# The Mira Hotel *A Biography of Edward Snowden* — Legendary Biographies No. 152 - **Subject:** Edward Joseph Snowden - **Written by:** Daniel Asher - **Shelf:** Movements / Dissidents & Whistleblowers - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 210 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-128-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-605-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/152-the-mira-hotel.html ## About this book June 5, 2013. The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald publishes the first of the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Joseph Snowden, twenty-nine, a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor working at the NSA's Hawaii facility. The story discloses the existence of a secret court order under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act compelling Verizon to hand over metadata for all of its customers' phone calls. Over the next eight weeks Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman publish dozens more stories — PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR — that reveal the architecture of the post-2001 American intelligence-collection apparatus. Snowden flies from Hong Kong to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport on June 23, 2013 with the intention of transiting to Quito. The U.S. State Department cancels his passport. He remains in the Sheremetyevo international transit zone for thirty-nine days. He is granted Russian asylum on August 1, 2013. He has been in Russia ever since. Daniel Asher's biography opens earlier — in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where Snowden was born in 1983 to a Coast Guard officer and a federal court clerk — and follows the arc through the Maryland childhood, the Anne Arundel Community College non-degree, the brief Army Reserve special-forces training that ended in shin fractures, the long CIA Geneva tour, the NSA Tokyo and Hawaii postings, the 2013 documents-selection process, the Hong Kong Mira Hotel sequence, the Moscow transit zone, the long Russian asylum, the Permanent Record memoir of 2019, the September 2022 Russian citizenship, and the long Moscow quiet of the post-2022 invasion years. What emerges is a portrait of the twenty-nine-year-old NSA contractor whose 2013 disclosures rewrote what the American public knew about the post-9/11 surveillance state — and the twelve-year Russian exile that the same disclosures produced. ## Contents 1. Elizabeth City 2. Geneva 3. NSA Contractor 4. The Decision 5. Hong Kong 6. "I Have No Intention of Hiding Who I Am" 7. PRISM 8. XKeyscore 9. The Five Eyes 10. The Flight 11. The Russian Offer 12. Moscow 13. Citizenfour 14. The USA Freedom Act 15. The Paradox 16. Russian Citizenship 17. Permanent Record 18. The Argument 19. The Passport ## Questions **Who is The Mira Hotel about?** Edward Joseph Snowden. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Mira Hotel — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,961 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 210 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Daniel Asher is a British-American science biographer and former Cambridge computational mathematician who spent fourteen years at the Isaac Newton Institute before turning to long-form non-fiction. His fourteen biographies treat scientific lives as moral documents: most centrally Alan Turing (The Imitation Game) — the inventor of the computer prosecuted by the country he saved — and a continuing run of figures from the cryptographic, nuclear, computational, and biological revolutions of the twentieth century. He writes mathematics into prose without dumbing it down and refuses the genre's tendency to canonise. He lives in Cambridge in a flat overlooking the Cam. Influences: Andrew Hodges, Walter Isaacson, Janet Browne.