196 Cuba, a denial it continued to repeat to every reporter who queried the airline for the next six weeks. The first news that Snowden was even in Russia came on July 1, 2013. A statement posted on n the Wikileaks web site and signed “Edward Snowden,” after thanking “friends new and old” for his “continued liberty,” accused President Obama of pressuring “leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions. It added: “This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression.” Since the Aeroflot flight to Cuba was the only means of getting directly from Moscow to Latin America, Russian reporters, encouraged by the Wikileaks post, continued taking the daily 11 hour flight to Cuba until August 1, 2013, The charade only ended when Kucherena said in a press conference at the airport that Snowden would be taking up residency at an undisclosed location in Moscow, and walked out of the airport with Snowden. The question remained: where had Snowden been staying for those 39 days? Sarah Harrison, his companion on the plane, told Vogue that she and Snowden had shared a windowless room in the transit zone, where they watched TV, washed their clothes in a sink basin and ate meals from the nearby Burger King. The only hotel with windowless rooms in the transit zone in 2013 was the Vozdushny V-Express Capsule Hotel, located next to a newly-opened Burger King restaurant. I next went there. The polite V-express desk clerk, who spoke English, showed me the standard windowless double-room. It was approximately 24 square feet, the size of a large shipping container. Most of the floor space was taken up by twin bed. Across from the bed, behind a plastic curtain, was a stall with a shower, a toilet and sink. Not only was it very cramped quarters for two people to share but it was fairly expensive. It cost 850 rubles an hour (about $18 in 2013.) For 3