Of course his boss would say that. Do you honestly think he would stand before congress and tell them he gave this young and apparently not smart man total access to EVERYTHING? Not a chance.
I think he had meetings set up in advance, perhaps some agreements on his safety, and he knows what countries won't or can't extradite him. Knowing what countries won't send you back to the USA would be step one.
Put yourself in his shoes. You have access to all of that data. You know where the USA can and can not / does not snoop. So you focus on where they can't / don't and work from there. Be it a certain phone company or service, he would have known where information would have been safe and that is how he contacted who he needed to contact.
Julian Assange, the President of Ecuador, possibly Putin, and lord knows who else, he didn't luck into contact with these people. You don't just send an email to Wikileaks and they blindly set you up with travel protection from Ecuador. You don't just hang out in the Russian airport with an invalid passport, missing flights to Cuba, and not get hassled. You ever been there? Ask some of the Russians how it is playing out there. You ever exited Hong Kong (or any country) on an invalid passport?
Ain't gonna happen. Not in a million years. He made a plan, lined it all up, protected his ass, and now he's working the plan with the help of Wikileaks or whoever.
I would also like to think he is a smart guy. While there is no way to know his IQ, he is obviously street smart enough to do exactly what he is doing and not get caught. At least not yet anyway. The USA has FBI and CIA all over the world. They could scoop him up in an hour flat if they thought they could. But they haven't. For now, he has outsmarted them.