Since spiriting NSA leaker Edward Snowden to safety in Russia two years ago, activist and WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison has lived quietly in Berlin. Sara Corbett meets the woman some regard as a political heroine—others as an accomplice to treason.

Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport is, like so many international airports, a sprawling and bland place. It has six terminals, four Burger Kings, a sweep of shops selling duty-free caviar, and a rivering flow of anonymous travelers—all of them headed out or headed in or, in any event, never planning to stay long. But for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013, the airport also housed two fugitives: Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who had just off-loaded an explosive trove of top-secret U.S. government documents to journalists, and a 31-year-old British woman named Sarah Harrison, described as a legal researcher who worked for the online organization WikiLeaks.

It was a tableau sprung from a spy novel—a turncoat intelligence contractor on the lam with an enigmatic blonde by his side. Snowden had based himself in Hong Kong for several weeks as his disclosures about government surveillance ripped across the global media. When the U.S. charged him under the Espionage Act on June 14, an extradition order was sent to Hong Kong. But it came too late: Before anybody made a move to capture him, Edward Snowden—led by Sarah Harrison—had quietly boarded a flight to Moscow and basically vanished.

Their whereabouts at Sheremetyevo became a mystery. There was no sign of them at the lone hotel inside the terminal area, which rented out tiny “capsule” rooms for about $15 per hour. Nor did they turn up for a flight they’d booked to Havana, where reportedly they had planned to catch a plane to South America. In the meantime, the United States revoked Snowden’s passport. Word quickly spread that the world’s most wanted man was stuck inside the airport’s transit zone, unable to leave Russia and also, without a visa, unable to stay.

‘Sarah refuses to allow intimidation to shape her decisions,’ comments Snowden. ‘If you forced her to choose between disowning her principles or being burned at the stake, I think she’d hand you a match’

As questions swirled about Snowden, the mysterious Sarah Harrison almost escaped notice. A gossipy Washington Post item claimed she was “a product of a posh British boarding school.” It also repeated a widely circulated rumor that she was, at least at one time, the girlfriend of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ controversial Australian founder. Old file photos showed Harrison to be strikingly attractive, with long, ringleted hair and a vivid, gap-toothed smile.

If her job was to help keep Snowden safe and hidden, she did it masterfully. For 39 days, the two managed to camp out in the airport transit zone, foiling the media hordes trying to find them. TV crews patrolled the restaurants and pay-to-enter VIP lounges. Reporters grilled airport staff about what they knew, which was invariably nothing. “I’ve spent up to eighteen hours a day beyond passport control and security looking for Snowden,” an ABC News employee reported glumly in a blog post a week into the hunt. “There is an irrational fear, even late at night, that the moment I call it quits he’ll come strolling down the hall. . . .”