Obama and his administration have minimal sway with Russia. Why Obama can't stop Snowden from traveling

Edward Snowden’s globe-trotting is the latest international headache for President Barack Obama, with no relief in sight.

The former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents about top secret electronic surveillance programs is in Russia and headed to Latin America — where options for bringing him back to the United States to face charges range from highly unlikely to virtually nonexistent.


The spotlight-grabbing international travel — just as Obama seeks to focus attention on his Tuesday climate change speech and a weeklong trip to Africa that begins Wednesday — is sure to keep Snowden’s own story atop the headlines, highlighting the White House’s relative powerlessness to bring him back to face charges.

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There’s no telling when the stream of stories drawn from his leaks will end, or what his host countries might decide to do with the information he carries, should he share it with them.

And there’s no spinning away the story of Snowden’s continued freedom: Obama and his administration couldn’t talk Hong Kong into extraditing Snowden before he left the city, a special administrative region of China, and have minimal sway with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s not a whole lot I can say except that this is both a head-snapper and an eye-roller for the U.S. and for American officials — including the highest level one — who have been trying to work with Russia,” said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state. “Putin personally, and his government, are not sorry to have opportunities to tweak the U.S.”

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The fact that the United States has already rescinded Snowden’s passport didn’t stop him from leaving Hong Kong for Moscow on Sunday — headed, WikiLeaks said, for the Republic of Ecuador.

The options for Obama won’t get any better on the other side of the globe, in any of the three Latin American countries reportedly on Snowden’s itinerary: The United States hasn’t had diplomatic relations with Cuba since the Castro regime took power. The oil-funded Venezuelan government has long tweaked the United States under the late Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro.

And Ecuador, which has housed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its Embassy in London for the past year and confirmed an asylum request from Snowden on Sunday, has become the unofficial patron state for WikiLeaks.

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Though hardly a bastion of press freedom — President Rafael Correa this month asked government ministers to stop granting interviews to independent media he labeled “corrupt” — it was the only country to expel a U.S. ambassador over the WikiLeaks cables.

“They have no serious interest in being friendly to us,” said a former State Department official who worked on Ecuador-U.S. relations. “It’s a huge mess. I can’t see that there’s anything that could be done.”

So, short of intercepting the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Havana that Snowden is reportedly set to board on Monday, there’s no way the president can prevent Snowden from traveling from Russia to Cuba, then on to Venezuela and Ecuador.

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In other words: The administration can’t stop Snowden from traveling — all it can do is ask nicely that other countries send him home.

“Persons wanted on felony charges, such as Mr. Snowden, should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Sunday.

Chris Lehane, a Democratic damage control consultant who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, said the White House must push the idea that the U.S. government will eventually bring Snowden home to face justice — even if it takes decades, not days.

“Second-term presidents have a limited amount of time, and every day that’s spent on something other than your agenda is a day that you’re losing,” Lehane said. “Because of the way the news broke and because of the way Snowden was willing to put himself out there, the administration has one or both hands tied behind its back.”

Snowden’s departure from Hong Kong comes a day after a senior administration official warned that failure to extradite Snowden “will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong’s commitment to the rule of law.”

The Justice Department had been in continual contact with Hong Kong officials at senior levels since learning June 10 that Snowden had relocated there, the department said Sunday, including a call last week from Attorney General Eric Holder directly to Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen.

The State Department, the U.S. consulate and the FBI had also repeatedly engaged their Hong Kong counterparts during that two-week period.

While Hong Kong’s government said Sunday that Snowden’s departure was via “a lawful and normal channel,” the Justice Department expressed frustration with the decision.

“The request for the fugitive’s arrest for purposes of his extradition complied with all of the requirements of the U.S./Hong Kong Surrender Agreement,” a Justice Department representative said in a statement.

“At no point, in all of our discussions through Friday, did the authorities in Hong Kong raise any issues regarding the sufficiency of the U.S.’s provisional arrest request. In light of this, we find their decision to be particularly troubling.”

Earlier Sunday, the Justice Department had said it would continue to discuss the matter with Hong Kong and to “pursue relevant law enforcement cooperation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to allow Snowden to change planes at Moscow’s airport on the first leg of his j0urney comes just a week after an icy bilateral G-8 appearance with Obama, where the Russian leader noted bluntly that on Syria, the positions of the United States and Russia “do not coincide.”

One reason Putin isn’t likely to cooperate now, Talbott said, is that the United States would almost certainly take in a Russian operative who admitted to leaking information about that country’s secret surveillance programs.

“If the shoe were on the other foot, if there was somebody who was wanted in Russia for leaking classified material would we feel obliged to turn them over?” Talbott said. “I don’t know, I kinda doubt it.”

In fact, there is little the United States could do now to secure Snowden’s return that wouldn’t chance creating more problems than it solves.

“I don’t see from my limited knowledge of how the world operates that there is any prospect of getting him back unless we were to interdict one of these flights,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “It’s in the realm of the possible, but not the likely. It would have serious consequences for relations with countries that I don’t think we are interested in poking right now.”

One promising opening for Obama could be a Venezuelan interest in improving relations with the United States. The two countries do not now have ambassadors in each others’ capitals, though Venezuela has taken steps since Chávez’s death to try to improve relations, said Charles Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Venezuela during the George W. Bush administration.

Venezuela has in recent years increased the number of drug traffickers it has extradited to Colombia and the European Union, though some of been sent to the United States, said David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America.

“The question would be how bad do they want to improve relations with the United States,” Shapiro said Sunday. “But they may see this guy as a hero who they don’t want to extradite. Depending on how bad the administration wants to get him, it would complicate life with the United States for Venezuela.”

Particularly since Maduro is a Cuba-trained anti-imperialist, said Smilde, who would be ideologically inclined to offer Snowden safe harbor if it meant sticking it to the United States for its electronic surveillance programs.

“They can use this to say we have a principled stance in favor of freedom of expression,” Smilde said in an interview Sunday from Caracas. “They get a lot of justified criticism in terms of a lack of freedom of expression.”

Obama’s option of last resort, said Schoenfeld, would be to launch a CIA operation to capture Snowden. But that, he said, is highly unlikely because of the international response that would result in the United States mounting a covert operation to kidnap one of its own citizens.

“As tough as they are, they’re not going to go that route in this situation,” he said. “The forms of blowback would be unpredictable, and they are very risk averse.”

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.