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December 26, 2006
Churchill and Thatcher left off Tories' great Britons list
Churchill and Thatcher left off Tories' great Britons list - Britain - Times Online
Philip Webster, Political Editor
Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher are conspicuous by their absence in a list of 12 great Britons who created the institutions that shaped the country’s history, compiled by the Conservatives and eminent historians.
The ranking was prompted as part of the Tory party’s review of the teaching of history in schools and comes after surveys showing that many children lack a basic knowledge of history.
The review is looking at ways of increasing the emphasis on narrative history, which children find more interesting and which helps to make the past more accessible to them. But the debate it stokes is likely to consume the adult population as well.
As David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said yesterday, history is always a matter of interpretation and the list is neither definitive nor exhaustive. If the aim is to provoke debate, as Mr Willetts said, it seems certain to succeed.
The list is in chronological order, and begins with Saint Columba for bringing Christianity to Britain, and ends with Nye Bevan (1897-1960), who is included for his role in creating the National Health Service.
That his is the last name on the list suggests that the historians and the Conservatives do not regard any of the institutions founded since the middle of the last century as comparable to those that came before.
Mr Willetts commented: “The loss of national memory means a loss of national identity. Britain needs to be one country — and this means that all British people must share a knowledge and understanding of the events which have made us what we are as a people.
“A country is more than an aggregation of individuals. It consists of the associations that individuals form — the institutions which bind us together in common and overlapping memberships. These institutions are the inheritance of every British child, and all British children should know about them.”
He added: “History is always a matter of interpretation, and this list is intended as neither definitive nor exhaustive. But this list should provoke thought and debate.”
The selection differs considerably from the findings of the 2002 BBC Great Britons poll in which the public voted to place 100 figures in order of greatness. Only two of those on the Tory list were selected by the public to take places in the BBC Top Ten — Isaac Newton and Oliver Cromwell.
In the BBC vote, Churchill, whose cause was advocated by Mo Mowlam in a BBC Two debate, was victorious after 1.6 million votes were cast, beating the engineer Isambard Brunel by 456,498 votes to 398,526. Diana, Princess of Wales, came in third with 225,584 votes.
Charles Darwin was fourth, followed by William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Queen Elizabeth I, John Lennon, Horatio Nelson and Oliver Cromwell. The BBC was surprised that Shakespeare, voted Man of the Millennium in 2000, struggled to secure 10 per cent of the vote. He is not included in the Tory list.
The Conservatives have also invited people who would like to contribute their ideas on how history should be taught, and who they think have shaped Britain’s institutions, to e-mail their thoughts to the public services website: www.publicserviceschallenge.com.
The list was compiled from suggestions by Neil McKendrick, Emeritus Reader in History and former Master, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; David Starkey, author of The Monarchy of England; and Michael Burleigh, the historian and author of Earthly Powers: The Conflict Between Religion & Politics.
December 26, 2006 at 10:29 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian
Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian, the Founding Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, is one of the United States’ most distinguished diplomats, credited with a career spanning the administrations of eight U.S. presidents. Ambassador Djerejian, who is also the Janice and Robert McNair Chair in Public Policy and the Edward A. and Hermena Hancock Kelly University Chair for Senior Scholars at the institute, is a leading expert on the complex political, security, economic, religious, and ethnic issues of the Middle East. Ambassador Djerejian has played key roles in the Arab-Israeli peace process, the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, successful efforts to end the civil war in Lebanon, the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and the establishment of collective and bilateral security arrangements in the Persian Gulf.
Prior to his nomination by President Clinton as U.S. ambassador to Israel, he served both President Bush and President Clinton as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and President Reagan and President Bush as U.S. ambassador to the Syrian Arab Republic. Ambassador Djerejian has also served as deputy assistant secretary of Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, as deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the Kingdom of Jordan, and as special assistant to President Reagan and deputy press secretary for foreign affairs in the White House.
Ambassador Djerejian joined the Foreign Service in 1962, and his assignments included political officer in Beirut, Lebanon, and Casablanca, Morocco; he also was consul general in Bordeaux, France. He headed the political section in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the critical period in U.S.-Soviet relations marked by the invasion of Afghanistan. He served in the United States Army as a first lieutenant in the Republic of Korea following his graduation from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He holds a bachelor’s of science and an honorary doctorate in humanities from Georgetown University, and a doctor of laws, honoris causa, from Middlebury College. He speaks Arabic, Russian, French, and Armenian.
Ambassador Djerejian has been awarded the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State's Distinguished Honor Award, the President's Meritorious Service Award, the Anti-Defamation League’s Moral Statesman Award, and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
Ambassador Djerejian was asked by Secretary of State Colin Powell to chair a congressionally mandated Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World. The advisory group published its report October 1, 2003.
Since March 2006, Ambassador Djerejian has served as senior advisor to the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel mandated by the Congress to assess the current and prospective situation in Iraq. The Baker Institute is an organizing sponsor of the ISG.
He is managing partner of Djerejian Global Consultancies, LLP, and is also on several public and nonprofit boards. Recently, former President Bill Clinton invited him to serve as an Advisory Board member of the Clinton Global Initiative’s working group on Mitigating Religious and Ethnic Conflict.
Ambassador Djerejian is married to the former Françoise Andrée Liliane Marie Haelters. They have a son, Gregory Peter Djerejian, and a daughter, Francesca Natalia Djerejian.
Select Publications, Presentations and Speeches
* Ambassador Djerejian’s essay, "From Conflict Management to Conflict Resolution," on the opportunity to produce a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace settlement following the recent armed conflict appears in the November/December 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, www.foreignaffairs.org. View: [PDF]
* Guest Blog: Djerejian on Public Diplomacy, Belgravia Dispatch, November 9, 2005.
* Press Release: Rice University's Baker Institute issues 'Trilateral Action Plan for Road Map Phase I Implementation'
* Policy Recommendation Paper: Trilateral Action Plan for Road Map Phase I Implementation
* Policy Recommendation Paper: Creating a Roadmap Implementation Process Under U.S. Leadership
* Policy Recommendation Paper: Changing Minds Winning Peace: Congressional Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy
* Congressional Testimony: The Honorable Edward P. Djerejian, Chairman, Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State, the Judiciary and Related Agencies.
* Speech: June 25, 2005: Future Prospects for Armenia
* OP-ED: A Simple Plan for America's Mideast Diplomacy, The Financial Times, July 14, 2004.
Select Appearances and News Articles
* CNBC Television Appearance regarding Iran, January 17, 2006.
* CNN Television Appearance regarding Ariel Sharon, January 6, 2006.
* FOX News Television Appearance regarding Ariel Sharon, January 5, 2006.
* It's the Policy Choices, The Washington Post, October 2, 2005 Sunday, Final Edition, Editorial; B06.
* On Mideast 'Listening Tour,' the Question Is Who's Hearing, The New York Times, September 30, 2005 Friday, Late Edition - Final, Section A; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Diplomatic Memo.
* Remembering 9/ 11, The Houston Chronicle, September 12, 2005, Monday, 3 STAR EDITION, B.
* Values war rages, says diplomat, Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), April 8, 2005.
* Al Hurra makes slow gains in Arab world, UPI, March 17, 2005.
* Edward Djerejian discusses Syria, National Public Radio (NPR), SHOW: Morning Edition 10:00 AM EST NPR, February 28, 2005 Monday.
* Baker Institute offers 'street map' for Mideast peace; U.S. leadership is essential for lasting stability in turbulent area, report contends, The Houston Chronicle, February 04, 2005, Friday, 3 STAR EDITION, A;, Pg. 17.
Last Updated: December 2006
Candidates Who Passed
The July 2000 NYS Bar Exam
DJEREJIAN, GREGORY PETER
December 26, 2006 at 03:47 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 25, 2006
New MI5 boss is top expert on Al-Qaeda
New MI5 boss is top expert on Al-Qaeda - Sunday Times - Times Online
David Leppard
A SPYMASTER who has tracked Al-Qaeda’s activities in Britain since the organisation first emerged as a threat to this country is frontrunner to be the next head of MI5.
Sources said Jonathan Evans, senior deputy director-general of the security service, was a “racing certainty” to take over from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who surprised Whitehall last week by announcing that she would be stepping down early from the top job.
Sources said she had decided to quit in anticipation that she might be asked to resign over blunders concerning last year’s July 7 bombings.
Evans is a career spy with a background in fighting terror. He served as head of G branch, MI5’s international terrorism section, making him the agency’s then supremo in dealing with the emerging Al-Qaeda threat. Before that he served as a senior officer in Northern Ireland, helping to spearhead the fight against the IRA.
The Home Office maintained last week that there was nothing unusual about Manningham-Buller’s decision to leave after only four years in the job.
In her leaving statement she insisted that she had decided in “early 2005” that it would be time to stand down by April 2007. But Whitehall officials said that the announcement had come as a “surprise”.
Insiders and security experts see it as a “pre-emptive strike” linked to forthcoming revelations concerning how much her agency knew about the intentions of the July 7 suicide bombers in the 18 months before the attacks.
The sources said that the agency was bracing itself for detailed disclosures about its intelligence on Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shezhad Tanweer, the two leading bombers who killed 52 people. The Sunday Times and other media are prevented by court orders from making this evidence public.
The sources said that Manningham-Buller’s decision to step down was unlikely to head off widespread public criticism of the spy agency: “She knows she will be asked to resign over this. She was protected by Charles Clarke (the former home secretary) but some people believe that if things go badly wrong John Reid (his successor) will be happy to slit her throat.”
In his statement on her departure, Reid was fulsome in his praise. “Her contribution to the security of our nation has been invaluable and I pay tribute to her unstinting efforts,” he said.
The Home Office will this week begin circulating advertisements for her replacement. Reid will make the final choice, expected to be announced by the end of next month. However, security sources are already tipping Evans to take over in April. As deputy, he has had daily responsibility for oversight of the service’s operational work.
Evans is highly respected as a spymaster. A source said: “He is very switched on. He’s dynamic, confident, a natural leader. He’s a gifted communicator. He’s very comfortable with himself and is good with ministers and mixing at the top table. But he is also very personable. He’s good at dealing with staff in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way.”
Evans is also said to have a formidable intellect: “He grasps the material and can make a quick decision. He has gravitas but he’s also got a very relaxed style.”
Former MI5 bosses including Dame Stella Rimington and Sir Stephen Lander have taken on part-time business directorships or public appointments, but Manningham-Buller is understood to want to spend more time on her 70-acre farm with her husband, a university academic.
They keep chickens and alpaca, the llama-like South American animal reared in Britain mainly for its wool. “She’s keen on hens and organic eggs,” said a colleague. “But she’s also very much in love with her husband. They are looking forward to spending more time together.”
December 25, 2006 at 10:25 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 24, 2006
US raid kills 'Taleban commander'
BBC NEWS | South Asia | US raid kills 'Taleban commander'
A senior Taleban commander and associate of al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, has been killed in Afghanistan, the US military has said.
Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani's vehicle was reportedly hit in an air strike in Helmand province in south Afghanistan.
The US said Mullah Osmani was the chief Taleban military commander in southern Afghanistan - scene of heavy clashes between the Taleban and US-led forces.
A Taleban spokesman is said to have dismissed reports of his death.
But Afghanistan's interior ministry confirmed the killing, calling it "a big achievement."
An Islamist insurgency spearheaded by the resurgent Taleban militia is at its strongest in the southern Afghan provinces bordering Pakistan.
'Not present'
US military spokesman Col Tom Collins said Osmani "had been deeply involved in terrorist acts against the people of Afghanistan, Nato and the government".
"He was a top commander of Taleban operations in the south and now he's no more."
Col Collins said Osmani was one of four commanders at the top of the Taleban's hierarchy and had also been in charge of the militia's finances.
He was reportedly close to the Taleban's fugitive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and to al-Qaeda chief, Osama Bin Laden.
Two people travelling with Osmani also died in the air strike on his vehicle on Tuesday, the US military said.
Col Collins said that although nothing was left of Osmani's body, intelligence sources have confirmed his death.
But a Taleban spokesman quoted by Reuters news agency denied the commander had been killed.
"He is not present in the area where American forces are claiming to have killed him," commander Mullah Hayat Khan told the agency by telephone.
"The American and Nato forces from time to time make such false claims. It's just propaganda against the Taleban."
December 24, 2006 at 01:29 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 15, 2006
No engagement, no pregnancy, no assassination - one by one, all the conspiracy theories are killed off
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent, and Stewart Tendler, Crime Correspondent
The 832-page Stevens report aims to end ten years of speculation about the car crash in a Paris underpass that killed Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul
Graphic: the accident in the tunnel
The relationship
The claim Mohamed Al Fayed said that the Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed were in a serious relationship and intended to get engaged. Mr Al Fayed told the inquiry that his son was going to present a ring to the Princess on the night she died and that they would have announced their engagement on September 1, 1997.
He also claimed that the Princess was pregnant and that the security services became aware of this through monitoring their telephone conversations. This, he maintained, provided a motive to murder them.
The investigation The Stevens team talked to the Princess’s family and friends. Prince William told the team that he had no knowledge of any plan by his mother to get engaged toFayed.
They also spoke to the Princess’s friend Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who spoke to her two days before she died. She told the inquiry that in a phone call the Princess said she was having a lovely time on holiday with Fayed but had no plans to marry.
“I said , ‘You’re not doing anything silly, are you, like getting married?’ She replied: ‘Not at all. I’m being spoilt and I’m having a lovely time, Annabel. I need marriage like a rash on my face.’ ”
When the Princess’s butler, Paul Burrell, suggested to her in a phone call that Fayed might be preparing to propose marriage, she asked for advice. Mr Burrell told the inquiry: “She didn’t want to accept it but didn’t want to offend Dodi and seem ungrateful. I suggested she wear it on the fourth finger of her right hand. She thought it was a clever solution.”
Mr Al Fayed also claimed to have information that the Princess and his son had gone to the Repossi jewellers in Monte Carlo, where they selected an engagement ring that was allegedly sent to Italy for sizing and later collected by Dodi Fayed from a Repossi branch in the Place Vendôme, in Paris.
The evidence about selecting and purchasing the ring was contradictory, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington said. Fayed or the Princess might have seen an item of jewellery in the shop window, but the company has no evidence of work being carried out on the ring. Fayed did visit the Repossi branch in the Place Vendôme on Saturday, August 30, 1997, and was shown a selection of rings but he left with only a catalogue. Two rings were later sent to the Ritz and Fayed selected one from the “Tell me Yes” range, regarded as an engagement ring range. It was not pre-selected or sent to Italy for sizing.
The verdict The weight of the evidence is that Diana, Princess of Wales was not intending to get engaged. Fayed may have meant to propose but the only evidence is from Mr Al Fayed.
Pregnancy claims
The claim Mr Al Fayed claimed that the body of the Princess was embalmed illegally in France and that this was done to conceal a pregnancy.
The investigation No tests for pregnancy were carried out in France but the Home Office pathologist carried out a full post-mortem examination and saw no signs of pregnancy. There was no indication of pregnancy given by the Princess to her doctor, family, friends or associates or those carrying out “personal services” to her in the days before she died.
The Stevens team found a sample of the Princess’s blood in the wreckage of the Mercedes in 2005. Tests showed no trace of the pregnancy hormone HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin.
Lord Stevens’s report went on: “There is witness evidence from close friends and others that the Princess of Wales in mid-August 1997 was in her normal menstrual cycle. There is witness evidence that she was using contraception.”
Myriah Daniels, a holistic healer who travelled with the couple on board the yacht Jonikal, said: “I know for a fact she wasn’t pregnant because she told me she wasn’t and through the course of my work on her body I found no indications to show me that she was.”
The verdict Pathological, scientific, medical, and anecdotal evidence showed that Diana, Princess of Wales was not pregnant.
Perceived threats
The claim The inquiry investigated claims that the Princess feared for her own safety and believed that there were plans to cause her harm.
The investigation The inquiry heard that the late Lord Mishcon, the Princess’s solicitor, made a note of a meeting with her in 1995 at which she told him that “reliable sources” had said to her that by 1996 efforts would be made to get rid of her, whether by her having a car accident resulting from brake failure, or by arranging an injury so serious that she would be declared unbalanced. “The Princess apparently believed that there was a conspiracy and that both she and Camilla Parker Bowles were to be ‘put aside’ ”, Lord Mishcon told the inquiry. Although he did not believe that what she was saying was credible, Patrick Jephson, who was her private secretary at the time, “half believed” the accuracy of her comments.
In addition Lord Stevens investigated a note left by the Princess in 1996 in which she claimed that the Prince of Wales was planning an accident in her car caused by brake failure to clear that way for him to remarry. It was assumed that remarriage referred to Mrs Parker Bowles — but the Stevens inquiry reveals that the note identified another woman. “There is a generally held perception that this reference is to Camilla Parker Bowles. This is not so. Operation Paget knows the identity of the woman named.” However, it does not disclose it.
It was reported last night that the woman is Tiggy Legge-Bourke, the former royal nanny, who is now married and living in South Wales. She declined to comment.
The Princess told her friend Roberto Devorik that she feared three people: Nicholas Soames, a friend of her husband; Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, who is married to the Princess’s sister; and the Duke of Edinburgh. “She said of Robert Fellowes: ‘He hates me. He will do anything to get me out of the Royals. He cost me the friendship with my sister’ — and added: ‘Prince Philip wants to see me dead’.”
Mr Devorik said that the Princess had had a premonition that she would be killed and was convinced that “they, the machinery” were going to “blow her up”. After her Panorama broadcast the Princess said to a friend: “I am sure Prince Philip is involved with the security services. After this they are going to get rid of me.”
On the day after losing her HRH title she looked at a portrait of the Duke and said: “He really hates me and would like to see me disappear. . . . He blames me for everything.”
On a flight to Rome with Mr Devorik in August 1996, she said: “Well, cross your fingers — any minute they will blow me up. . . You are so naive. Don’t you see they took my HRH title and now they are slowly taking my kids? They are now letting me know when I can have the children.”
But Lucia Flecha de Lima, another friend of the Princess, said she had never spoken of such fears to her. “She never feared Charles. Prince Philip tried to help her during the difficult period of her marriage, in his own way. He was sometimes a bit brutal. I have read the letters. They were not unkind. He is a clever man. He would not hurt her,” she told the inquiry.
The Duke saw no reason to comment when contacted by the Stevens team about the allegations.
The verdict There is no supporting evidence to show any grounds for the Princess’s repeated claims that she might be killed in a car accident after the brakes were tampered with. The Princess believed that her telephone conversations were being listened to and there may have been attempts to listen to her conversations at home.
The paparazzi
The claim Mohamed Al Fayed claimed that the presence of the paparazzi created the environment in which the collision could be arranged.
The investigation The Stevens inquiry went back over the Frenchinvestigation into the actions of the paparazzi. They found that the film seized from the cameras of those at the scene showed they were taking photographs of the car or the occupants, or both, almost immediately after their arrival at the scene as there were no emergency services visible in their photographs.
But there was no evidence to show that those arriving immediately after the crash, or later, deliberately interfered with attempts to save the passengers in the car or undertook any actions that showed they were involved in a conspiracy to harm them.
The verdict There is no evidence that others took advantage of an environment created by the paparazzi, and neither is there evidence that they colluded with others to create the circumstances that allowed others to murder the Princess and Fayed.
Henri Paul
The claim The inquiry investigated allegations that the driver worked for the security services, either of France or Britain, and was instrumental in the plan to have the Princess killed.
The investigation The team looked at allegations that incorrect information about Henri Paul’s fitness to drive because of alcohol had been deliberately disseminated in order to cover up the real cause of the crash, and that samples taken from his body were swapped by the security services with those of another body so that toxicological results for the French investigation did not relate to him.
Claims that Paul received payments from intelligence or security services could not be proved or disproved by his accounts. “His cash flow could not be accounted for solely from known income sources. In the absence of more specific information, different inferences can be made in respect of his finances,” the Stevens report said.
Some of the procedures and documentation relating to the first post-mortem examination on Paul were not of the highest standard. Paul had beeen drinking and was three times the legal limit in France and about twice the legal limit for driving in Britain. But there was no evidence that he was unsteady on his feet after his unexpected return to work on the night of August 30.
“Although there is no definitive evidence that Henri Paul was an alcoholic there is evidence of a perceived dependency on alcohol on the part of Henri Paul himself,” the report said.
The verdict There is nothing to support the contention that the samples analysed were not those of Paul’s blood. There is no evidence that Paul was a paid informer of MI6.
The Mercedes
The claim That the car the Princess was travelling in was tampered with.
The investigation The forensic accident investigator David Price, a consultant at the Transport Research Laboratory, examined the wreck for the inquiry. The report said: “David Price found nothing in his examinations of the mechanical elements of the car that would have adversely affected the control of the car or survivability of the occupants.
“His technical examination confirmed that none of the occupants of the car was wearing a seat belt at the time of the collision.”
This differed from the original French investigation, which suggested that the bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones may have been in the process of fastening the belt in the front passenger seat at the time of the accident.
All the seat belts were in good working order, it said.
The verdict “There were no defects on the vehicle that could have contributed to the causes of the crash. There was no evidence of tampering. or interference with the vehicle.” Suggestions that the speedometer was stuck at 192km/h (120mph) after the crash were not correct, the report said. The instrument had returned to zero after impact and tests, backed by today’s report, suggested the crash speed was about 65mph.
The accident
The claim Mr Al Fayed alleged that a vehicle may have blocked the Mercedes, ensuring it went into the underpass, and that a bright flash may have unlawfully contributed to the crash.
The investigation There was evidence of bright lights and flashes near the Mercedes after the crash. The Mercedes began to lose control before the underpass so bright lights or flashes in the immediate approach to or in the underpass were not contributory causes to the loss of control.
The verdict No evidence of any vehicle blocking the Mercedes and forcing Paul to taken the embankment expressway.
The aftermath
The claim The Princess could have been saved if she had been taken immediately to the nearest hospital. Mr Al Fayed claimed that, en route to Pitie-Salpetrière, the ambulance passed another hospital and because it took two hours to get her to treatment her chances of survival were minimal.
The investigation Sébastien Dorzée, a police officer, was one of the first to answer the emergency calls. He was asked to keep talking to the Princess to keep her conscious. She was badly injured with blood coming from her nose and mouth. Her head was between the two front seats.
He told investigators: “She could see her boyfriend just in front of her. She moved, her eyes were open, speaking to me in a foreign language. I think she said, ‘My God’ on seeing her boyfriend. At the same time she was rubbing her stomach. She must have been in pain.”
“She turned her head towards the front of the car, saw the driver and then I think she had an even better realisation of what was happening. She became quite agitated. A few seconds later she looked at me. Then she put her head down again and closed her eyes.”
Medical evidence showed that by the time the Princess arrived at the hospital she was unconscious and on a ventilator. She went straight into treatment and never regained consciousness.
She was given emergency treatment at the crash site before being moved to hospital four miles away where she died. She had treatment and surgery before being pronounced dead at 4am.
The inquiry found no evidence to show that any alternative treatment would have saved the Princess. There is medical debate about stabilising a crash victim before moving them to hospital. French practice at the time was to stabilise first but neither action would have saved her.
The ambulance did pass the Hôtel-Dieu hospital but it had no equipment for dealing with her injuries. The crash was at 12.23am and she arrived in hospital at 2.06am. It took 26 minutes to get her to Pitie-Salpetrière. The ambulance travelled slowly because of fears about her low blood pressure and stopped at one point.
The verdict A conspiracy would have required the agreement of medical specialists of some distinction following a plan of collaboration. Stevens said: “The evidence is that every effort was made to save her life.”
The embalming
The claim Mr Al Fayed maintained that Diana was embalmed in France to conceal her pregnancy and the actions of the French authorities were orchestrated by the British Ambassador and MI6.
He said that Dominique Lecomte, the pathologist who carried out an external investigation of the body, gave the authority for the embalming although it was unclear if the Royal Family or anyone else had given instructions.
As part of the cover-up Paul Burrell, the Princess’s butler, allegedly collected her blood-stained clothes despite the fact that the death was being treated as potentially suspicious. He later burnt the clothes.
The investigation No pregnancy test was carried out in France or Britain. “The only concern of the medical staff was emergency treatment to save her life. After the Princess was pronounced dead there was no need for further tests,” said the report.
No pregnancy tests were carried out in Britain because it was not relevant to the cause of death. The embalming was legal and authorised by a senior policeman and the British Consul-General, and the French pathologist was not involved. A French embalmer believed that no other method — such as dry ice — would work because of the extent of the injuries.
Mr Burrell told the inquiry that he had seen Diana’s clothes in a bag in the surgeon’s room in Paris. The records show that he signed for them but he cannot remember doing so.
He said that the “clothing that had been taken off the princess in Paris was returned to me the next day at Kensington Palace”. They included “her white pedal pusher trousers that I had brought her for the holiday. They were clearly blood-soaked”.
After talking to Lucia Flecha de Lima, “I destroyed them for health reasons. I did not know what else to do”. He had never seen the Princess’s outer clothing since the crash.
There is no evidence to show MI6 had any involvement with the embalming. Sir Michael Jay, the British Ambassador, denied being involved in the decision about embalming and the report finds no reason to doubt him.
The verdict “The evidence shows that all those involved in the decision to embalm the Princess of Wales believed it was necessary to make her body presentable before viewing”, Lord Stevens concluded. Stevens said: “There is no indication that the burning was anything but an innocent act.”
The French inquiry
The claim The French authorities did not carry out proper investigations at the scene of the crash and deliberately prevented investigators for the family of Henri Paul from getting body samples and blood for independent tests. The body was released for burial on the condition that no tests were carried out.
French police were accused of not roping off the scene for long enough for detailed work. Traffic investigations and a photograph of the Mercedes entering the tunnel showing its speed were suppressed.
A statement by Eric Petel, a motorcyclist, who claimed to be first on the scene and described hearing an “implosion” just before the crash, was suppressed by police and later lost.
The investigation The autopsies on Paul’s body were carried out by the French authorities. There were two; in France they can only be carried out by a doctor appointed by the authorities. Blood and tissue tests can also only be carried out by authorised experts.
Herve Stephan, the investigating magistrate, agreed to release the body but did not stipulate that there should be no further tests. However, the law would not have allowed them.
French investigators told the British inquiry that the accident scene was treated the same as any other. Roads are usually opened quickly to get traffic moving but are closed again later if there is more work to be done. The traffic investigator’s report under the French system is part of a dossier of material held by the investigating judge.
The Stevens inquiry found that the photograph of the Mercedes was taken outside the Ritz and not at the tunnel. They traced the photographer who took it as the couple were leaving on their final journey.
The report said that Mr Petel’s evidence should be treated with caution and “there is no corroboration for his account. The evidence available from other winesses contradicted his view that he stopped and tended the Princess of Wales. Those arriving at the scene would surely have seen him at the car”.
The French thought that he might have been a motorcyclist who had driven close to the crashed Merecedes without stopping, but at one point his claims were described as “pure fabrication”.
The verdict None of the claims was proven.
The white Fiat
The claim The Al Fayed team claimed that the white Fiat Uno that hit the Mercedes on the Alma underpass was driven by James Andanson, a French photographer who had been working in the south of France watching the Princess and Dodi Fayed.
His father claimed that Mr Andanson had been turned by the French and British security services. He was “murdered” in May 2000 to silence him and his death was never properly investigated.
The French investigating magistrate halted the search for the Uno without reason.
The investigation Mr Andanson was not in Paris on the night of the crash. His wife told the investigation that he was at home with her at Lignieres, 170 miles from Paris, on the night of the crash and left at 4am to fly to Corsica for an assignment.
He did own a white Fiat Uno and the evidence suggests it was at his home outside Paris. At the time of the crash the car had done more than 360,000 kilometres and was nine years old. Police questioned him and examined and eliminated the car from their inquiries in February 1998.
The French police believe that he committed suicide and the British team agree. There is no evidence he was murdered or that he worked for MI6. The burglary after his death was investigated and professional criminals were arrested but nothing belonging to Mr Andanson was taken.
The French stopped hunting for the Uno in October 1998 after checking 4,668 cars. It has not been identified.
The verdict Mr Andanson had nothing to do with the Uno that crashed into the Mercedes.
MI5 and MI6
The claim British security services were involved in a staged accident to kill the Princess and Fayed. This was done to prevent an announcement of the pregnancy and marriage of the couple. The plot was launched at the behest of Prince Philip.
Mr Al Fayed supported his claims with details from Richard Tomlinson, who worked for MI6, and David Shayler and Annie Machon, who had worked for MI5.
The investigation Police spent three weeks going through MI6 records. They interviewed all the MI6 officers in Paris in 1997. Many were on leave in August 1997 and none knew Paul. MI6 records show no sign of MI6 operations at the hotel.
There were claims that two MI6 officers arrived at the embassy just before the crash and left soon afterwards. Mr Tomlinson admitted to police he had been wrong about the postings of the two, named as Richard Spearman and Nicholas Langman, and admitted his suspicions “would appear to be unfounded”.
The two former MI5 officers told police that from their knowledge of the service the Princess was not under surveillance.
The verdict “There is no evidence that any Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer of any designation was involved in the events surrounding the crash in the Alma underpass.”
All the evidence shows that MI6 did not know that the couple were in Paris and there is no evidence to support the claims about Prince Philip.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
December 15, 2006 at 02:48 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 10, 2006
Al-Qaeda's new star raises stakes in spy war
Telegraph | News | Al-Qaeda's new star raises stakes in spy war
By Harry de Quetteville, Middle East Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:14am GMT 10/12/2006
He advocates poisoning enemy agents and infiltrating their organisations, suggests ways to beat lie-detector tests and campaigns for an effective counter-intelligence service.
But he is not working for the Kremlin or the CIA. Instead, according to a new report released by the Combating Terrorism Centre at America's West Point military academy, Abu Jihad Muhammad Khalil al Hakaymah is the first spymaster for al-Qaeda.
Drawing on access to classified information and an analysis of Hakaymah's own writings, the report is the profile of a rising star within al-Qaeda, who has identified people-based intelligence as the crucial battleground of the global jihad.
"The senior level of al-Qaeda leadership has been weakened considerably, captured or killed," the report's author, Brian Fishman, told The Sunday Telegraph. "You have a new generation stepping into those roles and he is part of that."
Hakaymah's significance to al-Qaeda became clear this summer, when he appeared on a video with the group's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri.
Egyptian-born Hakaymah is thought to have pursued a classic jihadi trail, from Islamic extremism in Egypt to the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Along with many of al-Qaeda's most wanted, he is believed to be hiding in the frontier region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, from where he has been studying Western intelligence services.
His most significant work is a book-length analysis of US intelligence agencies, called The Myth of Delusion, which includes sections on the "tradecraft" of spying such as the spotting and recruiting of agents.
"The Myth of Delusion is an attempt to analyse the US government at a level not seen by jihadis before," said Mr Fishman. "It shows an increased level of sophistication. He is a technical facilitator. He conceives of himself as the al-Qaeda spymaster, and is saying 'Here are my tips on how to do this stuff '. His appearance with Zawahiri shows that the top leadership endorses what he's doing."
Speculation and mistakes led him to be largely written off by Western intelligence agencies when he first emerged, but increasingly they are acknowledging the significance of his tactical impact on al-Qaeda.
"Some tried to dismiss him, but there's been a lasting effect," said John Rollins, a former chief of staff for intelligence at the US Department of Homeland Security.
While he is a keen student of US and British electronic surveillance techniques, Hakaymah insists that spies, not electronic wizardry, will play the main role in the battle between al-Qaeda and Western intelligence.
His writings demand that al-Qaeda create an effective counter-intelligence arm to prevent enemy penetration and conduct detailed background checks on prospective members.
December 10, 2006 at 10:46 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 09, 2006
Traces of spy poison found in cup at hotel
Telegraph | News | Traces of spy poison found in cup at hotel
y Duncan Gardham and Laura Clout
Last Updated: 1:02am GMT 09/12/2006
The Millennium Hotel in London emerged as the most likely site for the poisoning of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko last night after it was revealed that a cup had been found containing traces of the radioactive substance which killed him.
It was reported that polonium 210 had also been found in a dishwasher at the hotel, in Grosvenor Square, raising concerns that small amounts of the substance could have been released into the water system. Unlike his drinking partners at the hotel's Pine Bar, Litvienenko was tee-total and drank only tea.
All seven bar staff at the bar on the day Mr Litvinenko was poisoned have tested positive for the same radioactive substance that killed him two weeks ago. Tests were continuing on more than 250 customers who drank in the bar on the same day.
Police have refused to spell out exactly where Litvinenko visited on the day he was poisoned, but only his dining partner, Mario Scaramella, has so far tested positive at the Itsu restaurant where he ate.
Scotland Yard's attempts to question one of the men who were drinking with him were frustrated again yesterday, as it was announced that he was suffering from radiation poisoning.
Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB bodyguard turned businessman who visited each of the hotels and offices at which radioactivity has since been detected, was said by a Russian news agency to be suffering from multi-organ failure.
He is the second witness allegedly taken ill – it was reported on Thursday that his business partner Dmitry Kovtun, who was also at the Millennium Hotel meeting, had lapsed into a coma. Other reports coming from Russia seemed to suggest the condition of the two men was less serious.
ITAR-Tass, the state-owned agency, said Mr Lugovoi was feeling "normal"and quoted him saying: "Doctors believe that I'm in a stable condition."Mr Lugovoi's lawyer, Andrei Romashov, said his client's condition was not an obstacle to being questioned and he did not know why he had not been interviewed.
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office said Mr Kovtun had "developed an illness connected with the radioactive nuclide (substance)"and the Interfax agency said he had regained consciousness but had radiation damage to his intestines and kidneys.
But Mr Romashov said Mr Kovtun's condition was "the same"as when he was interviewed by British police, in the presence of Russian prosecutors, on Wednesday. Reports of Mr Kovtun's illness were, he said, "aimed at creating a negative atmosphere around this case to make a sensation out of it."
Last night German police said they were searching a flat in Hamburg, used by Mr Kovtun, for traces of the radioactive substance polonium. The confusion over the two men means that nine British counter-terrorism detectives, who have spent the week in Moscow, have so far interviewed only one of the main suspects.
Police will have many questions to ask Mr Lugovoi, after signs of radiation turned up at a number of hotels and offices he visited in the days before Mr Litvinenko fell ill, as well as the aeroplanes he travelled on.
So far radiation has been detected at the Parkes Hotel in Knightsbridge, where he stayed with Mr Kovtun from October 16 to October 18, and two offices of security firms which they visited with Mr Litvinenko.
There have also been positive tests on rooms at the eighth floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Park Lane, where Mr Lugovoi stayed from October 25 to October 27.
The most significant finds of polonium have been at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel and at rooms on the fourth floor, where Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun stayed from October 31 to November 3, meeting Mr Litvinenko in the bar on November 1, the day he was poisoned.
Last night the Pine Bar remained closed, but a bar and restaurant owned by Brian Turner, a celebrity chef, were busy. One guest, who did not wish to give his name, said: ''I am only staying here because it's the only hotel in London with spare rooms."
December 9, 2006 at 12:23 AM in Russia | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 08, 2006
Blair was overruled by Bush on post-war strategy, says Hoon
Telegraph | News | Blair was overruled by Bush on post-war strategy, says Hoon
By Toby Helm, Chief Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:11am GMT 09/12/2006
Geoff Hoon
Geoff Hoon says that he and Mr Blair had urged the US not to dismantle the Iraqi army
Tony Blair's "special relationship" with President George W Bush was called into fresh question last night when it emerged that he was overruled by Washington over key parts of the allied strategy for post-war Iraq.
Geoff Hoon, who was Defence Secretary at the time of the conflict, told The Daily Telegraph that he and the Prime Minister "lost the argument" with the Americans before the fighting ceased – with disastrous consequences.
Mr Hoon said in an interview that he and Mr Blair had urged the US, before the conflict ended, not to dismantle the Iraqi army or purge all members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party from senior positions. But they were over-ruled.
In May 2003 Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, issued two orders: one outlawing the Ba'ath Party and the other dissolving Iraq's 500,000-strong military and intelligence services. The two decisions are now widely believed to have left a vacuum that allowed Iraqi insurgents to launch their own terror offensive against the occupying forces.
Mr Hoon said he was not in "any doubt" that things should have been done differently.
"Firstly we would not have disbanded the Iraqi army," he said. "We were very concerned in the final stages of the conflict that the Iraqi army was a force for stability in Iraq and I think we would have preferred for that army to remain intact. I don't think we would have pursued the de-Ba'athification policy in quite the same way.
"I think we understood from perhaps experience in Europe that quite a lot people were Ba'athists because they had to be if they wanted to be teachers or administrators and they weren't necessarily committed to Saddam Hussein. Those were arguments that I certainly put forward and I know other members of the government put forward. So we lost the argument."
Asked to whom they had lost the argument, Mr Hoon said: "To the Americans."
Last night Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, whose party opposed the Iraq invasion, said Mr Hoon's admission was further proof that Mr Blair had failed to wield true influence with the Americans.
"From the very beginning of the occupation, it became clear that London's advice was simply ignored in Washington.
"The Prime Minister's strategy of staying close in public so as to be influential in private simply didn't work. The problem for the British Government was that we became so enmeshed in American strategy that we had no option but to go along with it, even when it was palpably wrong."
Mr Hoon, who remained in charge at the Ministry of Defence until last year, said the US and Britain had made other errors. Notably, they underestimated the extent to which the occupying forces, particularly in and around Baghdad, would be seen by the Iraqis as "part of the problem, not as we saw it, part of the solution".
He added: "I think this is still one of the problems today."
Earlier this month a US State Department official, Kendal Myers, said Britain was routinely ignored in a "totally one-side" relationship and that Tony Blair had got "no pay-back" from the US.
December 8, 2006 at 10:41 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunnis
Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunnis - Yahoo! News
By SALAH NASRAWI, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 1 minute ago
CAIRO, Egypt - Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in
Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.
Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.
But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.
Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of 96 because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zaqat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.
Some Saudis appear to know the money is headed to Iraq's insurgents, but others merely give it to clerics who channel it to anti-coalition forces, the officials said.
In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.
Overall, the Iraqi officials said, money has been pouring into Iraq from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bastion, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of
Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Saudi officials vehemently deny their country is a major source of financial support for the insurgents.
"There isn't any organized terror finance, and we will not permit any such unorganized acts," said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. About a year ago the Saudi government set up a unit to track any "suspicious financial operations," he said.
But the Iraq Study Group said "funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states."
Saudi officials say they cracked down on zakat abuses, under pressure from the United States, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
The Iraqi officials, however, said some funding goes to Iraq's Sunni Arab political leadership, who then disburse it. Other money, they said, is funneled directly to insurgents. The distribution network includes Iraqi truck and bus drivers.
Several drivers interviewed by the AP in Middle East capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with returning pilgrims.
"They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq," said one driver, who gave his name only as Hussein, out of fear of reprisal. "I know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don't take it with me, they will kill me."
He was told what was in the boxes, he said, to ensure he hid the money from authorities at the border.
The two Iraqi officials would not name specific Iraqi Sunnis who have received money from Saudi Arabia. But Iraq issued an arrest warrant for Harith al-Dhari, a Sunni opponent of the Iraqi government, shortly after he visited Saudi Arabia in October. He was accused of sectarian incitement.
Saudi Arabia is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The Iraq Study Group report noted that its government has assisted the U.S. military with intelligence on Iraq.
But Saudi citizens have close tribal ties with Sunni Arabs in Iraq, and sympathize with their brethren in what they see as a fight for political control — and survival — with Iraq's Shiites.
The Saudi government is determined to curb the growing influence of its chief rival in the region,
Iran. Tehran is closely linked to Shiite parties that dominate the Iraqi government.
Saudi officials say the kingdom has worked with all sides to reconcile Iraq's warring factions. They have, they point out, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is accused of killing Sunnis.
These officials say zakat donations are now channeled through supervised bank accounts. Cash donation boxes, once prevalent in supermarkets and shopping malls, have been eliminated.
Still, Iraq's foreign minister expressed concern about the influence of neighboring Sunni states at a recent Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo.
"We hope that Saudi Arabia will keep the same distance from each and all Iraqi parties," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari later told the AP.
Last month, the New York Times reported that a classified U.S. government report said Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency had become self-sufficient financially, raising millions from oil smuggling, kidnapping and Islamic charities. The report did not say whether any money came from Saudi Arabia.
Allegations the insurgents have purchased shoulder-fired Strela missiles raise concerns that they are obtaining increasingly sophisticated weapons.
On Nov. 27, a U.S. Air Force F-16 jet crashed while flying in support of American soldiers fighting Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent hotbed. The U.S. military said it had no information about the cause of the crash. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman, said he would be surprised if the jet was shot down because F-16's have not encountered weapons capable of taking them down in Iraq.
But last week, a spokesman for Saddam's ousted Baath party claimed that fighters armed with a Strela missile had shot down the jet.
"We have stockpiles of Strelas and we are going to surprise them (the Americans)," Khudair al-Murshidi, the spokesman told the AP in Damascus,
Syria. He would not say how the Strelas were obtained.
Saddam's army had Strelas; it is not known how many survived the 2003 war. The Strela is a shoulder-fired, low-altitude system with a passive infrared guidance system.
The issue of Saudi funding for the insurgency could gain new prominence as the Bush administration reviews its Iraq policy, especially if it seeks to engage Iran and Syria in peace efforts.
Bush's national security adviser,
Stephen Hadley, wrote in a recent leaked memo that Washington should "step up efforts to get Saudi Arabia to take a leadership role in supporting Iraq, by using its influence to move Sunni populations out of violence into politics."
Last week, a Saudi who headed a security consulting group close to the Saudi government, Nawaf Obaid, wrote in the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia would use money, oil and support for Sunnis to thwart Iranian efforts to dominate Iraq if American troops pulled out. The Saudi government denied the report and fired Obaid.
December 8, 2006 at 08:07 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 07, 2006
Death by Poison, Direct from Moscow
Why are Russian President Vladimir Putin's opponents dying? Former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko is only the most recent victim of assassination. Indications hint at a battle for power in Moscow -- between the government and the secret service.
For four long days in November, Andrei Nekrasov stayed at the bedside of dying Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, watching helplessly as his friend Sacha's condition steadily and implacably deteriorated. All the while, Nekrasov had to face the massive army of media present at the University College Hospital in London.
On last Thursday, though, after Litvinenko's death, Nekrasov was rushing through jam-packed Terminal 1 at London's Heathrow Airport. Two British Airways Boeing 767s stood outside on the tarmac. London police had ordered them taken out of service after traces of the same radioactive metal that killed Litvinenko, polonium 210, had been detected in the two aircraft. The airline set up a hotline in an effort to contact more than 30,000 people throughout Europe who been passengers on either of the two aircraft since Oct. 25 and may have been exposed to radiation.
Although fear of this ominous threat had already spread far beyond London, film director Nekrasov, on his way to an appointment in Milan, was unafraid. Given the magnitude of the dramatic events he had witnessed, the thought that he himself could have been exposed to radiation at Litvinenko's deathbed seemed to him ridiculous. Officials in London had offered to test him for possible exposure, but Nekrasov turned them down. He was in Ukraine after the Chernobyl accident where he was "of course exposed," he says, matter-of-factly. "What I could have gotten from Alexander is minimal."
Nekrasov first met Litvinenko in 2002 when he was filming a documentary called "Disbelief." The two men spent entire nights talking and eventually became friends. They also attended a memorial service for murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Westminster Abbey together. As they were leaving the church after the service, Litvinenko said: "It's quite clear that they are working down a list of targets. The state has become a serial killer." But unlike his dead friend, who, until his last breath, had accused the Russian president directly of having ordered the murder, Nekrasov finds it difficult to believe that Vladimir Putin was directly responsible for ordering the poisoning. Instead, said Nekrasov, Putin is unable to control certain elements among his allies, "people who sit in their dachas and saunas, bragging that they can find and destroy anyone -- anywhere in the world -- who displeases them."
The list
In other words, Litvinenko wasn't the only one. Politkovskaya may also have been on this suspected list. Journalist Jan Travinsky, shot to death in the Siberian city of Irkutsk in 2004, is another possibility. And what about the former Chechen head of security Movladi Baisarov, who, after being arrested, was shot in Moscow in broad daylight on Nov. 18? And Andrey Kozlov, the deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, who fell victim to assassins on Sept. 13? Was a powerful clique behind all those murders?
The ongoing series of murders -- a series which may have found its most recent victim on Monday with the murder of Alexander Samoilenko, the general director of the gas company Itera-Samara -- has many suspecting that doing away with political opponents may once again be a favored strategy inside the Kremlin. Former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was famous for it -- and now, it seems as though the baton has been passed, with dissidents in President Vladimir Putin's Russia once again having to fear for their lives. Even former political leaders may not be safe -- doctors have been unable to diagnose a mysterious illness which befell ex-premier Yegor Gaidar in Ireland last week. Poisoning is a leading candidate.
The series of gruesome attacks in recent years goes on and on -- and the majority of them have never been solved. As a pro-Western presidential candidate in 2004, Viktor Yushchenko barely survived a poison attack during his campaign against the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych. In July 2003, journalist and human rights activist Yuri Shchekochikin died of something his doctors defined as an "allergic reaction." Many in Russia think they know who is responsible for these and other, similar murders -- and their fingers generally point to Moscow. Putin, for his part, insists that such accusations are completely unfounded. At the European Union summit meeting in Helsinki in late November, the Russian president pointed out drolly that other countries also have their share of unsolved murders. Still, his apparent lack of interest in the Politkovskaya murder -- and the conspiracy theories flourishing as a result -- is doing him no favors in the global court of public opinion. That and the fact that at least 13 Russian journalists have lost their lives under peculiar circumstances since 2000. An official investigation, it seems, might not be such a bad idea.
The Litvinenko affair is only the most recent evoking uncomfortable memories of the Cold War -- casting a sinister light on post-Soviet Russia. It has also raised eyebrows among Russia's allies abroad.
"Very, very serious matter"
"It is obviously a very, very serious matter indeed," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in Copenhagen while en route to the NATO summit in Riga, Latvia. "We are determined to find out what happened and who is responsible," he added before assuring that "no diplomatic or political barrier" would stand in the way of the investigation.
Peter Hain, Blair's Northern Ireland secretary, was even more direct. "The promise that President Putin brought to Russia when he came to power has been clouded by what has happened since, including some extremely murky murders," Hain said, in what many have interpreted as an insinuation of Kremlin involvement.
Putin himself has seemed oddly indifferent to the international outcry and accusations against his person and government, almost as if he is not taking them seriously. He shows no sign of concern for his country's reputation, let alone compassion for the murder victims. Indeed, his pokerfaced demeanor in recent days has been much more reminiscent of a cold-hearted, former KGB colonel then a head of state.
His only reaction to the murder of journalist Politkovskaya was to critique her work as being "extremely insignificant." On the Litvinenko case, Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the Russian foreign intelligence service, commented that the man was "not the kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations (with Great Britain)."
When pressed for a personal reaction by journalists at the EU-Russia summit, Putin called the death a "tragedy" and expressed his sparsely worded condolences for the family. But, in the same breath, he also questioned the authenticity of Litvinenko's deathbed letter and warned the British authorities not to
"fuel groundless political scandals." Instead of appointing a high-profile commission to investigate the ongoing series of murders, Putin merely promised to "support the British, if possible."
What is going on here? When Putin came to power at the very end of 1999, Europe saw him and Russia as a partner and ally. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, his country made giant steps toward the West through various treaties and agreements, and by becoming Europe's single most important energy supplier. Not only that, but the Russian economy finally regained its strength and the government seemed to have at least the rudiments of a free and open democracy. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder even famously called him a "flawless democrat." Nowadays, it looks more than ever that the West was merely being naïve.
Memories of gulags
Still, the West needs Russia. The vast country is more than just an energy superpower, the world's second-largest petroleum producer and the country with far and away the planet's largest natural gas reserves. It has since become a political heavyweight. If any power can prevent Iran from going nuclear and convince Syria to help bring peace to the Middle East, that power is Russia. Moscow's help is likewise indispensable when it comes to controlling the highly dangerous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and his weapons arsenal.
The ailing United States now needs Russia more than it could ever have wanted. "Whatever the final outcome of the cases, the deaths of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya have chilled Russia's already frosty civil society, and revived memories most Russians would prefer to forget," wrote US news magazine Time in late November.
The memories Time refers to are those of gulags, and of the days when fear was a part of everyday life. They are memories of the Soviet days when dissidents -- aside from a handful of heroes like Andrey Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, who risked their lives to oppose the state -- only dared express their views in the absolute privacy of their kitchens and only to those they truly trusted.
Anyone who visits Moscow today sees a gleaming, cosmopolitan city that seems to differ from Paris, London or New York in only one respect: the higher hotel and restaurant prices. Every major global corporation has an office in the Russian capital, and leading fashion houses Gucci, Hermès and Dior sell more at the city's "Millionaires' Trade Show" than in any other city on earth. Lavish wealth is as much in evidence as the rise of a new middle class which, at least in the capital, can afford its growing devotion to all things Western, from McDonald's to Microsoft.
Soviet-style press censorship no longer exists. Russian television viewers can watch any channel they want, including CNN, BBC and Deutsche Welle. Fifteen years after the Soviet Union faded into history, Russia is transformed. The country has become vastly wealthier, repays its debts early and, thanks to its oil and natural gas bonanza, now has huge foreign currency reserves (currently estimated at more than $272 billion). And it is undoubtedly far more cosmopolitan than the Soviet Union ever was.
Despite all that, fear is making a comeback. It is the fear of a gradual "de-democratization" of Russia and of a president who seems to be tending toward authoritarianism.
As in the days of Czar Nikolai II, policy is once again being made "at court," says Dimitry Trenin of the Moscow Carnegie Center. "The president as a modern czar is the only functioning institution." Indeed, the country's constitutional court confirmed this only a few months ago when it issued an Orwellian decision. Because the Russian president, the court argued, is the "direct representative of the entire people," whereas the people are "the sole source of power," Putin is entitled to any powers he desires -- even if they are not mentioned in the constitution.
The country's political institutions have been consolidated. Military and intelligence veterans make up about 60 percent of Russia's highest-ranking leadership. Governors were forced to resign their seats on the Federation Council, and the upper house of parliament was practically stripped of its power. The Kremlin rendered most parties irrelevant when it enacted a new party law it had drafted itself. Putin's party, United Russia, which holds a two-thirds majority in Russia's parliament now ruthlessly adjusts parliamentary rules to suit its needs.
Bleak months
Two restrictive and highly controversial new laws are likely to be enacted this year. Now that foreign-backed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were criticizing Russia's gradual slide into autocracy have been put on tighter leashes, the government hopes to impose strict registration (essentially government monitoring) requirements on domestic NGOs. The second questionable draft legislation calls for introducing "control over political extremism," with the Kremlin serving as the final arbiter on what exactly falls under that category.
For activists and Kremlin critics, the last few months have been among the bleakest since the beginning of the Putin era, even without factoring in violent crime. The authorities had human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov arrested and imprisoned for three days. His crime? He had organized a demonstration for the victims of the tragedy in Beslan, where terrorists took more than 1,000 people hostage and Putin's special forces caused a bloodbath during their "liberation" effort.
Government whimsicality has also plagued Lidiya Yussupova, whose organization documents attacks by Russian soldiers on the civilian population in Chechnya. Journalists who complain about the state -- who go public with official treatment ranging from court summons to repression and anonymous threats -- are especially likely to find themselves under "observation." At the same time, the Kremlin has tightened its reins on the free press. While Russian TV viewers can watch violence, sex and soap operas to their hearts' content, the Kremlin controls most news and information programming. According to the journalists' union, 90 percent of the news on stations broadcast throughout Russia is devoted exclusively to the state -- and to Putin himself.
The government has paid less attention to the written press until recently. But in the last few months, the Kremlin, using state-controlled Gazprom and its media holding company as a front, has purchased the influential Isvestiya. Gazprom's acquisition of the country's highest-circulation daily newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, is already a done deal and will take effect in early 2007.
Back in the USSR
But along with the Kremlin's increased control over media and the state, fears of a new, non-transparent and undemocratic Russia are rising as the list of sinister murders -- affecting business leaders, reporters and government critics alike -- grows longer. "There may no longer be shortages of groceries and long lines at every street corner, but Russia today is still a place where human rights and freedom are in short supply," Lyudmila Alexeyeva, something of a grande dame among regime critics, told Time. She helped create the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976 -- a group which played an important role in softening the Soviet Union and bringing down the communist party's leaders. "People who question the policies of our government are increasingly targeted. People who work for human rights are increasingly under attack. So, are we in Russia? Are we back in the U.S.S.R.?"
Poison victim Litvinenko was without question one of the regime's toughest, but also possibly one of its most nonconformist critics. Who was this former spy? Some former colleagues have derided him as a braggart and a show-off. But could he also have recognized the shadowy nature of Soviet power politics early on and become a champion of truth?
Litvinenko spent most of his working life in the armed forces and the intelligence services. Drafted into the Soviet army at 18, it took him only eight years to be admitted to the KGB, in 1988, where he worked in the Soviet intelligence agency's counterterrorism unit. In the KGB's successor organization, the FSB, Litvinenko was assigned to Department 7, which dealt with organized crime. Public accusations against the Kremlin got him chucked out of the FSB in 1998. At a spectacular press conference, Litvinenko claimed that he had been ordered to murder oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He was arrested and later released, at which point he left the country and moved to exile in London.
In 2002 Litvinenko published a book titled "The FSB is Blowing Up Russia," a political thriller in which he blamed Putin's intelligence service for the bombings of apartment complexes in Moscow and other cities -- a series of explosions which ultimately killed 246 people and injured 2,000.
More accusations leveled at his former employer soon followed. In an interview with Australian television station SBS, Litvinenko claimed that at least two of the Chechens who stormed a theater in Moscow in 2002 worked for the FSB. He told the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita that the FSB had trained al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Dagestan, the republic bordering Chechnya, in 1998. And in April of this year, he claimed that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi had been involved in the 1981 attempted assassination of former Pope John Paul II. "His conspiracy theories were everything" he had left after fleeing from Moscow, says political scientist James Heartfield, who interviewed the former spy for several hours in May of this year.
The fantastic story surrounding his own murder seems to fit right in to the shady list of intrigue. Indeed, was there not proof all over London, it would stretch the imagination. The radioactive trail left behind by the victim and his presumed murderers has enabled Scotland Yard investigators to easily retrace their steps. Their dilettantism with handling the radioactive poisoning even prompted one member of the British government's crisis management team to ridicule the perpetrators as a far cry from being James Bond-like killers. Scotland Yard currently assumes that a group of five suspects, including former and current FSB agents, arrived from Moscow on British Airways flight 873 on Oct. 25.
Radioactive traces of death
The British authorities have also painstakingly reconstructed Litvinenko's fateful last walk through Mayfair, one of London's most expensive neighborhoods, on Nov. 1. He visited the Itsu Sushi Bar on Piccadilly Circus, the Ritz diagonally across the street, the exclusive Millennium Hotel on Grosvenor Square, the office of Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky on Down Street, and, finally, a security firm on Grosvenor Street called Erinys. Traces of the radioactive material that led to the former spy's death were found in all of these places.
Litvinenko told the Scotland Yard investigators where he had been on his last walk through the city and gave them the names of the people he had met. The list reads like a cast of characters in a cheap spy novel. First there is the Italian named Mario Scaramella, to whom Litvinenko said he gave a four-page document at the Itsu sushi restaurant. The document supposedly contained information about the murderers of journalist Politkovskaya. According to Litvinenko, it also contained a hit list put together by an obscure organization of alleged FSB officers and KGB veterans. The names Scaramella and Litvinenko were supposedly on that list.
On his deathbed, Litvinenko said that he suspected Scaramella might have given him the deadly poison. Indeed, even after suspicion seemed to veer away from Scaramella last week after the Italian voluntarily submitted to Scotland Yard questioning, he is once again seen as a key to the investigation. Despite having claimed to only have drunk water at the Japanese restaurant while Litvinenko ate miso soup and drank tea, he has tested positive for polonium 210. He is said not to be in danger, but it remains unclear how or where he came into contact with the poison.
A second meeting on that fateful Nov. 1 is likewise surrounded by questions. Litvinenko met Russian nationals Andrei Lugovoi, Vyacheslav Sokolenko and Dimitry Kowtun in the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel. Kowtun had flown in from Hamburg. Lugovoi, a former colleague of Litvinenko from his days as an agent, has since reported his version of the meeting. According to Lugovoi, Litvinenko had approached the men to arrange for their services in Great Britain. The real reason for the flight to London, Lugovoi claims, was an upcoming Champions League football match between ZSKA Moscow and FC Arsenal. That, says Lugovoi, was where he and his companions, along with his wife and their three children, went after meeting with Litvinenko.
Belying this version of the trip, however, is the fact that traces of polonium 210 were found in one of the hotel rooms and on light switches in that room. A Scotland Yard investigator told the Daily Telegraph that the contamination was so great that the poison must have been in the room, and could not come from the poisoning victim. Indeed, the visitors were apparently so nonchalant in handling the material that they dropped some of it on the carpet.
The third interesting find was in the office of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The billionaire, normally a high-profile and very public critic of his archenemy Putin, withdrew to his office after the traces of the radioactive element were found on the premises. "I have no comment," he wheezed into his mobile phone, and promptly issued a statement expressing his "full confidence in the British police." According to his PR consultant Lord Bell, a man who once worked for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Berezovsky, who has been convinced for years that his life is in danger, confronts his fate "defiantly and courageously." But others who know Berezovsky have a different take on the matter. "Berezovsky is afraid that he could be next," says one man.
Just how much of the radioactive poison was given to Litvinenko remains unclear. But the substance is strong enough that administering a lethal dose would not have been difficult. A single drop added to any food or beverage would have been plenty. And even former KGB agent Litvinenko would have been unable to taste that it was there.
Once polonium has entered the bloodstream, its so-called alpha radiation wreaks havoc on the tissue, especially in places where cell division takes place more frequently, such as the intestines, hair and, most of all, bone marrow, which produces a constant supply of blood and immune cells.
Litvinenko's symptoms -- nausea, diarrhea and hair loss -- were typical of radiation sickness. In the end his immune system simply broke down. Also typical of radiation sickness was the initial attack of weakness followed by a period of deceptive stability, in which most of the cells in Litvinenko's body that were especially susceptible to radiation were already dead or doomed. This period of apparent recovery is known as the "walking ghost" phase of radiation-related illness.
Favored weapon of Moscow
When Litvinenko's immune system broke down on Nov. 17, he was transferred to the University College Hospital, where he died on Nov. 23. Only a few hours before his death, doctors, who had initially believed that their patient had thallium poisoning, discovered significant amounts of radioactive polonium 210 in his urine.
Litvinenko's death brings back memories of an entire series of poison attacks -- all of which are suspected of being connected with the Russian intelligence service. Perhaps the world's most dramatic poison attack was that two years ago in Ukraine when Viktor Yushchenko was running for president. As part of his campaign, he had, with Western backing, announced that he planned to reduce the country's dependence on Moscow. At the time, Putin openly supported Yushchenko's rival and current Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.
Yushchenko became severely ill after a dinner with two high-ranking members of the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU, the successor to the Ukrainian arm of the KGB. Tests performed at Vienna's Rudolfinerhaus Hospital showed that he had been poisoned with dioxin. The 50-year-old politician's face has been disfigured by lesions ever since.
Many members of the SBU maintain close contacts with their counterparts in Moscow. The obvious suspicion that Russian intelligence was involved in the poisoning incident was never proven -- and yet it wasn't difficult to find a motive for the Russians. Russia's goal of reemerging as a major world power depended to a large degree on close political, economic and military ties to Ukraine.
Another victim was Roman Zepov, who was killed two years ago in St. Petersburg where he ran a security firm. Zepov, a graduate of a military school run by the interior ministry, was head of security in the early 1990s for Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin even invited him to the Kremlin for his inauguration as president in May 2000. Zepov had already launched his security firm by then. Zepov believed he was well protected against attacks. In an interview shortly before his death, he boasted: "There has not been a single death or injury among my clients or my employees."
A dangerous 'allergic reaction'
But his murderers apparently spared no expense. Significant levels of radioactivity were found in his body after his death. The doctors who treated Zepov conjectured that the poison could have been a drug used to treat leukemia.
Politicians in Russia have also fallen victim to deadly attacks. Dimitry Fotyanov, 31, was considered a superstar within the pro-Kremlin party United Russia in the Primorsky Krai region near Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. A successful businessman, he was seen as a prime candidate for mayor of the city of Dalnegorsk. But at the height of the election campaign in mid-October, Fotyanov was killed by shots from an automatic pistol. Boris Gryslov, the president of the local parliament, called it a "political murder."
Three years earlier, in July 2003, civil rights activist and investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikin died an agonizing death. His skin peeled away from his flesh and his lungs and brain became swollen. Shchekochikin, like Anna Politkovskaya, worked for the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gaseta, and like Politkovskaya, he was especially interested in Chechnya and corruption.
Shchekochikin was also a member of the Russian parliament and of its anti-corruption committee. When he died, he had been planning to write an expose on furniture smuggling, the arms trade and money laundering. Two deputies of then General State Prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov, as well as officials in the interior ministry, the domestic intelligence agency FSB and the customs authority were allegedly involved in the scandal.
Shchekochikin and other members of parliament wanted to call on Putin to investigate the matter. After meeting with FBI representatives in Moscow in June, Shchekochikin also planned to trace the money launderers' tracks to the United States. But he never made it that far.
In early July, Shchekochikin suddenly and unexpectedly died of an allergic reaction. According to the official diagnosis, he died of Lyell's syndrome. But the Novaya Gaseta documented a number of irregularities surrounding the case. Some of the doctors were suddenly reassigned, and a third blood sample, the last taken before his death, was lost in the interior ministry. Friends and relatives are convinced that Shchekochikin was murdered. The reason, they say, that the case was never solved is clear: because the trail leads too high up in the administration.
Former prosecutor Ustinov, now the justice minister, is closely related by marriage to Igor Sechin, the deputy Kremlin chief of staff, a Putin confidante and behind-the-scenes powerbroker at the Kremlin. In November 2003, Ustinov's son Dimitry married Sechin's daughter Inga.
Nothing short of an execution
Most recently, of course, is the murder of 48-year-old Moscow journalist Anna Politkovskaya -- nothing short of an execution and a clear message to government critics everywhere. Politkovskaya was completely defenseless when she emerged from Ramstore, a shop on Moscow's Franze Quay, at 4:05 p.m. on Oct. 7, carrying five shopping bags of weekend groceries: food, vegetables, a few kitchen and bath items.
Politkovskaya parked her silver Lada, went into the lobby of her building and walked to the elevator. When the elevator door opened, the murderer fired three shots at close range. Two of the bullets hit the journalist near her heart and the third shattered her shoulder. But the killer wasn't finished. Just to make sure, he fired a fourth bullet into the dead woman's head.
The Russian interior ministry does not publish statistics on its success rate in solving contract killings. But ministry official Leonid Kondratyuk did reveal that between 500 and 800 contract killings are committed each year in Russia. The unofficial figure, according to Kondratyuk, could even be two or three times as high.
Despite the fact that Putin has installed countless intelligence agents in key positions in the interior ministry and police force, the security situation has not improved. A total of 3,655 murders and attempted murders committed between January and October 2006 remain unsolved. While Russia's economy grows by an impressive 7 percent, crime is up 13 percent. Half a dozen bankers have been murdered in the last few weeks alone.
Two weeks ago Konstantin Mecheryakov, the 33-year-old co-founder of Spezeztroibank, was killed in front of his house in Moscow. He was shot in his back, neck and head. Russian authorities, as they do so often is such cases, provided their own razor-sharp analysis: The death of the victim, they said, was "tied to his professional activities."
The most prominent of these recent victims, Andrei Kozlov, 41, had just attended a football game and, together with his bodyguard, was emerging from the sauna at the Spartak clubhouse on Oleniy Wal in Moscow. Before Kozlov, the deputy director of Russia's central bank, could reach his armor-plated official car, two shots were fired. Kozlov and his bodyguard were both killed.
Kozlov, a committed liberal who, in 1995, was elected deputy head of the central bank at age 30, wanted to establish international standards in the Russian banking system. He introduced a law that would provide insurance for savings deposits. Many Russian banks are still fraught with underworld activity or used by organized crime to launder money.
Kozlov, who was in charge of the government's bank supervision agency, had declared war on this underworld element in the banking system. In the space of only three years, he withdrew the licenses of 260 banks, thereby quickly increasing the number of his enemies.
Most killers remain anonymous
Investigators say that the Kozlov murder was extremely professional. The killers and their clients were intimately familiar with the high-ranking official's schedule. Critical Moscow business magazine Expert suspects that Kozlov could have angered both conventional criminals and corrupt high-ranking officials within the government security services.
Most killers, and certainly most of those who order the killings, are rarely identified. The work of investigators is hindered by corruption within law enforcement agencies, low pay for their officials and poor technical equipment. Since 1991, many qualified officials in the police force and intelligence services have taken jobs in the better-paying private security industry. Russia's investigators have not recovered from this loss of some of their best people.
In an interview with DER SPIEGEL last week, Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov pointed out: "some contract killings, such as that of politicians Galina Starovoytova, have been solved." Kozlov's murderers have also been found, says Ivanov, but not their backers. "Unfortunately it is often the case that the perpetrators receive their dirty money from middlemen and don't even know who their real clients are," Ivanov conceded.
Only in rare cases can the suspicion be eliminated that professional murders are mainly the work of those who learned to kill professionally -- the successors to the Committee for State Security, or KGB.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 2.9 million people, or 1 percent of the population, were on the immense KGB's payroll. Thousands of agents abroad and hundreds of thousands of domestic informers received their orders from the Lubyanka, the popular name of the KGB headquarters complex, as did special regiments of tanks, ships and aircraft. For years, the KGB's own football club, Dynamo, dominated the Soviet league. The KGB was essentially a state within a state.
Beginning in 1967, party leader Yuri Andropov proved to be especially adept at using the KGB to contain dissidents and spy on the Soviet people with limited bloodshed. Andropov was also the first head of the KGB who managed to make it into the Kremlin, although his tenure there was brief. He died after only two years in office, and was succeeded one year later by his protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Job cutbacks for the KGB
Gorbachev was careful not to force his perestroika on the men at the Lubyanka. In fact, he convinced many of them to support his new direction. The "Kagebechiks," as KGB members were called, were by no means unanimous in their support for the old regime. After all, no other institution in the Soviet realm was quite as well informed about the dismal state of the government, economy and public sentiment as the intelligence service.
At the time, Moskovskiye Novosty registered, with some concern, that "the focus of the power oligarchy began shifting toward the KGB." Thousands of agents ran for office in the regional parliaments or became involved in business. KGB members assumed control over many banks and companies. After the attempted coup in 1991, the agency suffered a brief setback. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's new strongman, dismantled the KGB and ordered job cutbacks.
Many agents began looking for new lines of work. According to a 1997 analysis by German's foreign intelligence agency, the Russian intelligence services had entered into a "mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship" with organized crime. Agents joined the Russian mafia and former KGB soldiers became contract killers at home and abroad.
Others took jobs with the oligarchs who, like Boris Berezovsky, had accumulated vast fortunes in the wild 1990s. One of those agents with Litvinenko, Vladislav Surkov -- a member of military intelligence who took a job with the then Chairman of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- now works in Putin's presidential office.
The Litvinenko case clearly has Moscow concerned, and may even be trying to hinder the investigation. Moscow announced on Tuesday that it will not extradite possible suspects to Britain for trial, the prosecutor general said.
Political artiste par excellence
But does that mean, as Alexander Litvinenko alleged on his deathbed, that Putin was responsible for his death? Both Putin's supporters and his adversaries largely agree that is unlikely to be the case. Prominent author Viktor Yerofeyev, more a critic than a friend of the Kremlin, believes that the string of murders have not done Putin any good. He says that there are some with influence who would like to see Russia distance itself from Europe.
Last week's events directed a brighter spotlight at a man who is all too familiar with, and indeed an unmatched master at playing, the intrigues of Moscow's powerful. Anatoly Chubais, the current head of powerful electric utility Jes AG, was the head of the Kremlin administration under former President Boris Yeltsin. Chubais is a political artiste par excellence. He has kept his head above water throughout the ebb and flow of Russian politics in the last 15 years, even surviving a mine attack one and a half years ago. The presumed attacker, Vladimir Kvachkov, 58, a former special agent and a colonel in the military intelligence agency, is currently on trial in Moscow.
In the early 1990s, Chubais served as privatization minister in the government of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. Gaidar was also hospitalized last week after collapsing during a visit to Dublin. After drinking a cup of tea and eating a bowl of fruit salad, the politician spent half an hour spitting up blood and temporarily lost consciousness.
In a frightening parallel to the Litvinenko case, doctors have been unable to determine the cause of Gaidar's ailment, though he has been released from hospital. In a live, televised interview, Chubais said that Gaidar's illness could "hardly have been triggered by natural causes," adding that it was nothing short of a "miracle" that the "a deadly Politkovskaya-Litvinenko-Gaidar triangle" was not completed -- a feat Chubais claimed "supporters of an unconstitutional and violent power shift in Russia" had attempted to accomplish.
Chubais's and Yerofeyev's intimations are backed by a theory that has been hotly discussed among foreign political scientists for some time: that Putin is not the omnipotent Kremlin leader the West likes to perceive him as. The theory holds that the influence of other powerful groups is greater than has been assumed. Proponents believe that, in the run-up to the 2007 parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential election, elements within the intelligence community are concerned that Putin's overtures to the West could adversely affect their spheres of influence. The solution for these members of the Russian intelligence community, say the theorists, is to destroy the president's image abroad.
In his television interview last week, Chubais may have been deliberately using the adjective "silovoi," a term Russians interpret as a clear allusion to the Russian intelligence services. The men surrounding Putin are known as "Siloviki," or powerful people. Igor Sechin, the publicity-shy deputy head of the presidential administration, is considered their secret leader. Putin and Sechin have known each other for 15 years. Sechin worked as Putin's chief of staff when the president was still deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. When Putin became the Russian president, Sechin followed him to Moscow to become his chief of staff.
The Russian banana republic
The two men share a common past in intelligence. In the Soviet days, Putin worked as a KGB colonel in Dresden while Sechin served as an interpreter in the Mozambiquan civil war. Sechin is adept at painting his enemies in a dim light to promote his own image. In June 2003, he allowed political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky to leak a dossier warning against a power grab by the country's oligarchs. The document identified Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of oil conglomerate Yukos, as the leader of the conspiracy. Khodorkovsky was arrested a few months later and his company dismantled.
Rosneft, a state-owned company, acquired Yukos's crown jewel, the west Siberian energy company Yuganskneftegaz, in a shady auction. Sechin was Rosneft's chairman. Since then the Kremlin strategist has been looking for ways to secure his power and accumulated wealth beyond the end of Putin's constitutionally limited term in office in March 2008. Sechin's close associates insist that Sechin, who holds a degree in Romance languages, is motivated by the concern that things could fall apart in Moscow, much as they did at Rome's downfall, when Putin leaves office. Sechin is said to consider the two potential successors Putin favors -- Deputy Premier Dimitry Medvedev and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov -- incapable of holding Russia together in the future.
But perhaps the whole thing is far less complicated after all. The head of influential radio station Echo Moskvy -- who has good connections with the Kremlin normally shies away from inciting panic -- sees "Latin American-style death squads" at work in his country, groups he believes "could consist of former intelligence agents and veterans of the Chechnya and Afghanistan wars." If he's right, Russia is on its way to becoming a banana republic, perhaps not unlike El Salvador in the 1970s. Under that theory, Putin has completely lost control over what happens in his country.
ERICH FOLLATH, VERONIKA HACKENBROCH, HANS HOYNG, THOMAS HÜETLIN, UWE KLUSSMANN, CHRISTIAN NEEF, JAN PUHL, MATTHIAS SCHEPP
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
December 7, 2006 at 12:46 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 04, 2006
Open-Source Spying
Open-Source Spying - New York Times
These images represent terrorist attacks and some of the actors, weapons and targets linked to them. The physical relationship of the items suggests the level of connection.
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006
When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.
But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. “The reality,” he later wrote ruefully, “was a colossal letdown.”
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink — the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network — the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands — used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog — that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.
Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. Theoretically, the intelligence world ought to revolve around information sharing. If F.B.I. agents discover that Al Qaeda fund-raising is going on in Brooklyn, C.I.A. agents in Europe ought to be able to know that instantly. The Internet flourished under the credo that information wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All the clues were there — Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota, surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia — but none of the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report concluded that the agencies failed to “connect the dots.”
By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. “Web 2.0” technologies that encourage people to share information — blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia — often made it easier to collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine in late 2004, Burton went to Technorati, a search engine that scours the “blogosphere,” to find the most authoritative blog postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to locals in Kiev and on-the-fly debates among political analysts over what it meant. Because he and his fellow spies were stuck with outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate — to find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.
Burton, who has since left the D.I.A., is not alone in his concern. Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind — and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country’s most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?
The job of an analyst used to be much more stable — even sedate. In the ’70s and ’80s, during the cold war, an intelligence analyst would show up for work at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., or at the National Security Agency compound in Fort Meade, Md., and face a mess of paper. All day long, tips, memos and reports from field agents would arrive: cables from a covert-ops spy in Moscow describing a secret Soviet meeting, or perhaps fresh pictures of a missile silo. An analyst’s job was to take these raw pieces of intelligence and find patterns in the noise. In a crisis, his superiors might need a quick explanation of current events to pass on to their agency heads or to Congress. But mostly he was expected to perform long-term “strategic analysis” — to detect entirely new threats that were still forming.
And during the cold war, threats formed slowly. The Soviet Union was a ponderous bureaucracy that moved at the glacial speed of the five-year plan. Analysts studied the emergence of new tanks and missiles, pieces of hardware that took years to develop. One year, an analyst might report that the keel for a Soviet nuclear submarine had been laid; a few years later, a follow-up report would describe the submarine’s completion; even more years later, a final report would detail the sea trials. Writing reports was thus a leisurely affair, taking weeks or months; thousands of copies were printed up and distributed via interoffice mail. If an analyst’s report impressed his superiors, they’d pass it on to their superiors, and they to theirs — until, if the analyst was very lucky, it landed eventually in the president’s inner circle. But this sort of career achievement was rare. Of the thousands of analyst reports produced each year, the majority sat quietly gathering dust on agency shelves, unread by anyone.
Analysts also did not worry about anything other than their corners of the world. Russia experts focused on Russia, Nicaragua ones on Nicaragua. Even after the cold war ended, the major spy agencies divided up the world: the F.B.I. analyzed domestic crime, the C.I.A. collected intelligence internationally and military spy agencies, like the National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, evaluated threats to the national defense. If an analyst requested information from another agency, that request traveled through elaborate formal channels. The walls between the agencies were partly a matter of law. The charters of the C.I.A. and the defense intelligence agencies prohibited them from spying on American citizens, under the logic that the intrusive tactics needed to investigate foreign threats would violate constitutional rights if applied at home. The F.B.I. even had an internal separation: agents investigating terrorist activity would not share information with those investigating crimes, worried that secrets gleaned from tailing Al Qaeda operatives might wind up publicly exposed in a criminal trial.
Then on Sept. 12, 2001, analysts showed up at their desks and faced a radically altered job. Islamist terrorists, as 9/11 proved, behaved utterly unlike the Soviet Union. They were rapid-moving, transnational and cellular. A corner-store burglar in L.A. might turn out to be a Qaeda sympathizer raising money for a plot being organized overseas. An imam in suburban Detroit could be recruiting local youths to send to the Sudan for paramilitary training. Al Qaeda operatives organized their plots in a hivelike fashion, with collaborators from Afghanistan to London using e-mail, instant messaging and Yahoo groups; rarely did a single mastermind run the show. To disrupt these new plots, some intelligence officials concluded, American agents and analysts would need to cooperate just as fluidly — trading tips quickly among agents and agencies. Following the usual chain of command could be fatal. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda, you need to behave like a network,” John Arquilla, the influential professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me.
It was a fine vision. But analysts were saddled with technology that was designed in the cold war. They now at least had computers, and intelligence arrived as electronic messages instead of paper memos. But their computers still communicated almost exclusively with people inside their agencies. When the intelligence services were computerized in the ’90s, they had digitally replicated their cold-war divisions — each one building a multimillion-dollar system that allowed the agency to share information internally but not readily with anyone outside.
The computer systems were designed to be “air gapped.” The F.B.I. terminals were connected to one another — but not to the computers at any other agency, and vice versa. Messages written on the C.I.A.’s network (which they still quaintly called “cables”) were purely internal. To get a message to the F.B.I. required a special communication called a “telegraphic dissemination.” Each agency had databases to amass intelligence, but because of the air gap, other agencies could not easily search them. The divisions were partly because of turf battles and partly because of legal restrictions — but they were also technological. Mike Scheuer, an adviser to the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit until 2004, told me he had been frustrated by the inability of the systems to interpenetrate. “About 80 percent of C.I.A.-F.B.I. difficulties came from the fact that we couldn’t communicate with one another,” he said. Scheuer told me he would often send a document electronically to the F.B.I., then call to make sure the agents got it. “And they’d say, ‘We can’t find it, can you fax it?’ And then we’d call, and they’d say, ‘Well, the system said it came in, but we still can’t find it — so could you courier it over?’ ” “
These systems have served us very well for five decades,” Dale Meyerrose told me when I spoke with him recently. But now, he said, they’re getting in the way. “The 16 intelligence organizations of the U.S. are without peer. They are the best in the world. The trick is, are they collectively the best?”
Last year, Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general, was named the chief information officer — the head computer guy, as it were — for the office of the director of national intelligence. Established by Congress in 2004, the D.N.I.’s office has a controversial mandate: it is supposed to report threats to the president and persuade the intelligence agencies to cooperate more closely. Both tasks were formerly the role of the C.I.A. director, but since the C.I.A. director had no budgetary power over the other agencies, they rarely heeded his calls to pass along their secrets. So the new elevated position of national-intelligence director was created; ever since, it has been filled by John Negroponte. Last December, Negroponte hired Meyerrose and gave him the daunting task of developing mechanisms to allow the various agencies’ aging and incompatible systems to swap data. Right away, Meyerrose ordered some sweeping changes. In the past, each agency chose its own outside contractor to build customized software — creating proprietary systems, each of which stored data in totally different file formats. From now on, Meyerrose said, each agency would have to build new systems using cheaper, off-the-shelf software so they all would be compatible. But bureaucratic obstacles were just a part of the problem Meyerrose faced. He was also up against something deeper in the DNA of the intelligence services. “We’ve had this ‘need to know’ culture for years,” Meyerrose said. “Well, we need to move to a ‘need to share’ philosophy.”
There was already one digital pipeline that joined the agencies (though it had its own limitations): Intelink, which connects most offices in each intelligence agency. It was created in 1994 after C.I.A. officials saw how the Web was rapidly transforming the way private-sector companies shared information. Intelink allows any agency to publish a Web page, or put a document or a database online, secure in the knowledge that while other agents and analysts can access it, the outside world cannot.
So why hasn’t Intelink given young analysts instant access to all secrets from every agency? Because each agency’s databases, and the messages flowing through their internal pipelines, are not automatically put onto Intelink. Agency supervisors must actively decide what data they will publish on the network — and their levels of openness vary. Some departments have created slick, professional sites packed full of daily alerts and searchable collections of their reports going back years. Others have put up little more than a “splash page” announcing they exist. Operational information — like details of a current covert action — is rarely posted, usually because supervisors fear that a leak could jeopardize a delicate mission.
Nonetheless, Intelink has grown to the point that it contains thousands of agency sites and several hundred databases. Analysts at the various agencies generate 50,000 official reports a year, many of which are posted to the network. The volume of material online is such that analysts now face a new problem: data overload. Even if they suspect good information might exist on Intelink, it is often impossible to find it. The system is poorly indexed, and its internal search tools perform like the pre-Google search engines of the ’90s.“
One of my daily searches is for words like ‘Afghanistan’ or ‘Taliban,’ ” I was told by one young military analyst who specializes in threats from weapons of mass destruction. (He requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak to reporters.) “So I’m looking for reports from field agents saying stuff like, ‘I’m out here, and here’s what I saw,’ ” he continued. “But I get to my desk and I’ve got, like, thousands a day — mountains of information, and no way to organize it.”
Adding to the information glut, there’s an increasingly large amount of data to read outside of Intelink. Intelligence analysts are finding it more important to keep up with “open source” information — nonclassified material published in full public view, like newspapers, jihadist blogs and discussion boards in foreign countries. This adds ever more calories to the daily info diet. The W.M.D. analyst I spoke to regularly reads the blog of Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor known for omnivorous linking to, and acerbic analysis of, news from the Middle East. “He’s not someone spies would normally pay attention to, but now he’s out there — and he’s a subject-matter expert, right?” the analyst said.
Intelligence hoarding presented one set of problems, but pouring it into a common ocean, Meyerrose realized soon after moving into his office, is not the answer either. “Intelligence is about looking for needles in haystacks, and we can’t just keep putting more hay on the stack,” he said. What the agencies needed was a way to take the thousands of disparate, unorganized pieces of intel they generate every day and somehow divine which are the most important.
Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?
Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.
Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.
A profusion of spy blogs and wikis would have another, perhaps even more beneficial impact. It would drastically improve the search engines of Intelink. In a paper that won an honorable mention in the Galileo Awards, Matthew Burton — the young former D.I.A. analyst — made this case. He pointed out that the best Internet search engines, including Google, all use “link analysis” to measure the authority of documents. When you type the search “Afghanistan” into Google, it finds every page that includes that word. Then it ranks the pages in part by how many links point to the page — based on the idea that if many bloggers and sites have linked to a page, it must be more useful than others. To do its job well, Google relies on the links that millions of individuals post online every day.
This, Burton pointed out, is precisely the problem with Intelink. It has no links, no social information to help sort out which intel is significant and which isn’t. When an analyst’s report is posted online, it does not include links to other reports, even ones it cites. There’s no easy way for agents to link to a report or post a comment about it. Searching Intelink thus resembles searching the Internet before blogs and Google came along — a lot of disconnected information, hard to sort through. If spies were encouraged to blog on Intelink, Burton reasoned, their profuse linking could mend that situation. “
Imagine having tools that could spot emerging patterns for you and guide you to documents that might be the missing pieces of evidence you’re looking for,” Burton wrote in his Galileo paper. “Analytical puzzles, like terror plots, are often too piecemeal for individual brains to put together. Having our documents aware of each other would be like hooking several brains up in a line, so that each one knows what the others know, making the puzzle much easier to solve.”
With Andrus and Burton’s vision in mind, you can almost imagine how 9/11 might have played out differently. In Phoenix, the F.B.I. agent Kenneth Williams might have blogged his memo noting that Al Qaeda members were engaging in flight-training activity. The agents observing a Qaeda planning conference in Malaysia could have mentioned the attendance of a Saudi named Khalid al-Midhar; another agent might have added that he held a multi-entry American visa. The F.B.I. agents who snared Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota might have written about their arrest of a flight student with violent tendencies. Other agents and analysts who were regular readers of these blogs would have found the material interesting, linked to it, pointed out connections or perhaps entered snippets of it into a wiki page discussing this new trend of young men from the Middle East enrolling in pilot training.
As those four original clues collected more links pointing toward them, they would have amassed more and more authority in the Intelink search engine. Any analysts doing searches for “Moussaoui” or “Al Qaeda” or even “flight training” would have found them. Indeed, the original agents would have been considerably more likely to learn of one another’s existence and perhaps to piece together the topography of the 9/11 plot. No one was able to prevent 9/11 because nobody connected the dots. But in a system like this, as Andrus’s theory goes, the dots are inexorably drawn together. “Once the intelligence community has a robust and mature wiki and blog knowledge-sharing Web space,” Andrus concluded in his essay, “the nature of intelligence will change forever.”
At first glance, the idea might seem slightly crazy. Outfit the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. with blogs and wikis? In the civilian world, after all, these online tools have not always amassed the most stellar reputations. There are many valuable blogs and wikis, of course, but they are vastly outnumbered by ones that exist to compile useless ephemera, celebrity gossip and flatly unverifiable assertions. Nonetheless, Andrus’s ideas struck a chord with many very senior members of the office of the director of national intelligence. This fall, I met with two of them: Thomas Fingar, the patrician head of analysis for the D.N.I., and Mike Wertheimer, his chief technology officer, whose badge clip sports a button that reads “geek.” If it is Meyerrose’s job to coax spy hardware to cooperate, it is Fingar’s job to do the same for analysts.
Fingar and Wertheimer are now testing whether a wiki could indeed help analysts do their job. In the fall of 2005, they joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to. To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out