Pro
bono publico
Exclusive
Responsibility of State Leaders
Historically, the state was created and still exists
as a comprehensive system of social administration and organisation of society,
while being a violent, repressive apparatus of imposing law abidance. This
apparatus supports and ensures the authority of the political leaders holding
power, and in conditions of totalitarianism, it even leads to the absolutisation
of the power of dictators and despots.
The existence and functioning of the state
system is ensured by the created hierarchy of power and people working in it.
Being well-paid professionals and biased intellectuals involved in the system,
they are – in the interests of their employers – concerned about the
preservation of the established formal democratic system and its purposeful and
successful functioning (although this often is contrary to the interests of
society). For the sake of preserving their social status and their own
benefits, they become conformists who are spoilt by power and freely interpret
morality, who in fact have sold their professionalism along with virtues, handed
over their intellect, talents, skills and competence (and also reputation)
to the power elite, oligarchs and tycoons.
Under the conditions of fraudulent democracy,
the political hierarchy ensures the formation of the power elite and its
existence. Possibilities for the start of seizing the public administration, expansion
of monopolisation and grabitisation
of state property, i.e. arbitrary use of the authority of power and the state
apparatus in order to exploit the people and squander the resources of the
country, thus satisfying selfish interests, are created. Covering all this with
the illusory ideology of a bright future
and a mythical need to protect the self-proclaimed national interests and militarise the state.
Power can enhance our strengths, but it also amplifies our weaknesses.
For leaders, those aspects that become amplified are inevitably cascaded onto
their people.
BY Nik Kinley
Whether you’re a frontline supervisor in your first management role or
the CEO of a global multinational, being the boss changes you. Part of this is
simply leaders adapting to the challenges and pressures inherent in all
positions of power. Things like the wider scope of responsibilities, greater
decision complexity, and heavier workloads.
However, a growing body of research shows that another part of what
power does to people occurs at a deeper level, subtly yet fundamentally
altering how leaders think and feel. This runs so deep that it has been shown
to lead to changes
in brain structure and chemistry. And now, evidence is mounting that
broader societal changes are amplifying these effects, creating greater
challenges for leaders and greater risks for the organizations they lead.
For the most part, the mechanisms through which being a leader affects
you are the same whatever your level. The only difference is that the higher
you go, the stronger the pressure they apply on you, so the more likely you are
to be changed by them. Three mechanisms stand out as being the most
influential.
It increases distance
The first thing power does is increase the psychological distance
between leaders and the people they lead. On the plus side, positioning
individuals above others tends to make them feel better about themselves,
increasing self-esteem and confidence, to the extent that they are more prone
to over-confidence. It also gives leaders a helicopter view, making it easier
for them to see things more abstractly and to ignore potentially distracting
details.
But this greater abstract thinking also means leaders are more likely to
use stereotypes and generalizations. And the psychological distance
involved in all this makes leaders more liable to objectify others and view
them as resources, and less able to see things from their perspective or
understand how they feel.
It warps information flow
Power also alters the flow of information to and from leaders, changing
what they see, hear, and communicate, partly due to the greater distance
created by being the boss. For starters, it increases leaders’ tendency to rely
on what they already know and makes them less sensitive to contextual
information and less able to hear others’ opinions. This, in turn, leaves them
more susceptible to subjective biases.
And exacerbating all of this, because leaders have power over others,
people are less likely to be open with them and less likely to challenge their
thinking. Finally, their greater sensitivity to internal information means that
leaders are more likely to focus on salient goals, which can often mean
short-term ones and sometimes personal ones.
It amplifies what lies within
The third main mechanism is potentially the most important: People with
power are more likely to act in accordance with their emotions, preferences,
personalities, values, and personal goals. In other words, power amplifies the
default and instinctive
tendencies within people.
This can be for the better, enhancing strengths. But it can also magnify
weaknesses. So, if you’re prone to overconfidence, power usually makes you more
so. If you’re susceptible to indecision, being in charge can make this worse.
And if you are more task-focused than people-focused, being the boss will only
further impair your ability to empathize.
This is also why the adage that power corrupts people is oversimplified
and— ultimately—wrong. Yes, the greater psychological distance and warped
perspective seem to make some people more likely to act selfishly and find
lying easier. But power doesn’t corrupt everyone. It actually increases
benevolent and principled behavior in some people. So, power doesn’t corrupt
people; it just reveals and amplifies the propensity for corruption that’s
already there.
The power of context
However, individual differences are not the only factor determining the
precise effects of power. The effects of power also vary across situations. For
instance, when there are fewer checks and balances on leaders, the effects of
all three mechanisms tend to be stronger. This is why the more established
leaders become, the more they tend to be influenced by the effects of power.
The more powerful leaders are, the more exaggerated the expression of their
inner character and instincts tends to be.
There is something else here, too. When leaders feel overly insecure in
their role, they tend to focus on securing their position and pursuing
short-term and personal goals. And that rarely drives positive or useful
behaviors. This is where we get to the kicker, because on almost every metric
measurable, leadership roles are less secure than ever before. Add to that a
broader societal trend toward impression management and an apparent growing
intolerance of differing viewpoints, and it is easy to see why so many
researchers view leadership positions as more isolated and precarious than ever
before. And as they become ever more so, the leaders who hold these roles
become more vulnerable to the effects of power.
Cascading impact
What makes all this so important is that leaders are not solo operators.
The very nature of their role means that their behavior affects not just
themselves, but also their teams. And through this, leaders have a cascading,
trickle-down impact on everyone in their organization.
This is why, for all the many ways power can affect leaders, ultimately
it is leaders who often have a greater impact on the power they hold. They
don’t just affect the way the people beneath them behave, they also change the
expectations people have of leaders in general and how leaders behave. This is
why toxic leaders can be so damaging. They poison the well for the leaders who
follow them, undermining not just how much people trust them personally but
also how much people trust leaders generally.
Implications
There are implications here for both leaders and organizations. For
leaders, part of the challenge here is that it is rare to find an organization
that supports leaders by helping them understand how they, as individuals, can
spot and manage the effects of power. Until this changes, leaders need to take
steps to protect themselves. And the starting point here should be to
sense-check the degree to which they are retaining objectivity, remaining
well-informed, and connecting with others’ perspectives. Creating, in other
words, checks and balances for themselves.
For organizations, there is a need to start talking more openly about
power and the role it plays. Executives need to more explicitly evaluate how
individuals might be changed by power when selecting leaders and to balance the
focus on what leaders can do for the business with what they will do to it,
through the way in which they wield their power. They need to invest in
preparing leaders for the challenges of how power will change them.
Whether we recognize it or not, power does things to us. It can enhance
our strengths, but it also amplifies our weaknesses. And because we are
leaders, the aspects of ourselves that become amplified are inevitably cascaded
onto the people who work for us. We may not immediately see these effects, but
they are there. And the only debatable thing is whether we—as leaders—take
steps to understand and better manage them. https://www.fastcompany.com/91256936/how-power-changes-leaders
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the
Twentieth Century
A historian of fascism offers a guide for
surviving and resisting America's turn towards authoritarianism.
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
"Mr. Snyder is a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present." —The New York Times
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
"Mr. Snyder is a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present." —The New York Times
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Twenty-Lessons-Twentieth-Century/dp/0804190119
Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie -- And
Why Trump Is Worse
This definitive
history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have
eroded -- and why Trump's lies are especially dangerous.
If there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, it's that he lies. But he's by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception-each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie-and the media's complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.
Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.
If there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, it's that he lies. But he's by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception-each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie-and the media's complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.
Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52594894-lying-in-state
Do Morals
Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Americans constantly make
moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of
these assessments are poorly thought through. A president is either praised for
the moral clarity of his statements or judged solely on the results of their
actions.
In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in US foreign policy during the American era after 1945. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions of their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not fully constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. He further notes the important ethical consequences of non-actions, such as Truman's willingness to accept stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons.
Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Most importantly, presidents need to factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy-especially in a future international system that presents not only great power competition from China and Russia, but a host of transnational threats: the illegal drug trade, infectious diseases, terrorism, cybercrime, and climate change.
In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in US foreign policy during the American era after 1945. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions of their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not fully constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. He further notes the important ethical consequences of non-actions, such as Truman's willingness to accept stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons.
Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Most importantly, presidents need to factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy-especially in a future international system that presents not only great power competition from China and Russia, but a host of transnational threats: the illegal drug trade, infectious diseases, terrorism, cybercrime, and climate change.
Disloyal: A Memoir:
The True Story of the Former Personal
Attorney to President Donald J. Trump
The
Inside Story of the Real President Trump, by His Former Attorney and Personal Advisor—The Man Who Helped Get Him
Into the Oval Office
.
«Il y a le feu
à la Maison Europe», le manifeste des patriotes européens
Par Un
collectif d'écrivains internationaux — 25 janvier 2019 à
14:24
Trente
écrivains internationaux, dont plusieurs Prix Nobel, ont répondu à l'appel de
Bernard-Henri Lévy pour tirer la sonnette d'alarme, en exclusivité dans
«Libération», sur la montée des dangers qui menacent l'Europe.
«Il
y a le feu à la Maison Europe», le plaidoyer européen de trente écrivains
internationaux
Tribune. L’Europe est en
péril.
De
partout montent les critiques, les outrages, les désertions.
En
finir avec la construction européenne, retrouver l’«âme des nations», renouer
avec une «identité perdue» qui n’existe, bien souvent, que dans
l’imagination des démagogues, tel est le programme commun aux forces populistes
qui déferlent sur le continent.
Attaquée
de l’intérieur par des mauvais prophètes ivres de ressentiment et qui croient
leur heure revenue, lâchée, à l’extérieur, outre-Manche et outre-Atlantique,
par les deux grands alliés qui l’ont, au XXe siècle, deux fois
sauvée du suicide, en proie aux manœuvres de moins en moins dissimulées du
maître du Kremlin, l’Europe comme idée, volonté et représentation est en train
de se défaire sous nos yeux.
Et
c’est dans ce climat délétère que se dérouleront, en mai, des élections
européennes qui, si rien ne change, si rien ne vient endiguer la vague qui
enfle et qui pousse et qui monte et si ne se manifeste pas, très vite, sur tout
le continent, un nouvel esprit de résistance, risquent d’être les plus
calamiteuses que nous ayons connues : victoire des naufrageurs ;
disgrâce de ceux qui croient encore à l’héritage d’Erasme, de Dante, de Goethe
et de Comenius ; mépris de l’intelligence et de la culture ;
explosions de xénophobie et d’antisémitisme ; un désastre.
Les
signataires sont de ceux qui ne se résolvent pas à cette catastrophe annoncée.
Ils
sont de ces patriotes européens, plus nombreux qu’on ne le croit, mais trop
souvent résignés et silencieux, qui savent que se joue là, trois quarts de
siècle après la défaite des fascismes et trente ans après la chute du mur de
Berlin, une nouvelle bataille pour la civilisation.
Et
leur mémoire d’Européens, la foi en cette grande Idée dont ils ont hérité et dont
ils ont la garde, la conviction qu’elle seule, cette Idée, a eu la force, hier,
de hisser nos peuples au-dessus d’eux-mêmes et de leur passé guerrier et
qu’elle seule aura la vertu, demain, de conjurer la venue de totalitarismes
nouveaux et le retour, dans la foulée, de la misère propre aux âges sombres
– tout cela leur interdit de baisser les bras.
De
là, cette invitation au sursaut.
De
là cet appel à mobilisation à la veille d’une élection qu’ils se refusent à
abandonner aux fossoyeurs.
Et
de là cette exhortation à reprendre le flambeau d’une Europe qui, malgré ses
manquements, ses errements et, parfois, ses lâchetés reste une deuxième patrie
pour tous les hommes libres du monde.
Notre
génération a commis une erreur.
Semblables
à ces Garibaldiens du XIX° siècle répétant, tel un mantra, leur «Italia
farà da sé», nous avons cru que l’unité du continent se ferait
d’elle-même, sans volonté ni effort.
Nous
avons vécu dans l’illusion d’une Europe nécessaire, inscrite dans la nature des
choses, et qui se ferait sans nous, même si nous ne faisions rien, car elle
était dans le «sens de l’Histoire».
C’est
avec ce providentialisme qu’il faut rompre.
C’est
à cette Europe paresseuse, privée de ressort et de pensée, qu’il faut
donner congé.
Nous
n’avons plus le choix.
Il
faut, quand grondent les populismes, vouloir l’Europe ou sombrer.
Il
faut, tandis que menace, partout, le repli souverainiste, renouer avec le
volontarisme politique ou consentir à ce que s’imposent, partout, le
ressentiment, la haine et leur cortège de passions tristes.
Et
il faut, dès aujourd’hui, dans l’urgence, sonner l’alarme contre les
incendiaires des âmes qui, de Paris à Rome en passant par Dresde, Barcelone,
Budapest, Vienne ou Varsovie jouent avec le feu de nos libertés.
Car
tel est bien l’enjeu : derrière cette étrange défaite de l’Europe qui se
profile, derrière cette nouvelle crise de la conscience européenne acharnée à
déconstruire tout ce qui fit la grandeur, l’honneur et la prospérité de nos
sociétés, la remise en cause – sans précédent depuis les
années 30 – de la démocratie libérale et de ses valeurs.
Signataires : Vassilis
Alexakis ; Svetlana Alexievitch ; Anne Applebaum ; Jens
Christian Grøndahl ; David Grossman ; Ágnes Heller ; Elfriede
Jelinek ; Ismaïl Kadaré ; György Konrád ; Milan Kundera ;
Bernard-Henri Lévy ; António Lobo Antunes ; Claudio Magris ;
Adam Michnik ; Ian McEwan ; Herta Müller ; Ludmila
Oulitskaïa ; Orhan Pamuk ; Rob Riemen ; Salman Rushdie ;
Fernando Savater ; Roberto Saviano ; Eugenio Scalfari ; Simon
Schama ; Peter Schneider ; Abdulah Sidran ; Leïla Slimani ; Colm
Tóibín ; Mario Vargas Llosa ; Adam Zagajewski.
'A chain of stupidity':
the Skripal case
and the decline of Russia's spy agencies
The unmasking of the
Salisbury poisoning suspects by a new digital journalism outfit was an
embarrassment for Putin – and evidence that Russian spies are not what they
once were. By Luke
Harding
Tue 23 Jun 2020 06.00 BSTLast
modified on Tue 23 Jun 2020 12.45 BST
In
2011 I was in Libya reporting on the civil war. Rebels backed by the US, the UK
and France were advancing on the capital, Tripoli. The insurgents moved forward
through bombed-out towns as Muammar Gaddafi’s forces retreated. Coastal cities
in the west and east, oil refineries, Roman ruins and temples – all fell, one
by one, as the regime lost ground.
These were dangerous
times. In the town of Zawiyah I found locals celebrating victory in
the main square. They were shooting in the air and doing wheelspins and skids
in their cars and trucks. Gaddafi’s soldiers had left the previous night,
fleeing down the road. I saw a small boy, maybe eight years old, stomping on a
Gaddafi flag. “The city is ruined. No problem – we will rebuild it,” one local,
Tariq Sadiq, told me.
The signs of battle were
everywhere. The square’s four-star Zawiyah Jewel Hotel was a ruin. The lobby
was filled with rubble. Mattresses where Gaddafi’s soldiers had slept lay
strewn among crates containing mortar cases and empty plastic water bottles.
The air crackled with jubilant gunfire.
The celebrations turned out
to be premature. From their new positions, and without warning, Gaddafi’s army
began shelling the square. I took shelter indoors. First one mortar, then six
more. Each was a loud thunderclap, a sudden affirmative whomping, followed by
puffs of black smoke.
At that moment, I wasn’t
much interested in the types of munitions that were raining down. There was a
simple urge: to escape. My role, as I saw it, was to tell the stories of those
unwittingly caught up in conflict. I had brought to Libya the usual tools of a
frontline correspondent: flak jacket, satellite phone and first-aid kit, carried
in a rucksack.
A man named Eliot Higgins
was following events in Libya, too – not from the front line, but from his home
in the east Midlands. Specifically, from his sofa. It was a safer place to be –
and, as it turned out, as good a perch as any from which to analyse the
conflict, and to consider questions that, in the heat of battle, were
interesting, but seemingly unanswerable. Questions such as: where did the
rebels get their arms?
Higgins
recalls growing up as a shy “nerd”. According to his brother Ross, Higgins was
an obsessive gamer and early computer enthusiast. He liked Lego, played Pong on
an antediluvian 1980s Atari and was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons. He spent
hours immersed in the online roleplay game World of Warcraft, where
participants pooled skills and collaborated across virtual borders. His
instincts were completist: he wanted to finish and win the game. This would
prove useful later on.
Higgins tried for a career
in journalism and enrolled on a media studies course in Southampton. It didn’t
work out, and he left without a degree. Next, he earned a living via a series
of unlikely administrative jobs. One day Higgins logged on to the Guardian’s
Middle East live blog. Libya was the centre of international attention. Higgins
made his own contributions to the comment section of the Guardian blog, using
the name Brown Moses – taken from a Frank Zappa song. The blog often featured
videos uploaded by anti-regime fighters. There was fierce debate as to whether
these images were authentic or bogus.
One such video showed a
newly captured town. The rebels claimed it was Tiji, a sleepy settlement with a
barracks that had been recently bombed by Nato jets, close to the border with
Tunisia, and on the strategic main road leading to Tripoli. There was a mosque,
a white road and a few little buildings with trees around them. The video
showed a rebel-driven tank rolling noisily down a two-lane highway. There were
utility poles.
Higgins used satellite
images to see if he could identify the settlement and thereby win the
discussion. The features were sufficiently distinctive for him to be able to
prove he was correct: the town was Tiji. “I’m very argumentative,” he says. It
was the first time he had used geolocation tools. He realised he could collect
user-generated videos and later work out exactly where they had been filmed.
Shortly afterwards his first
child was born. Higgins combined his new childcare duties with online research.
Meanwhile, the uprisings in the Arab world spread. Soon Syria was at war, too.
What began as a way of
scoring points over online adversaries evolved into something bigger.
Smartphones with cameras, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Google Earth, Google
street view, YouTube – the digital world was multiplying at an astonishing
rate. This stuff was open-source: anyone could access it. By cross-checking
video footage with existing photos and Google maps, it was possible to
investigate what was going on in a faraway war zone.
These techniques offered
interesting possibilities. Open-source journalism might be applied to the realm
of justice and accountability. Sometimes soldiers filmed their own crimes –
executions, for example, carried out on featureless terrain. If you could
identify who and where, this could be evidence in a court of law. The shadow
cast by a dead body was a strong indication of time of death.
At home, and surrounded by
his daughter’s discarded toys, Higgins unearthed a number of scoops. He found weapons from Croatia in a video
posted by a Syrian jihadist group. The weapons, it emerged, were from the
Saudis. The New York Times picked up the story and put it on the front page – an
indication of how armchair analysis could be as telling as dispatches from the
ground.
Higgins documented the
Syrian regime’s use of cluster bombs. He discovered that government soldiers were
tossing DIY barrel bombs out of helicopters, and that rebels were fighting back
around Aleppo with Chinese-made shoulder-launched missiles. His reputation
spread. He launched a new investigative website: Bellingcat.
The idea was to consolidate
pioneering online research techniques and to connect with a wider pool of
international volunteers. In July 2014, three days after Bellingcat went live,
a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane was blown out of the sky over Ukraine. Some
298 people – nearly 200 of them Dutch – died. The incident grew into
Bellingcat’s first major investigation.
Higgins’s team discovered
that the missile launcher had come from Russia’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile
brigade, based in the city of Kursk. Video footage showed the launcher
trundling across Russia as part of a military convoy. The system was filmed
again by locals inside eastern Ukraine after MH17 was brought down, heading
back to Russia with
one of its missiles missing.
Bellingcat got bigger. One
key figure was Christo Grozev, a fluent Russian-speaker and a Bulgarian from an
anti-communist family. Grozev grew up in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city; his
father was fired from his job as a teacher for growing a hippie-style beard.
Bellingcat joined forces with the Insider, an independent Russian news website
run by Roman Dobrokhotov.
By summer 2018, the British
police were confident they had identified the two Russian suspects who had
tried to murder Sergei
Skripal a few weeks earlier, in March. Skripal, a former officer with
Russia’s GRU military spy agency, was poisoned in Salisbury, together with his
daughter Yulia. The assassins’ names had not been made public. The hope was
that they might travel to western countries where they could be arrested.
There were discussions
inside the British government about what to do. One course was to demand their
extradition – knowing Vladimir Putin would refuse, as he had with the killers
of Alexander Litvinenko 11 years earlier. Another was to
recognise that there was zero prospect of a criminal trial, and to publish
concrete intelligence.
That September, prime
minister Theresa May went with option two. She told the House of Commons that the two Russian assassins
were Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov – adding that the police believed
these names to be aliases. CCTV images from their trips to Salisbury were
revealed. Also shown was the apparent murder weapon – a counterfeit perfume
bottle containing the nerve agent novichok.
The new details were a boon
for Bellingcat. During the next few weeks, its volunteers scurried all over the
evidence. They would go on to inflict a series of humiliations on Russia’s GRU
military intelligence spy agency that may have contributed to the fall of its
chief, Igor Korobov.
In
the 20th century, Soviet assassins were able to travel around Europe using fake
passports. Their movements were seldom discovered. They may have been better,
more professional spies – or lesser ones. It was an age before transparency.
The modern GRU was still
using the old Soviet playbook when it came to covert operations such as the
murder of enemies outside the country. These analogue plots now took place in a
digital environment. GRU officers earned their spurs in the Soviet “near
abroad” – in Tajikistan, Moldova or Ukraine, where there were few cameras to
worry about, and not much of a CIA or other American presence.
Western Europe was
different. Britain, in particular, was a counter-intelligence challenge. The UK
had CCTV on every public corner – in railway stations, hotel lobbies and
airports. Any passengers arriving on a flight from Moscow would be logged and
filmed. A port-of-entry database was available to western security agencies.
Meanwhile, Russian markets
sold CDs of mass official information: home addresses, car registrations,
telephone directories and other bulk indexes. For £80 or so you could buy
traffic police records. With the right contacts, and a modest cash payment, it
was even possible to gain access to the national passport database.
Paradoxically, this
low-level corruption made Russia one of the most open societies in the world.
Corruption was the friend of investigative journalism, and the enemy of
government–military secrets.
After the Metropolitan
police published photos of Boshirov and Petrov, Bellingcat took up the hunt. It
sought to unmask their real identities. The first step was to image search
their photos via online search engines. This yielded nothing. They looked for
telephone numbers associated with the two names. Nothing again.
And so the online
investigators tried a deductive approach. They spoke to sources in Russia and
asked where a GRU officer operating in western Europe was likely to have been
trained. One answer was Siberia, and in particular the Far Eastern Military
Command Academy in Khabarovsk, just across the Amur River from China. The men
appeared to be in their late 30s or early 40s. This gave an approximate date of
birth.
Yearbooks from the academy
yielded no results, but a photo of a group of graduates taken in Chechnya
looked promising. One of the soldiers – woolly hat, uniform, standing in front
of anonymous, snow-covered hills – looked like Boshirov. The 2018 article said
that academy students had gone on to become “heroes of Russia”, Moscow’s
highest military award. Was it possible that Boshirov was among them?
The academy’s website
included a photo of its memorial wall. In its centre was a gold statue of the
Soviet marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, one of several top commanders who led
the Red Army to victory in the second world war. There was also a list of
names, engraved in gold letters. Ten were “heroes of Russia”. Most had earned
their accolade fighting against the Nazis, or in Afghanistan. But two of the
names were more recent. An online list said only that the pair had received the
honour “by decree of the Russian president”.
One was too old, but the
other looked about right. His name was Anatoliy Chepiga. Bellingcat searched
for further traces and soon the evidence piled up. At the age of 18, Chepiga
had enrolled in the military academy, 25 miles from his home village near the
Russia-China border. He graduated in 2001, and his brigade served three times
in Chechnya. At some point between 2003 and 2010, he moved to Moscow and was
trained at the GRU’s main academy, known as the Conservatory. In 2014, his
brigade was deployed to Ukraine. It was there he earned his “hero of Russia”
award – though what he did there was unknown. After that, Chepiga travelled
frequently to western Europe and the UK.
The passport photo showed a
younger version of the assassin wanted by the British authorities. Chepiga was
Boshirov, and Boshirov was Chepiga.
Chepiga was married with a
child. The first Skripal poisoner, then, was a father, a husband, a soldier and
a would-be murderer. And a veteran of conflicts in Russia’s restive southern
and western borderlands. But what about the second?
Identifying Petrov would
prove a little more difficult.
Bellingcat
revealed the identity of poisoner No 1 in a message on its website. Having unmasked one assassin, it seemed likely
that Bellingcat would succeed in identifying Petrov, too. Sure enough, in late
September I received an invitation to a press conference. It was to be held in
an illustrious location: the Houses of Parliament, in an upstairs committee
room, number nine. Its subject was Petrov’s real identity.
By the time I arrived, the
room was full. I spotted a reporter from the New York Times, Ellen Barry,
together with leading representatives from the British and US media. It was
hard to escape the conclusion that power in journalism was shifting. It was
moving away from established print titles and towards open-source innovators.
The new hero of journalism was no longer a grizzled investigator burning shoe
leather, à la All the President’s Men, but a pasty-looking kid
in front of a MacBook Air.
Higgins and Grozev were
there, as well as a Conservative MP, Bob Seely. I found a spot on a bench and
sat down. The mood was expectant. Seely set the scene. He described Bellingcat
as a “truly remarkable group of digital detectives”. Their success was due to
an explosion of digital technology and a rise in digital activism, he said.
Grozev explained how
Bellingcat had identified that Petrov’s real name was Alexander Mishkin.
The search involved methods new and old. It found Mishkin in a car insurance
database, as the owner of a Volvo XC90. The car was registered to the GRU’s
Moscow headquarters at Khoroshevskoye Shosse. Next, they used Russian social
media to get in touch with Mishkin’s student contemporaries. Did any of them
remember him from their St Petersburg days?
Most didn’t answer. But two
did. One said Mishkin had been in a different class – and that Russia’s
security services had been in touch two weeks previously and instructed
graduates not to divulge any information about Mishkin under any circumstances.
Lastly, the Insider
dispatched a reporter to Mishkin’s home village. At least seven residents
identified Mishkin from the photo produced by the British police. Mishkin’s
grandmother – now in her 90s – wasn’t home. Her neighbours, however, said it
was well known that Mishkin had received a “hero of Russia” award in connection
with Ukraine.
Mishkin had an unusual
profession for a travelling assassin: he was a doctor. The GRU had recruited
him between 2007 and 2010 and given him his cover name. There was one last
remarkable detail. Mishkin’s granny had a photo of her grandson receiving the
award, residents said, and used to show it to them proudly while never letting
it out of her grasp. The person congratulating Mishkin and shaking his hand
was Vladimir
Putin.
Chepiga
and Mishkin’s world began to unravel even before Bellingcat outed them in
parliament. Their photos – as Petrov and Boshirov – had been sprayed all over
the place. This presented a dilemma for the GRU. One option was to hide the
pair away for ever. Another was to instruct them to give a media interview.
Someone inside the Russian
state decided to try this model. It may have been Putin, who used a conference
in Vladivostok to urge them to come forward. Chepiga and Mishkin agreed (or,
more probably, were told) to speak to RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
Simonyan was a trusted person and Russian media star – a leading apparatchik
who sat on top of a global propaganda empire. Putin had given her an award for
“objectivity” for RT’s coverage of Crimea. What could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out,
everything. Chepiga and Mishkin’s joint interview on RT was a disaster. It was an unintentionally comic performance that
made them and the GRU a laughing stock, not only among English-speaking
countries, but across Russia, too. They were professional spies, and so lacked
media experience.
Play Video
1:24
Men claiming to be
Salisbury novichok attack suspects speak to Russian state TV – video
They appeared nervous,
shifty, under pressure, timorous, idiotic and craven. Unlike Putin – a grand
master when it came to deceit – they were lousy liars. The pair insisted that
they were not GRU officers, and that their real names were indeed Petrov and Boshirov.
As for the curious events of Salisbury – well, these might be explained:
Simonyan: What
were you doing there?
Petrov: Our
friends have been suggesting for quite a long time that we visited this
wonderful city.
Simonyan:
Salisbury? A wonderful city?
Petrov: Yes.
Simonyan: What
makes it so wonderful?
Boshirov: It’s a
tourist city. They have a famous cathedral there, Salisbury Cathedral. It’s
famous throughout Europe and, in fact, throughout the world, I think. It’s
famous for its 123-metre spire, it’s famous for its clock. It’s one of the
oldest working clocks in the world.
Chepiga/Boshirov’s knowledge
of Salisbury seems to have been gleaned from a cursory reading of Russian
Wikipedia. The cathedral spire is impressive – built in the 13th and 14th centuries,
the tallest in Britain, octagonal, with flying buttresses and scissor arches,
and praised by Sir Christopher Wren and Malcolm Muggeridge as a marvel. Still,
it seemed unlikely this spire had drawn the two spies all the way from Moscow.
How also to explain the fact that the Russians visited Salisbury twice?
Chepiga/Boshirov’s answer:
there was heavy snowfall the weekend they arrived, which played havoc with
transport connections and made them “wet”. So drenched, actually, that the pair
said they were forced to abandon their sightseeing on day one, Saturday, and
take refuge in the train station coffee shop. And to buy new dry shoes on
London’s Oxford Street.
The pair said they came back
the next day and admired the “beautiful English Gothic buildings”. Again they
were compelled to return to London from Salisbury because of “heavy sleet”.
Maybe they passed the Skripals’ house, maybe they didn’t, Chepiga/Boshirov
said. He added: “I’d never heard of them before this nightmare started.”
As the interview goes
forward, two things are evident. First, that Simonyan finds it hard not to
snigger at the spies’ all-round uselessness and discomfort, especially when she
asks why two grown men would share a room together. And second, that the GRU
soldiers express zero sympathy for their victim. They are concerned for
themselves:
Petrov: If they
ever find the ones who did it, it’d be nice if they at least apologised to us.
Simonyan: Who?
The poisoners?
Boshirov: No,
the British … you have no idea what it’s done to our lives.
Petrov: Can’t
even go and fill up your car in peace.
The dominant note is
self-pity. They say they are frightened, uncertain what may happen tomorrow,
and generally wretched, ever since their photos appeared in the media.
Petrov: One just
wants to hide and sit it all out.
Boshirov: So
that they get off our backs … we simply wish to be left alone.
Petrov: We’re
sick and tired of all this.
Boshirov:
Exhausted.
And with that, the heroes of
Russia vanish. They are not seen again.
Moscow
officials did their best to fight back against these embarrassing revelations.
They used familiar tactics – disdain, innuendo and ludicrous counter-claims.
Beginning in October 2018, they purged Petrov, Boshirov and other officers from
their internal systems.
The Russian envoy in London,
Alexander Yakovenko, accused Britain’s spy agencies of poisoning the Skripals
and then kidnapping them. He summoned the media to his Kensington embassy
and expounded his theory in lengthy press conferences. The
ambassador described Bellingcat as a branch of the “deep establishment” – a
phrase that echoed Donald Trump’s attacks on the FBI. (This claim was based on
a “feeling,” Yakovenko said.
Russia’s strategy was to
paint Bellingcat as stooges and spies working for MI6. This was an old Soviet
trope, deployed by the modern Kremlin against opposition critics at home. The
geeks of Bellingcat weren’t secret operatives. Their methods were open. They
were collaborative. And quick.
The attacks ignored a more
interesting truth: that spying was no longer the monopoly of nation states.
“Now it belongs to anyone who has the brains, the spunk and the technological
ability,” Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a security and
defence thinktank, told the New York Times, adding, “We are witnessing a
blurring of distinctions.”
It was becoming evident
that, in the Skripal affair, Moscow had miscalculated. Despite Brexit, the UK
still had allies. More than 20 western countries expelled Russian diplomats in solidarity. About 150
embassy-based spies, mostly GRU officers, were forced to pack their bags. This
was a serious blow to Russia’s overseas espionage network. The GRU’s ability to
collect intelligence and recruit agents was set back.
Ironically, the biggest
clearout of Russian spies took place in the US. The Trump administration
removed 60 Russian officials, including a dozen based at the UN in New York. It
shut the consulate in Seattle, ending the Russian Federation’s diplomatic
representation on the US west coast. Was this a sign that Trump – someone who
had shown no great enthusiasm for confronting Moscow was finally getting tough?
It would seem not. According
to the New York Times, Trump reacted sceptically to Britain’s request for
punitive Russian expulsions. He viewed Skripal’s poisoning as “distasteful but
within the bounds of espionage” and “part of legitimate spy games”. “Some
officials said they thought that Mr Trump, who has frequently criticised ‘rats’
and other turncoats, had some sympathy for the Russian government’s going after
someone viewed as a traitor,” the paper reported.
The
GRU’s 2016 operation to interfere in the US election was a triumph. A few years
later, however, the agency found itself in deep crisis. There were expulsions,
indictments and staggering foreign mishaps. At home and abroad, Putin projected
a strongman persona. Now he looked a little foolish. What had gone awry?
According to the
defector Viktor Suvorov, the decline in GRU standards was part of something
larger. Suvorov – real name Vladimir Rezun – is a former GRU officer who fled
to the UK from Geneva in 1978.
I met Suvorov in London. It
was December 2018, exactly a century after Lenin set up Moscow’s first military
intelligence service, following a proposal from Trotsky. The GRU was in poor
shape, he said. Sure, it still sent kill squads to Europe and engaged in hybrid
warfare such as cyber-hacking. But it had failed to adapt to a 21st-century
universe of total information.
Suvorov likened his old
organisation’s failings to a nasty, cancer-like illness. It was eating up
Russia’s entire body politic. This disease had affected spying, technology and
rocket production, he told me. It explained the abysmal roads, the dying
villages. The country was literally disintegrating. Suvorov used the word “raspad”:
collapse or breakdown. The situation was akin to the Titanic, he said with the
rich looking to flee in a lifeboat.
The glory days of the GRU
were in the 30s and 40s, when its agents stole the US’s atomic secrets, Suvorov
said. After the USSR’s demise, the organisation fared better than the rest of
the country. In time, though, the service was destroyed. When Putin’s foreign
policy turned aggressive and he needed covert-agent recruits, the GRU was
rebuilt. But the quality was gone.
In Suvorov’s day, GRU
officers were Moscow slicks with university degrees, unaccented foreign
languages, and Soviet-posh manners. The most famous was Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval
attache in London who, in 1961, had an affair with Christine Keeler, forcing the British war
secretary, John Profumo (who had also slept with Keeler), to resign. Ivanov was
handsome, clever, witty, hospitable and charming. By contrast, Suvorov claimed
that Ivanov’s modern-day successors were poorly educated and provincial.
Suvorov said his former
service had sunk into “idiotism”. Its generals were incompetent and greedy. As
for Salisbury, this was a “chain of stupidity”, featuring not-very-professional
assassins caught repeatedly on CCTV. “In my time this would not have been
possible! Such idiots!” he told me.
Putin must have personally
approved the novichok plot, Suvorov suggested, reasoning that, “Nobody would
take responsibility without him.” Suvorov said the Russian embassy in London
may have given logistical support, but wouldn’t have known the details. These
probably restricted to 15 or 20 people, including a technical expert and a
handful of top Kremlin officials. The two assassins belonged to a small group
of “dirty” specialists. They would have killed before.
After Suvorov left the USSR,
both the Russian state and the GRU sentenced him to death in absentia. The GRU
would never forgive a traitor, even if a civilian government did, he said. The
Salisbury attack was carried out – in his view – to deter GRU colleagues who
might be contemplating defecting to America. “The GRU is saying to its own:
‘Boys, look at that!’” he said.
Was he sure the GRU poisoned
Skripal? “Of course,” he replied.
Suvorov joined the GRU in
1970. Back then it was a bitter rival to the KGB. The KGB’s headquarters – the
Lubyanka – was in the centre of Moscow and highly visible, reflecting the KGB’s
mission to protect the regime from homegrown enemies. The GRU was lower-profile
and “somewhere in the dark”, Suvorov said, which made the latest revelations
all the more painful.
As the Russian investigative
journalist Sergei Kanev put it to me: “Everything is open. It’s possible to
follow everything. Where you go, whom you meet, where you work.” Kanev
attributed the GRU’s setbacks to a variety of factors, including drunkenness,
unprofessionalism and bardak – the Russian word for chaos.
“The world is changing. They are doing everything like in Soviet times,” he
said.
Who was to blame for this?
Other than Putin, the most obvious person was Igor Korobov, the GRU’s top
commander. That autumn, Korobov’s standing inside Russia’s elite fell sharply.
According to Kanev, the Ministry of Defence was awash with rumours that the GRU
was due for a clearout, with generals likely to be asked to leave. There was
talk of “deep incompetence”, “boundless carelessness” and “morons”.
Kanev’s sources said Korobov
was summoned to a personal meeting with Putin in mid-September. The colonel
general set off from his apartment in an elite complex used for top-ranking
officers on Starovolynskaya Street, next to Moscow’s Victory Park. We don’t
know if the discussion with Putin was friendly, or a dressing down. On his way
home, Korobov suddenly felt unwell. The story of the general’s illness swirled
around the ministry, Kanev wrote.
True account or not, Putin
failed to mention Korobov during a speech at Moscow’s military theatre to mark
the GRU’s 100th anniversary. Instead he spoke of comrades who had died in
battle. “As supreme commander in chief, I certainly know your, without
exaggeration, unique capabilities, including in special operations,” Putin
said. Korobov wasn’t among those invited to the gala ceremony.
Seemingly, Korobov’s errors
had caused Putin to lose face. Later that November, Russia’s Ministry of
Defence made a sad announcement: Korobov had passed away. He was 62. His death
was due to a “long and serious illness”. Was he dead because he messed up? “Of course, it’s pure speculation,” Suvorov
told me. “But everyone inside the GRU will understand 125% he was murdered.” He
added: “Even if it was a natural death, people will say: ‘Come on!’ Nobody will
believe. They know the nature of the organisation.”
theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/23/skripal-salisbury-poisoning-decline-of-russia-spy-agencies-gru?utm
