Managing to stay several steps ahead of the long arm of US law, intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden seems to have won the support of governments with little or no regard for a principle Mr Snowden has championed: freedom of speech.

It was almost possible to hear suppressed giggles on Sunday as straight-faced officials, first in Hong Kong and later in Moscow, blamed legal slip-ups by the US for Washington's most wanted being allowed to leave Hong Kong on a commercial flight; and the Russians explaining how they couldn't possibly nab Mr Snowden at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport because he was in transit.

Other players in a global drama that incensed Washington were Venezuela and Ecuador, the latter reportedly being Mr Snowden's most likely final destination, and Cuba, thought to be a secure transit point for the fugitive's last travel leg into South America.

Orchestrating it all was the antichrist of leaking, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who confirmed from his refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London that his legal advisers and staff were helping Mr Snowden to relative safety in Ecuador.

And like a Hollywood script writing itself, the drama was not without its moments of farce. As a pack of journalists milled in the Moscow airport terminal where Mr Snowden remained out of sight, they reportedly were approached by Patricio Chavez, the Ecuadorian ambassador to Moscow, asking: ''Do you know where he is? Is he coming here?''

Mr Snowden has likely already left Russia, Interfax quoted a source familiar with the matter as saying Monday.

"Snowden, most likely, has already left the Russian Federation," the source told the Russian news agency. "He could have left by a different plane" other than the Moscow-Havana flight that he was widely expected to take earlier in the day.

Mr Snowden has been the cause of acute embarrassment and fury in Washington, leaking classified documents on its vast domestic and international phone and internet surveillance. And at the weekend, further reports in Hong Kong and London provided more detail on the extent of US electronic eavesdropping in China - seemingly it has been hacking millions of text messages - and shedding light on British surveillance, with The Guardian reporting vast amounts of data being sucked from internet cables into and out of Britain and held in a data store for up to 30 days.

''The [leaks] demonstrate that the US, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age,'' the Chinese official news agency Xinhua reported.

Mr Snowden has studiously spoken only to journalists, lest he be cast as a spy. But The New York Times is quoting two unnamed Western intelligence experts who claim that in the few weeks in which he was in Hong Kong, the Chinese would have surreptitiously downloaded the entire contents of the four laptop computers he carried on arrival.

They said it was more practical for Beijing to suffer the short-term discomfort of US complaints about Mr Snowden being allowed to slip out than to be subjected to relentless US pressure to hand him over in what would have become a protracted extradition process.

The US had already formally charged Mr Snowden and in requesting that he be handed over, Washington also revoked the 30-year-old's US passport.

But in a move that US officials described as disingenuous, the Hong Kong authorities claimed the US paperwork was legally deficient and Washington's cancellation of Mr Snowden's passport became a moot point - apparently Ecuador had issued him with special refugee travel documents.

On Sunday, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino tweeted that Mr Snowden had requested political asylum. Once he arrived in Ecuador, his request would be formally processed.

As events unfolded rapidly through Sunday, it came as no surprise when one of Hollywood's most overused lines was heard from the lips of Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov. According to The Guardian, he told reporters: ''I know nothing.''