| ® || 252 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS These documents also revealed that Stone had paid Anatoly Kucher- ena, Snowden’s legal representative in Moscow, $1 million, sup- posedly for the rights to his novel, Time of the Octopus. Even by Hollywood standards, $1 million was an extraordinary sum to pay for a yet-to-be-published work of Russian fiction, and it was espe- cially striking because Stone was making a fact-based movie using the actual names of the characters, and he had already bought the rights to The Snowden Files. “Is your script based on Kucherena’s Time of the Octopus?” I asked. “No,” Stone replied. “I haven’t used it.” He said that the payment was for what he termed “total access.” He explained that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the pro- ducers of the James Bond franchise, had optioned Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide to make into a movie about Snowden for Sony. Stone said that the million-dollar deal with Kucherena effectively guaranteed that any competing project would not have access to Snowden. Sony consequently put the competing film on hold. © Lawyers often negotiate deals on behalf of a client, but blocking a re) competing film requires considerably more influence with the pow- ers that be in Russia. Kucherena, though, was no ordinary lawyer. Among other influential positions, I noted earlier, he was on the pub- lic board of the Russian federal security bureau, which had assumed the domestic operations of the defunct KGB in April 1995. In light of such connections, Stone said Kucherena might be acting as an intermediary for other parties who controlled access to Snowden in Russia. In any case, his concern was making a movie, and Kucherena delivered the exclusive access to Snowden. Aside from being a skilled director, Stone is a shrewd producer who knows how to close a deal. He assessed, correctly as it turned out, that his project coupled with the payment to Kucherena would effectively block Sony’s competing project. Where the money w