One year ago this month an Aeroflot plane brought Edward Snowden to Russia. He has since said that his finding asylum in Moscow was an accident. "I personally am surprised," he told Brian Williams in an hour-long interview on NBC last month. "I never intended to end up in Russia."

Whatever the truth of his claim that Russia was intended as a stopover on the way to Latin America, it has shifted attention away from still-unanswered questions about the first stop in his journey, Hong Kong.

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