in response to a request for a new flight plan.
But Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Spain all said that requests for asylum must be made in person on their territories and therefore Mr. Snowden had not properly submitted an application. India and Brazil said they had rejected Mr. Snowden’s request outright. Poland said that it had received an application that was not properly submitted, but that it would have been rejected in any event.
Hours earlier, Mr. Morales, who was attending an energy conference in Moscow, had been asked by reporters if he would consider giving asylum to Mr. Snowden, 30, who has been holed up at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport for more than a week, his passport revoked by the United States, unable to go anywhere. Bolivia is one of at least 19 countries reported to have received an application from him.
Officials in Italy, which also received an asylum application, said they were evaluating it. But there was little expectation that Italy would grant Mr. Snowden’s request.
“Why not?” Mr. Morales responded, according to Bolivian news media accounts. “His case has triggered international debate, and of course, Bolivia is ready to take in people who denounce things.”
Mr. Snowden, 30, has been charged in the United States with violations of espionage laws for leaking classified information about the vast global surveillance operations of American intelligence agencies. WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that has been assisting Mr. Snowden, has described him as a whistle-blower who exposed American abuses of privacy. The Obama administration has described him as a hacker who should be extradited and prosecuted.
It was already clear by then that the Moscow conference had been overshadowed by the saga of Mr. Snowden and his revelations, which have deeply embarrassed the Obama administration,
As an international oil and gas forum convened here on Monday, there had been speculation that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Maduro would use the opportunity to negotiate terms for Mr. Snowden to leave the Sheremetyevo transit area, his home since arriving from Hong Kong on June 23.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who was also at the conference, had suggested he might offer Mr. Snowden asylum but did not plan to fly him to Venezuela.
He had apparently intended to board a connecting flight headed for Latin America. In the interim, the United States announced that his American passport had been revoked, leaving him in a geopolitical limbo, stripped of any valid travel document and unable to leave the transit zone.
But Mr. Morales’s remarks appeared to open the door. At least that was the way they were interpreted.
Russia enjoys warm ties with Venezuela, a major arms customer and energy partner, which sees the alliance as a way of countering the United States’ influence in Latin America.
The problems began even before Mr. Morales left Moscow , Mr. Choquehuanca said. On Monday, Portugal, without explanation, had withdrawn permission for Mr. Morales’s plane to stop in Lisbon to refuel, the foreign minister said. That forced Bolivian officials to get permission from Spain to refuel in the Canary Islands.
The newspaper Izvestia speculated Monday that Mr. Maduro could spirit Mr. Snowden away on his presidential plane when he leaves Russia on Tuesday, arranging to take off from Sheremetyevo instead of a government facility at Vnukovo Airport. But at a news conference on Monday, Mr. Putin responded blankly to that theory.
The next day, after taking off from Moscow, Mr. Morales’s plane was just minutes from entering French airspace, according to Mr. Saavedra, when the French authorities informed the pilot that the plane could not fly over France.
“As to the possible departure of Mr. Snowden with some official delegation,” he said, “I know nothing.”
There was also plenty of confusion in Moscow over how Mr. Snowden could possibly leave undetected on a government aircraft.
Even as Mr. Maduro seemed to hedge about Venezuela’s intentions, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, confirmed that Mr. Snowden on Monday had submitted asylum requests to other countries, but that he had rescinded his request for asylum in Russia.
Government planes carrying foreign officials to diplomatic meetings in Moscow typically arrive and depart from Vnukovo Airport, which is also the main airfield used by the Russian government, rather than at Sheremetyevo, where Mr. Snowden arrived from Hong Kong on June 23 hours after American officials had sought his extradition there.
“He has abandoned his intention and his request for the opportunity to remain in Russia,” Mr. Peskov said on a conference call with a small group of reporters in Moscow. At the same time, however, Mr. Peskov reiterated that Russia had no intention of extraditing Mr. Snowden to the United States, where, he said in a familiar but false jab at the United States, the death penalty is a possibility for him if he is convicted.
The speculation that Mr. Snowden would hitch a ride on a government jet was discounted by the fact that the plane would have to first make a quick flight from one Moscow airport to the other.
On Monday, Kim N. Shevchenko, the Russian consul at Sheremetyevo Airport, said that Mr. Snowden’s traveling companion had hand-delivered an asylum request to the consular office in Terminal F of the airport, and that it had been passed on to the Foreign Ministry.
In an interview with the television station Russia Today, Mr. Maduro said that he would consider any request by Mr. Snowden. Then, ending the interview with a dash of humor, he said, “It’s time for me to go; Snowden is waiting for me.”
The request had threatened to deeply complicate Russia’s position in Mr. Snowden’s case, potentially making it impossible to maintain the mostly neutral position that Mr. Putin has sought to stake out since Mr. Snowden landed in Moscow.
Rick
Gladstone reported from New York, and William Neuman from Caracas, Venezuela. Reporting was contributed by David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew Roth from Moscow, and Monica Machicao from La Paz, Bolivia.
The Russian Constitution gives the president direct authority over asylum requests.
At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Putin tried to thread the needle, saying Mr. Snowden was welcome to stay in Russia as long as he stopped publishing classified documents that hurt the United States’ interests. He went on to acknowledge that this was unlikely to happen.
“If he wants to go somewhere and they accept him, please, be my guest,” Mr. Putin said. “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips.”
He added, “Because he sees himself as a human-rights activist and a freedom fighter for people’s rights, apparently he is not intending to cease this work. So he must choose for himself a country to go to, and where to move. When that will happen, I unfortunately don’t know.”
Mr. Putin’s comments reflected an increasingly sober view of the outcome if Mr. Snowden remains in Russia. For the second time, he took pains to say that Mr. Snowden had not been recruited by Russian intelligence — an impression that could corrode Mr. Snowden’s image as a truth-teller and drive away some supporters.
“He sees himself not as a former agent of a special service but as a fighter for human rights, a sort of a new dissident, someone similar to Sakharov, on a different scale, though,” Mr. Putin said. “But nevertheless, at his core he is a fighter for human rights, for democracy.” The reference was to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.
While Mr. Snowden remains at Sheremetyevo, the United States has engaged an array of countries that have considered granting him asylum, making clear that doing so would carry big costs.
Ecuador, the country that is sheltering the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has distanced itself, with top officials saying that they cannot consider Mr. Snowden’s asylum request unless he in Ecuador or one of its embassies and that Russia bore most responsibility for his fate.
Mr. Putin’s spokesman said as recently as Sunday that Mr. Snowden’s case “was not one on the Kremlin’s agenda,” noting that Sheremetyevo’s transit zone is legally not the part of territory of the Russian Federation.
“Snowden himself is in a pretty difficult situation,” said Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “I think he was following Assange’s advice trying to get to Ecuador, but then Ecuador, and, indirectly, Cuba, have failed him. I think Venezuela is talking to the U.S. as well. The U.S. can offer things to Venezuela.”
Mr. Snowden’s application for asylum could make it difficult for the Kremlin to remain neutral, especially since the case has become a primary topic for public discussion in Russia over the last several days.
A parade of public figures — including human rights activists, pro-Kremlin figures, Communists, nationalists and parliamentarians — have made statements in favor of granting him asylum. As anchors read reports on Mr. Snowden’s case on a popular news program Monday night, a vivid blue-and-red backdrop read “Betray Snowden — Betray Freedom” and showed President Obama wearing headphones, a visual reference to the surveillance programs Mr. Snowden has revealed.
“To be honest, I can’t see any problem there,” Ivan Melnikov, one of the leaders of Russia’s Communist Party, told Interfax. “If the problem is hysterics from the United States, they ought to remember that, historically speaking, granting political asylum to figures like Snowden is normal historical practice, and there’s no reason for Russia to be embarrassed and drop out.”
Reporting was contributed by Melissa Eddy and Chris Cottrell from Berlin, Jim Yardley from New Delhi, Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro and Rick Gladstone from New York.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 2, 2013
Correction: July 2, 2013
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article omitted the context for a quote by Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Peskov’s remark that Edward J. Snowden would face the death penalty in the United States were he extradited and convicted there was a familiar but false jab at that country, not a reference to the precise legalities of the case. The charges Mr. Snowden faces do not carry the death penalty upon conviction.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article omitted the context for a quote by Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Peskov’s remark that Edward J. Snowden would face the death penalty in the United States were he extradited and convicted there was a familiar but false jab at that country, not a reference to the precise legalities of the case. The charges Mr. Snowden faces do not carry the death penalty upon conviction.
