The Magazine of Your Reading List: Daily Edition

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The Magazine of Your Reading List

DAILY EDITION
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Oct
Articles :
www.nybooks.com | The Kill or Capture Presidency by Steve Coll | NYRblog www.nybooks.com | Can Islam Be Criticized? by Malise Ruthven | NYRblog www.nybooks.com | In the New World of Spies by Anne Applebaum www.foreignaffairs.com | Foreign Affairs www.brookings.edu | Americans on the Middle East: A Study of American Public Opinion
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The Kill or Capture Presidency by Steve Coll | NYRblog

Steve Coll
a detention regime that works anymore. Anytime it brings terrorists suspects into custody it generated political controversy. And so what you can see is a bias is built up in the system, in which the Obama Administration judges its just easier to kill people. That doesnt create any political controversy. You can listen to the whole podcast, subscribe with iTunes or your RSS reader to download this and other New York Review podcasts, or read Colls review of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden. October 12, 2012, 11:25 a.m. Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/oct/12/podcast-kill-or-capture-presidency/
US army special forces walk in a field as Blackhawk helicopters transporting NATO officers land in Marjahs Balakino Bazar neighborhood on February 24, 2010. Sue Halpern: You imply that the idea that the Abbottabad mission was a raid in which they might have brought back Bin Laden alive was really just a fiction. If they were going to kill him, why does it matter? Should we care? Steve Coll: I think for two reasons, yes. I mean, youd like your government to tell you the truth, and the government dissembled repeatedly after the raid about what the rules of engagement were. They dissembled because the truth was uncomfortable and because the rules are secret, and they have this deep culture of secrecy in this administration, as in the last couple, about rules of engagement. What it also highlights is that the United States does not have
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Can Islam Be Criticized? by Malise Ruthven | NYRblog

Malise Ruthven
who murders the maker of Innocence of Muslims, the crude new film. The Pakistani ministers intended victim appears to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-American Christian who used the alias Sam Bacile when producing the film, which in the YouTube clip shows a young, long-haired Muhammad indulging in oral sex with a Bedouin woman in her tent. Since Nakoula had received a number of death threats, newspaper pictures and television shots showed him shrouded and under heavy guard as he was bundled into a police vehicle when he was arrested by the Los Angeles police for violating the terms of his probation on bank fraud charges dating from 2010. The parallels with Rushdies disappearance from public view after Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa on St. Valentines Day, 1989, were somewhat uncanny. Invited to sympathize with Nakoulas predicament, Rushdie made a crucial distinction. I think hes done something malicious, and thats a very different thing from writing a serious novel, he said on CNNs Today show. Hes clearly set out to provoke, and hes obviously unleashed a much bigger reaction than he hoped for. He set out to create a response, and he got it in spades. However, the responses to both Rushdies book and Nakoulas film are evidently motivated in part by the same issue: the belief, now dominant among Islamists and even some non-political Muslims, that (contrary to numerous precedents in Islamic art history) the image of the Prophet must always be aniconic, and that representations of himlet alone inflammatory caricaturesare absolutely forbidden. Many will recall the violent reaction to
Rehan Khan/epa/Corbis Supporters of the Islamic group Jamaat Ahle Sunnat protesting an anti-Islam YouTube video, Karachi, Pakistan, September 19, 2012 It may be ironic, but it is not entirely surprising that the YouTube clip of what appears to be a badly made film satirizing the Prophet Muhammad appeared, causing mayhem and destructioncoinciding with the death of US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevensin the same week of September that the novelist Salman Rushdie published Joseph Anton. The memoir recounts Rushdies life as a celebrity victim after Irans Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his death for offending Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. Not to be outgunned by the late Ayatollah, the Pakistani railroad minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour has now personally offered a $100,000 reward to anyone
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/oct/11/can-islam-be-criticized/
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the Muhammed cartoons originally published in a Danish newspapercartoons that continued to provoke extremist attacks years after their publication. Indeed, even as the debate over the new antiMuslim film was playing out in September, a French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, incited further tensions in the Muslim world by publishing a new set of cartoons, one of them showing the Prophets naked backside. On the motives behind the film Rushdie is surely right: researchers have revealed close connections between Nakoula, a militant Coptic separatist, and out-and-out Islamophobes such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. (Indeed, even as people in the Middle East were rioting against the film in late September, Geller was sponsoring a controversial anti-Muslim advertising campaign in the New York subway, raising questions about hate speech in the United States.) The films consultant, Steve Kleinan insurance salesman from Hemet, Californiahas been linked to the extreme counter-jihadist or anti-Muslim crusader current that inspired or even had connections with the right-wing extremist Anders Brevik, now serving a life sentence for the July 2011 Utoya massacres in Norway.
Pakistan railroad minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour in Islamabad, Pakistan, September 25, 2012 There is some comfort in the thought that both kinds of extremistsChristianist and Islamistare relatively small in number. In Egypt the security services of the pro-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government rounded up the mostly youthful rioters who stormed the US Embassy in Cairo in a fracas that caused just one fatality. In Libya the killers of Ambassador Stevens, militants belonging to a group known as Ansar al-Sharia (helpers of the holy law), were well-armed but few, and have subsequently been expelled from Benghaziand in some cases killedin a populist backlash. (Ansar al-Sharia may have been acting independently of the anti-video protesters.) And despite being government-sanctioned, the protests in Pakistan, dubbed the Day of Love for the Prophet Muhammad, drew estimated crowds of at most five-thousand to ten-thousand peoplefewer than would typically attend a mainstream political rally, or even a high-profile funeral, according to Declan Walsh of The New York Times. (They did however result in the deaths of up to 19 people.) However, in a world where millions of people have instant access to the kinds of images shown on YouTube, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain Rushdies distinction between a serious novel (to be enjoyed, as it were, in the private space of a readers imagination) and what the novelist himself describes as a deliberately malicious video. The Satanic Verses, quite apart from its title, was itself intentionally provocative: its labored lampooning of Muhammads sexuality, after all, addressed some of the same issues, if less crudely, as the outrageprovoking trailer shown on YouTube. Rushdies title refers to an episode in the life of the Prophet that is recorded by some of his chroniclers. In it, Satan is said to have interpolated some verses into the Quran, a book that believing Muslims regard as the unmediated word of God. These Satanic verses
Matthew Feldman, a political scientist, has used the term Christianism to describe ultra-right-wing anti-Muslim polemicists such as Geller and the Quranburning pastor Terry Jones, who also supported the film, in order to highlight their similarities to their Islamist enemies. Both rely on religious feelings to mobilize much larger groups because of the esteem for their respective religions in the broader cultures in which they reside.
Aamir Qureshi/ AFP/GettyImages
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which extolled three female deities worshipped by the pagans of Meccawere subsequently removed, but the episode could be used to cast doubt on the divine provenance of the Quran (although some early commentators had no problem with the story). This disputed part of the Prophets life, however, is only a small part of an extremely complex novel that explores the psychological impact of migration and the conflicting cultural forces to which migrants find themselves exposed. The novel parodies the ingredients of Indo-British Muslim identity. Mixing fact with fiction, history with myth, it ridicules some of the brittle shibboleths surrounding Muslim beliefs and identities: not just the integrity of the Quran, but, much more dangerously, the sexuality of Mohammed and the honor of his wives. In the dreams of Gibreel, who is one of the novels protagonists, Islams most central rite, the Hadj or pilgrimage to Mecca, and the prophet Mohammed are subject to merciless satire. In a series of scenes reminiscent of Jean Genets famous play Le Balconin which a brothels patrons assume the roles of bishop, judge, and generalRushdie has prostitutes at The Curtain (the primary meaning of hijab, or veil) play the part of the prophets wives, the most popular being the fifteen-year-old Ayesha (the name of Mohammeds youngest wife). Clients circulate around a Fountain of Love much as the pilgrims rotated for other reasons around the ancient Black Stone in Mecca. This anti-mosque evidently mocks attitudes to women legitimized by Mohammeds numerous marriages. The poet Baal presides in the brothel as a kind of anti-prophet. Whether or not Baal symbolizes his creator, his role in the novel is prescient: A poets work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verse inflict, then they will nourish him.
Ayatollah Khomeini; drawing by David Levine At least sixty people are believed to have been killed in the agitation that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses in 19881989 in India and Pakistan, two in Belgium, and thirty-seven in Sivas, Turkey, in an arson attack by Islamists on a hotel where the books Turkish translator, the novelist Aziz Nesin, and other writers were meeting. In an incisive review of Rushdies new memoir in The Guardian, Pankaj Mishra suggests that the attitudes revealed in The Satanic Verses belong to an earlier, less complex age than the one we live in today. Rushdies neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdies novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle.
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Mishra finds it somewhat ironic that that in his brilliant early phase the author of Midnights Children and Shame had bravely attacked such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures. He is evidently disappointed by what he sees as Rushdies failure, in Joseph Anton, to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction, but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical. The heart of the matter, as I found in my own exploration of the Rushdie affair back in 1989, is that lampooning the prophetespecially in conjunction with sexual issuesraises questions of Muslim identity that go beyond religious belief. Building on the neuroscientist Susan Greenfields notion of group identity, one could suggest thatafter many centuries of programming by means of ritual, devotion, and prayerthe cultural myth of the Prophet, like that of other religious icons, is so integral to the construction of how many Muslims see themselves that an assault on the Prophet may be experienced as an attack on all Muslims.
picted Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, not because they may or may not be non-believers, but because they were deemed to have insulted Muslims by violating the aniconic image of the Prophet Muhammad. Militants such as the killers of the US ambassador to Libya, Salafists in Cairo, Hezbollah activists in Lebanon, and Taliban supporters in Kabul have all used the YouTube film to mobilize support against governments perceived as pro-Western, or pro-American. But the fact remains that there is populist mileage in defending the image of Muhammadan image that has been given the status of something that cannot be reproduced or denigrated for more than fourteen centuriesand this can extend to more serious-minded critical discussion of Islam as well. In 1995, for example, the Egyptian scholar Nasr Abu Zayd was effectively forced into exile after being declared an apostate, a ruling that led to the annulment of his marriage under Islamic law. Abu Zayd had infuriated fundamentalists by applying modern critical methods to the text of the Quran. The affair sets a legal precedent that bodes ill for the future of scholarship under Egypts current Muslim Brotherhood-dominated regime. There may be a crucial difference between being seen to trash the image of Muhammad publicly, as in the case of the Danish cartoons and the YouTube clip, and the deconstruction of that image using the tools of modern scholarship. Historian Tom Hollands recent documentary Islam the Untold Story, based on his book In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, which questions the historicity of the Arabian prophet, drew protests from some Islamic scholars, and Britains Channel Four TV network cancelled a screening and public discussion after Holland received a torrent of abusive messages on Twitter. Nevertheless the program went out as scheduled, and it was accessible online. Above all it did not generate riots from Benghazi to Kabul.
Indeed, its worth considering that what secular people are inclined to regard as religious fanaticism or intolerance is often less about differences of belief than about manifestations of customs or social attitudes that are the outcome of those beliefs. Theological differencesabout God, the Virgin, the Real Presence, the divine mission of Muhammad, the docetic Christology of the Quran (according to which Jesus was not crucified), the inheritance of Ali ibn abi Talib, or the martyrdom of the Imam Husseinare not the real reasons that people indulge in murderous behavior toward their neighbors or intimate enemies. Religious conflicts, between Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shias, Hindus and Muslims, are often best understood as turf wars over the less tangible, but not in itself theological, issue of human respect. Threats were made against Rushdie and Kurt Westergaarde, the Danish cartoonist who de-
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These contrasting responses suggest the possibility of a two-pronged approach to the free speech issues raised by images of the Prophet. Insulting the Prophet with the intent of stirring up hatred might be categorized as a form of hate speech comparable to anti-Semitism, racism, flag desecration, or Holocaust denial, which are forbidden by law in many countries (though not the US, where a proposed amendment protecting the US flag failed to pass by a single Senate vote in 2006), because the sacred image of the Prophet has become a fundamental part of how Muslim communities have come to define themselves. While in practice it may be difficult to draw the line between insult and criticism, if there is a distinction it must lie in intention. In Britain, for example, the governments effort in the wake of the Rushdie Affair to extend the race relations act in response to Muslims protests opened a legal minefield. It is now an offense (under the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act) to display by writing or other visible representation material that is threatening, abusive or insulting with the intention of causing harassment, alarm or distress. Yet the law paradoxically protects the right to insult and abuse with a proviso stating that nothing in it shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents. Intention is clearly the key. Had he been required to defend his book under the 2006 act, Rushdie and his lawyers would doubtless have argued that the storm of controversy it raised was an unintended consequence of a misreading (mostly by politically-motivated parties) of his serious novel. Critical analysis of the Quran that challenges the myths surrounding the primal figures of Islam is another story entirely: it is something that scholars of other faiths have been engaged in since the Enlightenment. Since the nineteenth century, Islamic scholars such as Sayyed Ahmad Khan and Chirag Ali have questioned the authenticity of many of the
hadiths (verbally transmitted reports) on which the earliest chroniclers relied for their accounts of the Prophets life, exemplary behavior, and ministry. It would be utterly wrong for the law to discriminate in favor of (or effectively against) Muslims by insulating them from this process, because critical engagementabout science, religion, and politicsis a necessary precondition for communities to flourish in a cosmopolitan and increasingly globalized world. October 11, 2012, 11:25 a.m.
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In the New World of Spies by Anne Applebaum

imperial government bought seventy-two Italian planes. The Japanese military attach in Rome reported the deal with approval. It was, he declared with satisfaction, equal to three heavy bomber regiments. As Fiats representatives in Manchukuo, Martin and Oggins surely shared some of the credit. But by the time the sale went through, both Martin and Oggins had disappeared. The deal was real enough. But the salesman had not been quite what they seemed. Charles Emile Martinalias George Wilmer, Lorenz, Laurenz, or Duboishad been named Max Steinberg at birth. Though he spoke fluent German and French with a Marseilles accent, Steinberg was born not in Switzerland but in Belgorod-Dnestrovsky, a Ukrainian port town on the northern coast of the Black Sea. He had obtained a genuine Swiss passport through the use of fraudulent identity documents. Ogginss surname was authentic, as was his American passport, but his persona was not. Before living in Manchuria, he also passed some time in Paris, living innocuously next door to one of the last members of the Romanov dynastyan excellent place from which to keep a close watch on the White Russian diasporaas well as Berlin. Those who had once known him as Isaiah Oggins, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper in the Connecticut mill town of Willimantic, would have been astonished by his aristocratic demeanor. Those who had known him as a Columbia graduate student dabbling in radical politics would have been even more surprised. Steinberg and Oggins looked and acted like wealthy businessmen, but in fact they were Soviet spies, operating not as diplomats but as illegals, under false identities and beneath deep cover. Charles Martin and Co. may have been a real business, but as An-
Sergei Milashov Dmitri Bystrolyotov, who was recruited by the Soviet secret services in the 1920s, on a reconnaissance mission in Bellinzona, Switzerland, circa 1934
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/25/new-world-spies/?pagination=false
To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague range of European connections. Working in concert with a Milanese businessman, they had come to Manchukuo to sell Fiat cars and airplanes to the Japanese. At the time, Mussolini was courting the Japanese regimehe had just sent an Italian Fascist Goodwill Mission to Manchuriaand the business seems to have been a success. At the end of 1937, the Japanese
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drew Meier discovered while writing The Lost Spy, his meticulously researched and beautifully written biography of Oggins, the company also provided its owners with a reason to be in Manchukuo in 1935. From this unusual vantage point, they were able to observe not only Axis politics but also, again, the large White Russian community that had emigrated to Harbin after the Russian Revolution. They abandoned the effort only because the war between China and Japan was intensifying. There is no record that they were ever exposed. Their success was not unusual at the time. Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greenes Vienna, and George Smileys London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier. As Robert Service observes in Spies and Commissars, his equally colorful history of the Bolsheviks early relationships with the West, the first Soviet espionage efforts were amateurish: on this as on other practical matters, Marx and Engels had left no handbook of instruction behind. Most of the Bolsheviks knowledge of intelligence and counterintelligence came from their own experiences with the Okhrana, the tsarist security police, who had often used double agents to infiltrate the revolutionary movements in Russia. A young protg of Lenin was among these agents, as the Bolsheviks discovered when they opened the Okhrana files, and some have always thought Stalin himself may have been as well. But the new spies learned fastso much so that the 1930s, W.H. Audens low dishonest decade, became a period of extraordinarily creative skulduggery for Soviet espionage. In this era, Soviet agents recruited Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and (probably) John Cairncross, the infamous Cambridge Five. In the US they recruited Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. At the same time, the NKVD also trained a group of men who later became known as the Great Illegals, Russian
spies who were or pretended to be foreign nationals and who lived under deep cover. They took their tradecraft to such high levels that CIA officers once studied their exploits as a part of basic training. Before the war the Soviets ran circles around us, a retired CIA officer told Meier. The twenties, the thirtiesthat was their heyday. Members of this generation of illegals included Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy who spoke fluent German from childhoodhis mother was Russian, his father was Germanand who penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo by posing as a Nazi reporter. Among other things, Sorge sent Stalin advance warning of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, though Stalin chose to ignore him. Ignace Poretsky, alias Ignace Reiss, was another leading figure of the era. Based in Paris for many years, well known to Communists across Europe, Reiss was murdered by NKVD agents in Switzerland in 1937, after he objected to Stalins policies and tried to defect. His death set off a chain of other events, among other things convincing Whittaker Chambers to abandon his own career as a Soviet agent. In Stalins Romeo Spy, Emil Draitser tells the life story of yet another Great Illegal, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, the inventor of the modern honey trap. Bystrolyotov, the bastard son of a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family (or so he claimed), was recruited by the nascent Soviet secret services while living abroad in the 1920s. Encouraged by his superiors in Moscow, he obtained a fake Greek passport from a crooked consul in Danzig, started a cloth-trading company in Poland, and then moved to Berlin, where he embarked on a career seducing secretaries, countesses, and diplomats wives. At one point he married his own wife off to a French intelligence officer in the hopes of obtaining even more information. Like so many spies, Bystrolyotovs attraction to intelligence work grew out of his psychology: Draitser points out that by his own admission, he reveled
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in it, despite the danger; a new world opened for [him]. As Meier writes, many of the other Great Illegals were also masters of seduction who could ingratiate themselves in any company, whether their interlocutor was a visiting ambassador or a train-station prostitute. Those attracted to the deepest levels of clandestine work had to love disguises, secrets, deception, and pretense. They had to be able to memorize new identities, new biographies, and complicated cover stories. In practice, they had to get some pleasure out of doing so as well. Yet in this era, many spies were drawn to serve the USSR for more than mere love of secrets. Certainly Steinberg, Oggins, Bystrolyotov, Sorge, anduntil their defectionReiss and Chambers all intitially served the USSR out of profound ideological conviction. The roots of Ogginss loyalty to the Communist Party ran deep into his mill town childhood. Bystrolyotovs mother had been a convinced progressive, a radical feminist who had deliberately given birth to him out of wedlock.
The feelings were not always mutual. From the beginning, the Soviet Union deployed foreign spies but from the beginning, the Soviet elite never trusted those spies either. Anybody willing to go abroad and live among capitalists, even for the sake of the regime, always lived under a cloud of suspicion upon his return. In its earliest incarnation, the Cheka, the Soviet secret police (later renamed the OGPU, the NKVD, and then the KGB), were considered to be above the law, as were their foreign agents. This meant, however, that they could be controlledand eliminatedby extralegal measures too. They often were. Soviet spies also had to cope with Lenins ambivalent approach to international relations. Immediately after the revolution, as Service describes, the Bolsheviks began plotting the downfall of regimes all across Europe, the better to hasten the international revolution that they were certain would come. At the same time, they sought diplomatic recognition and trade links. Although the revolutionary impulse cooled after Stalin declared that it was possible to have socialism in one country, Soviet agents were always interested, at least theoretically, in the eventual collapse of capitalism and democracy as well as in the furthering of Soviet national interests. To put it differently, this generation of Soviet spies and Soviet diplomats was expected to be active revolutionaries on the one hand and representatives of a sovereign state on the other, often pursuing directly contradictory goals. Their heyday was a short one. By the end of the 1930s, this generation of spies-by-conviction had almost entirely disappeared. Some fell victim to the Great Terror. Bystrolyotov was arrested in 1938 and spent sixteen years in the Gulag. Oggins disappeared into the camps in 1939. Unusually, the American government took an interest in his casemost Americans arrested in the USSR at that time were ignoredbut this unusual concern may have hastened his death. When he was due to be released
The economics and the politics of the time also led many into collaboration with the USSR. Chambers himself later described the appeal of communism in Witness, his autobiography: The vision inspires. The crisis impels. To an extent not appreciated now, both Europeans and Americans were deeply disappointed by the failures of capitalism and liberal democracy in the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. Many came to feel that their choices were limited to fascism on the one hand or Marxism on the other, a polarized view of the world that was promoted and encouraged by people on both sides. Nor, among many leftists, was there a stigma, as there would be in later years, in taking Moscow Gold. To the truly dedicated, the goals of the international proletariat and the Soviet secret police would have seemed equally laudable and utterly interchangeable.
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from the camps in 1947, Soviet secret police decided that it was too dangerous to set him free. He was injected with poison in a Moscow prison, and died on the spot. Many others left the secret service because they had lost their faith. The arrests of their comrades, the spectacle of the Moscow show trials, and above all Stalins pact with Hitler in 1939 convinced many that they had made the wrong choice. Chambers was only one of several Soviet agents in the United States to defectand to reveal his contacts to the US government. By 1940 the Soviet Unions American network had fallen apart and its networks in Europe were much weakened. They never really recovered. Contrary to popular assumptions, the cold war era that followed was not the apex of Soviet espionage. Although the postwar Soviet foreign espionage services were more professional, better funded, and better organized, they never again had so many friends in so many high places.
worked as a real estate broker in Cambridge; on her website she wrote of her ability to ensure quality service, honesty and integrity. Just as their Italian airplane company gave Oggins and Steinberg an insiders view of wartime Japan, Bezrukovs management consulting company gave him an insiders view of what Lucas calls the the think-tank world: the soft under-belly of the American security and intelligence community, where retired officials, those hoping for jobs, and those taking a break from government mix and mingle with outsiders. Once he had been accepted in Cambridge and Washington, Bezrukov assiduously promoted his software to companies with international and defense links, attempting to cultivate relationships with people like Leon Fuerth, Al Gores former national security adviser. He developed professional ties in Europe and Asia as well, and though he exaggerated his professional successes, he was hired as a consultant by at least one French company. He might have gone even fartherhe was trying to persuade several companies to install his software, perhaps in order to insert spyware into their clients systemsbut in June 2010 Bezrukov/Heathfield and his wife were arrested, along with eight other Russians illegals. Some had been living for many years in the United States, buried deep in suburbia and doing very average-sounding, even inconsequential jobs. At the time, they were ridiculed, particularly when one of the illegals, Anna Chapmanmaiden name Anna Khushchyenkoturned out to be an unusually attractive redhead with a fluffy-sounding career in international real estate. Lucas points out that this was deliberate: Spies need to seem as boring and inconspicuous as possible, to develop the capabilities that their real jobs require. Some need jobsin international real estate, perhapsthat allow them to meet a wide range of people without attracting suspicion. Others, like Bezrukov, a man whose striking quality was blandness, had labored for many years to acquire
Fast forward seventy years: if the life story of Isaiah Oggins will surprise those who identify spies with the cold war and the cold war imagination, the life story of Andrei Bezrukov, alias Donald Howard Heathfield, will come as an even bigger shock. The stories of Bezrukov and his wife, Yelena Vavilova, alias Tracey Lee Ann Foley, are brilliantly told in Deception, Edward Lucass book on contemporary Russian spies. Like his predecessors in Manchukuo, Bezrukov was an illegal, operating under deep cover. Donald Heathfield was the name of a dead Canadian child whose passport he used and whose identity he stole. But as with all of the most effective illegals, much else about Bezrukov was genuine. Arriving in Canada in 1992, he really had studied international economics at York University in Toronto as his website declared, and he really had earned a masters degree in public administration at Harvard. He had also really worked as a management consultant, sold a decision-making software system called FutureMap, and wrote an academic paper for an Oxford colloquium on Future Studies. He really had a son at Georgetown University. His wife
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more solid professional credentials, hoping eventually to gain access to people with real power. Lucas traced the activities of these modern spies with the same kind of attention to detail as Meier used to uncover the activities of Oggins. He discovered that the apparently silly Anna Chapman was entangled, along with her ex-KGB father, in what seems to have been a complicated effort to launder money in Zimbabwea scheme involving a British-registered company with a phantom owner and several cases of identity theft. Bezrukov/Heathfield, as noted, had made himself into a plausible consultant. Another member of the group, Mikhail Semenko, was touting his genuine academic credentialshe spoke Mandarin and Spanish as well as English and Russianin an effort to get a job at a think tank. Some of these spies shared certain qualities with their 1930s predecessors. Espionage still attracts a certain kind of person, often flawed or troubled, who is willing to shed the social mores that hamper deceiving, cheating and manipulating people. But none of them appears at all motivated by the kind of ideological conviction that sent someone like Isaiah Oggins to Paris and Berlin, or that led Ignace Reiss to write an anguished letter to Stalin, accusing his Politburo of having betrayed the Russian worker. Instead, they were attracted to the opportunities and the material goods available to them in the West. Their missives back and forth to Moscow concerned not the ideals of the revolution, but the houses they felt they had to buy or the private schools they felt their children had to attendin order to maintain their cover, of course. Life in a New Jersey suburb had clear advantages over life in Tomsk, the original home of one of the couples. Chapman is said to have wept buckets when she learned that her British passport had been revokedshe obtained it through a short-lived marriageand that she would never be able to return to the US or the UK. Bezrukov appeared deeply attached to his phony consultants career, and has apparently tried to continue the same line of work in Moscow.
The attitude of the Russian state toward its foreign agents has also changed. At least in public, spies are no longer figures of suspicion. Russias current president, Vladimir Putin, is himself a former spy, and espionage is a part of his biography that he chooses to celebrate. Upon returning to Russia, the expelled American illegals were duly lionized by the Russian media as heroes who had been cruelly evicted by vicious traitors and the wicked FBI. Chapman became a national icon, with her own column and television show, even joining a youth group linked to the Russian president. Paradoxically, she was lauded as a symbol of upward mobility and successsuccess in London and New York, of course, not Moscow. But that is precisely the kind of success many Russians want. Unlike their Soviet predecessors, Russias contemporary elite openly craves the material goods of the West, and openly admires those who get them. The feeling is not mutual, which is why Russia will always have an advantage over the West in the deployment of illegals. Clever and educated Russians will compete hard to become long-term (and heavily subsidized) residents of the American suburbs, and once they arrive they find it easy to fit in. Nowadays, theres nothing at all unusual about a Russian accent in New Jersey. Some of the recent batch of spies, Chapman included, never even bothered to change their names. But the reverse is much harder to imagine: How many Americans would agree to spend twenty years in suburban Tomsk, living under deep cover (or even light cover), and how many could convincingly pretend to be Russian for that length of time? Historically, Western intelligence agencies dont have a great track record for this sort of thing. Lucas has a chapter in his book dedicated to a famously disastrous British-American attempt to parachute anti-Communist illegals into the Baltic states after World War II. The plan was revealed before it was enacted to Soviet counterintelligence by Kim Philby himself, and never had a chance of success; the partisans who greeted the men as they dropped into Lithuanian and Estonian villages were all employees of the KGB.
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Somewhat lost in the amused publicity that surrounded the more recent espionage scandal was the question of what the new generation spies were actually doing in the United States, and how great a threat they really posed. Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute was the headline in New York magazine. Lucas vehemently disagrees with this oddly complacent attitude, arguing that Russia uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making. Though many reviewers have disagreed with his analysisafter all, none of the illegals, at least the ones we know about, ever did get close to anyone remotely importantit is also true that, when seen in the longer light of Russian, Soviet, and KGB history, his view gains strength. Modern Russian foreign policylike Soviet foreign policy before itoften has mutually contradictory goals. On the one hand, the Russian ruling class, dominated as it is by former members of the KGB, genuinely wants stable and open relationships with the West. Russian businessmen want to trade, to travel, and to live abroad, and they dont want to jeopardize their access. But at the same time, this same Russian ruling class would very much like to skew Western institutionsbanks, think tanks, the media, government bureaucraciesso as to make the West more comfortable for themselves. To put it differently, the members of the Russian elite may no longer aspire to launch international Communist revolution, as they did in the 1930s. But they do aspire to change the Western norms and behavior that they see as standing in their way: they want to make Americans and European less interested in human rights, more accepting of corruption, and perhaps more amenable to Russian investment and Russian oligarchs. To some degree, they can try to do so openly. Their money buys them the services of retired Western officials, including a former German chancellor, as well as access to public relations firms, advertising agencies, and lawyers.
But there may be times when they need some clandestine means to pursue these goals as well. Even if Anna Chapman, Donald Heathfield, and the others never got very far in their bid to penetrate elite America, they were in a position to handle illegal money, pass along information, and generally do and say the kinds of things the Russian government prefers not to do and say openly. Besides, a great deal of time and money were invested in their education, their living expenses, their travel. Someone cared a good deal about creating and maintaining their cover storiesand that alone is evidence that someone thought they were important.
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foreignaffairs.com
16/10/2012 13:02
Rania Abouzeid
Foreign Affairs
fter nearly 18 months and some 20,000 dead, Western and Arab governments are still debating the geopolitical pros and cons of intervening in Syria. But inside the country, the opposition has more pressing concerns, from battling the regime to collecting the trash. A report from on the ground in rebel-controlled northern Syria.
Men from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) stalked about, deciding which firepower was worth their money. A young, bearded man with gelled hair examined several BKC machine guns but walked out emptyhanded. Maybe it was their price tags (each ranged from $5,000 to $6,000); perhaps they were poor quality. He was too polite to say. But Abu Sohaib did not try to stop him, mainly because he did not need to: there were plenty of other buyers. Demand has increased a lot, Abu Sohaib said, especially since Aleppo rose. Its increased about 50 percent. To his point, he sold his entire inventory in a matter of days. Weapons traders are doing a brisk business in Syria. Desperate rebel groups are constantly on the hunt for matriel to keep up the battle against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Yet as the war grinds on -- some estimates list the death toll as high as 30,000, and the United Nations reports as many as 1.5 million displaced people -- the booming weapons trade is aggravating rifts within the armed opposition. Rival FSA commanders are leveraging access to suppliers to exert influence and buy allegiances. And the patronage networks forged in the process could set Syria up for a bloody round of infighting, even after the battle for Damascus is settled. Dressed in his units irregular uniform of black-andgray camouflage cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a baseball cap (which he wore backwards), Khatab explained that his unit relies on donations from the Syrian diaspora and wealthy businessmen in Aleppo to fund its activities. He had about ten million Syrian pounds (around $150,000) to spend, which would go toward his specially ordered anti-aircraft machine guns as well as additional Kalishnikovs and BKCs. He was also buying ammunition to restock his units depot, which he said never dips below 25,000 bullets
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/rocket-propelled-syria?page=show
Dangerous bedfellows: A member of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo. (Courtesy Reuters) On a recent Monday, Khatab, a 28-year-old former factory worker, sipped bitter coffee, leaned against an unpainted wall of a small house in the northern Syrian province of Idlib, and explained that he was in no rush. His special order of two 14.5-millimeter anti-aircraft guns was not slated to arrive until much later in the day. A veritable arsenal of weapons surrounded him: heavy machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs, and boxes upon boxes of ammunition. In the middle of the room sat the master of the operation, a silver-haired Syrian named Abu Sohaib, who had smuggled this shipment of weapons across the border from Iraq.
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Foreign Affairs
16/10/2012 13:02
for each type of gun. Im here every two or three days, he said. Thats how long this ammunition will last if the army attacks us, or if we are going to try and retake an area. Khatab said he would rather make the dangerous trek to Idlib than approach his local opposition military council for a handout. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in coordination with Turkish intelligence operatives, began covertly providing light weapons to the FSA. These weapons tend to bypass the nominal leaders of the FSA -- Colonel Riad al-Asaad (not to be confused with the Syrian president) and General Mustafa al-Sheikh, who, until recently, were based in Turkey -- and are instead directly funneled to ten or so regional councils, each representing rebel units that operate within a province. But the handouts are considered meager and insufficient, and the method of distribution has been plagued by accusations of favoritism and double-dealing since its inception.
of the weaponry he needs on the black market, but his unit also manufactures its own rockets. Weve made about 150 of these, Abu Hussein said as he propped up his product, the Freedom 1, in the courtyard outside his home. Its design takes cues from the Qassam rocket that Hamas has engineered. The cylindrical metal object stands roughly three feet and nine inches high, about two inches wide, and is comprised of three parts -- the body (stacked with potassium and sugar), the explosive head (which weighs about 4.4 pounds, mainly aluminum nitrates), and a detonator. It has a range of nearly 7.5 miles, he said, and has been used in Homs, Talbiseh, and Hama. Abu Hussein coordinates with groups in Hama that are also manufacturing homemade rockets, comparing notes and making adjustments, but he has not reached out to the military councils. I havent asked for help, because I wont give them allegiance, he said. The Muslim Brotherhood approached me, I also refused. Although the Syrian rebels lack the direct foreign military assistance that Assads regime receives -- mainly from Russia -- they have managed to tap into a variety of sources for procuring arms and money. Senior defectors such as Asaad and Sheikh are not involved in the Saudi-Qatari effort, but they have their own means of funding (largely provided by Syrians in the diaspora and from wealthy Arabs in the Gulf) and are setting up individual patronage networks, distributing money to select groups of FSA units. The problem for Asaad and Sheikh, who remain rivals despite the fact that they formed a joint military council in March, is that they have to confront the growing authority of the military councils, which look derisively at the deal-making, tea-sipping officers who are ensconced in the safety of Turkish and Jordanian territories. They already face the wrath of men such as Colonel Afif Suleiman, the head of the Idlib Military Council, which consists of
The problem is that the supporters arent giving goods to the right people, Khatab said of the Saudi-Qatari effort. His Abu Omara brigade had not received any of the free weapons, he said, but would not have accepted them even if they had been offered because they came with a condition that he and his men were not prepared to meet. If you dont pledge your loyalty to the military council, you get nothing from it, and with all due respect, we started this revolution so that we wouldnt have to make pledges of loyalty like this to anyone. Units that receive the Saudi-Qatari weapons must also find other suppliers to fill out their inventory. Whereas Khatabs unit relies solely on purchasing matriel, other Syrian rebel groups are resorting to more homespun methods. Abu Hussein, who heads the Martyr Mazin rocket brigade in the northern Syrian city of Jabal al-Zawiya, also refuses to pledge allegiance to anyone except his men. He buys some
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Foreign Affairs
16/10/2012 13:02
some 16 units from across the province. Asaad and Sheikhs leadership became a question of, Will you follow me so that I extend you support? Suleiman explained. They took money that was given to the free army and distributed it like this. This is our conflict with them. Suleimans complaints underscore the deep internal divisions of the Syrian opposition. From the earliest days of the revolt, attempts to bring unity to the rebel factions have foundered. A recent effort by a Jordan-based general, Mohamed al-Haj Ali, to unite the disparate rebel brigades under his leadership and a new name -- the Syrian National Army -- seems to have fizzled. Moreover, the loose band of secular and Islamist rebels operating under the FSA banner is not the only armed player in Syria. There are also separate Islamist groups, including the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham, which reportedly receives the bulk of its support from Kuwait. Those sitting in Turkey and elsewhere are just watching and thinking about what position they will occupy after the revolution, Khatab said. Some people came to us, our brigade, and talked to us about how they want our support after the fall of the regime, he added. They want it secured now. Despite distrust and disorder, the rebels guns are still more or less pointed in the same direction. Should Assad fall, however, and that common target disappear, those guns could very well be turned against each other. It seems increasingly likely that the battle for Syria will continue long after Assad has left the scene.
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brookings.edu
October 8, 2012
Americans on the Middle East: A Study of American Public Opinion

Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland and the Program for International Policy Attitudes Report | 3. A majority of Americans believes that an Israeli strike on Irans nuclear facilities would result in a drastic oil price increase, Iranian attacks on American bases, and a worsened American strategic position in the Middle East. 4. Majorities of the American public support increasing sanctions on Syria and imposing an international no-fly zone, but overwhelmingly oppose bombing Syria, arming rebels, or sending troops to Syria.

In mid-September 2012, attacks on US diplomatic missions in Libya and Egyptcountries going through revolutionary processes that began with the Arab Springshocked Americans in the midst of a closely fought presidential campaign. The very different governments of Libya and Egypt, both new and untested, had to formulate responses to the attacks, which immediately fed in to the American political process. The University of Marylands Anwar Sadat Chair and the Program on International Policy Attitudes sought to learn what have been the American publics first impressions of these events, and how attitudes on other issues in the region may have changed. Highlights of key findings from the poll include: 1. Most Americans believe that the the recent violent attacks against the American embassies in Libya and Egypt are the work of extremist minorities, not majorities, but most are dissatisfied with the reactions of the Libyan and Egyptian governments. 2. There is support for decreasing aid to Egypt, but not for stopping it.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/10/08-americans-middle-east-telhami
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October 8, 2012
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2012/10/08-americans-middle-east-telhami
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