WaPo: U.S. Officials Scrambled to Nab Snowden ("Decision to Force a Foreign Leader’s Plane to Land")

[Pholus]

69. Can we hire those Austrian officials? Please?

Sounds like out of all the head-up-their-asses intelligence and diplomatic luminaries involved in the Morales affair, they were the only ones who were actually using deductive reasoning!

Austrian officials said they were skeptical of the plan from the outset and noted that Morales’s plane had taken off from a different airport in Moscow than where Snowden was held. “Unless the Russians had carted him across the city,” one official said, it was unlikely he was on board.

Even if Snowden had been a passenger, officials said, it is unclear how he could have been removed from a Bolivian air force jet whose cabin would ordinarily be regarded as that country’s sovereign domain — especially in Austria, a country that considers itself diplomatically neutral.

“We would have looked foolish if Snowden had been on that plane sitting there grinning,” said a senior Austrian official. “There would have been nothing we could have done.”