Category: Foreign Affairs

WASHINGTON, Jan 12 — Seven months ago, a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele won a contract to build a file on Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia. Last week, the explosive details — unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes, real estate deals that were intended as bribes and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of Democrats — were summarized for Mr. Trump in an appendix to a top-secret intelligence report.

The consequences have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day. Word of the summary, which was also given to President Obama and congressional leaders, leaked to CNN Tuesday, and the rest of the media followed with sensational reports.

Mr. Trump denounced the unproven claims Wednesday as a fabrication, a Nazi-style smear concocted by “sick people.” It has further undermined his relationship with the intelligence agencies and cast a shadow over the new administration.

Late Wednesday night, after speaking with Mr. Trump, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, issued a statement decrying leaks about the matter and saying of Mr. Steele’s dossier that the intelligence agencies have “not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable.” Mr. Clapper suggested that intelligence officials had nonetheless shared it to give policy makers “the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.”

Parts of the story remain out of reach — most critically the basic question of how much, if anything, in the dossier is true. But it is possible to piece together a rough narrative of what led to the current crisis, including lingering questions about the ties binding Mr. Trump and his team to Russia. The episode also offers a glimpse of the hidden side of presidential campaigns, involving private sleuths-for-hire looking for the worst they can find about the next American leader.

The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists, Fusion GPS, to compile a dossier about the real estate magnate’s past scandals and weaknesses, according to a person familiar with the effort. The person described the opposition research work on condition of anonymity, citing the volatile nature of the story and the likelihood of future legal disputes. The identity of the donor is unclear.

Fusion GPS, headed by a former Wall Street Journal journalist known for his dogged reporting, Glenn Simpson, most often works for business clients. But in presidential elections, the firm is sometimes hired by candidates, party organizations or donors to do political “oppo” work — shorthand for opposition research — on the side.

It is routine work and ordinarily involves creating a big, searchable database of public information: past news reports, documents from lawsuits and other relevant data. For months, Fusion GPS gathered the documents and put together the files from Mr. Trump’s past in business and entertainment, a rich target.

After Mr. Trump emerged as the presumptive nominee in the spring, the Republican interest in financing the effort ended. But Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton were very interested, and Fusion GPS kept doing the same deep dives, but on behalf of new clients.

In June, the tenor of the effort suddenly changed. The Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, apparently by Russian government agents, and a mysterious figure calling himself “Guccifer 2.0” began to publish the stolen documents online.

Mr. Simpson hired Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence officer with whom he had worked before. Mr. Steele, in his early 50s, had served undercover in Moscow in the early 1990s and later was the top expert on Russia at the London headquarters of Britain’s spy service, MI6. When he stepped down in 2009, he started his own commercial intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.

The former journalist and the former spy, according to people who know them, had similarly dark views of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. officer, and the varied tactics he and his intelligence operatives used to smear, blackmail or bribe their targets.

As a former spy who had carried out espionage inside Russia, Mr. Steele was in no position to travel to Moscow to study Mr. Trump’s connections there. Instead, he hired native Russian speakers to call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own connections in the country as well.

Mr. Steele wrote up his findings in a series of memos, each a few pages long, that he began to deliver to Fusion GPS in June and continued at least until December. By then, the election was over, and neither Mr. Steele nor Mr. Simpson was being paid by a client, but they did not stop what they believed to be very important work. (Mr. Simpson declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Steele did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
The memos described two different Russian operations. The first was a yearslong effort to find a way to influence Mr. Trump, perhaps because he had contacts with Russian oligarchs whom Mr. Putin wanted to keep track of.

According to Mr. Steele’s memos, it used an array of familiar tactics: the gathering of “kompromat,” compromising material such as alleged tapes of Mr. Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, and proposals for business deals attractive to Mr. Trump.

The goal would probably never have been to make Mr. Trump a knowing agent of Russia, but to make him a source who might provide information to friendly Russian contacts. But if Mr. Putin and his agents wanted to entangle Mr. Trump using business deals, they did not do it very successfully. Mr. Trump has said he has no major properties there, though one of his sons said at a real estate conference in 2008 that “a lot of money” was “pouring in from Russia.”

The second Russian operation described was recent: a series of contacts with Mr. Trump’s representatives during the campaign, in part to discuss the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. According to Mr. Steele’s sources, it involved, among other things, a late-summer meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and Oleg Solodukhin, a Russian official who works for Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization that promotes Russia’s interests abroad.

By all accounts, Mr. Steele has an excellent reputation with American and British intelligence colleagues and had done work for the F.B.I. on the investigation of bribery at FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. Colleagues say he was acutely aware of the danger he and his associates were being fed Russian disinformation. Russian intelligence had mounted a complex hacking operation to damage Mrs. Clinton, and a similar operation against Mr. Trump was possible.

But much of what he was told, and passed on to Fusion GPS, was very difficult to check. And some of the claims that can be checked seem problematic. Mr. Cohen, for instance, said on Twitter on Tuesday night that he has never been in Prague; Mr. Solodukhin, his purported Russian contact, denied in a telephone interview that he had ever met Mr. Cohen or anyone associated with Mr. Trump. The president-elect on Wednesday citednews reports that a different Michael Cohen with no Trump ties may have visited Prague and that the two Cohens might have been mixed up in Mr. Steele’s reports.

But word of a dossier had begun to spread through political circles. Rick Wilson, a Republican political operative who was working for a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio, said he heard about it in July, when an investigative reporter for a major news network called him to ask what he knew.

By early fall, some of Mr. Steele’s memos had been given to the F.B.I., which was already investigating Mr. Trump’s Russian ties, and to journalists. An MI6 official, whose job does not permit him to be quoted by name, said that in late summer or early fall, Mr. Steele also passed the reports he had prepared on Mr. Trump and Russia to British intelligence. Mr. Steele was concerned about what he was hearing about Mr. Trump, and he thought that the information should not be solely in the hands of people looking to win a political contest.
After the election, the memos, still being supplemented by his inquiries, became one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, as reporters — including from The New York Times — scrambled to confirm or disprove them.

Word also reached Capitol Hill. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, heard about the dossier and obtained a copy in December from David J. Kramer, a former top State Department official who works for the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. Mr. McCain passed the information to James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director.
Remarkably for Washington, many reporters for competing news organizations had the salacious and damning memos, but they did not leak, because their contents could not be confirmed. (Mother Jones magazine was an exception, publishing a story on Oct. 31 that described the dossier, its origin and significance, while omitting the titillating details.) That changed only this week, after the heads of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency added a summary of the memos, along with information gathered from other intelligence sources, to their report on the Russian cyberattack on the election.

Now, after the most contentious of elections, Americans are divided and confused about what to believe about the incoming president. And there is no prospect soon for full clarity on the veracity of the claims made against him.
“It is a remarkable moment in history,” said Mr. Wilson, the Florida political operative. “What world did I wake up in?”

Jonathan Martin, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

BERLIN — After police killed the asylum seeker suspected of the deadly truck rampage here, other migrants expressed relief that a terrorist was caught but also anxiety about a renewed backlash against them.

“We come from another country, so it’s difficult for us to see this happen,” Omrr Mohebzada, 26, who is from Herat, Afghanistan, said Friday after Tunisian national Anis Amri died in a shootout with police in Milan, Italy.
Mohebzada fled Afghanistan 18 months ago because his father’s logistics company works with the U.S. military and radical Taliban insurgents trying to regain control of the U.S.-backed government threatened to kill him. “Germany has been very good to us. We feel bad when we hear this news. We don’t want Germans to turn against us.”

It’s a reasonable concern in a country that accepted approximately 1 million migrants from war-torn countries in the Middle East and elsewhere during the past two years under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy. But her welcoming stance has come under increasing assault from an anti-immigration party that has that has shown surprising strength in local elections this year.

A backlash against the flood of refugees flared a year ago, when gangs of recent arrivals were accused of mass sexual assaults of women during New Year’s eve celebrations in Cologne and other cities. Since then, there have been other attacks by migrants that have put Merkel under pressure to reverse her refugee policy.

Amri, 24, the suspect in Monday’s truck attack at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, which killed 12 and injured 48, spent time in jail for theft and vandalism. His German asylum application was rejected because authorities feared he had become radicalized. He avoided deportation because of a bureaucratic mix-up, and he had been under surveillance as a potential terrorist but had not done anything to justify his arrest earlier.

The truck attack occurred five months after a Syrian man killed a woman and wounded five more people with a machette. Also in July, a teenage refugee from Afghanistan injured five tourists from Hong Kong with an ax and knife on a train. In a separate incident, another Syrian blew himself up outside a bar, wounding 15 people.

Because the Berlin attack was the most deadly terror incident, it has heightened concerns among asylum seekers that they will be targeted for even more retribution than already has occurred. There have been more than 1,000 incidents, dozens of them violent, targeting refugee shelters and asylum seekers in Germany since the start of this year, according to the interior ministry.

Odeh Diab, 20, a Syrian refugee, said that in Berlin, the vast majority of his interactions with Germans have been positive and helpful but a backlash is noticeable in small ways. “Often when I get on the subway and sit down, people immediately move away from me because they think I am dangerous,” he said.

He pointed out that there was a far-right, anti-immigration demonstration at the site of the Christmas market attack on Wednesday night, but a simultaneous counter-protest was far larger.

“The idea of a huge ‘backlash’ against the refugees is being pushed by the right-wing political agenda of some of political parties and groups,” said Gregor Wendler, a Berliner with a government-funded organization that helps refugees find work in Germany’s capital. “That only works on people who don’t know how they feel about refugees.”
About two-thirds of Germans approve of Merkel’s decision to stand for a fourth term in next year’s general election, according to a poll published in late November — before the attack — by PoliBarometer.

Still, an earlier survey published by Germany’s Focus magazine found that 60% of Germans want Merkel to put a fixed limit on the number of refugees Germany accepts, a proposal she has repeatedly rebuffed. Meanwhile, the nationalist, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland party has seen its popularity soar in recent parliamentary elections, although it has peaked at about 15% nationwide.

“This attack is bad news for all of us refugees who live in Germany,” said Mohammad Soltani, 25, a former bodyguard for a wealthy political family in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Like fellow Afghan Mohebzada, Soltani sought asylum in Germany because the Taliban had made repeated threats to kill him and he saw no other option. “A lot of my friends in Germany are very sad about this attack,” he said. “I hope they captured the right guy. I hope the government does not change its mind about refugees.”

Mohebzada said he hopes the death of the Berlin attack suspect will allow people in Germany and throughout Europe to enjoy Christmas.

Like most asylum seekers in Germany, he and his wife and two small children are Muslim. “Wait, remind me,” he said. “What is the name of the guy with the big, white beard and red clothes?”

FAISALABAD, Dec 11: The industrial phase of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is going to kick off soon under which Chinese investors would be allowed to set up only high tech industries, which would not have any negative impact on Pakistan’s existing industry, said CPEC Acting Project Director Hasan Dawood.

Speaking to a delegation of the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI), he said that CPEC has three major perspectives including geo strategic, regional integration and industrial cooperation, adding that Chinese investors cannot afford any clash at any stage with Pakistani industrialists; hence, they prefer to concentrate on Gwadar Port.

The delegation, which was headed by FCCI Vice President Ahmed Hasan, met with the director and apprised him about the reservations of the local industrialists.

Three routes have been proposed to link China with Gwadar Port including eastern, western and central routes, which are expected to be completed by the year 2018, informed Dawood.

Talking about the industrial cooperation under CPEC, he said that working groups are being established to determine the needs of both countries. Four meetings between National Development and Reforms Commission of China and Planning Commission of Pakistan have already been held, said the director.

He said that working groups will have representation of all provinces and encouraged FCCI to present its proposal through their related province for discussion in the working group.

He further told that 36 economic zones would be established under CPEC which would not only create thousands of jobs but also gear up the pace of progress and prosperity.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11th, 2016.

ONE of Pakistan’s greatest diplomatic achievements during the Cold War was to simultaneously enjoy strong ties with the United States and China. With the end of the Cold War and the retreat of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, this triangular relationship has changed. Pakistan’s ties to Beijing have never been stronger, while ties to Washington are once again troubled. Nothing symbolises this shift more than CPEC.

China has offered Pakistan over $50 billion in investments for critical infrastructure projects as prospects for greater financial and military assistance from Washington dim. Washington has good reasons to be supportive — or at least not negative — about CPEC. If Pakistan can raise its game and make the most of this opportunity, CPEC will not just be one more external lending stream, it can help Pakistan achieve sustainable economic growth, one predicate for national, if not regional stability.

There are, however, challenges to be overcome before extravagant visions of CPEC can be realised. Thriving port cities depend on location and historic patterns of commerce. Habitual Pakistani frictions between provinces and civil-military relations are complicating the takeoff stage. Beijing does not have a track record of philanthropy with respect to foreign investments. CPEC is not a gift; it’s a mutual opportunity, accompanied with interest rates. And Pakistan is in no position to drive hard bargains.

The US may not compete with China for influence in Pakistan.

The upswing in China-Pakistan relations extends well beyond CPEC. Beijing is also helping Pakistan by placing road blocks before India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group and preventing the UN from adding Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar to its listing of terrorists. In contrast, the US Defence Authorisation Act passed by the Congress conditions half of the assistance given to Pakistan on demonstrable steps against terror groups.

Not that long ago, in 2009, Washington decided to make a major effort to improve relations with Pakistan and to bolster a newly elected civilian government. Now it is very hard to envision another major initiative by Washington, which is sceptical of Islamabad’s promissory notes, or by Pakistan, which is accustomed to being on the receiving end of Washington’s initiatives, not the other way around. Absent a source of new propulsion, bilateral ties will continue to lose altitude.

Islamabad, Washington, and even Beijing have something to lose from these dynamics. No matter how generous Chinese infrastructure and military support turn out to be for Pakistan, having one major power benefactor is half as good as having two. Washington will have less influence to change Pakistani choices for the better, and will now need more of Beijing’s help with crisis management. And while Beijing’s gains are likely to be real, so, too, will the responsibilities of being Pakistan’s top benefactor.

Washington is not inclined to compete with China for influence in Pakistan. Nor is the prospect of more Russian engagement with Pakistan likely to alter US calculations. Washington’s current mood is to continue offering assistance to support common interests — while conditioning a growing portion of aid to demonstrable steps that confirm long-promised changes in Pakistan’s national security policies. All this can be upended with another major act of terrorism that can be traced back to Pakistan.

A legitimate question is whether Washington is capable of acknowledging changes for the better in Pakistan’s national security policies after such a long period of complaint. There has been clear acknowledgement of Pakistan’s counterterrorism campaign against the Pakistan Taliban, and the sacrifices this has entailed. But there is deep scepticism that the scope of this campaign will be widened.

Some in the incoming Trump administration might be inclined to pursue the ‘nuclear option’ — declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. This would be a grave mistake, not just for Pakistan and the United States, but also for India. Severing ties will not improve Pakistan’s choices, nor help the United States to encourage nuclear-armed neighbors to improve ties or defuse tensions. Washington does more of the latter than the former because, when New Delhi occasionally seeks to turn the page, an attack on India by cadres of groups based in Pakistan typically follows.

One challenge for Washington during the Trump administration will be to keep the door open and to recognise changes in policies that have weakened Pakistan’s well-being. A second challenge will be to not fly off the handle in ways that badly affect ties. The challenge for Pakistan is to keep moving forward rather than to fall back on bad habits. And to recognize that standard talking points will fall flat without changes in national security policy. Even in the absence of changes in Pakistani policies, the US continues to have important reasons to remain fully engaged on common interests. That sounds easy enough, but sensible steps cannot be taken for granted in the Trump administration.

The writer is co-founder of the Stimson Centre.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has determined that Russia did in fact try to help Donald Trump win the US presidency rather than work to simply interfere with the election, according to a secret report conducted by the agency.

US intelligence officials from multiple agencies have found connections between the Kremlin and Wikileaks. The former provided the latter with countless hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, and many others, the Washington Post reported.

The spectre of an ongoing email controversy lurked over Ms Clinton’s campaign from the onset of her candidacy. But in the final months, the massive leak of thousands of emails closed the gap between the former Secretary of State and Mr Trump by double digits. Cybersecurity experts, as well as intelligence officials, had found evidence that linked the hacks to Russia.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” a senior US intelligence official briefed on information shared with US senators told the Post. “That’s the consensus view.”
Still, there is some disagreement among some of the officials from all 17 intelligence agencies. They lacked evidence that showed a direct connection between Russia and Wikileaks.The actors they found were “one step” removed from the Russian government, the officials said. 

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had said Russia was not the source of the leaks in an interview published on the state-owned broadcaster Russia Today.

“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” he said. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications.
“That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

President Trump protests
Earlier in the day, the Obama administration ordered a “full review” of election-related hacking. 

The President’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, made the announcement to reporters at an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. 

“We may have crossed into a new threshold and it is incumbent up on us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” she said. 

Mr Obama expects a full report before he leaves office on 20 January.

US officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence officially accused Russia of hacking the DNC and other organisations “to interfere with the US election process”.
 
The reiterated their accusations earlier this week.

“The US Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organisations,” officials said in a statement.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorised these activities.”

In a perplexing response, the Trump transition team outright dismissed the validity of the report and the intelligence committee they will soon be running.

“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the team incorrectly said in a statement. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again’.”

Officials held a secret briefing with congressional leaders in September, but House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doubted the legitimacy of the assessment.

Additionally, the Post says Mr McConnell made his opposition to such intelligence clear, and if the White House spoke publicly about the Russians’ role in the hacks, he would simply consider it a partisan political stunt.