What I'm Reading - Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about reading a book about high finance.  But this is no ordinary book.  The Boston Globe’s review of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice “a tale of an accidental activist.”  This is a very accurate description of Bill Browder’s tale of Russian corruption and murder.  A “red notice” that gives the book its title is a tool a country uses to let other countries know they wish to arrest a person with an eye toward extradition.  It is a tool that Vladimir Putin’s regime uses to silence its critics outside of Russia.  The custom is this – if a country issues a red notice, countries that participate in Interpol [which is every country except North Korea] are obliged to honor the wishes of the requesting country.  The police don’t have to arrest the subject of a red notice, but countries cut the individual in question off from their bank accounts and, in theory, the entire global financial system.

The book tells of Browder’s story.  His grandfather, Earl Browder, was a Communist who ran for President of the United States twice [1936 and 1940].  Bill Browder himself was the son of left-wing academics.  But somehow, this son of academics with Communists in his family closet was interested in pursuing a life in business.  He worked for Bain Capital and the Boston Consulting Group.  it was at the latter group that he expressed an interest in making some kind of business mark in Eastern Europe, a place where his Communist grandfather had spent a lot of time.  Soon after beginning work in the London offices of BCG, the Iron Curtain crumbled.  There would be opportunities galore to help ex-Communists become capitalists. 

Later, as an employee of Salomon Brothers, he found many opportunities for foreign investment in Russia.  the Russian government had decided to give away most of the state’s property to the people. The government was going about this in a number of ways, but the most interesting was something called voucher privatization.  The Russian government granted each citizen one privatization certificate.  These certificates were exchangeable for shares in Russian companies.  And the companies for which the shares were literally being given away were very undervalued.  One of the higher-ups at Salomon Brothers got wind of what Browder found about Russian investment opportunities, and decided to drop lots of money in Russia.  Soon Salomon Brothers became the owner of $25 million worth of the most undervalued shares that had ever been offered anywhere in history.  Having made this mark at Salomon Brothers, Browder decided the time was right to form his own company, Hermitage Capital.

The book starts with a deportation.  Bill Browder was the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital.  Since its founding in 1996, Hermitage Capital made a lot of money for a lot of people.  In 2000 the firm had been ranked as the best performing emerging-markets fund in the world.  In November 2005, Browder had taken a flight from the United Kingdom [his adopted home] to Moscow, where his company managed approximately $4.5 million worth of assets.  His main approach to investing had been shareholder activism. In Russia that meant challenging the corruption of the oligarchs, the twenty-some-odd men who were reported to have stolen 39 percent of the country after the fall of communism and who became billionaires almost overnight.  The oligarchs were stealing from their own companies, and Browder made it his mission in life to expose corruption among these Russian oligarchs in order to do right by his investors. 

Flights from London to Moscow were routine for Browder, but this flight in November 2005 was different – he was denied entry into Russia.  He was sent back to whence he came – London.  Browder tried to find out why he was suddenly persona non-grata in a country he routinely visited.  At first, he thought it was some bureaucratic screw-up.  Then he was told the Russians refused entry into their country on the grounds of “national security.”  Browder made a lot of enemies in Russia, but as long as those enemies [the aforementioned oligarchs] were also enemies of Vladimir Putin, Browder could crusade against corruption in Russia to his heart’s content.  After the arrest and conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man and an opponent of Vladimir Putin, Browder continued to name and shame the rich people who were kleptocrats.  Unbeknownst to Browder, these kleptocrats were “friends of Vladimir”.  Browder crossed a line he didn’t know existed.  Soon the Russian FSB wanted to deprive Hermitage of all of its assets.

Who was Sergei Magnitsky, and what was his “crime”?  Sergei Magnitsky was the head of the tax practice at law firm of Firestone Duncan.  He was an expert on Russian tax law.  Browder described his knowledge as “encyclopedic.”  After Browder pissed off the wrong people, he was being investigated [and eventually charged with] tax fraud.  Bill Browder retained his services, and in so doing Magnitsky uncovered $230 million of tax fraud involving some of the companies stolen from Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital.  He discovered that some of Hermitage’s companies had been “stolen”.  The new “owners” of the stolen companies tried to get rebates of taxes paid by the Hermitage companies before they were stolen.  These rebates were paid.  

How does one “steal” a company?  The police raided Hermitage’s offices, seized a ton of documents, and then used a convicted killer to fraudulently re-register their companies.  The police took the company’s original seals, certificates of ownership, and registration files.  Once stolen, the new owners could act just like any other owners of a company. They could run it, liquidate it, take its assets, relocate it.  After that was accomplished, Hermitage became victims of what is called a “Russian raider attack.”  These typically involved corrupt police officers fabricating criminal cases, corrupt judges approving the seizure of assets, and organized criminals hurting anyone who stood in the way. 

What happened to Sergei Magnitsky?  After exposing the largest case of tax fraud in Russia’s history, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested by Russian police.  The charge – tax fraud.  In November 2008, Russian police arrested Magnitsky.  He didn’t think the Russian authorities would do anything to him because he hadn’t done anything wrong.  He was wrong.  The same people that he discovered were defrauding the Russian people were the same people investigating his case.  During his detention, he was denied bail.  The Russian Interior Ministry fabricated a “report” that Magnitsky had applied for a UK visa and had bought an airplane ticket to Kiev, and so he was labelled a flight risk.  He was refused any contact with his family.  He was subject to terrible living conditions.  He nearly froze to death in his cell.  As his detention dragged on, Magnitsky got very sick.  The doctors where he was detained diagnosed him with pancreatitis, gallstones, and cholecystitis.  A week before he was to undergo an ultrasound exam, he was moved to another facility that was not equipped to handle illnesses like those that afflicted Magnitsky.  He asked for medical treatment but was refused.  They deliberately withheld medical treatment from him. 

On October 14, 2009, he submitted a formal twelve-page testimony to the Interior Ministry in which he documented the full extent of the financial fraud. He provided names, dates, and locations.  On November 12, 2009 Magnitsky finally had his day in court. He first read his complaint about not receiving adequate medical care. The judge rejected it. He then read his complaint about the fabrication of evidence in his case file. The judge rejected this as well. As he began to read the complaint about his false arrest, the judge cut him off midsentence and rejected it too. In total, she rejected more than a dozen of Magnitsky’s complaints.  After his hearing was over, Magnitsky’s medical condition became critical.  He was transferred to a place called Matrosskaya Tishina to be treated.  But instead of being taken to the medical wing, Magnitsky was taken to an isolation cell and handcuffed to a bed.  Eight guards in full riot gear entered the cell and beat Sergei Magnitsky to death.  The “official” version of Magnitsky’s death was that he died of “heart failure, with no signs of violence.”

Executive Inaction vs. Congressional Action.  Throughout the Obama Administration, the President was rarely hesitant to take executive action to remedy a problem when faced with Congressional inaction.  In the case of Sergei Magnitsky’s murder by Russian police, the script was flipped.  When Bill Browder visited the State Department’s Office of Russian Affairs, he suggested the State Department use something called Proclamation 7750 against those Russian officials implicated in Sergei Magnitsky’s death.  Created during the Bush Administration in 2004, Proclamation 7750 allows the State Department to impose visa sanctions on corrupt officials.  Since the fall of Communism, corrupt Russian officials travelled across the globe, spending money like it was their last days on Earth.  Restricting travel for these individuals would get the Kremlin’s attention.  But when presented with this option, the State Department balked.  They didn’t want to upset the apple cart.  It was more important for them to document the Magnitsky problem that to actually do anything about it. 

Browder approached Senator Ben Cardin [D-MD] with the details of the Magnitsky case.  Sen. Cardin was chairman of the US Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency whose mission is to monitor human rights in former Soviet Bloc countries.  Once Browder gave Sen. Cardin all the details of the Magnitsky case, he pledged to provide any and all support to Browder’s efforts to sanction the Russians.  Sen. Cardin wrote to Secretary of State Clinton, asking her to invoke Proclamation 7750.  Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials involved in Sergei’s death and the tax fraud, and next to each name was his or her department affiliation, rank, date of birth, and role in the Magnitsky case.  The State Department ignored Sen. Cardin’s letter. 

Browder then testified before the House Human Rights Commission.  Rep. Jim McGovern [R-MA] chaired the commission.  After he heard the story of Sergei Magnitsky, he decided to up the ante.  He promised that not only would he support Sen. Cardin’s efforts on Magnitsky’s behalf, he would introduce legislation to codify the contents of Sen. Cardin’s letter to Secretary Clinton, and to make Obama say “no” during an election year.  Sen. Cardin and Rep. McGovern worked together on the Magnitsky Act.  Sen. Cardin told Browder he needed some Republican co-sponsors for the draft bill to go anywhere.  Thus cued, Browder got a meeting with John McCain, who agreed without hesitation. 

Context:  The effort to pass the Magnitsky Act came in 2012, an election year.  During one presidential debate, Mitt Romney was asked what he considered to be the United States’ biggest geopolitical threat.  Without hesitation, he answered “Russia”.  President Obama retorted “the 80s called, and they want their foreign policy back.”  If the Obama Administration supported passage of the Magnitsky Act, it would be admitting the “reset” policy was a failure.  The last thing any political campaign wants to do is to admit failure to anything.   But still they resisted.  However, the Obama Administration wanted to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment so that American businesses can be competitive in Russia when it became part of the World Trade Organization.  But he needed help from Congress.   Since Jackson-Vanik was still public law, President Obama couldn’t unilaterally get rid of it – he needed Congressional help.  He was told in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t support the Magnitsky Act, he wouldn’t get what he wanted regarding Jackson-Vanik.  John Kerry, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations committee, tried to stonewall its passage – he wanted to succeed Hillary Clinton at Foggy Bottom.  But once the Administration heard of the quid pro quo [I’ll give you Jackson-Vanik repeal for support for Magnitsky], Kerry’s stonewalling stopped.  The Magnitsky Act passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming [veto-proof] majorities.  President Obama had no choice but to sign it into law, which he did in December 2012.

How did Vladimir Putin react?  Not well.  The Magnitsky Act is a source of extreme resentment by Putin.  But he’s really pissed because the law penalizes those whom he allows to continue their acts of corruption without any consequences.  He’s been trying in his own way to get the Magnitsky Act repealed.  But so far, the only concrete “retaliation” has been to ban American families from adopting Russian children.  One other action taken by Russia – they put a dead man on trial.  In March 2013, Bill Browder and Sergei Magnitsky [who had been dead since November 2009] were tried for tax fraud.  Not even Stalin put dead people on trial.  Of course, the two were found guilty.  Browder was sentenced in absentia to a nine-year prison term.

Though not covered in this book, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump, Jr. at Trump Tower to lobby for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act.  Since the Magnitsky Act was enacted, Vladimir Putin has made its repeal one of his top foreign policy priorities.

Browder had the last laugh.  “We found their Achilles Heel.  Following the money and freezing the money is by far the most effective tool there is when dealing with a kleptocracy.”  Since the Magnitsky Act became law, other countries have followed suit.  Among the most recent, Canada’s Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act became law on October 19^th of this year.  Putin’s reaction was "the issue is simply used for fanning anew anti-Russian hysteria."  he US Magnitsky Act has since been broadened to be world-wide.

Score one for the good guys…

What I'm Reading - The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan wrote their first book, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, in 2010.  It was about the rise of the FSB in the era of Vladimir Putin from the ashes of what was once the KGB.  Five years later, they wrote second book, The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.  This book could easily have been titled The Russian Surveillance State: How Old Habits Die Hard from Soviet Times to the Present.  One would suspect from the title this book concentrates on just the Internet in post-Soviet Russia, but this book is much more.  Soldatov and Borogan document in great detail the breadth of the old Soviet KGB technical surveillance apparatus, how and where it began, and how techniques and equipment have adapted to the Internet age.

The story begins in a residential district in southwest Moscow, wherein lies a nineteen-story gray-and-white building known as Phone Station M9.  Half of Russia’s Internet traffic passes through this building.  The building has another occupant on its eighth floor – the FSB.  The FSB is the successor organization to the Soviet Committee for State Security – the KGB.  Throughout the building are little boxes marked SORM [which is an acronym for the Russian words for “operative search measures”].  These are the devices which the FSB uses to monitor Russian web traffic.  First invented by the KGB to monitor telephone calls, these SORM boxes monitor e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, cell phone calls, text messages and social networks [Twitter, Facebook, etc.].  It is with these SORM boxes the Putin regime monitors political opposition.  In 1991 Russia inherited a dysfunctional and broken communications system with barely a connection abroad, and today the Pew Research Center approximates that 73 percent of those questioned in Russia said they had online access, compared to 63 percent for China and 87 percent in the United States.  In a country of over 200 million people, that’s a lot of Internet traffic to monitor.

“Prison of information.” Soldatov and Borogan describe the old Soviet Union as a “prison of information”.  They describe the infrastructure that was put in place by the Soviet security apparatus to build this “prison of information”. 

-        Marfino [located northeast of Moscow] stood a building that was once a seminary.  During Stalin's time, this former seminary was transformed into a Soviet secret research facility.  Their mission was to create a secure telephone system for Stalin.  In 1952, while working at Marfino, Vladimir Fridkin made the Soviet Union's first working copy machine.  Three years later, the KGB smashed Fridkin’s copy machine to bits in order to prevent the copying of "prohibited materials".  Such was the paranoia of the Communist Party that they had to maintain a stranglehold on information.

-        Kuchino.  In December 1953, eighteen prisoners were transferred from Marfino to Kuchino, another security service compound twelve miles east of Moscow. It became the KGB’s main research center for surveillance technologies, including the all-pervasive Soviet system of phone tapping and communications interception. They also figured out how to intercept a human voice from the vibrations of a window. Kuchino was the main research facility for Stalin’s secret services in the area of special, or “operative,” equipment—ranging from weapons to radio sets to, most importantly, listening devices.  The engineers employed therein, and at the Scientific Research Institute of Dalny Svyazi in Leningrad, conducted much research in the field of speech recognition.

-        The Computation Center of the Academy of Sciences on Vavilova Street in Moscow applied computers to the speech recognition work.  This evolved into a private company called the Speech Technology Center in 1993.  With generous funding from the FSB, this company created technology that could to store many millions of items of biometric data, such as voice samples and photo images, and match them to individuals by searching the world’s communication channels, including video files. The voice recognition technology can identify the speaker, regardless of language, accent, or dialect, based on physical characteristics of the voice.

-        Kurchatov Institute [which included the Computation Center] held a prestigious status in the Soviet Union.  Much of the work to get the Soviet atom bomb was done here.  Additionally, it worked on other crucial defense projects, to include laser weapons and development of Soviet submarines. The Soviet Internet was born here.  It was here the Soviets made their first connection to the Internet. Alexey Saldatov, the father of one of this book’s co-authors, was a key player in making the Soviet Internet a reality.  The elder Soldatov was the head of the Computation Center.  He had done an internship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. During his time there, he knew of computer scientists that created a network that connected computers.  He had a team of computer programmers that adapted a bootleg copy of Unix [and called it Demos] to the Soviet’s first supercomputer with a Soviet-made copy of an IBM mainframe.  They created a local area network at Kurchatov.  Once they did that, they expanded to a larger network that connected Kurchatov and the Institute of Informatics and Automation in Leningrad, 460 miles away. After that, connections were established with research centers in Dubna, Serpukhov, and Novosibirsk. The network used ordinary telephone lines. 

Almost a year after that first global Internet connection was made, the abortive Communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place.  The Internet connection to cities outside of Moscow and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union proved extremely important because the coup plotters neglected to take down the computer network.  Large amounts of uncensored information flowed in and out of Moscow, and the coup plotters unknowingly helped the other side by demonstrating an old way of thinking, to control radio and TV.  The KGB didn’t think to censor the nascent computer network – it never occurred to them, and at this time this was a network they couldn’t control.  This is ironic because the much of the money that made the Soviet Internet a reality came from the KGB.  The ‘net’ didn’t foil the coup attempt all by itself, but it was an important new tool in the toolbox against oppression.

Russian Internet tools.  The Russian security services have quite a few tools in their Internet suppression toolkit.  Among these tools are:

-        A nationwide system of online filtering and censorship was put in place by 2012 and has since been refined.  Internet filtering in Russia is unsophisticated; thousands of sites were blocked/blacklisted by mistake, and users could easily find ways to make an end-run around it. At the same time, very few people in Russia were actually sent to jail for posting criticism of the government online.

-        Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks by “hacker patriots” - when an attacker uses a multitude of infected computers to access a website at the same time, and the site often crashes as a result

-        Pro-Kremlin hacktivists and trolls were hired to attack and harass liberals online

-        SORM devices – the little black boxes control information online and obstruct a free press and political opponents.  first versions intercepted and recorded phone calls for the Soviet Union, but now Internet service providers (ISPs) install the latest generations of SORM onto Internet lines so that the FSB can intercept content (not just metadata) from email, internet traffic, mobile calls and voice-over internet such as Skype.  All Russian operators and ISPs were required to install the black boxes, about the size of an old video tape recorder, which would fit on a rack of equipment, and permit connection to the regional departments of the FSB.

-        Kompromat - compromising material released to the public to blackmail activists, embarrass opponents & business rivals, influence elections, and create confusion.  Kompromat used against journalists and others most likely came from content that SORM intercepted.

-        Coercion - The main subjects of Soldatov and Borogan’s book, online service providers including ISPs, media outlets, aggregators, mail services and social networks, are constantly angling for a position from which it is safe to conduct business. They are Putin’s willing executioners.  They are told that if they don’t provide the access to communications that the FSB desires, they won’t have the ability to do business in Russia.  The threat of being dragged into criminal proceedings – or, indeed, of losing one’s business – serves to activate what is perhaps the most commonplace survival mechanism in today’s Russia: self-censorship.

-        Blogger Law – There are many popular blogs in Russia, and is one of the few areas in cyberspace where lively and relatively free political debates take place.  This was a rewrite of anti-terrorist statutes that required blogs with 3,000 or more followers to register with the government.  This registration gave security services a way to track bloggers, intimidate them, or close them down. 

Face recognition software – The Russians, through a company called Ladakom-Service, have developed facial recognition software, and have been using it wherever there are gatherings of large numbers of people, whether they are sporting events or at the Russian subways.  At the entrance to sporting events, spectators go through metal detectors, ostensibly in efforts to find weapons.   While the spectators are patted down by security, their pictures are taken.  The cameras rapidly capture each face into a green digital frame and then identify different characteristics of the face, including such distinctive features as distance between the eyes. A computer connected to the camera then evaluated each person based on a complex algorithm, and within seconds the person’s name was established and they were given a unique number. Near the metal detectors sits an operator with a laptop.  He monitors every face closely. One window on his screen shows the live camera acquiring the face images, another part of the screen shows the captured images, and a program was constantly running to match the captured images with people in a government passport database, one of the biggest in the country. When the match was successful, a photograph just taken appeared along the bottom of the screen with the person’s full identity.  The same company in 2011 had installed this technology in the entrance hall of one of the busiest metro stations in the city. As people stepped on the subway escalator, their faces entered a frame and were captured by video cameras. The images are rapidly linked to their identity in security service databases. There was no notification to anyone that they were being recorded. The system is so advanced that a scan of 10 million images would take no more than seven seconds. The facial images and video are sent to the Metro system’s situation room, the Interior and Emergencies Ministries, and to the FSB. 

Putin’s “Willing Executioners”.  The authors point out that engineers in Soviet Union [and today’s Russia] are not trained in ethics like medical doctors are.  They were taught to be servants of the state.  These engineers were focused on the technical needs of the Soviet Union, and they did not [and still do not] question the uses of their technical creations in service to the state.  These people are much more comfortable being told what to do without question – they have a much better understanding of the mechanical world than “the often-unruly reality of freedom”.  They have little or no understanding of politics.  The authors questioned one such engineer named Sergei Koval.  When questioned about what he thought about regimes around the world using his technology to suppress dissent.  His reply - “All this talk about technology catching dissidents is just bullshit.  It’s typical of the kind of psychological warfare the Americans use against their opponents. I think all these arguments about human rights are completely hypocritical.  We just come up with the hardware. It’s just technology that is developed with law enforcement in mind. Sure, you can use it against the good guys just as easily as you can use it against the bad guys. One way or another, these governments will be able to use surveillance technology, whether we supply it or not.… If governments listen in on people’s conversations, it’s not the microphone’s fault!”

Who are the “hacker patriots” and Putin’s on-line trolls?  During the 2000s the Kremlin had created large pro-Kremlin youth organizations, which mostly consisted of youth recruited in Russia’s regions. Two of the most important organizations were Nashi (“Ours”), the oldest movement, built up under direct guidance of Surkov, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), the youth wing of the pro-Kremlin political party United Russia.  These people aren’t government employees, hence the Kremlin’s ability to maintain the façade of “plausible deniability” whenever they are accused of stirring up trouble.  A Ukrainian hacktivist group named CyberBerkut, which consisted of supporters of the country’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled to Russia after the Maidan forced him from office, claimed to have hacked the email accounts of Ukrainian NGOs.  They “obtained” emails from Ukrainian NGOs to “prove” that the targeted NGOs were not only in touch with the US Embassy but also received funding from American foundations.

“Digital Sovereignty”.  In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the practices at NSA, an idea sprang from the Russian State Duma.  The idea was that meant Russian citizens should be forbidden from keeping their personal data on foreign servers.  The pretext of this “fear” of the surrender of Russian citizens’ data to American intelligence agencies.  In order to keep that from happening, the Kremlin wanted Facebook, Google’s services, Twitter, Gmail, and YouTube to have their computer servers on Russian soil.  What this really means is that once the servers of these social media are on Russian soil, the Russian security services can put in their own internet controls.  They wanted the SORM boxes installed on these social media services.  Since 2011 the FSB complained they had no way to chat messages and emails on Facebook and Gmail.  “Digital sovereignty” was their ticket to access.  According to the authors, the Russian government announced in March 2015 that Google had indeed located servers in Moscow.

The Panama Papers.  In 2016 the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which consists of reporters based all over Europe and the former Soviet Union, from Azerbaijan to Romania to Ukraine to Russia, had gotten their hands on an extensive trove of documents detailing offshore Panamanian companies that government officials and oligarchs all over the world—Russians included—used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.  The Russian journalists identified multi-million-dollar accounts owned by Sergei Roldugin, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin.  Putin saw the publication of the Panama Papers as a personal attack on him funded by the United States Agency for International Development [USAID].  The Russians, especially Vladimir Putin, thinks of USAID as a CIA front organization that plots to undermine the Putin regime.  WikiLeaks claimed the OCCRP targets Russia and other former Soviet countries and is paid by USAID and George Soros.

The Bolotnaya protests.  In 2008, Vladimir Putin was constitutionally ineligible to serve a third consecutive term as Russian president.    Putin sidestepped this constitutional inconvenience by having Dmitri Medvedev [Russia First Deputy Prime Minister] run in his place.  Medvedev appointed Putin as Prime Minister.  Medvedev was/is Putin’s puppet.  In September 2011, Medvedev announced he wouldn’t run for re-election and endorsed Putin as his successor.  Many people in Russia were disappointed at this turn of events.  There wasn’t great love for Medvedev since he was part of Putin’s United Russia machine.  The disappointment came in that this decision [“the castling”] was made by two men behind closed doors.  The Russian electorate wouldn’t get the chance to make a decision between Putin or Medvedev.  These people saw this development as a lost chance for thaw, liberalization, or democratization, modernization.  

Parliamentary elections took place in December 2011.  An organization named Golos is the only independent election watchdog organization in Russia, and Golos uncovered voting fraud in the parliamentary elections.  The method exposed is known as “carousel voting”.  Voters of United Russia [Putin’s political party] would go from polling station to polling station and stuff ballot boxes.  These people were given false identity papers so they could vote at different polling places, and they had ballots marked for United Russia.  In different parts of the country, election observers reported results that exceeded 100 percent. The same people who were angered by Medvedev being dumped were further angered by the exposed vote fraud.  On December 10, fifty thousand protesters against election fraud gathered on Bolotnaya Island in Moscow.  The protests were mobilized by Twitter and Facebook, technology made in the West.  It was a nightmare for Vladimir Putin.  In his worldview, everything is vertical – organized from the top down.  There’s always [in his view] a “boss” to reach out and crush when things become inconvenient.  But these protests were united by horizontal methods [think “whack-a-mole”].  Putin can whack a lot of moles, but he can’t get them all.

The 2016 Election.  Putin believed Hillary Clinton had been a driving force behind the Bolotnaya protests in December 2011. He also believed that she and her people at the US State Department were behind most of the Western anti-Russian moves—from the US sanctions, to the activities of the Russian opposition, to journalistic investigations exposing corruption in Russia [specifically the Panama Papers].  The authors listed instances where Russia used cyber warfare against in-country dissidents, Kremlin “enemies” in former Soviet states, and other countries they see as opposed to Russian interests [France, Germany].  The authors see the Russian meddling in the 2016 as “our turn” to get a taste of Russian statecraft.   Unlike the Chinese [whose government directly supervises cyberattacks], the Kremlin uses all kinds of informal actors for plausible deniability - from patriotic hackers, to Kremlin-funded youth movement activists, to employees of cybersecurity companies forced into cooperation by government officials.  The authors briefly discuss the actions of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, and the havoc these groups created inside the Democratic National Committee.

Disruptive tactics.

-        The use of rank-and-file hacktivists not directly connected to the state in order to help the Kremlin maintain plausible deniability;

-        Guidance and protection from criminal prosecution, provided by the president’s administration alongside the secret services;

-        Hacked information was published as kompromat (i.e., compromising materials) online as a way of smearing an opponent.

One has to listen to Putin’s words [and those of his spokesman Dmitry Peskov] very carefully, because they are very adept at parsing words. When they emphasize that no Russian government bodies were involved in hacktivist activities, they have some plausible deniability.  The Russian government isn’t directly involved in these activities.  The Russian government outsources these activities to informal actors—hackers’ groups and companies.  One thing the Russians didn’t count on was that in May 2016, that the cyber expert community is now able to deduce the sources of cyberattacks, including those made by Russia. If an attack could be attributed to a hacking group with a known history of attacking similar targets and this group’s attacks consistently worked to benefit one particular country, cyberattack investigators put two and two together and make a conclusion.  After the Russians were expelled from the DNC computers, they went on to the next step – kompromat.  They released the Democrats’ dirty laundry, as provided to them by WikiLeaks.  The “laundry” that was released is documented here, as it was in newspapers across this country.

Why did WikiLeaks side with the Russians?  The arrangement was mutually beneficial.  In return for WikiLeaks doing the Russians’ dirty work in digging up dirt on the Democrats and helping disrupt the 2016 campaign, the Russians allowed WikiLeaks to re-locate their servers to Russia.  Perhaps this was WikiLeaks way of protecting their own operations from Western snooping-interference-penetration [pick your favorite verb, it’ll fit].

Putin’s Gift.  Vladimir Putin’s gift to the US was cynicism.  He grew up in the Soviet era where officials never trusted the people.  People are unreliable who need to be managed and controlled.  Putin and those like him think that people can’t come together voluntarily to do something for the common good.  People who try to do something not directed by the government – his government -  are corrupted by either foreign governments wishing to do Russia harm, or are corrupted by corporations [greed].  Nobody is to be trusted.  Large sections of America distrust government and the media, and the Russians exploited the distrust.  Russian trolls on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.  Despite the Russian efforts against Clinton [and all the dirt they found], the authors characterized the election thusly:

“The Russian hackers did not compromise polling stations, nor did they affect the critical infrastructure of the United States during the presidential campaign. Donald Trump found himself in the White House for a number of very serious reasons, most of them originating in the United States, not from abroad.”

While the US electoral infrastructure was not compromised, what was compromised was trust – trust in media, trust in politicians [which wasn’t high to begin with].  The Russians exploited weaknesses in the American system that were already there.  In an article published last week on the website Project Syndicate, former CIA analyst Kent Harrington wrote that Russia was able to “stoke discord along economic, racial, and political lines” by inundating Google and Facebook with automated messages from tens of thousands of user accounts.  And Harrington also attributes the gullibility of the American body politic to civic illiteracy.  The hacker patriots and Putin’s online trolls described by Soldatov and Borogan created English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.  Harrington attributes the lack of civics education in American schools to a decline in the public’s understanding of issues and the political process, and made them susceptible to disinformation, what is now referred to as “fake news”.

In the authors’ view, though, not all hope is lost.  The Russians have many technical means at their disposal to control political thought.  Putin’s people can coerce their opponents, jail them, smear them, harass them, monitor them, and sometimes kill them.  But Putin’s worldview of a vertical power structure inhibits his regime’s ability to control the Internet in Russia because Internet content isn’t generated by the owners of websites and social media.  Internet content is generated by the users, and anyone with a laptop or a cellphone can participate.  As much as he would like it to be so, Vladimir Putin can’t be everywhere.  He would have to control the mind of every single Internet user, which is not possible.  As a final example of Putin’s inability to control information, the authors cite the “little green men” in Ukraine.  Russian conscript soldiers serving in Ukraine are doing more damage than Western media in exposing Putin’s lies about Russian meddling in Ukraine.  These soldiers are doing so by merely posting images they themselves took in Ukraine.  The Internet enabled these soldiers to do so.  If Putin can’t control his own soldiers, who can he control?

Turkey Since the Coup

Imagine if you will a country that is absorbing terrorist attacks from several organizations, both from within and from outside the country.  Imagine that same country is a temporary home to over 3 million refugees that have escaped a crippling civil war in a neighboring country.  Imagine that same country is enduring a political struggle that could potentially tear the country apart.  And finally, imagine that country has military elements that tried to overthrow a democratically-elected government.    There is such a country that fits all of those descriptions – that country is Turkey.

It has been a little more than a year since dissident elements of the Turkish military attempted a coup to overthrow the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on July 15, 2016.  Much has happened in that country since the attempted coup failed.  The country has endured numerous terror attacks from several different groups.  The government has purged [and continues to purge] many sectors of Turkish government and Turkish life from what they call “The Deep State,” members of which the Turkish government claims to be behind the abortive coup, namely the Gülen movement.  Most significantly, the country held a constitutional referendum to decide what kind of government the country will have.

When he was Barack Obama’s first Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel was often attributed as the one who uttered the phrase “don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”   An attempt to remove a duly elected President from office by force is about as big a crisis one can think of in a democracy.  As the coup attempt was in its early stages, I asked the following question on Facebook:

“Wondering if this coup in Turkey will turn out like the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991...”

As fate would have it, the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey proved to be just as inept as that tried in the Soviet Union in August 1991.  The plotters failed miserably.  Erdoğan is still in power.  In commemorating the coup attempt’s failure, Erdoğan vowed that “we will chop off the heads of those traitors” if the Turkish parliament passed a bill to restore capital punishment to Turkey. 

Suffice to say, Erdoğan is not letting this crisis go to waste.  The night the coup collapsed, Erdoğan referred to the attempted coup as a “gift from God.”  The “gift” was to Erdoğan, who has used the coup as a pretext to cement his grip on power.  He has repeatedly demonstrated a thin skin in the face of criticism and satire, and has shown no reluctance to user the levers of state power to settle scores.

State of Emergency

Article 120 of the Turkish constitution allows the President, with the consent of parliament, to declare a state of emergency.  The first declaration of this state of emergency was for three months, and has been extended three times since its imposition on July 20, 2017.  The state of emergency allows resident to rule by decrees that have the force of law.  At first the state of emergency was going to last only three months.  But not, Erdoğan says it could last indefinitely.  He hasn’t locked up all of his actual and perceived enemies yet, so that could take a while.

Terrorist Attacks

New York Times writer Patrick Kingsley described Turkey as “a nation under pressure”.  Turkey is fighting two different terrorist campaigns – one led by the Kurds, the other by ISIS.  There were several acts of terrorism committed both before and after the July 15th coup attempt.  Some of these included the following:

•           Atatürk Airport attack – June 28 – 45 killed, >230 injured [Nobody claimed credit, Turkey suspects ISIS]

•           Ankara car bombing – February 17 – 29 killed [14 Turkish soldiers], 60 injured - Kurdistan Freedom Hawks [TAK] claimed responsibility

•           Ankara car bombing – March 13 – 37 killed, 127 injured - Kurdistan Freedom Hawks [TAK] claimed responsibility

•           Kurdish wedding, Gaziantep, Turkey. – August 20 – 57 killed, 66 injured [Both ISIS and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) blamed, nobody claimed credit]

•           Diyarbakır bombings in February [6 killed, 1 injured], March [7 killed, 27 injured], May [3 killed, 45 injured] , and November 2016 [11 killed, 45 injured] – ISIS claimed responsibility

•           Kayseri car bombing – December 17 – 14 Turkish soldiers killed, 55 injured - Kurdistan Freedom Hawks [TAK] claimed responsibility

•           Istanbul car bombings – December 10 – 48 killed [36 were police officers], 166 injured - Kurdistan Freedom Hawks [TAK] claimed responsibility

•           Şemdinli car bombing – October 9 – 15 killed [10 Turkish soldiers], 27 injured -  PKK's armed wing HPG claimed responsibility

One can imagine the anxiety level of our own population and leadership if attacks like these happened here.  But in Turkey, the charge of “supporting terrorism” is very broad-based and is used by Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) to silence its critics.  Those critics include journalists, many of whom have been imprisoned by the AKP government.  This issue of press freedom is but one sticking point between the EU and Turkey, which has been trying to gain EU membership since 1987.

The Migrant Crisis

Migrants/refugees started to surge into Europe as a result of the Arab Spring in 2011.  Since the Syrian Civil War began later that same year, more than 5 million Syrians have fled their country seeking shelter.  As a front-line state in that conflict, Turkey alone is sheltering over 3 million of them, and they are overwhelmed.  According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are approximately 950,000 total pending asylum application for asylum pending in Europe.  Germany and Sweden have open immigration policies and the most generous asylum policies in the European Union.  Those two countries account for approximately 64 percent of those asylum applications.  However, Eastern European states like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have all expressed their desire to take in only non-Muslim refugees.  France and Denmark are hesitant to take in migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, citing security concerns in the wake of Muslim terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. 

The EU as a whole isn’t exactly welcoming Syrian refugees with open arms.  President Erdoğan complained the EU wasn’t doing enough to help Turkey deal with the problem.  The EU and Turkey struck a deal over the migrant issue.  In return for €6 billion from the EU, Turkey will block the flow of asylum seekers to Europe.  Turkey also desires visa-free access to the EU for Turks.  The promise of visa-free European travel for Turks is a key incentive in the migrant deal, but Turkey says the EU must change its conditions for the visa concession.   Erdoğan accused the EU "hypocrisy" for telling Ankara to adapt its counter-terror laws in return for visa-free travel while it was fighting the PKK.  Erdoğan never misses an opportunity to remind that any slight to Turkey or himself personally [whether actual or perceived] could put the migrant deal with the EU in jeopardy. 

The Purge

In the immediate aftermath of the failed coup, 20,000 teachers and administrators were suspended from their jobs.  More than 2,700 judges and prosecutors were removed from their jobs, as were 6,000 soldiers.  All were considered by the government to be allied with Fethullah Gülen.  This tells me this was like the Nazi Party’s Night of the Long Knives in 1934 [only nobody was killed here]  – the AKP had their lists ready, and needed an excuse to act to remove perceived political opponents from their places of employment.

Patrick Kingsley described the ongoing purge this way:

“Many in Turkey feel little pity for the Gülenists. For years, the group’s members kept a firm grip on the country’s justice system and education sector. And when they were still allied with the government, their cadres in the judiciary were accused of persecuting secular soldiers and politicians in a purge that draws comparisons to Mr. Erdoğan’s crackdown today. The government describes the Gülen movement as a carefully structured conspiracy with a secret leadership that aims to infiltrate and take over the Turkish bureaucracy, and even those of the dozens of foreign nations, like the United States, where it owns schools.”

A group of journalists who say they are “a small group of young journalists who are trying to be the voice for Turkish people who suffer under an oppressive regime” maintain a website called Turkeypurge.com.  This website tracks the purge of officials within the Turkish state bureaucracy, military, and civilians alleged to have links to Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish cleric who used to be allied with Erdoğan.  Gülen is now accused of being the mastermind behind the failed coup.  They keep track of “daily account of academics, military officers, police officers, teachers, government officials and bureaucrats who have been dismissed from their jobs as part of the ongoing purge.” 

As of July 19, 2017, their totals include:

State officials, teachers, bureaucrats, and academics who were dismissed by gov’t decrees, teachers whose licenses were revoked by Turkey’s Education Ministry, academics who lost their jobs by gov’t decrees, and dismissed military personnel:  145,711

Detained:  120,117

Arrested: 56,114

Judges & prosecutors dismissed:  4,424

Media outlets shut down: 149

Journalists arrested:  269

Universities closed:  15

7,316 academics working at 108 universities across Turkey

Eleven pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party HDP lawmakers have detained on charges of having ties to the outlawed militant group the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).  The party claims that since parliamentary immunity was lifted earlier this year, the central government has systematically tried to destroy it through arrests and erroneous claims that it supports the PKK.  The government has also arrested hundreds of HDP party workers across the country.  This is part of a campaign that has seen pro-Kurdish members of parliament, writers, and elected city mayors imprisoned on charges of sympathizing with the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).  The PKK has actively promoted an autonomous Kurdish region and led an armed insurrection against the Turkish government since 1984.  Both the United States and the EU list the PKK as a terrorist organization.  The HDP denies involvement with the PKK, but has expressed support for government-PKK peace talks.

But in Turkey, the charge of “supporting terrorism” is very broad-based and is used by Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) to silence its critics.

The Referendum

In January 2017, the Turkish parliament passed a package of constitutional amendments to greatly expand the powers of the presidency.  The amendments greatly expand the powers of the presidency.  Until now, the post of president was ceremonial, with executive authority resting with a prime minister.  The presidency was also a non-partisan post.  The amendments allow the president to be a member of a political party.  The president will have authority over all executive branch institutions, including the military.  It would give the president the power to appoint key senior-level judges and other judicial officials without parliamentary—or any other—review. He would also be able to issue decrees with the force of law in many areas of Turkish life, particularly regarding economic and social concerns—unless Parliament acted to override the decrees. It would abolish the post of prime minister, with the president assuming the powers of that office. And it would allow, under certain circumstances, the president to serve three terms totaling just short of 15 years.  One of the amendments involves creating an additional 50 seats in the Turkish parliament [from 550 to 600], which could enable Erdoğan to carve out a geographical advantage for the AKP to obtain a critical two-thirds majority in future elections.  The potential is there for Turkey to turn into a one-party state.  The EU isn’t pleased.

On April 16, the amendments narrowly passed.  Fifty-one percent of Turkish citizens voted “yes”.  Just as the votes were being counted, the High Electoral Board (YSK) stated that ballots without the official stamps would be counted. This, of course, quickly raised a red flag.  The result – Turkish society is highly polarized [sound familiar?], the EU wants to suspend ascension talks with Turkey, and the vote result is being appealed to European Court of Human Rights.  If the opposition wins the appeal, I’m certain Erdoğan will ignore it.

German-Turkish Relations

It seems lately that every passing day brings another incident that contributes to the heightened tensions between Germany and Turkey.   There is a large Turkish community in Germany, approximately 3 million strong.  More Turks live in Germany than anywhere else outside Turkey. Germany started to invite Turkish citizens to work in the country in the 1960s as it was facing a severe labor shortage, and many Turks subsequently moved to Germany as temporary "guest workers." Contrary to initial governmental plans, a significant share of those workers never left the country.  There is a tension between the Turkish immigrants and their German hosts.  Angel Merkel urges Turkish immigrants to assimilate into German society.  Erdoğan encourages Turks in Germany to integrate, but not assimilate so the Turks don’t lose their Turkish identity.  Germany and Turkey are allies within NATO, but you wouldn’t know it by reading what’s on the Internet. 

One month prior to the coup, the German Bundestag voted to recognize the massacre of 1.5 Armenians by Ottoman forces as genocide.  A similar vote comes up in every new American Congress, but because we want to maintain good relations with Turkey, such a resolution fails to pass.  But last year, the Germans actually did it, and the Turks were furious.  Although the resolution used the word “genocide” in the headline and text and says Germany - at the time an ally of the Ottomans - is partly guilty for doing nothing to stop the killings.  Nevertheless, the Turks were furious.  German-Turkish relations have been going downhill and picking up speed ever since.

During the campaign for the April 2017 constitutional referendum, approximately 1.3 million Turks living in Germany were eligible to vote.  Erdoğan wanted to address them – Germany refused.  As a result, Erdoğan said the Germans were using “Nazi practices” to keep him from addressing the Turkish diaspora.  In another development, the head of German foreign intelligence said in an interview that Turkey failed to convince them that Gülen was behind the abortive coup.  Der Speigel quoted Bruno Kahl as saying “Turkey has tried to convince us of that at every level but so far it has not succeeded.”

Germany decided to withdraw its troops who support the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria from Incirlik base and move them to Jordan after German lawmakers were refused the right to visit the base.  Turkey blocked German MPs from visiting the troops in apparent retaliation after Germany gave asylum to Turkish officers who fled in the wake of last year’s failed coup attempt.  The Turks also claimed some German MPs have been in contact with the PKK and couldn’t allow them to visit Incirlik for “security reasons”. 

German-Turkish reporter Deniz Yucel has been imprisoned in Turkey since mid-February 2017. 

Erdoğan described him as a German spy and agent of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Erdoğan said he had ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), claiming picture evidence proved the journalist was a "proper agent" and "terrorist."   German journalist Mesale Tolu was arrested in the early hours of May 1.  Tolu was reportedly placed under remand facing allegations of spreading "propaganda for a terrorist organization" as well as "membership in a terrorist group."

Earlier this month, Turkish police detained ten people [four of have since been released], including German human rights consultant Peter Steudtner and Amnesty International's director for Turkey, Idil Eser. They’re in custody awaiting trial for allegedly aiding an unnamed terror group. Pre-trial detention in Turkey can last for up to five years.  They had been conducting a digital security and information management workshop that had been in progress for two days when they were arrested.  Steudtner's co-organizer, the Swede Ali Gharavi and seven Turkish activists were also detained.

Germany has since demanded Steudtner’s release, but Turkey has responded to the German demands as interference with the Turkish judiciary.  They also accused the Germans of harboring fugitives from Turkish justice.  Turkish officers and diplomats that Turkey says were involved with the July 2016 coup have sought political asylum in Germany.  The German foreign minister complained that German companies are being accused of aiding and abetting terrorism without any evidence, and that this current diplomatic climate casts doubt on future German exports to Turkey.  Germany is also revising their “travel advice” for German tourists traveling to Turkey.  The German foreign minister stated that what happened to Steudtner could happen to anybody.  Steudtner’s arrest might be a bridge too far for Germany.  Given Turkey’s president of perpetual outrage, this may not end well.

“March for Justice”

A Turkish court found Enis Berberoglu, a member of parliament for Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP – the party of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), guilty of leaking a video that purportedly showed Turkey smuggling weapons to Syrian rebels. Berberoglu was given a 25-year prison sentence.  CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu described the decision as lawless and politically motivated.  As a protest, Kilicdaroglu walked from Ankara to Istanbul, where Berberoglu is imprisoned, while holding a sign reading "Adalet," meaning “justice” in Turkish.  He gathered thousands of fellow marchers along the 250 miles between Ankara and Istanbul.  It was a non-political protest – the only sign that was displayed was the Adalet sign.  Keep in mind that in the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt, Kilicdaroglu and his CHP supported Erdoğan’s government.  Erdoğan warned that Kilicdaroglu’s march could land him “in trouble”.  But for now, the opposition to Erdoğan [hitherto fragmented] has unified, and Kilicdaroglu is still a free man.  How long the opposition to Erdoğan maintains their unity remains to be seen.

Helmut Kohl - RIP

As the cliché goes, some are born to greatness, while others have it thrust upon them.  Helmut Kohl became German Chancellor in an unusual way.  In most parliamentary democracies, a successful “no-confidence” vote forces the government that lost the vote to call for a new election.  That government is forced to resign but continues in office as a caretaker government until the newly-called election determines the make-up of the new government.  In Germany, there is what is called a Constructive vote of no confidence.  This allows a parliament to withdraw confidence in a government and allow a new government to take over immediately if there is the prospect of a majority to support a new government to take its place.  Article 67 of the German Basic Law states:

Article 67. (1) The Bundestag can express its lack of confidence in the Federal Chancellor only by electing a successor with the majority of its members and by requesting the Federal President to dismiss the Federal Chancellor. The Federal President must comply with the request and appoint the person elected.

(2) Forty-eight hours must elapse between the motion and the election.

This was how Helmut Kohl became chancellor in 1982.  At that time, the ruling Social Democratic Party [SPD - the chancellor was Helmut Schmidt] was in a coalition government with the Free Democratic Party [FDP – led by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Schmidt’s foreign minister].  By the fall of 1982, the FDP disagreed with the SPD over economic policy.  This disagreement prompted the FDP to leave the SPD-FDP coalition and join with the Christian Democratic Union [CDU].  The FDP switched sides, Schmidt lost the vote, and Kohl was immediately sworn in as Chancellor.  Helmut Kohl remained Chancellor of Germany until 1998.

Helmut Kohl died on June 16, 2017.  He was 87.  He was Germany’s longest-serving Chancellor since World War II.  He played a significant part in ending the Cold War.  His part in that was to allow the US to base Pershing II missiles in West Germany.  At the time, the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear-capable SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles.  Chancellor Schmidt argued the Europeans needed a similar weapon to deter possible Soviet use of the SS-20 [and any other aggression].  Ironically, Chancellor Schmidt’s own party was deeply divided over whether to allow US deployment of such a deterrent on German soil.  Helmut Kohl’s CDU party had no such divide.  Over the course of two years of negotiations, it boiled down to the Soviets desiring to keep almost 600 nuclear warheads in Eastern Europe if the US canceled the deployment of the Pershing IIs and the ground-launched cruise missiles in other NATO countries.  The US didn’t like the Soviet idea and deployed the Pershing IIs in November 1983.  The Soviets walked out of the INF negotiations.  In 1987 on his own initiative, Kohl decided to remove older Pershing Ia missiles.  The Soviets eventually came back to the bargaining table. Because Helmut Kohl allowed the Pershing II deployment, and demonstrated good faith by getting rid of the Pershing Ia missiles, the US and the Soviets eventually agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons in September 1987.

Helmut Kohl will be remembered as the “Reunification Chancellor”.  He made the reunification of Germany happen despite misgivings from the Soviets, the French, and the British.  How did he do it?  I found this nugget from a National Public Radio article published the day Kohl died:

"For 70 percent of the time that he was in office he looked like he was semi-asleep,"

John Kornblum, U.S. ambassador to Germany during Kohl's final years in power, told

NPR's Eric Westervelt. "He wasn't one of these people out ordering people around. He

spent much more time talking with people on the phone and getting a feel for what

was going on. He schmoozed all the time. But when it came time to do something, he did something."

He was a politician, and from what the article implies, he was a pretty good one.  He listened more than he spoke.  When Francois Mitterrand voiced his skepticism of German reunification, Kohl persuaded him the Germans had learned from World War II, and that the best way for Germany to be a good neighbor was to be integrated with the rest of Europe – financially, economically, and politically.  Kohl saw German reunification and European integration as being two sides of the same coin.  He earned goodwill of Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher [albeit grudgingly] by renouncing German claims to Polish land, by recognizing the Oder-Neisse line [set after World War II] as the permanent German-Polish border.  He won over Mikhail Gorbachev by pledging to pay billions of German Deutschmarks to pay for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany.  Some would call that a very expensive bribe, but it did the trick.  Gorbachev used to make references to a “common European home”, and Kohl’s desire for a unified Germany in an integrated Europe echoed that theme.  Cynics would think that was telling Gorbachev what he wanted to hear, but Kohl followed his own rhetoric with concrete action.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 took all of us by surprise [it happened the day before I turned 27].  Helmut Kohl was on a visit to Poland.  He was just sitting down to eat dinner when he got word of the events of November 9^th.    He cut short his visit and rushed to Berlin.  His critics thought Kohl lacked the vision to make reunification a reality, but in less than three weeks he proposed a 10-point plan for reunification.  In presenting this plan, it included economic assistance, a kind of confederation between the two German states, a wish to strengthen the European Community [“We see the process of regaining German unity as a European matter…”].  He called for a more-democratic East Germany with free and fair elections that included opposition parties.  He sent a personal letter to the Francois Mitterrand, which included a time-line for further steps at the EC level regarding the economic and monetary union. 

As travel between East and West Germany became more routine, the East German political structure began to erode.  This wasn’t due to anything Kohl himself did – that credit goes to the people of East Germany, and to the people of the former Warsaw Pact countries that threw off the Communist yoke in 1989.  But to his credit Helmut Kohl saw his shot and he took it.  The East German Christian Democrats [the sister party to Kohl’s own CDU] and their allies made reunification the major issue for their campaign in the upcoming March 1990 elections.  The East German Christian Democrats won the election and got to form the first freely-elected government in East Germany.  Helmut Kohl had an ideological twin in East Germany - Lothar de Maizière.  Two months after de Maizière formed his government, he and Kohl signed the German Treaty on the Creation of a Monetary, Economic and Social Union, which entered into force on 1 July.  To keep East German workers in East Germany [and to keep them from overwhelming West Germany], Kohl introduced the Deutschmark in East Germany, and allowed East Germans to swap their weaker East German Marks at a through a 1-to-1 conversion rate.  He did this despite warnings from the German Bundesbank.  Once the monetary and economic union happened, the political union followed very quickly.  The four post-World War II occupying powers [US, UK, Soviet Union, and France] agreed to let Germany to regain total sovereignty.  East Germany reconstituted itself into five Länder, and each Länder joined West Germany under the Basic Law.  The reunification of Germany took effect October 3, 1990.  Helmut Kohl was the last chancellor of West Germany, and the first chancellor of a post-war united Germany.  None of this would have happened had not the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled.  But, Helmut Kohl saw an opening, adapted to events on the fly, and accelerated events to such a point that something I thought would not happen in my lifetime [the reunification of Germany] became a reality.  I believe his ability to schmooze with other world leaders was key to the reunification.

As I mentioned before, Kohl renounced any German claims to Polish lands east of the Oder-Neisse line.  He went one step further and did the same with the Czech Republic.  Kohl made a treaty with them where Germany renounced any claims to the Sudetenland.  Once Germany reunited, Kohl turned his attention to the European Community.  Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand were the prime movers to make the Maastricht Treaty a reality.  Now most European countries have the same currency [the Euro], and travel between member countries is as easy as travel between states within the United States.  While Europe doesn’t always speak with one voice, the European Union that resulted from the Maastricht Treaty is a more-unified Europe, where we are seeing more coordination between the member countries.  The most recent example of this coordination and cooperation is the economic sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia in the wake of their illegal annexation of Crimea.   

More important than the entity that is the European Union, there is the ideal of the European Union.  The EU is a strong pillar of the post-Cold War order.  To borrow a phrase from RFE/RL’s Brian Whitmore, the EU stands for a world where small countries have the same rights as big countries.  The sovereignty of smaller countries is no less sacrosanct than those of the larger countries and is, therefore, unconditional.  All countries are created equal.  That belief has brought peace and stability to Europe.  This contrasts with countries like Russia, who believe that smaller states must be subservient to the larger states.  Countries like Ukraine and Georgia want to join the EU, and desire to leave behind their past when they were vassals of the Soviet Union.  Eugene Rumer’s June 30, 2016 piece on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website lists the EU’s values as:

1.      Respecting the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of all nations;

2.      Refraining from using force to settle international disputes;

3.      Allowing freedom of choice by all states to pursue their foreign policies and enter into alliances;

4.      Demonstrating respect for fundamental human rights and personal freedoms in states’ domestic political arrangements.

Since late 2013, thousands of Ukrainians have died for this ideal.  They want to be part of Europe and not to be subservient to Russia.  They desire to chart their own course, and not to have their course charted by someone else.  In no small way, THAT is Helmut Kohl’s legacy.

Helmut Kohl hung around German politics a little too long.  Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder unseated him as German chancellor in 1998.  Two years later, it was revealed that Kohl had a secret slush fund he could use to help fellow CDU politicians.  The scheme of illegal campaign financing did not enrich Kohl personally, but it did tarnish his reputation to the extent that Angela Merkel, once a Kohl protégé, took advantage of to become the CDU leader [and now German chancellor].  Over the passage of time, this one scandal has receded from memory while Kohl’s legacy – the reunification of Germany and the foundation of the European Union as we know it – remains intact.  At first it seemed that Helmut Kohl had greatness thrust upon him.  But given his performance on the world stage, it appears that Helmut Kohl was instead “born to greatness.”  His place in history is secure. 

RIP Helmut Kohl. 

Helmut Kohl at the gate he opened...

This Day in History - Germany Attacks [May 10,1940 - Part 2]

The Maginot Line was France’s first line of defense against a German attack.  It was manned by half a million French soldiers.  It was the most elaborate, the most expensive set of fortifications ever built at the time.  These fortifications would halt the Germans, providing the Germans attacked in that direction.  The Maginot Line extended from the along the French border from Switzerland to Belgium.  It stopped 250 miles short of the English Channel.  The French strategists argued it best to fight the Germans in Belgium if not Germany itself.  It was too expensive to extend the Maginot Line all the way to the Channel, and the French didn’t want the Belgians to think that France would abandon them to the Germans when the attack came.  But King Leopold opted for neutrality in 1936. He closed the Belgian border to French military observers.  The French were very defensive-minded in their military thinking.  Most of their tactics were derived from the First World War.  They, like the British, didn’t want a repeat of the carnage of World War I.   The French had done much to introduce the tank and the airplane to warfare, but had done little to develop them.  They had made advancements in mechanized transport, but reverted to using horses and railways.

German thinking was just the opposite.  They too didn’t want a repeat of the First World War, especially since they’re the ones who lost it.  During the interwar years, Heinz Guderian wrote his thoughts on armored warfare in a book Achtung Panzer!  

Achtung Panzer! is not just a work of theory that was intended to help Germany prepare for the warfare of the future.  It is also a historical work.  More than half the book is dedicated to analysis of how tanks were used on the Western Front in World War I.  It emphasizes on how tanks came into existence, the technical development of tanks, the organizational development of the tanks corps, and the actual experience of tank operations.  Guderian was lucky to have a patron who agreed with him [General Oswald Lutz].  Lutz was the Inspector of the Transport Troops, which was charged with motorizing the German army.  Guderian was soon to become Lutz’s chief of staff.  It was in this job that Lutz encouraged Guderian to develop his armored warfare theories, even going as far as to order him to write a book about it [Achtung Panzer!]. 

The things Guderian wrote about in 1936-37 are commonplace today, but in his era, it was a revolution in tactical thinking.  Guderian was multilingual.  He spoke French fluently, and was almost as good at English.  He studied the works of British maneuver warfare theorists [Swinton, J.F.C. Fuller, B.H. Liddell Hart, and Giffard Martel], as well as one French tank advocate named Charles de Gaulle.  He read everything he could get ahold of from these sources, and met face-to-face with German tank veterans from World War I.  So sharp was Guderian that he became a recognized tank expert before he ever set foot in a tank.  Guderian’s thinking was close to that of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the author of the Deep Battle doctrine [Guderian had seen Russian armor for himself], though Tukhachevsky is not mentioned by name.  Guderian had an audience [Adolf Hitler] that was more receptive to what he had to say than his British, French and Russian/Soviet counterparts.

Prior to World War I, Guderian was attached to a telegraph unit.  During World War, I he became a radio specialist and it was here he developed his appreciation for the use of “signals” as a means of enhancing command and control of armored units.  In 1930, he took command of a motor transport battalion.   This unit was equipped with some armored cars, motorcycles, anti-tank guns and dummy tanks [The Versailles Treaty forbid the Germans from having tanks].  Because the Versailles Treaty limited the size of the Reichswehr to only 100,000 men, the ten-pound brains in the German army [they weren’t allowed to have a General Staff either] had to find a way to create an effective, highly mobile force to meet contingencies.  Guderian’s unit was charged with demonstrating how different mechanized combat arms could work together.  The lessons he learned from World War I include: 1) Tanks should be used in large groups; 2) Tanks should not be wasted on unsuitable ground like swamps; 3) Tanks are best used when you have the element of surprise.  His instructions were clear – strike hard, and quickly, and don’t disperse your forces.  Hit the enemy with a fist – don’t poke them with fingers.  His thoughts about other combat arms included:

Infantry – called “the Queen of battle” by many, but not so Guderian.  He saw infantry as a supporting combat arm rather than a supported combat arm.  He thought infantry needed to be combined in fully motorized formations with other traditional supporting arms – engineers and artillery – all in support of tanks. 

Engineers – go out and find mines, provide pathways over waterways [build bridges], provide means to traverse swamps or other soft ground, reinforce bridges that are too weak to support tanks

Artillery – must be fast-moving, must be sufficiently well-protected to keep up with tanks. Suppress targets and geographical features that tanks can’t take on by themselves.  Long bombardments chew up ground, makes it difficult for tanks to maneuver, betrays the location of impending attack, permits defenders to enhance the readiness of reinforcements.  Joint training of artillery and tanks is a must. 

Aircraft – Guderian stressed the impact of airpower on operations of the Western Front.  Aircraft created disorder in German rear areas, hindered the movement of reserves, and brought German batteries under actual attack.  Because of their “great speed, range and effect on target,” aircraft became an offensive weapon of the first order. 

The French did have a plan.  If the Germans attacked through Belgium like they did in World War I, 40 French divisions, along with 10 divisions of British troops [the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)], would move into neutral Belgium to meet them.  The plan was to re-fight the First World War.  The French commander, General Gamelin, looked at the map and decided to guard the Ardennes Forest with 10 of his weakest, worst equipped divisions.  To the French, the Ardennes were impenetrable.  The Germans knew what opposed them in this sector.  They also knew the French had more tanks, better and heavier tanks, but had dispersed them throughout the army.  The Germans had a different idea. 

Erich von Manstein was Gerd von Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff when he served in Army Group A in 1939-40.  When he saw the original plan to attack France he saw a plan that was not a recipe for swift and decisive victory over the Allies.  He saw a plan in which the bulk of the attack would happen north of France through Belgium.  At first he thought it was a rerun of the Von Schlieffen Plan used to attack France in the First World War.  In that plan, the armies moved like a wheel through Belgium, sweeping along the English Channel coast and then heading south toward Paris.  Upon further review, he still saw that the northern forces [Army Group B] would head straight for the Channel coast, which would allow the Allies to counterattack its southern flank [see Map 3 below].  What he proposed [and Hitler eventually agreed to] was to shift the bulk of the attack from Army Group B to the more southern Army Group A.  While Army Group B would attack through Belgium like it would have in the original plan, a more beefed-up Army Group A would attack through the Ardennes, make a breakthrough, get into the enemy’s rear and make a dash for the Channel [see Map 4 below].  His proposal was like a Von Schlieffen Plan in reverse.  Once the breakthrough was made, Army Group A would swing to the northwest while Army Group B pressed directly west, thus catching the Allies in a pincer, cut off from the rest of France.  With the bulk of the French and British armies cut off from France, France would be ripe for the taking.  The French received reports of 50 German divisions on the move.  They even found out the day of the attack, but they preferred to “wait for events”.

The waiting ended on May 10^th.  At 5:30am, the Germans attacked neutral Holland from the air.  Their targets were the bridges over the Maas River [Meuse in France and Belgium].  The boldness of the German attack stunned the Dutch.  Dutch soldiers surrendered in large groups.  The Germans had stunning success in Belgium as well.  Glider troops landed on the roof of Fort Eben Emael, the largest fort in the world at the time, and was the lynchpin of Gamelin’s defensive line.  Gamelin moved his 50 divisions north into Belgium and Holland, straight into the trap the Germans set for them.  The column of troops heading through Luxembourg was a target-rich environment for Allied aircraft, but they were too busy covering the French/British advance into Belgium.  The Luftwaffe hit Allied airfields, catching many aircraft on the ground while they were lined up in neat rows. fThe Luftwaffe attacked Fifty Allied airfields on that first day. 

On the third day of the German offensive, the panzers reached Sedan. Of historical note, Sedan was the place where the Prussians captured French Emperor Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War.  Gamelin didn’t think the panzers could get that far so fast.  According to his calculations, the Germans were six days ahead of schedule.  The French had blown all the bridges over the Meuse except for one.  The Germans found a weir to cross 40 miles north of Sedan.  A panzer division commanded by Erwin Rommel found this weir relatively unguarded.  As Rommel got his tanks across the Meuse, the Luftwaffe went into action near Sedan.  Gamelin and his generals were target-fixated on what was going on in Belgium.  By the end of the fourth day of the attack [May 13^th], German infantry were across the Meuse in large numbers, and German engineers were building bridges across the Meuse to get more panzers across. 

The French tried to counterattack Army Group A, but their attacks were poorly organized.  On May 14^th, the Allied air forces attacked the German bridges over the Meuse, but Allied losses were heavy.  Only 50 percent of the planes that made the attack returned to base.  After May 14^th, the Luftwaffe had achieved air superiority.  Holland surrendered that same day.  After the German victory at Sedan, Gamelin thought the Germans would head straight for Paris, so he pulled troops away from the Meuse to protect the capital.  That move just gave the Germans more room for maneuver to make their dash for the Channel coast.  Brussels fell on May 17^th, and on that same day Gamelin was relieved.  He was replaced by General Weygand, who was recalled from virtual retirement in Syria.  A 73-year old general was replacing a 68-year old general.  The French were desperate.  Marshal Henri Petain also became Deputy Prime Minister, and he was 84.  At that time, Petain was the French Ambassador to Spain.  Before he left Spain, Petain told Franco that his country was beaten, a result of “30 years of Marxism”.  French troops surrendered by the thousands. 

On May 20^th, the Germans that had broken through at Sedan reached the English Channel.  The British withdrew to Dunkirk.  The French were not happy with the British.  On May 25^th Boulogne fell, and Calais fell the next day.  On May 28^th, news reached Paris that Belgium surrendered.  Dunkirk held out until June 4^th.  The British managed to evacuate over 300,000 troops back to Britain before then, but they left behind their tanks, their trucks, all their heavy equipment.  The evacuation was celebrated, but Churchill remarked that “wars aren’t won by evacuations.”  The panzers had time to reorganize, re-equip, and catch their breath and began the push south toward Paris on June 5^th.  After three days of fighting, Rommel reached the Seine.  On June 10^th, the French government fled Paris.  Two days after Paris fell, Petain [who by then was Prime Minister] asked the Germans for an armistice. 

Hitler insisted on using the same railroad car in Compiegne used to sign the armistice that ended World War I.  The Battle of France was over.  It took Hitler’s Wermacht five weeks to do what the Kaiser’s armies couldn’t do in four years.

Sources:
The World at War - France Falls: May-June 1940
Heinz Guderian - Achtung Panzer!
Erich von Manstein - Lost Victories