186 The day after his attempt to pressure the Washington Post, he asked Greenwald to drop everything he was doing and immediately fly to Hong Kong. He had, it will be recalled, already sent Poitras an enciphered file, and told her she would get the key once she and Greenwald followed his instructions. Presumably, he wanted Greenwald’s story and the video done in Hong Kong before he became a suspect. If they had immediately flown to Hong Kong that May, it still might have left Snowden an escape window. As Snowden found out, when dealing with journalists, things do not always go as planned. Greenwald, although agreeing to come to Hong Kong, waited in New York for two days while the Guardian editors completed their due diligence. Poitras waited with him. As a result of this delay, Snowden’s clock ran out. Greenwald and Poitras did not arrive at his hotel in Hong Kong until June 3° It would be only hours before he became a prime suspect. “It was a nervous period,” Snowden recalled. Although he bravely told the Guardian, “there was no risk of compromise/” That claim was, at best, wishful thinking on his part. By this time, he was no longer invisible. Not only had he registered at the hotel under his true name and provided his credit card, but he was he in contact with three high-profile journalists, two well-known hacktavists and, as he suggested to Gellman, a foreign diplomatic mission. Even if Snowden had failed to persuade the Washington Post to publish a coded identifier, the mission’s interest would likely be piqued when the newspaper published it first story on June 5". Even if adversary intelligence services had missed Snowden and his archive of NSA documents earlier in May, they would not neglect the availability of such a prize after the NSA stories broke in the Guardian and Washington Post on June 5". Greenwald even went on TV in Hong Kong, revealing to every interested intelligence service, in the unlikely event that that they did not already know, that a d