Diplomacy & Crisis News

MEXICO CITY — Carmen Aristegui is a likable hero for Mexico’s perennially embattled media. Given to little makeup or hairstyling, the 51-year-old radio personality has gained a reputation for her lack of pretension. A few weeks ago, I met her at the offices of her online newspaper, Aristegui Noticias, located in a run-down building in the unassuming Anzures district of Mexico City. The setting is more reminiscent of a basement start-up than the bureau of a celebrity broadcaster, whose radio show once regularly drew an average of 15 million listeners.

“I like to use the stairs, it’s the only exercise I get these days,” she explains by way of an apology for the sluggish elevator. After warmly greeting her news team, Aristegui leads the way to a closet-like back office.

There, over the buzz of a worn-out electric fan, she recounts the story of her dismissal in March from MVS Comunicaciones, the Mexican radio and satellite television provider. In Aristegui’s telling, it is a tale of government collusion. MVS, on the other hand, claims that it fired Aristegui and cancelled her popular morning radio program because she refused to accept the station’s new editorial guidelines. But she links her dismissal to her reporting on a major conflict-of-interest scandal with the president at its center.

Last November, Aristegui revealed that Grupo Higa, a major public contractor that won millions of dollars in state business, built a lavish home for the wife of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The investigation into the $7 million luxury mansion, dubbed the “White House” owing to its white interior and color-changing lighting system, sparked subsequent revelations about additional properties owned by Higa and used by the presidency’s inner circles.

“There was no business rationale to cancel the newscast except that MVS was under very strong political pressure, especially after the White House investigation,” says Aristegui from across the table. “It is obvious that the company used a pretext, and that this decision was very probably made by the government.”

She is now taking her fight to the courts. A Mexico City judge has ordered a hearing scheduled for May 12 to determine whether MVS violated its contract with the radio host, and if she should be reinstated. “When MVS refused to negotiate, it left me with no choice but to go to the courts,” she says. “This is not only about my journalistic work or my job. It is about freedom of expression and defending audiences’ right to information.”

The case has whipped up public opinion, turning Aristegui into Mexico’s latest martyr for press freedom. Her supporters across the country have joined six rights organizations to file so-called “amparos,” a Mexican legal procedure intended to protect human rights, in protest of her dismissal.

Her firing has also unleashed a wave of intrigue and conspiracy that would make House of Cards creator Beau Willimon proud. Some people assert that MVS let go of Aristegui to curry favor with the government ahead of an auction for broadcasters’ airwaves next year. Others suggest that the president demanded her dismissal out of fear that her promotion of MéxicoLeaks, a small whistle-blowing website, would give its investigations a higher profile, allowing revelations of more government scandals to reach national audiences. And there is even talk that MVS had lost an important ally against the government — the powerful telecoms mogul Carlos Slim — making the station more vulnerable to political pressure.

Critics say that a pervasive culture of self-censorship in Mexico’s broadcast media contributes to a lack of watchdog journalism in the country. The politically connected Televisa controls almost 70 percent of the broadcast television business, and media owners depend on concessions granted by a regulator that has historically been influenced by special interests. “The level of tolerance for journalism critical of the government is extremely low in Mexico because we don’t have a sufficiently developed democratic system,” Aristegui argues.

But a number of her former superiors and colleagues have criticized the beloved yet battle-prone journalist for her lack of regard for authority. Moreover, there is no proof implicating the government in Aristegui’s banishment from the airwaves. (As Salvador Camarena, Aristegui’s trusted former MVS colleague, admitted to me: “we have no smoking gun.”)

The commotion around Aristegui’s case highlights the government’s sinking credibility. Her no-frills style strikes a sharp contrast to the nattily-dressed, aloof Peña Nieto, whose perfectly coiffed hair was as much a talking point in his December 2012 election victory as his lofty reform promises. Almost three years later, he has made important economic strides. But he has yet to implement tough measures to crack down on corruption or assure Mexicans that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — once synonymous with greed and a lust for power — has changed its stripes.

Aristegui, meanwhile, has won huge admiration among anti-corruption crusaders and free speech advocates for her unflinching attacks against Mexico’s political elite. Over her 25-year career, she has uncovered a prostitution ring run by a party chief, a pedophile priest protected by a powerful Roman Catholic cardinal, and the alleged involvement of Televisa in a Central American drug-smuggling ring.

When Aristegui blew the lid off the “White House” story last November, the Peña Nieto government was already reeling from accusations of incompetence and corruption. The previous month, 43 students from the Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa in rural Mexico were allegedly murdered by a corrupt mayor in cahoots with criminal gangs. The scandal sparked an international outcry, not to mention massive protests against the government, whose gaffe-prone communication strategy made matters worse. “Carmen became the pebble in Peña Nieto’s shoe,” said Denise Dresser, a long-time collaborator of Aristegui’s and a former MVS pundit.

But the government isn’t the only institution Aristegui has antagonized, according to numerous interviews with her colleagues and former employers. In 2002, Aristegui hosted a radio show for the broadcasting company Grupo Imagen. But her boss at the time, Pedro Ferriz de Con, fired her over disagreements about the company’s editorial line: “She said terrible things about Imagen on-air during her time there. Imagine how the audience took it?” he said.

In another incident in 2008, W Radio, a joint-venture between Spain’s Grupo Prisa and Televisa, decided not to renew her contract. According to Daniel Moreno, her boss at the time, she arrived at the office late and refused to take commercial breaks, depriving the station of a vital source of revenue. As the bottom line suffered, the company presented her with new rules, Moreno said. But after months of negotiations, she backed out, claiming the station wanted to censor her.

In many of her spats with employers Aristegui has cried foul, turning up the political heat by implying that the powers that be have called for her head. According to Aristegui, Ferriz and businessman Alfonso Romo, a stakeholder in Imagen, had a personal vendetta against her because she exposed a sex scandal involving a highly respected and powerful religious order in Mexico. She also claims that she was dismissed from W Radio due to her criticism of the derisively named “Televisa Law” – a measure passed in 2006 that was widely interpreted as giving the powerful station privileges in gaining new broadcast concessions and expanding its market dominance. “On the program we had months of debate about this law, and it infuriated Televisa,” she said.

Perhaps all this should have sounded the alarm for MVS owner Joaquín Vargas Gómez when he hired her. But the tycoon was seduced by Aristegui’s massive viewership, and loaded her contract with deal sweeteners. This included an ethics code spelling out her editorial control over her show, an MVS ombudsman to safeguard audiences’ rights, and an independent arbitrator to intercede in editorial disputes between her and the company.

Yet Aristegui has a habit of repeating herself. In 2011, the firebrand journalist was let go after Felipe Calderón, the president at the time, called Vargas demanding that Aristegui apologize or be fired for reporting rumors he had a drinking problem. According to Aristegui, Vargas allegedly begged her to yield to the president’s request, saying that he was in the middle of negotiating with the government to hang onto a multi-million dollar broadcast concession. But Aristegui refused, choosing instead to publicize what happened. “Why should I have to equivocate and apologize, and accept the temper tantrum of a president?” she said at her office. Vargas later reinstated her after her huge fan base protested.

Aristegui claimed that the incident did not damage her relationship with Vargas, but that problems resurfaced with the White House investigation. She says he asked her not to air the report on her radio show (requesting her “understanding”). So she broke the story on her own website. MVS has not responded to the allegations.

In the months that followed the White House revelations, her reporting grew relentless, sparking an on-air showdown with her employer that led to her dismissal in March. “There was a loss of confidence in Carmen,” said Ezra Shabot, another journalist at MVS. “The owners felt that they were losing their space on the radio, that she was the owner of it.”

Tensions reached a climax when Aristegui announced on March 10 that her team of investigative journalists at MVS would help promote Méxicoleaks, a new digital tool founded by eight Mexican media outlets and civil society groups courting would-be whistleblowers to help expose state corruption.

Infuriated, MVS issued a series of news bulletins that appeared in the middle of Aristegui’s show, accusing her team of using the MVS brand name to endorse Méxicoleaks deceptively and illegally. It then fired two leading journalists on her investigative team, Daniel Lizárraga and Irving Huerta, both of whom were involved in the Méxicoleaks story.

Aristegui refused to accept their dismissal and picked a fight with the company on-air. “Instead of punishing them we should be rewarding them!” she said on her March 13 broadcast. MVS retaliated, declaring to its audiences it would not accept her “ultimatum,” and published new editorial guidelines on its website imposing restrictions on content.

On March 15, MVS said it would reinstate Lizárraga and Huerta if Aristegui accepted the new editorial rules. But she refused, and that evening received notification from MVS that her show had been cancelled. The next day, news of her firing and that of her 17-member team made headlines, sparking a public uproar.

Aristegui still has a column in the Mexican magazine Reforma and a show on CNN’s Spanish-language program version. But her supporters say that her exile from the airwaves has left a critical gap in the coverage of Mexican politics ahead of important mid-term congressional elections on June 7. The story has also been swept up into wider criticisms of Mexico’s shaky human rights record.

In the same breath that media reports have referenced Aristegui’s firing, they point out that attacks on reporters in Mexico are ticking upward. According to a March investigation by the British rights group Article 19, violence against members of the press rose 80 percent in the first two years of the Peña Nieto administration, relative to the six-year average of his predecessor. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists also ranks Mexico among the world’s top 10 countries for journalist killings, and impunity in such cases is as high as 90 percent.

But the crux of the issues in the case of Carmen Aristegui appears to be less about the human rights tale than the slow — and often sporadic — slog toward political reform.

New legislation enacted last July has sought to bring fresh competition into Mexico’s stiflingly uncompetitive broadcast market. It has also created specialized tribunals for media and antitrust matters, helping to fast-track legal procedures. Aristegui’s supporters have utilized the newly formed telecommunications and broadcast courts to file complaints against MVS, claiming that the company’s actions breached the public’s right of access to information. Still, critics argue that these procedures could be bogged down in red tape and that the courts remain over-stretched, lacking both human and financial resources.

“These new legal tools are here to guarantee the rights of journalists and the Mexican people, but it is a big challenge for Mexico’s justice system,” says Aristegui, looking tired for the first time in our interview. Yet the crack in her armor is only momentary. Leaning forward to be heard over the raspy fan, she adds with characteristic zeal: “But it mustn’t drag on, every minute wasted is a minute that the Mexican people lose their right to critical information.”

YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GettyImages

Pakistan
White House denies journalist’s assertions on bin Laden raid

On Monday, the White House responded to a controversial report by journalist Seymour Hersh, dismissing it as “baseless” (CNN, RFE/RL). Hersh wrote in the London Review of Books on Sunday that the U.S. government secretly cooperated with Pakistani intelligence officials to kill bin Laden, and that top Pakistani Army intelligence officials knew about the raid. Ned Price, the White House National Security spokesman, said on Monday that “the notion that the operation that killed Osama Bin Ladin was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false.” He added: “As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of senior U.S. officials. The president decided early on not to inform any other government, including the Pakistani government, which was not notified until after the raid had occurred.” During the daily press briefing on Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest again dismissed the report, citing CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen’s comment that “what’s true in this story isn’t new, and what’s new in the story isn’t true” (CNN).

Pakistani PM, Officials Arrive in Kabul

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif arrived in Kabul today for key talks on increasing cooperation between the neighboring countries in fighting militant groups (AP, Pajhwok, VOA). Army Chief Gen. Raheel Sharif and the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Gen. Gizwan Akhtar are also part of the visiting delegation. This is the first time Sharif is visiting Kabul after the installation of the National UnitY Government, and the delegation is holding separate meetings with both Ghani and Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

Nepal

Another earthquake in Nepal, India prepares aid

A second major earthquake hit Nepal on Tuesday, with dozens of deaths reported and thousands more injured. The U.S. Geological Survey assigned the new earthquake a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, compared to 7.8 assigned to the April 25 earthquake. (New York Times). Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with top Indian officials to monitor the situation. Modi’s office tweeted that he has “directed all concerned authorities to be on alert for carrying out rescue and relief operations, as required” (NDTV). Per initial reports, at least two people were killed by the earthquake in the Indian state of Bihar, which borders Nepal (Times of India). Tremors from the earthquake were felt as far away as Delhi, where Metro services were briefly suspended (India Today).

Bangladesh

Atheist blogger killed in machete attack

Ananta Bijoy Das, a Bangladeshi atheist blogger, was murdered in the city of Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh (The Guardian, CNN). Das was hacked to death by four masked attackers with machetes, according to the police. This is the third such murder in Bangladesh this year. Das wrote blogs for the Mukto-Muno website, which used to be moderated by Avijit Roy, who was himself stabbed to death in February in Dhaka, the capital. While Kamrul Hasan, the commissioner of Sylhet police, declined to offer a motive for the attack, the previous two attacks have been attributed to Islamic militants opposed to the victims’ secular views.

India

Chinese smartphone makers eye Indian market

The New York Times reported on Monday that Chinese smartphone manufacturing companies are increasingly shifting their focus towards India (New York Times). The Chinese smartphone market has become more and more saturated, with 800 million smartphone users in the country. Fewer new buyers, coupled with a slowing economy, has diminished growth prospects within China. Instead, Chinese smartphone makers are targeting the Indian market, which is sized at $14.5 billion and rapidly growing. Indians are expected to buy 111 million smartphones in 2015 and 149 million in 2016. Chinese companies like Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Gionee are planning to set up research and development facilities in India.

Modi set to be first Indian PM to visit Mongolia

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit East Asia this week, and his meeting with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing will be a highly anticipated event. Following his visit to China, Modi will also visit Mongolia on May 17, the first such visit by an Indian Prime Minister (Times of India). Noted South Asia scholar C. Raja Mohan argues that there is a strategic element to Modi’s Mongolia trip, as India and China compete for influence within each other’s neighborhoods (Indian Express).

Afghanistan

Roadside bomb kills 5 civilians

A roadside bomb killed five civilians and wounded three others in Kandahar province on Tuesday (RFE/RL, TOLO). Samim Akhplwak, the spokesman for the provincial governor, said that two women and one child were wounded in the blast and that an investigation is underway to determine if it was an old mine or a bomb planted by the Taliban (AP). The Taliban have not yet claimed responsibility for the bomb, but Kandahar province is the staging ground for their insurgency.

Taliban, security forces battle in Herat

Skirmishes between Taliban militants and Afghan security forces in Herat province continued on Tuesday, as dozens of insurgents attacked a number of security checkpoints in the Shindand district (Pajhwok, TOLO). Abdul Rauf, a police spokesperson, said that 20 rebels were killed during the fighting, but other officials declined to give a count of casualties. On Saturday, Taliban insurgents attacked and gained control of Jawand district in western Badghis province. The recent uptick in fighting is attributed to the beginning of the Taliban’s spring offensive last month.

— Udit Banerjea and Emily Schneider

Edited by Peter Bergen

Un an après son arrivée au pouvoir, en mai 2014, le premier ministre indien Narendra Modi continue d'ériger en modèle économique les recettes expérimentées dans l'Etat du Gujarat, qu'il a dirigé de 2001 à 2014 . Si son étoile commence à pâlir, le dirigeant du parti hindouiste Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a (...) / Inde, Agriculture, Économie, Industrie, Libéralisme, Mouvement de contestation, Parti politique, Travail, Répression, Privatisation - 2015/05

Ce saisissant roman prolétarien n'est pas une nouveauté , mais il est bon de saisir l'occasion d'une nouvelle publication pour revenir sur ce chef-d'œuvre d'un genre peu fréquenté, et parfois plus attachant par la thématique que par la grandeur littéraire. Avec Le Bateau-Usine, écrit en 1929, (...) / Asie, Japon, Russie, Communisme, Culture, Histoire, Idéologie, Littérature, Mer, Mouvement de contestation, Travail, Fiction, Pêche - 2015/05

By Paul McLeary with Ariel Robinson

Adding it up. It’s now been just over nine months since a U.S.-led coalition began pounding the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq from the air. And in that time, the mission, which one Pentagon wag then dubbed “Operation: Dude, That’s My Humvee?” has hit 6,278 targets — including 288 U.S. Humvees the Islamic militants snatched from the Iraqi Army. The whole thing has cost Washington over $2.3 billion ($8.6 million a day) to keep the rocks bouncing, and there’s no end in sight.

First things. In Iraq, which the White House says is its first priority, the Islamic State still holds the cities of Mosul and Fallujah, and appears poised to take control of the Baiji oil refinery. The refinery and the city of Ramadi remain “highly contested” Defense Department spokesman Col. Steve Warren said Monday, and the fight could go either way.

Video of U.S. planes in action over Iraq. Those bombs just don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re dropped by American pilots flying aircraft in at times close proximity to Islamic State fighters, who are very happy to fire back. The group recently released a video of fighting in and around the Baiji refinery that showed U.S. attack aircraft taking sustained ground fire. (Start at the 3:35 mark.) In response to an email query about the ground fire, U.S. Air Force Capt. Andrew Caulk replied that “we don’t have a releasable number for surface-to-air fire (SAFIRE) events. While the ground fire in the video may seem severe, the picture looks very different from the air. Our pilots occasionally report ineffective small arms or anti-aircraft artillery fire.”

We’re coming! Soon-ish. In another sign that the Asia “rebalance” is still on despite the fact that the Middle East is burning, we found out Monday that American special operations forces are bringing some of their newest aircraft to Japan.

Just not until 2017.

Ten of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command’s (AFSOC) 50 CV-22 tiltrotor Osprey aircraft are headed for Yokota airfield near Tokyo. The Pentagon announcement comes on the heels of Japan’s plans to spend $3 billion to buy 17 of the speedy V–22 Osprey from the U.S.

While the U.S. Marine Corps already operates 24 Osprey from the Futenma base on Okinawa, the move expands the AFSOC footprint in the region, with the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group having long operated out of Kadena Air base in Okinawa. But with U.S. operators based in South Korea and Okinawa, the deployment can be seen as effectively splitting the large geographic distance between the two, making quick relief of those special ops ground forces potentially pretty tough.

“This is another example of the challenge of SOF airlift (which really only exists to get ground SOF into and out of hostile areas) that is not collocated with the ground forces” it will support, emails David Maxwell, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who now teaches at Georgetown University. “But that is the nature also of being in theater and subject to host nation political constraints. I would rather have them in Yokota than not in theater at all.”

Always. Be. Closing. Today marks the kickoff of the increasingly contentious two-day Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at Camp David, where President Barack Obama will host the leadership of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to talk through security issues. Originally billed by the White House as a sitdown among heads of state, there’s been some backsliding on the original hype. Saudi King Salman has already pulled out of the meeting, sending his 29 year-old defense minister instead. And Bahrain’s king has also declined to attend, sending his defense chief. The Pentagon confirmed Monday that Defense Secretary Ash Carter will also attend, but a spokesman declined to say who else from the department might be there. FP’s John Hudson outlines some of the tensions, and the uncertainty, over what will actually be accomplished over the next two days.

Say it ain’t so. It looks like all sorts of defense officials are pushing back against Seymour Hersh’s inflammatory story in the London Review of Books on Monday claiming that just about everything you’ve been told about the U.S. SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan is a lie. FP’s Sean Naylor catalogs the outrage.

It’s Situation Report time! Tell the kids to go draw a picture or “play the quiet game” for a few minutes while you scroll through your phone with us, won’t you? Let us know what’s on your mind at paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary

Revolving door

“Porter Goss, a director of the CIA under the Bush administration, has been hired by Turkey’s government to lobby Congress on matters including counter-terrorism, energy-security, and stability in the the NATO-member’s region,” Bloomberg’s Isobel Finkel reports.

Yemen

Hostilities continue in Yemen, where Houthi rebels and Saudi-led coalition forces “traded heavy artillery and rocket fire in border areas,” a day before the proposed humanitarian cease-fire is to take effect on Tuesday, according to Al-Jazeera. Many are skeptical of the deal: a group of 17 international aid agencies say five days is not enough to provide adequate humanitarian assistance, and Yemen’s Foreign Minister Riyad Yassin said he believed the Houthis “had no desire for a ceasefire deal.”

Cyber

At a cybersecurity forum at George Washington University on Monday, chief of U.S. Cyber Command — and head of NSA — Adm. Michael Rogers said hackers (and other perpetrators of cyber attacks) will “pay the price,” for their actions. “What concerned me” Defense News quotes him as saying, “was, given the fact that this is a matter of public record, if we don’t publicly acknowledge it, if we don’t attribute it and if we don’t talk about what we’re going to do in response to the activity … I don’t want anyone watching thinking we have not tripped a red line.”

Israel

Israel will be buying four patrol boats from the marine division of Germany’s ThyssenKrupp to protect natural gas fields in the Mediterranean, The ticket price on the deal is approximately $480 million. ThyssenKrupp has also committed to around $181 million worth of reciprocal purchasing in Israel, AFP reports.

Georgia

About 200 U.S. Army troops from the 3rd Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade (some of whom are also currently in western Ukraine) have kicked off a joint military exercise in Georgia with local forces after the U.S. shipped a company’s worth of heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles across the Black Sea, Reuters reports. The purpose of the mission is to train a company of Georgian soldiers to be able to operate as part of NATO’s Response Force, a Pentagon official confirmed Monday.

Terrorism

It would appear that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi alive and well, according to reporting from The Daily Beast.  He continues to lead the group, a Defense Department spokesman said Monday, adding, “the U.S. military has no reason to believe he was injured in a coalition airstrike.”

Fighting continues in Yemen today with just hours to go before the implementation of a five-day ceasefire between Saudi and Houthi forces. The ceasefire is set to begin at 11 PM local time and will allow the delivery of critical humanitarian aid. “It is unclear how much longer Yemen’s remaining hospitals have before the lights go out,” Human Rights Watch’s deputy Middle East director told the Washington Post, stressing the need for fuel for generators and water supply pumps. Yesterday, Saudi Arabia struck a large munitions stockpile near Sanaa, setting off a chain of secondary explosions. Today more strikes have targeted Houthi positions in Sanaa and Aden, and Saudi Arabia has massed ground forces along Yemen’s northern border. A U.S. airstrike, believed to have been launched by a drone, hit the presidential residence in al-Mukalla, which was seized by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula last month.

President Obama is expected to discuss the situation in Yemen with Gulf diplomats later this week at a summit at Camp David. Human Rights Watch has called on President Obama to press Gulf nations to implement reforms to allow more political dissent. Obama said in an interview last month that “the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.” Those comments reportedly offended Gulf leaders and may have contributed to King Salman’s decision not to attend the summit in person.

European Union Presents Plan for Migrants to United Nations

The European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, presented a plan to stem the tide of migrants fleeing to Europe from Libya at the U.N. Security Council yesterday. Mogherini clarified potential actions to dismantle smuggling operations, saying “No one is thinking of bombing. I’m talking about a naval operation.” EU nations on the U.N. Security Council are drafting a resolution to authorize the use of force. “The crucial thing for the European Union is destroying the business model of the trafficking and smuggling organizations, making sure that vessels cannot be used again,” she said. “They sell hope, but instead of hope they deliver death.”

Headlines

• The Iraqi government has begun training and arming an initial class of more than 1,000 Sunni forces in Anbar province to combat the Islamic State.

 

• Egyptian Justice Minister Mahfouz Saber has resigned after making controversial comments to a television station that the children of sanitation workers cannot become judges.

 

• Mohamed Fahmy, whose trial by the Egyptian government for conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood while working as a journalist drew international condemnation, will sue Al Jazeera for damages.

 

• A Swedish ship participating in an effort to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza has begun its voyage toward the Mediterranean carrying solar panels, medical equipment, and 13 people.

 

• A prominent Kurdish general in the fight against the Islamic State was assassinated in a bomb attack on his motorcade near Kirkuk, Iraq.

-J. Dana Stuster

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images

On 11 May 2015, Jean-Marie Guéhenno joined MSNBC's The Cycle to discuss his newly published memoir The Fog of Peace.

It’s almost axiomatic by now that Chinese bureaucrats of all stripes should be careful what they wear on their wrist. On May 5, a sharp-eyed Web user spotted a host on state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) wearing an Apple Watch on her left wrist while giving a news report that day. After the user posted screen shots of CCTV host Wang Yinqi and her expensive timepiece, the photos spread quickly on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform, setting off a fervent debate about what counts as luxury and excess in contemporary China.

The photos initially attracted attention as an example of an ostentatious display; a spate of news articles and Weibo media posts on May 5 accused Wang of “showing off her wealth.” Some Weibo users chimed in to criticize Wang as well. “Official media should appear thrifty,” wrote one Weibo user, arguing that the image of official media and that of the government that controls it are closely related. More than one speculated without evidence that Wang, beautiful and in her mid-20s, might be mistress to a wealthy man.

Those claims are harsh (and unsubstantiated) – but the vitriol toward China’s reviled state broadcaster is more understandable. While CCTV has often served as an important mouthpiece for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s nationwide anti-corruption crackdown, now into its third year, the state broadcaster itself has been embroiled in several scandals during that time. In July 2014, authorities unexpectedly detained one of CCTV’s most outspoken hosts, Rui Chenggang. That same month, authorities held senior CCTV executive Guo Zhenxi for suspected bribery, and in August 2014 they detained Huang Haitao, a prominent CCTV deputy director, for alleged graft.

Expensive watches have become a symbol of corruption in China ever since August 2012, when netizens unearthed an image of provincial safety bureaucrat Yang Dacai smiling at the scene of a deadly traffic accident — and wearing a luxury timepiece likely beyond his modest means. Further images of Yang’s wrist-wear soon went viral on the Chinese web, sparking a grassroots campaign to oust him from office. It succeeded, and in September 2013, Yang was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption. Since then, party leaders have been careful either not to purchase luxury watches, or at least not to wear them in public.

Apple’s new watches are harder to categorize. The most expensive, retailing at up to $20,000 and called Apple Watch Edition, seems tailor-made for China’s still-massive luxe market; the priciest model sold out in China within two days of its offering. But lower-tier models can cost anywhere from $349 to $1,099, a similar price range as the iPhone 6, Apple’s newest smart phone model which after its Chinese release in October 2014 marked the first time more iPhones were sold in China than in the United States. In other words, while Apple watches aren’t cheap, neither are they out of reach for members of China’s giant urban middle class.

That may explain why most web users among the thousands of commenters refuted the notion that Wang’s timepiece was anything glamorous. “What’s wrong with wearing an Apple?” one Weibo user wrote. “It’s priced for the common people.” “A few hundred dollars for a watch, and they’re saying it’s ‘showing off wealth,’” wrote one user on May 6 in a popular comment. Yet another wrote in a popular comment, “When a couple hundred dollars is flaunting riches, it’s a beggar country indeed.”

There’s no question that, as a group, Weibo users, who mostly access the platform via smartphones, are more affluent than the country at large. But the online support for Wang (or at least, her timepiece) marks a turnabout from 2008, the year before Apple began selling its signature smart phone in China, when iPhones were the rare and much-coveted property of expats or overseas Chinese back for a stay in their homeland. Then again, according to World Bank statistics, in 2008, per-capita GDP in China was $3,414. In 2013, it was $6,807. That’s why Ms. Wang’s career is probably safe. As the ranks of China’s urban middle class and its elite continue to grow, the normalcy of even the newest and most expensive Apple products can be taken as a sign of the times.

Fair Use/Weibo

The Obama administration gave Royal Dutch Shell conditional approval Monday to begin drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic, a major triumph for a company that has seen the waters of the remote region as a tantalizing business opportunity for years.

The company will still need to receive approval from other regulatory agencies, but has plans to begin drilling in the Chukchi Sea this summer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company plans to invest $1 billion in the Arctic project this year.

The decision is a major setback for environmentalists, who argue that drilling in the Arctic could pave the way for a major environmental disaster. Oil giants, including Shell and BP, have had major spills in recent years, including Shell of Nigeria spills in 2008 and 2009 that cost the company $84 million. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled millions of gallons of crude oil on the Prince William Sound in Alaska.

The United States’s interest in the Arctic is not exclusive to drilling. The melting of the polar ice cap and opening of Arctic waterways means an increase in tourism, fishing, and mineral exploration. And for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, it means new waterways to patrol.

In 2013, the Defense Department released an Arctic Strategy report claiming that it was the Pentagon’s responsibility to ensure that the Arctic remains peaceful as human access to the region increases in coming years. Their security focus in the region, the report said, would range from resource extraction to national defense.

Last year, the Pentagon complemented that report with a climate change readiness roadmap to outline ways the Defense Department would work proactively to prepare for the national security implications climate change could have. That would include military responses to would need to respond to natural disasters sparked by climate change.

In the case of this Shell project, environmentalists are especially concerned because its remote location would make it difficult to mount a clean-up effort in the event of a spill. The closest Coast Guard station equipped to respond is more than 1,000 miles away.

A Shell spokesman, Curtis Smith, said in a statement that the approval of Shell’s project was “an important milestone and signals the confidence regulators have in our plan.”

But before operations can begin this summer, he said “it’s imperative that the remainder of our permits be practical, and delivered in a timely manner. In the meantime, we will continue to test and prepare our contractors, assets and contingency plans against the high bar stakeholders and regulators expect of an Arctic operator.”

Obama’s relationship with environmentalists has had its highs and lows.  As president, he has made strides on climate change but also advanced opportunities for offshore drilling — which activists vehemently oppose — as the United States continues to look for more domestic oil opportunities.

Just four months ago, his administration approved a measure to begin another offshore drilling project on the East Coast. But in February, when Congress passed legislation for Keystone XL pipeline, an $8 billion project to transport tar sands from Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf, Obama vetoed the measure. Lawmakers need his permission because the pipeline would cross the Canadian border, but he refuses to give it his approval until the State Department finishes reviewing the project.

MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/GettyImages

A senior U.S. official said Monday the White House has rejected a proposal from Gulf nations to forge a common defense treaty with the United States. The revelation follows decisions by the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain to skip a summit organized by the White House this week — a move perceived by some as a snub to President Barack Obama.

U.S. and Gulf officials insist the lackluster attendance for this week’s Camp David summit is not the latest symptom of bad blood that may exist between Washington and its Gulf allies. But key members of the Gulf Cooperation Council had lobbied hard for the U.S. to agree to a defense pact ahead of the summit.

“We need something in writing. We need something institutionalized,” UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba told a Washington conference last week.

In a Monday conference call, Robert Malley, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region, told reporters that the U.S. informed Gulf allies “weeks ago” that a defense treaty “was not possible.”

Despite that disagreement, Malley insisted Gulf allies came away largely satisfied following a meeting in Paris last Friday that was attended by foreign ministers of the six GCC nations and the U.S.  “Again, one of them reminded us that they would’ve liked a treaty, but beyond that there was no hint of dissatisfaction,” Malley said.

Hours later, the White House said that Saudi King Salman called Obama to “express his regret at not being able to travel to Washington this week.”

Last month, Obama invited GCC leaders to Washington after his administration secured a framework agreement with Iran to limit Tehran’s nuclear program. Gulf states worry that the potential deal — offering Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program — will provide Iran with an influx of cash to fund proxies and expand its regional ambitions in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.

This week’s summit aimed to let the U.S. settle those nerves about the emerging deal and discuss regional security issues, including the takeover of Yemen by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia announced that the country’s monarch, King Salman, would not attend the summit, even though White House officials told reporters on Friday that he would be there.

Saudi officials denied that his absence amounts to a snub, and said the last-minute decision by King Salman to stay in Riyadh reflected his desire to monitor the cease-fire scheduled to begin Tuesday between the Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Saudi-led coalition that has been launching airstrikes in the country. Omani and UAE officials cited health reasons for why their leaders could not attend the gathering.

Still, given the lack of star power at this week’s summit, expectations for a series of substantive breakthroughs between the parties are low.

During the White House conference call Monday, officials said a new announcement on joint military exercises was likely to come out of the meeting. But they stopped far short of confirming the summit would yield any big news or announcement for a new missile defense shield for the Sunni nations — a longtime U.S. priority in the region.

Despite that, regional experts have noted there are worse things than failing to come away with a major deliverable during a summit of Gulf monarchies, many of whom rank poorly when it comes to human rights, press freedoms, and corruption problems.

“I don’t think the U.S. should feel compelled to bend over backwards,” Frederic Wehrey, a Gulf expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told a roundtable of reporters on Monday. “I think we need to be very concerned about the reform angle.”

Getty Images

North Korean state media announced over the weekend that it had reached a major milestone in the country’s attempt to improve its missile capabilities: the successful firing of a submarine launched ballistic missile. The event was of course accompanied by the requisite release of triumphant photographs, including this gem, which has us wondering: Have you ever seen the supreme leader of North Korea look happier?

This undated picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 9, 2015 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un smiling while observing an underwater test-fire of a submarine-launched ballistic missile at an undisclosed location at sea. North Korea said May 9 it had successfully test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) — a technology that could eventually offer the nuclear-armed state a survivable second-strike capability. AFP PHOTO / KCNA via KNS REPUBLIC OF KOREA

Cigarette and binoculars in hand, hair ruffled by the ocean breeze, smoke-stained chompers on full display, Kim Jong Un is something of a study here in gleeful despotism basking in glow of his military’s latest advance. And it’s no surprise he’s happy in this photograph: The step forward of an SLBM is a major advance for North Korea, which has been rumored to be preparing an ocean-launched missile for several months.

Still, North Korean armed forces have a long way to go before they put these missiles aboard their submarines. The missile in question reportedly only traveled about 150 meters, and the test’s primary aim was to show the feasibility of the first, tricky step of putting a missile in the air from below the ocean’s surface. According to arms experts, the missile fired on Saturday bears a resemblance to the SS-N-6 “Serb” missile, which the Soviet Union used aboard some of its nuclear-armed submarines. It’s also unclear whether North Korea has perfected the process of sufficiently miniaturizing nuclear warheads to place atop a missile of this nature.

This test should be seen as an incremental step toward North Korea’s goal of strengthening its nuclear deterrent, and Kim is placing himself in the front and center of that project, positioning himself in the propaganda images released strangely close to the missile launch. It’s difficult to judge distance in this photograph, but it would certainly appear that Kim was either much too close for safety to an untested weapon or was photoshopped in after the fact.

An image obtained by Yonhap News Agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un pointing at a ballistic missile believed to have been launched from underwater near Sinpo, on the northeast coast of North Korean, 09 May 2015. The KCNA, the North’s state media, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the test-fire. EPA/KCNA SOUTH KOREA OUT

Other images show Kim observing the launch:

An image obtained by Yonhap News Agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un looking through a pair of binoculars at a ballistic missile (not in frame), believed to have been launched from underwater near Sinpo, on the northeast coast of North Korean, 09 May 2015. The KCNA, the North’s state media, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the test-fire. EPA/KCNA SOUTH KOREA OUT

Also released were images of the missile’s launch:

An image released by North Korea’s Rodong Shinmun shows what Pyeongyang claims to be a ballistic missile being launched from a submarine in waters near the northeast coast of Sinpo on 09 May 2015. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the North’s state media, said the communist state successfully test-fired the submarine missile. EPA/RODONG SINMUN SOUTH KOREA

An image obtained by Yonhap News Agency show a ballistic missile believed to have been launched from underwater near Sinpo, on the northeast coast of North Korean, 09 May 2015. The KCNA, the North’s state media, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the test-fire. EPA/KCNA SOUTH KOREA OUT

The May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden handed the White House one of its few major foreign policy successes, so it’s of little surprise that the Obama administration would push back on two new articles that allege that much of what the U.S. government told the world about the raid is false.

What’s interesting is just how strongly the administration — and its former officials — are denying the new claims.

In a rare on-the-record comment, CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani described the first article, written by Seymour Hersh and published Sunday in the London Review of Books, as “utter nonsense.”

Michael Morell, who was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the bin Laden raid, said he stopped reading Hersh’s article after finding “something wrong” in every sentence.

Hersh reported that the Pakistani government was holding the al Qaeda leader prisoner in the compound in Abbottabad where he was eventually killed. Hersh further reported that the CIA learned of bin Laden’s presence there not by tracking his courier, as the Obama administration has stated, but from “a senior Pakistani intelligence officer” eager to claim the $25 million reward, and that, contrary to the public version of events, the United States did not bury bin Laden at sea.

“It’s dead wrong — not even close to the truth,” said Morell, who details the events surrounding the raid in a chapter of his new book, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism — From al Qaida to ISIS. “We didn’t learn about Osama bin Laden from a Pakistani official that we paid $25 million to. We learned about his whereabouts from following the courier.”

Late Monday afternoon, in a follow-up article, NBC News reported that it had separately been told by two intelligence sources that a Pakistani “walk in” had told the United States where the al Qaeda leader was hiding.

Current and former U.S. officials insisted that was not the case.

“A walk in did not give up bin Laden’s location,” said a U.S. government official, speaking after the NBC News story had been published. “The U.S. found him the way we said we found him,” added the official, who requested anonymity so as to discuss sensitive intelligence issues.

Additionally, Morell said in an interview Monday, Hersh’s assertion that the Pakistanis had foreknowledge of and participated in the raid that Joint Special Operations Command conducted under CIA auspices to kill bin Laden in his compound is not true. A former senior member of SEAL Team 6, the unit at the heart of the Abbottabad raid, described Hersh’s article as “laughable,” adding that bin Laden was found through “some luck and some good eavesdropping.” The former Team 6 member also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Hersh for decades has gotten under the U.S. government’s skin. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the 1968 massacre — and cover-up — at My Lai during the Vietnam War. But his more recent reporting has come under harsh scrutiny, particularly his April 2014 article that a chemical attack in Syria widely attributed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad was in fact perpetrated by Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, in coordination with the Turkish government. Hersh’s latest article relies largely on the account of an anonymous source described as “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.” The other principal sources  are two anonymous “longtime consultants to the [U.S.] Special Operations Command, and retired Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, who headed Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in the early 1990s.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the Defense Department each issued very similarly worded statements that flatly refuted Hersh’s article on the bin Laden raid.

“The notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false,” said NSC spokesman Ned Price in an email. The Obama administration did not inform the Pakistani government until after the raid, Price said.

The Hersh article contained “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions … to fact check each one,” said Pentagon spokesman Maj. Roger M. Cabiness II in an email. “We had been and continue to be partners with Pakistan in our joint effort to destroy al Qaeda, but this was a U.S. operation through and through.”

Photo: Aamir Qureshi/AFP

German Ambassador to India, Michael Steiner (L) listens to Dr. Hubert Lienhard (R), Chairman of the Asia-Pacific Committee of German Business (APA), speaking during a joint news conference in New Delhi, India, 11 July 2014. MONEY SHARMA—EPA

Charities and citizen advocacy groups are having a tough time these days in some large developing countries. Both Russia and China have increasingly tightened restrictions on their activities, as well as other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Now it is India’s turn, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced on April 27 the cancellation of registrations for close to 9,000 foreign-funded NGOs, citing the failure of the NGOs to file returns. Tensions between foreign NGOs and the Indian government have long existed, although some fear under Modi’s watch oversight of NGOs is increasing.

Some NGOs have been placed on a “watch list,” rumored to include such well-known NGOs as the Climate Work Foundation, the Danish International Development Agency,  Greenpeace, Hivos, Mercy Corps, and the Sierra Club. Other NGOs have had their bank accounts frozen.  Among those targeted is the Ford Foundation, based in New York, which currently funds programs in India to promote livelihood among the poor, advocacy for economic and social rights, good governance, and women’s reproductive health.  Since starting its operation in 1952 under Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, the foundation has funded some $508 million. These programs are now required to receive permission from India’s home affairs ministry before any money gets transferred to recipients.

Many link the crackdown on Ford’s activities to their support of human rights activist Teesta Setalvad, who has fought for the rights of victims of the 2002 riots in Gujarat — during which Modi acted as chief minister of Gujarat. The riots followed the torching of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, which killed 59 people. Hindu mobs then attacked Muslims, resulting in the death of over 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Given his Hindu nationalist background, Mr. Modi stands accused of failing to quell the violence against Muslims in 2002, and has recently been criticised for his silence on several anti-Muslim incidents taking place since he assumed power.

In March, the Gujarat government condemned the funding by Ford of a trust to support the victims, accusing Ford of interfering in the “internal affairs” of India and “of abetting communal disharmony.” Some analysts attribute the move as an attempt by the Modi government to appease Sangh Parivar, the coalition of right-wing Hindu nationalist groups, started by members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who support Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Last June, a report by India’s Intelligence Bureau leaked to the media accused Ford, Greenpeace, and Hivos of hindering India’s growth through their active opposition to nuclear, mining and power projects.

While registrations for close to 9,000 NGOs have been cancelled, by some estimates there are 3.2 million NGOs operating in India, of which some 40,000 are registered. An attempt by the Modi government to clean up the registration process is needed, as well as more transparency, but the effort should not turn into a witch hunt to target specific groups, such as those who are trying to protect the environment or fight for human rights. The German Ambassador to India, Micheal Steiner, recently added his concerns at an event in Delhi, stating “NGOs are doing impressive work in India,” adding, “I think the fundamental approach should be to support their work.”  U.S. Ambassador Richard Verma went further, warning of a “potential chilling effect” should the Modi government continue to crackdown on NGOs.

While scrutiny of the activities of NGOs is certainly necessary and justifiable, any perceived bias against those NGOs operating in the environmental or human rights space risks driving many NGOs out and making it difficult for those that remain to operate effectively. Should the Modi government chose to impose new regulations on the operations of all NGOs, this will likely slow the operations of the many NGOs who are having a favorable impact on the quality of life in India.

International NGOs, such as the Danish International Development Agency, the Ford Foundation, Greenpeace, and Mercy Corps, operate across many countries and regions, and with constraints on their funding, must choose among worthy nations.  In making that choice of where to deploy funding and resources, two key factors are local operating conditions and how effective that capital can be deployed to produce real change. Should international NGOs decide India’s operating conditions are too onerous, and efforts to produce real change too distant, it will be up to the Indian government to fill the void with effective programs of its own, lest the Indian populace suffer.

The vast majority of scientists agree that human activity has significantly increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — most dramatically since the 1970s. Yet, global warming skeptics and ill-informed elected officials continue to dismiss this broad scientific consensus. As a generational challenge, climate change seems to be victim to a failure of communication. It is badly in need of a framework to help reduce the gap between what is understood by the scientific community, and what the public and policymakers need to know.

Susan Joy Hassol, a climate change communicator, analyst, and author who has been making climate science accessible for 25 years. Director of Climate Communication, Susan helps scientists communicate more effectively and provides information to policymakers, journalists, and others. She has authored and edited numerous reports, written an HBO documentary, and appeared on national media. In her recent talk, ClimateTalk: Science & Solution, given at a TEDx event, Susan discusses how a resolution of the climate communication failure is essential to unleash our ability to solve the climate problem. 

I had a chance to catch up with Susan during her visit to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) our discussion:

Climate change. Would you say it is the most important challenge we face this century?

Oh, yes. Left unchecked it’s an existential threat to civilization. It’s the mother of all challenges, in that by tackling climate change, we’d also address a range of other challenges like job creation, health issues, social equity, environmental protection and security concerns.

But just because it’s the most important challenge doesn’t mean it’s the most daunting. We have almost everything we need to solve it: the technologies, the policies, and recent polls show that there’s broad public support across political lines for climate action. It won’t be easy, but nothing important ever is. It will be quite cheap, though, compared to the consequences of inaction.

Is the challenge in tackling and generating action on climate change largely a communications failure?

Communications failures are major obstacles to action. They range from language confusion, both inadvertent and deliberate, to the disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about the science, to the way the media handle climate – the minimal coverage, the undue airtime given to contrarian views, and a general failure to connect the dots between what we’re experiencing and the human influence on climate.

But while these failures have been obstacles to action, they’re not insurmountable. There are ways forward.

What do you see as the top hurdles in bridging the gap between science and policy action with regards to climate change?

The top hurdles include the partisan ideological divide – the “toxic tribalism” that has infected the climate issue, and the disinformation campaign that deliberately muddies the waters – and they’re not unrelated. It’s hard to get sufficient policies enacted in the U.S. when the leadership of one political party still largely denies the science. The disinformation campaign fuels that denial. And the scarcity of media coverage is a hurdle because people tend to prioritize what’s “trending,” so climate change just doesn’t reach high priority status for most people.

Ten years from now — and realistically speaking — do you see concrete, substantive action happening on climate change? What is your hope?

It depends on whether we can achieve the political breakthroughs necessary. It’s not primarily a problem of science or technology. It’s primarily a political problem. If we can summon the leadership and political will to bridge the ideological divide and agree on solutions that provide wide-ranging benefits, it’s my hope that in ten years we’ll be well on our way to changing our trajectory and ensuring our future. We can do this.

Are there any angles that the discourse on climate change is not leveraging? Ideology and faith, for instance?

Some people are working diligently in those arenas. For example, Bob Inglis is engaging his fellow conservatives and Katharine Hayhoe is reaching out to her fellow evangelical Christians. And how about Pope Francis! Not only is he engaging the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, he makes a moral case for climate action that reaches many others too.

This is where the critical importance of trusted messengers comes in. People are much more likely to accept an idea when they hear it from someone with whom they connect on values. So there’s an important role for identifying and promoting trusted sources for various audiences.

If you could, how would you solve climate change?

I would implement globally all the policies and technologies we can already see working in various places. These would include properly pricing all energy sources to include all of their real costs to society; instituting strong energy efficiency standards on everything that uses energy, from cars to appliances; removing all subsidies from carbon-based fuels; and instating policies that encourage the use of renewable energy. To do all this, I’d draw on the talents of brilliant people who are making these things happen in cities, states, and countries around the world now.

How can the public — especially the younger generations — effectively engage and drive action around climate change?

I think becoming politically engaged on all levels – your university, city, state, and region – is key to driving action. Each college or town can serve as a laboratory for what works and can be an example for others to follow. You can let your political leaders know that climate change is a top priority issue that will determine your vote. Young people can pursue careers in clean energy and other avenues that use science, technology, and policies to ensure a healthy future. And for all of us, it’s time to raise the profile of climate change – to bring it to the front burner.

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The world passed a milestone of sorts last month, as China finally surpassed the United States as the top global importer of crude oil. But what really matters for Beijing — and the world — is less the volume of Chinese imports than where that oil is coming from.

In that sense, China’s continued and, indeed, deepening reliance on volatile regions of the world for energy supplies, especially the Middle East, points to continued security vulnerabilities for Beijing for decades to come. That’s true despite efforts to diversify where China gets its energy from, and breakneck efforts by Chinese leaders to transform the country into a true maritime power.

In April, Reuters reported, China imported a record 7.4 million barrels of oil a day, just nipping the 7.2 million barrels a day imported by the United States, long the world’s oil glutton. By most accounts, that marked the first time China has imported more oil than the United States. By other measures, including net imports of all petroleum products, China had already elbowed its way into first place in late 2013.

Regardless of the exact timing, the emergence of China as the top crude importer is unlikely to be a one-off event. Oil production is still booming in the United States, reducing import dependence to levels last seen when President Richard Nixon was scandal-free. China, in contrast, continues to consume more oil despite an economic slowdown and efforts to shift the economy away from heavy industry and more toward services.

More important than the 7 million barrels is the fact that Chinese dependence on overseas oil, and especially on oil from the Middle East, has only grown in recent years. In 2007, according to Chinese customs data scoured by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, China imported 3.2 million barrels a day with 1.46 million barrels, or 46 percent, coming from the Middle East. In 2014, even before the recent record, China imported an average of 6.1 million barrels of oil a day. Of that, more than 52 percent — or 3.2 million barrels — came from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.

In other words, despite years of effort to source more energy from places like Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and Russia, China gets more oil today from the Middle East than all the oil it imported just a few years ago.

Those diversification efforts “will help stem the rate of growth of dependence on Middle East oil, but they don’t change the fundamentals,” said Bruce Jones, director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and author of The Risk Pivot. “China will remain heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil and gas for 30 or 40 years at least.”

In practical terms, that makes China acutely vulnerable to fallout from any energy-supply disruptions in the Middle East, without being able to do much about it. Earlier this month, for example, Iranian ships detained a cargo ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-transit chokepoint. That prompted the U.S. Navy to escort some ships through the passage for a few days; now the Navy is just monitoring sea-lane security there. A recent study on Chinese naval operations concluded that “regional conflict is the most likely and most dangerous threat to sea-lane security.”

China has spent years trying to build a blue-water navy that could operate far from home. Since 2008 it has maintained a long-distance anti-piracy patrol off the coast of Somalia precisely to help limit the threat that pirates pose to shipping. But despite heroic efforts, including the launch of its first aircraft carrier and a rapid naval modernization, China is still decades away from matching U.S. naval capacities, which leaves it hostage to regional instability.

“There is a fundamental asymmetry between China’s reliance on Middle East oil supply, and its very minimal capacity to do anything to contain or mitigate political risk in the region,” Jones said.

More broadly, the strategic nightmare that has haunted Chinese leaders for two decades shows no sign of going away.

Former Chinese President Hu Jintao first fully articulated in 2003 what has become known as the “Malacca Dilemma.” That laid out Chinese fears that some unnamed power — such as the United States — could use its dominance at sea to blockade the narrow-but-critical sea lane in the Strait of Malacca near Singapore, through which about three-quarters of Chinese oil imports pass. Continued economic growth is the central pillar of legitimacy for China’s leadership; any serious and sustained energy-supply disruption would strike at the underpinnings of Beijing’s hold on power.

The “Malacca Dilemma” is behind some of China’s highest-profile diplomatic moves, from closer energy ties with Russia to the construction of a New Silk Road across Central Asia and a Maritime Silk Road across the Indian Ocean. But as the latest oil-import numbers show, those initiatives will likely only trim China’s vulnerability at the margins, without being able to address for at least a generation the existential worry that’s part and parcel of the country’s miraculous economic transformation.

Ultimately, China’s deep and continued reliance on energy imports, and especially crude from some of the most unstable parts of the world, will likely push Beijing to ramp up its diplomatic and military engagement not just in Africa or the Indian Ocean but in the broader Middle East. For a United States anxious to escape that morass and complete its own pivot to Asia, that might not be such unwelcome news.

Photo credit: FRANS CASPERS/Flickr

HONG KONG — The People’s Commune resides not on a utopian farm in the Chinese heartland, but on the second floor of a shabby building in Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong’s busiest and most neon-packed shopping areas. Wedged between two watch stores offering timepieces costing tens of thousands of dollars and a money exchange joint, the narrow entryway leading up to the shop is plastered with adverts for its top offerings: coffee, baby formula, and banned books.

It’s an unlikely combination, but one logical for its appeal to the store’s patrons, mostly mainland tourists on shopping sprees. 19.1 million mainlanders, or more than 2.5 times Hong Kong’s resident population of seven million, visited the former British colony as tourists in 2014. Many are looking for things they can’t get at home, or at least not as cheaply. Gucci handbags, cosmetics, and safe baby food make the list, but so does something more risqué: books that Chinese authorities have deemed ideologically unfit.

On the day I visited in early May the little shop was mostly deserted. Two clerks chatted behind the cashier, while a lone customer, an African man, pecked away on his laptop in a corner. The place was not much of a coffee shop — three tiny tables cramped behind a book display case was the extent of its ambitions. The room felt so tight it wasn’t clear where an espresso machine would fit. In its entirety, the store was at most 1,000 square feet, but it was filled to the brim with books.

To browse the wares on offer in People’s Commune is to wade into the unpredictable swamp of political rumors about top-level Chinese politics. All kinds of colorful critters flourish outside the control of the Communist Party. Much of it is bunk; even an adventurous reader would be well-advised to keep careful mental distance from titles like Hu Jintao’s Unsuccessful Suicide, Li Keqiang’s Imminent Resignation, or The Conspiracy to Overthrow Xi Jinping in Five Years. (Hu is China’s former president; Li is its current premier, Xi its current president.)

The sordid and salacious seem to sell particularly well. When I asked the clerk about the types of book favored by the store’s clientele, she pointed to a bestsellers list near the door. Among this month’s leaders was the purported autobiography of Shen Bing, a beautiful presenter at China Central Television (CCTV), who is thought to be a mistress of Zhou Yongkang, the former security czar now being prosecuted for corruption. The account is probably not authentic — it would be virtually impossible for Shen to have written it in 2014, while she was under investigation for the Zhou case. But the combination of sex, fame, and power evidently proved irresistible to many mainland Chinese buyers, whose exposure to an accounting of Zhou’s misdeeds is mostly limited to terse, carefully vetted state media releases.

Hong Kong publishing houses are only too happy to fill the information void that mainland state control creates, churning out a steady supply of books and magazines about the Chinese leadership that usually make no attempt to substantiate any claims beyond throwaway references to “well-placed sources in Beijing.” Street newsstands often peddle the political drama pieces as well, jamming the glum faces of somewhat sinister-looking Chinese men in suits next to porn and Japanese anime.

But I’d not come in search of steamy liaisons and failed coups; I was looking for a memoir by Li Rui, a 98-year old retired Communist Party official now known as one of the party’s harshest internal critics. Li’s book represents a slice of the Hong Kong banned-book genre that offers real value: memoirs by bona fide eyewitnesses to history. One of the best-known examples is Prisoner of the State, a memoir by late, deposed Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The reformist Zhao was once among China’s most powerful men, but he made the mistake of openly sympathizing with student protesters amassed in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and spent almost two decades under house arrest. Prisoner of the State is based on tapes of his conversations with friends that had been smuggled out of China. Similarly, Li’s book, Li Rui’s Oral Account of Past Events, is based on a series of interviews and conversations from the early 2000s.

Li’s life is the stuff of legend. Born in 1917 to a merchant family, the still-idealistic Li landed in Yan’an, the “red capital” of China, in the 1940s. The communists had caught a breather in Yan’an after their epic Long March to escape from the ruling Nationalists, who launched a series of “encirclement campaigns” to exterminate the fledgling party. At Yan’an, Li became a newspaper editor and grew close to many of the communist leaders who would go on to govern China, but also had his first taste of the party’s wrath when he spent a year in detention over suspicion of being a Nationalist spy.

After the Communist Party won the Chinese civil war in 1949, Li was charged with directing the country’s (then non-existent) hydroelectric projects, and also served as Mao Zedong’s secretary for a few brief months in 1958. In 1959, Li was purged and sent to labor camp, and spent almost two decades in political wilderness, including six years in solitary confinement at the infamous Qincheng prison, which has held many Chinese notables. In 1978, after Deng Xiaoping came to power, Li was rehabilitated and tapped to be the deputy head of central organization department, the organ that is, essentially, the human resources branch for the party, which now has over 85 million members. Li was tasked with building a pipeline of younger cadres, and the men who would later take top posts in the party, like former President Jiang Zemin, Hu, and Xi all had personal contacts with Li while he evaluated party members for promotion.

Mao was “ruthless,” according to Li, who Li claims did not care about the death of millions during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which amounted to a “mistake that Communist party made that was unprecedented in human history.” Li also painted Jiang in a negative light; after Li recommended Jiang for posts at key junctures of Jiang’s career, Jiang repeatedly sought Li’s advice and support throughout the 1980’s, but “acted like a stranger” after he becaming party secretary. Li had similar experiences with Hu, who ignored Li’s letters and advice after he ascended the throne. Li had woefully little to say about Xi, probably partly because Xi’s father was a close friend of his, but Li has continued to call for the party to institute democratic process to “save itself.”

As a bona fide party elder, Li has also emerged as a leading voice for political reform. After being sidelined once again after 1989 for criticizing the decision to use force against student protesters on Tiananmen Square, Li began to write extensively on his personal brushes with power, dealings with powerful men, and his having borne witness to the corruptive nature of power. His ripe old age, Yan’an credentials and past contributions to the party have protected him from anything worse than gentle warnings. Li gripes in the closing words to his memoir that his figurative “sons and grandsons in the party are now trying to rein me in.”

Li’s book made international news when his daughter, Li Nanyang, sued Chinese customs for confiscating 50 copies of the book when she tried to cross the border from Hong Kong into mainland China. In an opinion piece about the case, the staunch party-advocate Global Times dismissed Ms. Li’s actions as “divorced from China’s reality,” but acknowledged that bringing one or two banned books into China for one’s own enjoyment is a common, albeit “controversial,” practice. There is little chance that Ms. Li will have her day in court, and she probably does not expect to. If her goal was to call further attention to the informational wall China has built around its citizens, then she has already succeeded.

Since banned books are widely available in Hong Kong at bookstores and newsstands, probability dictates that a fair number of them must have seeped through the porous customs check into China. But a valuable and weighty memoir like Li’s is apparently rarer contraband than the frivolity and smut that’s mostly on offer in Hong Kong. For mainland Chinese readers, flipping through banned books is like peering through a looking glass to a strange world. But what they see seldom takes them any closer to the truth.

Image via Flickr/credit: I’m Goldfish

In 1962, in the depth of the Cold War, the Vatican excommunicated communist-revolutionary-turned-Cuban-president Fidel Castro after he banned religious celebrations and the building of new churches in Cuba, which would later declare itself an officially atheist state. But half a century later — two decades after the Cold War’s end — Fidel’s brother Raúl, Cuba’s current president, says he’s so impressed by Pope Francis that he’s considering going back to church.

After a very friendly visit with Francis at the Vatican, Castro told reporters on Sunday, “I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church, and I’m not joking.”

Castro visited Francis on his way back from Moscow, where he was reportedly the only Western Hemisphere leader to attend celebrations marking the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazism. The Moscow stop was a reminder that Cold War ties — and divisions — run deep. But they’re not immutable: Francis will reciprocate Castro’s gesture later this year and become the third pope of the last three to have held the office who have visited Cuba since the Cold War ended.

“When the pope goes to Cuba in September,” Castro said, “I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction.” He added that he had “always studied at Jesuit schools” — an allusion to the time before the revolution that brought his brother to power in 1959.

Warming relations between Havana and the Vatican demonstrate a broader trend of reconciliation between the once-hostile ideologies, which has accelerated under social welfare-minded Francis.

The basic principles behind Communism and Catholicism have been fundamentally at odds ever since Karl Marx famously wrote that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” Antipathy arguably reached its height with the Vatican’s 1949 “Decree against Communism,” which excommunicated all Catholics involved with communist groups. It continued with Pope John XXIII’s endorsement of democracy over other forms of government in 1963, and Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of “atheistic communism” as chief among “such ideologies as deny God and oppress the Church.” Later, many credited Pope John Paul II with helping speed the fall of communism in his native Poland, where Catholic churches served as centers of political opposition.

More recently, and particularly with Francis’s emphasis on egalitarianism and fighting poverty, the two ideologies’ goals, at least as preached by Francis and the Castros, have started to sound more similar. After the Cold War ended, Cuba  lifted restrictions on Catholic practice, allowed Catholics to join the Communist Party, and removed its constitution’s declaration of atheism. Catholics – nominally about 60 percent of Cuba’s population — no longer have to practice in secret, although many who’ve been baptized don’t practice regularly.

Fidel Castro visited the Vatican in 1996, paving the way for Pope John Paul to become the first pope to visit Cuba in 1998. Pope Benedict met Fidel and Raúl, both of whom were baptized and have showed some religious tendencies in the past, in Havana in 2012. Last year, the BBC reported that building was underway on the first new church since a freeze on construction after the Cuban Revolution.

Now, as a 2013 Atlantic article titled “The Vatican’s Journey from Anti-Communism to Anti-Capitalism” points out, Francis has declared “a new enemy for the Catholic Church: modern capitalism.” According to Francis, “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” But “this opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

With the Cold War long over and communism soundly defeated as an ideology in all but a handful of countries – Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and (nominally) China — Francis argues that for the welfare of mankind, states need to exercise more, not less, control over financial markets.

Some who don’t see many similarities between the two -isms have raised alarms that Francis is abandoning one for the other. Rush Limbaugh, for example, has accused Francis of practicing “pure Marxism” in place of Catholicism. Francis has graciously responded that “Marxist ideology is wrong, but I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people.”

Still, Communism and Catholicism now have more to talk about than they have for the past several decades. As the Atlantic’s Emma Green pointed out, Argentina-born Francis’s message seems to be crafted less for North America and Europe — the epicenters both of recent church scandals and of what Francis sees as individualistic capitalism’s corrupting influence — and more for Latin America and Africa, where economic development has left many behind.

On Sunday, Castro and Francis spoke in their native Spanish, building on a dialog that Castro has credited with helping thaw relations with the United States under President Barack Obama and move toward a lifting of sanctions that – along with communist rule itself — have helped impoverish the country.

During Castro’s visit with the Pope, the Associated Press reported, “Francis gave Castro a medal depicting St. Martin of Tours, known for caring for the destitute. ‘With his mantle he covers the poor,’ Francis told Castro, saying more efforts on behalf of the poor are needed.”

That’s definitely one thing both leaders can agree on.

GREGORIO BORGIA/AFP/Getty Images

As President Barack Obama and the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) sit down at Camp David this week, the White House’s goal is clear: reassure America’s Middle Eastern partners that it remains committed to their security. But the summit is clearly not off to a good start, with only two of the six GCC monarchs planning to attend — and King Salman of Saudi Arabia waiting until the last moment to announce he is not coming.

According to media reports, the Obama administration is preparing to assuage skepticism toward the potential nuclear agreement with Iran by focusing on new security arrangements and billions of dollars in weapons that the United States may offer to sell to the Gulf states. Arms sales and security guarantees may be a piece of the equation — but they won’t be enough. The most effective way for the Obama administration to make headway with the Gulf is by signaling a more comprehensive approach to countering Iranian influence in the Middle East.

What the Gulf states fear most is that in the aftermath of a nuclear agreement, the United States will cut a deal with Tehran to divide the region and abandon its Arab partners. Saudi Arabia has been the most vocal in expressing concerns that the United States is so interested in achieving an agreement on the nuclear question that it is willing to tolerate Iran’s unchecked influence throughout the region. To many of America’s partners, Iranian nuclear ambitions are inextricably linked to Tehran’s aggressive support of its proxies through the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which provides training, funding, and support for Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, among other groups.

So far, America’s allies have a poor record of responding to Iranian interventionism in the Arab world. In Syria, where the IRGC is operating overtly and covertly, the response of U.S. Gulf partners has been reactive — favoring support for militant Sunni Islamist forces to counter Iranian influence. Fighting the fire of Iranian proxies with the fire of radical Sunni fighters may be expedient, but it is unhelpful in realizing the longer-term goal of greater regional stability.

But it’s going to take more than ever-larger arms sales to convince the Gulf states that Iran isn’t on the march in the Middle East. In 2014, U.S. allies in the GCC outspent the Iranians by a margin of more than seven-to-one, investing over $113.7 billion in their militaries compared to Iran’s $15.7 billion. The United States has long given its Gulf allies some of its most advanced military equipment, such as the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets that it sold to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Riyadh alone spent more than $80 billion on defense in 2014. And Saudi air defenses — bolstered by advanced F-15 fighters, top-of-the-line intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and missile defense capabilities — are more than capable of defending the kingdom from Iran’s conventional military attacks. Yet, anxiety in the region is still high.

There are a number of steps Obama can take this week beyond arms sales to reassure his Gulf partners. He can start by putting the regional challenges caused by Iran at the top of the agenda at Camp David: If the president and his team start the discussion with a focus on what the Gulf states view as their top priority, instead of focusing on the Iranian nuclear challenge, it would send a strong message that the United States is listening to its partners’ concerns.

As part of this effort, the United States might also consider increasing interdictions of Iranian weapons shipments, improving intelligence cooperation, pursuing more aggressive joint covert actions against Iranian-supported terrorism, and finding ways to expose Iranian operatives and embarrass Iran when it pursues irresponsible destabilizing policies in the Middle East. The United States has already started to increase its support for such efforts by providing intelligence for the Saudi military operations against the Houthis in Yemen, and increasing its naval presence to deter Iranian arms shipments in the Gulf. The United States also sent a strong signal in the aftermath of the Iranian seizure of the container ship Maersk Tigris, beginning military escorts of U.S. and British commercial vessels throughout the Gulf, which likely played a role in the ship’s release.

The Obama administration should also embark on a long-term effort to train these U.S. allies how to more effectively counter Iran. There is already a potential model in Jordan, which is particularly focused on building the capacity of partners on the ground to defeat jihadists such as the Islamic State. The Jordanians are set to take the lead in a mission to train Iraqi Sunni Arab National Guard units, and Amman is expressing public intent to recruit and train Syrian fighters from tribal groups that live in Islamic State-controlled areas of eastern Syria. Other U.S. allies — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey — are scheduled to provide training sites and support for the U.S.-led program to train and equip Syrian rebels, which has already reportedly begun in Jordan.

The United States can also send a message to both its partners and to Iran that it is not abandoning the region by enhancing the current U.S. force posture in the Middle East. Obama should tell his GCC allies that the approximately 40,000 U.S. military personnel, and the robust U.S. naval and air capabilities, are not only in the Middle East to stay but will be enhanced. Forward stationing more advanced manned and unmanned aircraft and missile defense assets in the region, for instance, would help assure America’s wary partners.

Of course, all of these steps do not preclude increased arms sales to the Gulf States. But ideally, those should focus on defensive capabilities such as minesweepers and ballistic missile defense. They should also include the types of capabilities that would make our Arab partners more effective at countering the unconventional Iranian challenge, such as tactical tools like night vision goggles and weapons optics, and also more strategic capabilities such as advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and the networking architecture to enhance air and maritime domain awareness.

In the end, it will not be possible for President Obama to fully reassure America’s regional allies in the aftermath of a nuclear deal with Iran. Their concerns about a “Persian pivot” will remain, and their distrust of the president will make U.S. relations with the Gulf states difficult. But if Obama is able to begin to implement an effective reassurance strategy, he can hand off a better situation to his successor — who will have to do the bulk of the work in repairing some of America’s relations with the Gulf states in the aftermath of a nuclear deal with Iran.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Ex-CIA officer Joe Weisberg debuted his TV show The Americans in January 2013, chronicling the lives of two “illegals”—deep-undercover Russian spies seemingly living a normal American existence. Weisberg’s series was partly inspired by 10 illegals who had been apprehended on U.S. soil three years earlier. That event also revealed something far more dramatic, according to investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov: Russian intelligence appeared desperate to relive the glory days of the long-defunct Communist International (Comintern), a Soviet-era organization that recruited party sympathizers from around the world, while strengthening state security in the meantime. Weisberg, whose show recently aired its third-season finale, and Soldatov, whose book on Russian surveillance, The Red Web, will be published in September, recently debated the merits of illegals, trusting agents, and the world according to Edward Snowden.

Joe Weisberg: I have a dual perspective on the use of illegals. What is the point of continuing to run them? On the one hand, I see no purpose in it whatsoever—of putting all this effort into training these people and giving them these deep covers when they really have nothing to do, very little access, and no way to produce useful intelligence. On the other hand, I feel the same way really about all espionage; it’s all useless. Even the SVR [the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service] officers in the embassies, it’s the same for them. I don’t think they have access, and I don’t think they produce useful intelligence either. But, if you look at it differently, the illegals at least really have much better cover. Unless there’s a traitor who gives them up, they are generally impossible for the intelligence services to discover. So in a certain sense, it makes more sense to use illegals.

Andrei Soldatov: I have to disagree with you. My opinion is that illegals are the most unofficial way to do intelligence because it means that you have your officers trained for years and years to pretend that they are, in this case, Americans. The illegals who were used for many years in the United States were put in a very dangerous situation: These people were not protected by diplomatic power. If they’d been exposed, they would have been in a position to provide all details to counterintelligence. Many years ago, I had a very interesting conversation with someone from the SVR who told me a fascinating story. He said that some of these illegals in the United States, as they retired, they asked as a special reward to stay in the country. And I thought, they want to live in this culture they spent their life trying to undermine. If the people that trained and spent their careers in the United States do spend the rest of their lives also in the United States, they’re very vulnerable to counterintelligence. I would be very cautious of these people if I were in charge of Russian foreign intelligence.

JW: There’s a very interesting memoir by a former Directorate S officer who claims that the illegals were never fully trusted—for exactly the reason you’re saying. He says they were sometimes given a drug that was undetectable and a sort of truth serum. They were then questioned under the influence, sometimes waking up and not necessarily realizing they had been drugged. That was the level at which the Soviet Union didn’t fully trust its own agents.

AS: That brings us to an interesting question: Why did Soviet and now Russian intelligence actually decide to use illegals? Why do we have this strange practice of sending Russian nationals to pretend that they are American or British or French? It’s a unique thing that nobody except Russia actually uses. Comintern might have had one of the most successful intelligence agencies because it actually consisted of nationals of many countries, including Americans, the British, and all kinds of Europeans, united by the idea of communism. All these guys were recruited not by Soviet intelligence but by Comintern officers. The problem with Comintern, though, was that in 1943, when Stalin decided to disband it completely, many of these people were actually sent to jail or killed. Not too long after, KGB intelligence started a special avenue for training illegals; they were pressured to find some sort of replacement to that success.

* * *

AS: The scandal of illegals in 2010 was portrayed in Russia as a huge victory for the SVR, despite the fact that these guys were all caught—a PR celebration to say that Russian intelligence is back. But in the United States, the perception was completely different. How can you explain this contradiction?

JW: Well, the very first response was the FBI saying, “These guys are so dangerous.” But very quickly the media caught on to the fact that even the FBI couldn’t present any proof that they had actually done anything. Soon the reporting turned to the idea that these guys had no value and weren’t a real risk. It took about half a year for the intelligence community to fight a kind of rear-guard action, to say, “Here’s what the illegals might have been doing that was really dangerous, so you should be scared of them.” For example, one of them was close to somebody who was close to Hillary Clinton. And also they may have been communicating with people in the NSA [National Security Agency]. It’s in the [U.S.] intelligence community’s interest for the illegals to have posed a major, serious threat. When it was time to do The Americans, I was less interested in the reality of what illegals did or didn’t do. I was interested in the perception, in the spies among us, and in the fear at that time—Ronald Reagan, the evil empire. Of course, the illegals were actually there to act in wartime, to go and blow things up, poison water supplies—things like that. They did have a fairly insidious mission; it just wasn’t really acted upon. So I wanted to put back together a fantasy of the worst possible things and make it more dramatic. There’s no question that in the show these guys are much more active and are doing much worse things than illegals ever did. There’s some conflict between that and the main purpose of the show, which is really to say, “Take a look at the enemy; the enemy is really just like you, so stop seeing them so much as your enemy.”

AS: Yes, I think that’s a very good point to look at the actions. That was always the commentary from the SVR guys. One point of the illegals was always to act in a “special period,” which actually means war—to have a special cache of weapons in times of war, that illegals might use to hide weapons and explosives. In the scandal in 2010, everybody tried to get comments from the SVR. Eventually, a general was dispatched. When he was asked, “Well this program is so expensive, we have left these guys for years, and what is the result?” he said the same speech: “Well, in ‘a special period,’ these guys might be useful.” So they developed this program when they had in mind a “period” when there might be a big war between Russia—or the Soviet Union—and the United States. They developed special procedures and they still work from these procedures. They still have the same principles. It’s fascinating, that so many years have passed, nobody thinks about the big war between the two super powers, but nevertheless, they still have these things.

JW: I’ll tell a favorite illegals story: They were also sent to Eastern Europe, interestingly enough—to the Soviet allies. For example, there was an illegal that was sent to Czechoslovakia in 1968; this person, like many of the illegals, had become somewhat westernized and he sent back to Russia these very honest accounts about what was going on and was really sort of pro-the forces of Czechoslovakia that were fighting for freedom and independence. This person was fearless and, to a certain degree, because of some of the politics of the illegals program, was able to send these reports and didn’t have any repercussions for it. Of course the general officers in the embassy were under great pressure to say what everybody wanted to hear. That was a problem with Soviet intelligence throughout the entire Soviet period—that you couldn’t really give accurate intelligence because you could lose your job over it. But this illegal was able to go into Czechoslovakia and say, “Look, these people are not so bad; they are kind of doing something decent”—and send these reports back to Moscow.

AS: That’s such an interesting story. There were at least some sort of results from this kind of program.

* * *

JW: You speak and you write very freely about everything going on in Russia. Are you afraid of being arrested?

AS: Well, I was first interrogated by the FSB many years ago, in 2002. So I might say I got used to it. But three years ago, it was impossible to accuse journalists of state treason because they were special marked in the registration—you could not be accused of espionage if you had no access to classified information. But then this was changed by Russian legislators. Now it’s possible to accuse journalists or others of state treason even if they had no access to any kind of secrets. And of course this put the journalists in a special and very awkward situation. The Russian system of censorship is based mostly on instigating self-censorship. It’s not about real suppression. It’s based on intimidation. You are not actually told what to do; you need to guess. And I try to fight this hold of self-censorship, trying to think what might the reaction be of the American or British or French journalists in this situation.

But thanks to the Internet, we’re sometimes able to find a way to bypass the censorship. Something that’d be impossible to publish in Russian media, if you find a way to have your story published first on the web, after that, Russian publications might translate the story and publish it in Russian.

JW: When people do self-censor, are they afraid that, as some journalists have been, that they’re going to be beaten up on the street? Or is the primary fear that they’ll be arrested, tried in a court, and sent to prison?

AS: It’s about different things. First, you might very quickly lose your job if you publish something sensitive. The owners are mostly pro-Kremlin oligarchs, and these guys know the rules. They know how to put pressure on the editors and the editors might talk to the journalists and find out that everybody understands the rules. The last time I was able to work for a Russian publication full time was in 2009. So this is a reality. But also we have all kinds of personal friends and we have Russian investigative journalists who’ve been killed. The most famous is Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006. And you know, just recently, Boris Nemtsov was killed very close to the Kremlin. So you might say what you want to say but everybody understands this as a message, that you should be very cautious. And this message is very well understood.

* * *

AS: The thing about Edward Snowden that is usually is not understood in the United States and the rest of the world is that Snowden is completely unavailable for Russian journalists and for foreign journalists based in Moscow. All of the interviews he’s done over the last year and a half were conducted by people coming from the United States, specifically to interview him. We don’t quite understand the reasons for the secrecy, because in December Snowden said that he doesn’t feel like he’s in danger, that he can walk freely, cross the streets, use the underground. Of course this lack of transparency doesn’t help because Snowden’s presence in Moscow coincides with a huge offensive sponsored by the Russian authorities on the Internet. And many of the oppressive measures are justified in Russian legislatures by his revelations. They’re now trying to force global companies like Google and Facebook to relocate their servers to Russia, arguing that we need to protect personal data of Russian citizens from NSA spying. But the goal is obvious: to provide back doors to these systems for Russian secret services.

JW: Do you think that had it not been for Snowden, the authorities would have simply found another excuse to do that?

AS: That might have been possible, but remember that before Snowden, Russia failed to make other changes to the Internet. But now they had an excuse. Part of the problem is that Snowden failed to really fight for Internet freedom in places outside the United States.

JW: He seems like someone who must be horrified by what the Russian government is doing with the Internet. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that he’s not speaking out strongly because of his own personal interests. Is that eventually going to become too much of a conflict for him and he’ll have to speak out from his conscience? Or is he going to live out the rest of his days in Moscow swallowing his conscience?

Soldatov: courtesy photo; Weisberg: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

During a four-hour helicopter ride over the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara in early February, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz and Russia’s Gazprom boss, Alexey Miller, mapped out plans that could potentially rebuild the long-adversarial relationship between their two countries. The men scouted the likely path of “Turkish Stream,” Moscow’s latest grandiose pipeline proposal, which would channel natural gas from the Russian coastal town of Anapa all the way to Ipsala, on Turkey’s border with Greece.

But Yildiz and Miller also traced what could be the newest fault line in Europe’s geopolitical landscape. That helicopter ride, and the subsequent formal agreement signed in early May, suggest Turkey’s patience with Brussels is wearing thin—the EU, after all, has been slow-footing the country’s membership for decades now—and Ankara’s willingness to support Europe’s foreign-policy priorities, from diversifying energy resources to isolating Russia, is diminishing. Now, this one pipeline, which could deliver gas as early as next year, could have the power to embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin, endanger a critical alliance the West has spent decades cultivating, and upend Eurasia’s entire energy and security landscape.

In other words, Turkey would become a middleman for Europe’s energy buyers, and it would be precisely the linchpin Moscow needs to keep an energy hold on the continent.

To be sure, Turkey has long been at the center of global pipeline politics. Since the 1990s, Europe has fantasized that natural gas pipelines would someday push fuel from the Caucasus and Central Asia to Europe. And Turkey’s privileged geographical position would indeed allow for this, while there’s abundant gas in places such as Azerbaijan. Europe’s dreams finally seemed to be coming true in March 2015, when, after years of development, Turkey and Azerbaijan broke ground on a trans-Anatolian pipeline designed to shuttle gas from the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus and Turkey, and into Europe.

But here’s the rub: Europe doesn’t consume enough gas to justify two new massive pipelines. Put simply, the road goes through Turkey, and Turkey will decide whom Europe will deal with on energy.

Turkey’s games with Europe, while not a complete about-face, are nevertheless jarring. Ankara has been Western-leaning and secular since the end of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I—an allegiance that was cemented in 1952, when the country joined NATO. But that started to change at the turn of this century, when Ahmet Davutoglu, currently the prime minister and a longtime advisor to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, began trying to forge much closer ties with nearby Muslim countries and crafting an increasingly independent stance toward Washington and NATO. (In 2003, for instance, Ankara notably refused permission for the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to cross Turkey to invade Iraq. More recently, Turkey has proved a reluctant partner in the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State and has taken an antagonistic approach to Israel after years of good relations.)

Turkish Stream, then, might be viewed as the culmination of Davutoglu’s vision: The country is moving to become a neo-Ottoman powerhouse and the center of Eurasia’s energy structure.

Such rebranding comes just in time for Russia, which, for nearly 10 years, has been looking for a way to keep a reluctant Europe hooked on its energy while sidestepping a problematic Ukraine. Starting in 2007, Putin began championing “South Stream,” a Russian-built pipeline meant to carry Russian gas across the Black Sea, through Turkish waters, into Bulgaria, and then into the rest of Europe. Moscow only grasped in 2014 that the plan didn’t comply with EU law: Brussels isn’t too keen on monopolies, especially ones that control both energy and the pipes that carry it.

Nonetheless, Russia was already well on its way to scheming a new way forward. In December, while in Ankara for a one-day trade and economic mission, Putin abruptly announced the death of South Stream in the middle of a news conference and debuted the new Turkish Stream. Russia and Turkey’s energy relations, Putin said, “have reached a truly strategic level.” Although the initial announcement came as a surprise to nearly everyone, including Russian energy officials and Turkish authorities, just two months later Yildiz and Miller were boarding that helicopter for their scouting mission.

What’s significant—and problematic—about Turkey’s apparent leap into Russia’s embrace is that Ankara has been both a bulwark of Western security architecture for more than 50 years and a key to Europe’s plot to reduce reliance on Russian energy, an even more urgent priority since the start of the Ukraine crisis. In one fell swoop, Erdogan’s Turkey seems to be abandoning its wilting dream of joining Europe and appears to be throwing in its lot with the one country most determined to undermine the global order in general, and European security in particular.

From Brussels’s point of view, Turkey would likely be a more reliable transit country for energy supplies than Ukraine, but it still lacks much of the physical infrastructure needed to serve that role, such as natural gas storage tanks. What’s more, unlike existing pipelines between Russia and Europe, Turkish Stream wouldn’t even deliver gas directly to the European Union; rather, the gas would be held in Brussels’s backyard in the hope that it would spend billions of dollars to go and fetch the gas at the Turkey-Greece border.

For Moscow, the upside of Turkish Stream is obvious: If it were built, Putin would finally succeed in isolating Ukraine, while still keeping big parts of Europe reliant on Russian fuel. And for Ankara, Turkish Stream could be the vehicle for finally achieving Davutoglu’s dream of reinventing Turkey. But for all his yearnings to resuscitate former glories, he seems to be overlooking the country’s complicated history with Russia.

For 400 years, from the middle of the 16th century through the height of the Cold War, Turks and Russians battled constantly for supremacy in the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, and Crimea. And those issues haven’t been collecting dust in history books. After a couple of decades of peace, the hundreds of thousands of Turkic Tatars living in the Crimean peninsula are again dreading Russian reprisals reminiscent of the Stalin years; Russia is ramping up naval activities in the Black Sea; and Putin is eyeing a greater military presence near Turkey, including new basing agreements with Cyprus and Syria. This is all compounded by long-
standing differences over the conflict in Syria: Turkey wants to oust President Bashar al-Assad and has let Islamist groups run rampant, while Russia staunchly backs its Syrian ally.

Thus, Turkey’s part in the newest pipeline project and the cementing of a strategic relationship with Russia amount to a massive bet that centuries of historical rivalry and animosity can be erased with cheap gas, some spit in a palm, and a friendly handshake. That calls to mind the old Turkish proverb: “The sheep separated from the flock is soon eaten by the wolf.” Or, in this case, the bear.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister