SO WHERE IS EDWARD SNOWDEN, REALLY?

AP reporter Ian Phillips traveled from London to Ukraine with a 21-hour layover in Moscow and no visa to enter Russia, just to see if he could find Edward Snowden. He didn't:

After a nearly two-hour wait inside the terminal, a bus picks me up -- only me -- from the transit area. We drive slowly across the tarmac, through a barrier, past electronic gates covered in barbed wire and security cameras.

The main part of the Novotel is out of bounds. My allotted wing feels like a lockup: You are obliged to stay in your room, except for brief walks along the corridor. Three cameras track your movements along the hallway and beam the images back to a multiscreen monitor. It's comforting to see a sign instructing me that, in case of an emergency, the locks on heavily fortified doors leading to the elevators will open.

When I try to leave my room, the guard outside springs to his feet. I ask him why room service isn't responding and if there's any other way to get food. He growls: "Extension 70!" I rile him by asking about the Wi-Fi, which isn't working: "Extension 75!" he snarls....

Now it's midnight, and I'm getting edgy. I feel trapped inside my airless room, whose double windows are tightly sealed....

("Can't I just wait in the lobby after midday?" I asked the receptionist at check-in. "Of course not," she retorted. "You have no visa. You will stay until you are picked up.")...

If this is really the only option for anyone who lands at the Moscow airport and has no Russian visa, then Snowden is in the same grim limbo (which is also an expensive one -- a mozzarella-and-pesto appetizer from room service costs about twenty bucks, a ribeye about fifty). Phillips couldn't locate Snowden:

I've called all the 37 rooms on my floor in hopes of reaching Snowden. No reply except for when I get my security guard.

The floor above? A similarly futile attempt.

I only reach a handful of tired and irritated Russians who growl "Da? Da? Da?"

Is he even there? Is it possible he's been spirited out of the country -- or into the country?

We know from The New York Times that the Russian government is cheering him on:

While Edward J. Snowden has remained mysteriously hidden from sight during his visit to Russia this week, Russian television has been making him a hero.

On programs that were hastily arranged and broadcast on the two largest federal channels, he was compared to the dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and to Max Otto von Stirlitz, a dashing fictional double agent from Soviet television. He was described as "the man who declared war on Big Brother and got stuck in the transit zone," and as "a soldier in the information war, who fights, of course, on the side of Russia, or maybe the side of China."

... Since Mr. Snowden landed in Moscow on Sunday, the likelihood that he will remain in Russia has steadily crept up....

I think he's out of the airport, but is somewhere in Russia or elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc. (He'd be blabbing to the press if he were anywhere he felt free.) It's ironic if he refused to return to the U.S. because he didn't want to face Bradley Manning's fate and is now effectively a prisoner somewhere in Putin's sphere of interest.