by Jules Evans | Mar 20, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Global system
I was astounded to read today of the FSB’s arrest of Ilya Zaslavsky, who’s a manager at TNK-BP in Moscow, and also the organizer of the Russian branch of the Oxford Alumni, on charges of industrial espionage.
The Russian-Oxford alumni association held monthly drinks in Moscow, which I went along to a few times. Can’t say it was a hotbed of Decembrist activity…more like a lot of Russian MBAs back-slapping each other and reminiscing about that time they drove through Oxford back in the 90s. Ilya seemed like a decent-enough guy though.
The FSB (the heir to the KGB) apparently invaded the offices of TNK-BP and found all sorts of ‘incriminating evidence’ against him, such as the business cards of ‘foreign military agencies and the CIA’ according to an FSB spokesperson. This is sufficient, apparently, to prove that both Ilya and his brother Alexander, who the BBC says works for the British Council, are illegally getting industrial secrets for foreign companies (presumably BP).
But if they really were spies, would they leave the business cards of CIA agents lying around on their desk at work? And isn’t gathering information on market participants like Gazprom not ‘industrial espionage’ but simply doing their job?
This could be a way of turning the screws on BP, as Gazprom prepares to buy many of its Russian assets. But it’s also a sign of the continued unchecked power of the secret services to harass private citizens on the flimsiest of charges. And it’s further evidence of the FSB’s growing harassment of foreign individuals in Moscow, or Russians working for foreign companies.
Another friend of mine, an American journalist, had to leave Moscow abruptly last year, when he was advised by the US government that he was in the process of being set up by the FSB. He had been handed over some military secrets by a taxi-driver who claimed to be ex-FSB (I know, weird circumstances). But he was then told, while abroad, that if he went back to Russia, he could be in hot water. So he never went back.
Well, I hope Ilya and his brother – who both have dual Russian and US citizenship – are let out soon. Using the freedom of your own citizens as bargaining chips in mergers and acquisitions seems like a pretty shoddy way of behaving.
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 19, 2008 | UK
So which political adviser and/or Whitehall official(s) have been talking with the FT’s resident ‘Rita Skeeter‘? In her notebook today she despairs of the British Prime Minister’s handling of the national security strategy:
Oh Gord! The new national security strategy that Gordon Brown, the prime minister, is due to announce on Wednesday – it is all about potential disasters – has proved a bit of a disaster itself. Its genesis has been marked by delays indecisiveness at the top, a total lack of funds and some glorious Whitehall squabbling.
The strategy, which will detail all kinds of threats from terrorism to pandemics and floods, is nearly six months late. The first draft was ready last October, but parts of Whitehall were distinctly unhappy. I am told that one section on flooding was written by a senior military man who did not bother to consult the flood supremos in the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
(Better gossip is that they forgot to include Britain’s nuclear deterrent in one draft)
Sue continues:
When the shouts of protest died down, a new version was produced in February this year – after due consultation. This did not upset anyone. Indeed it was so anodyne that some officials felt positively embarrassed. Advisers in Number 10 cut its length drastically. Mr Brown started writing his speech about it, which seems to have led to a series of further changes to the strategy itself as new ideas came to him. “It’s Gordon’s temperament,” sighed one Whitehall insider. “Only he can sort things out but he concentrates on matters of the moment and drops everything else. The result is that things big and small don’t get sorted quickly.”
So what will be included?
Right from the start there seems to have been no clear guidance from Mr Brown as to what the strategy was meant to achieve. It is expected to include plans for a new US-style national security council on which will sit the great and the good from the military and the intelligence services, but the council will report to a new cabinet committee, chaired by Mr Brown, and the old Cobra arrangements for dealing with emergencies will remain in place. All rather confusing, but the hope is that the council will make it easier to bang heads together and stop departments fighting their own corners. Hard to see how, say insiders. “Governments have always had to choose between spending on flood defences, for example, and armaments,” says one senior figure, adding that unlike the US security council, whose job is to prioritise spending, there will be no serious extra money for contingency planning.
Not sure that is quite the point. But what about Whitehall’s reaction to the document?
Some fear the new strategy will bring even more centralisation of power with Number 10, cutting other departments out of the action. There is even concern that top intelligence officials could become part of the prime minister’s team instead of serving the government as a whole. On this the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the dangers of that should be all too apparent.
Looks like paranoia is setting into Whitehall.
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 17, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
This Wednesday the British Government will publish the UK’s first ever National Security Strategy. This is a big moment for Gordon Brown and comes with great expectations. Don’t be surprised if there is no Minister on the Today Programme discussing the strategy’s pros and cons on Wednesday morning – this will be Gordon Brown’s opportunity to kill lots of birds with one mighty strategic stone (so lets hope he does wait and announce it in Parliament).
Dignity and gravitas will ooze from every pore of the front bench as Brown steps up to the dispatch box and announces the strategy. MPs from all sides of the House will nod and mouth their agreement. In the gallery sketch writers will pen columns for Thursday’s newspapers about how important Parliament is. For a brief moment the Government will look in complete control of its destiny – polls will even show the Labour party jump ahead of the Conservatives.
Some British newspapers are already trailing the announcement. The Telegraph suggests that ‘a national security council will be created, staffed by senior politicians including, potentially, individuals from other parties, intelligence and military chiefs, and scientific experts.. and that Paddy Ashdown has been suggested as a possible leading opposition figure with the experience to be invited to serve alongside senior Government ministers’. The Guardian points to the fact that ‘officials were divided about how broad they should paint the security threats facing Britain, and whether they should include such issues as social cohesion, for example,’ while The Times believes that a ‘group of veteran specialists will advise Gordon Brown on all aspects of national security, ranging from terrorist strikes to pandemics’. Finally the Financial Times writes that Sir Paul McCartney has been ordered to pay his estranged wife Heather Mills £24.3m.
Below are some thoughts ahead of the publication of the UK NSS.
(more…)
by David Steven | Mar 15, 2008 | Conflict and security
In a recent post on Global Dashboard, I wrote about resilience, drawing on thinking that Alex and I have been developing together for a new project we hope to launch later this year.
The post was triggered by David Miliband’s argument that one of the defining features of the era we live in is a shift in the balance of responsibilities between state and citizen. It was a mistake to assume this would lead to greater stability, I argued. The key question is whether, when faced with a distributed threat, our systems become more resilient or less so.
Lloyd Anderson, head of science at the British Council and an ecologist, pointed out to me that it is helpful to think about three levels of influence on a system: trends, stresses and shocks.
Trends are gradual shifts in a system’s composition and context. Shocks are immediate and catastrophic. Stresses sit somewhere in the middle, and tend to affect a complex system in a particular way. Under pressure, the system ‘resists’ change up to an unpredictable point. It then shifts rapidly – and usually irreversibly – to another equilibrium.
We pay plenty of attention to shocks and trends. The former sell newspapers, while the latter keep social scientists in work. But stresses are deadly, both because they fly beneath the radar, and because they have the potential to lead to deep-seated changes that undermine the basis of our way of life.
Take two examples: the 2003 heat wave in Europe and the slow-burn insurgency in the Niger delta. (more…)
by Richard Gowan | Feb 18, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
I’ve spent some of my President’s Day holiday hammering out a review of Surrender is Not an Option, John Bolton’s scaborous memoir of his tenure at the UN. This will eventually come out in the International Journal, based in Canada, but as (i) the wheels of academic publishing move slowly and (ii) the IJ doesn’t put its reviews online, I thought I’d extract a few paragraphs here. These deal with what strikes me as the most interesting and least discussed element of the (generally badly reviewed) book: Bolton’s obsession with the political uses of jokes…
Mr. Bolton states that his audience is to be found in Middle America. He is concerned that many of his fellow nationals are too easily beguiled by the UN. For them, “the United Nations to this day remains the UN of UNICEF trick-or-treating on Halloween, and of famine-relief efforts in natural disasters, or combating diseases in developing countries.” Bolton now sets out to disillusion “those who still think glowingly of the UN as they had imagined it on Halloweens long ago.” His volume may be a first in international relations literature: a book explicitly intended to sour childhood memories.
To achieve this he hauls us through some highly involved descriptions of diplomatic negotiations enlivened by the breaking of confidences, ad hominem attacks on most other participants, and a lot of jokes. Curiously, the most interesting element of the entire project may be the jokes. We already know quite a lot about the humor of the Bush administration – Bob Woodward has revealed, for example, that the president finds flatulence funny. Mr. Bolton is more interested in verbal repartee, and from time to time he is genuinely witty. Describing a visit by George Clooney to New York to discuss Darfur before the Security Council, he notes that the actor was swarmed by female staffers, “providing humility lessons, and therefore character-building, for the rest of us.” However, he is best at skewering those he dislikes with harsh humor, and he knows it, often returning to the same victims (such as his British and Swedish counterparts at the UN) again and again.
This fascination with comedy is clearly essential to his understanding of how diplomacy works. Mr. Bolton has often been presented as a devotee of power politics, seeing little beyond interest, influence and advantage. This book does not dispel that view. But humor seems to act as a guide to how these forces work. He explains how he gained advantage over a senior German official in a meeting on Iran by noting that he inspired “general merriment”, while his adversary only “joked lamely” and then responded “dourly” to Bolton’s comedic success.
Contrary to his stated intentions, Mr. Bolton has not produced a book that will appeal to those suffering belated qualms about whether their trick-or-treating was misguided – it would be utterly ludicrous to believe that anyone without a sad obsession with multilateral diplomacy is going to care one iota whether Mr. Bolton bested largely unheard-of diplomatic rivals in the humor stakes. But for those of us who are burdened with that unfortunate obsession, this is a treasure-trove.
And if that doesn’t make you want to buy it, what will?
