Let’s drop the nuclear physics for a bit. People want know what makes Kim Jong-un tick. Theories abound, but no candidate has the quality that says, “this nails it.”  In the euphoric moment, political types tend to confuse fact and desire. But the intelligence community is not so easily beguiled. (Reuters) Understanding Kim: Inside the U.S. effort to profile the secretive North Korean leader.

My own attempt at a compact theory appears in, Trump says ‘major, major’ conflict with North Korea possible:

• The rule of Kim Jong-un is too weak to survive cancellation of these [missile, nuclear] programs.
• If Kim Jong-un is deposed, it is most likely that he will die. He is too dangerous to his challengers to be left alive.
• In the protracted negotiations with the father, Kim Jong-il, under the 1994 framework, the program slowed, or appeared to stop for periods, but no assets were relinquished by North Korea. Hence the son cannot relinquish assets.
• The portraits of father and son hang side-by-side. This is not for decoration. It is symbolic proclamation that the son is the continuation of the father. A loss of symbolic continuity would immediately activate the weakness of the son’s power base.

with the conclusion,

The bullet list has tight linkages, implying that the object of regime change is identical as a goal with nuclear disarmament of North Korea.

But the human mind is not ultimately knowable. This is a game of almost-facts. The estimate should be read as, “This is likely to be the case.”  Now this estimate is challenged by new emotions, producing new biases, caused by a political meeting that may have featured either genuine sentiment or really good acting.

As a compact chain of logic, my theory may share the inherent weakness  of the three theories presented in (CNN) Why Kim Jong Un came in from the cold: 3 theories. But it should not be an invitation to pick one of the four. That would be like betting at the track without an edge.

The real takeaway is that complicated theories do not work very well by themselves. Deduction has limits. An additional mode of logic must be invoked.  Precedent or consensus are no help, because the meeting is  a singular event. If four theories with at most six logical steps (count the paragraphs) contradict each other,  should we look to more complicated theories, or simpler ones?

I introduced a technique called “fencing” in No successor to Maliki named; fencing the problem. Quoting,

Fencing the problem is an important part of the predictor’s toolkit. Sometimes the fence is made of facts; other times, pseudo facts, things that have higher probabilities than the swirling cloud of amorphous possibilities.

By surrounding the problem with “almost facts” the solution becomes a bounded space. It can be used to knock a theory out of contention. It happens when the theory hits the fence and keeps on going. But let’s first knock down the euphoria a bit. It centers the     mind.

The concept of a personality profile useful in the conduct of  foreign affairs and conflict is rooted in the Second World War. The rulers of the Axis powers were colorful, histrionic, labile demagogues. Their personalities were adorned with quirks as colorful as the feathers of exotic birds. But Joseph Stalin, more relevant to the current question, was ordinary.  See author Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

When not in a sadistic mood, Stalin’s traits of persuasion earned him the nickname “Uncle Joe.”   He deceived some of the most important political figures in the West. A small circle of diplomats with extensive exposure to the Soviet Union  accurately divined him. But it took until the 1947 publication of the X Article by George F. Kennan, that the political establishment understood what the small circle knew years in advance.

Their story is the subject of The Wise Men; Six Friends and the World They Made, by Walter Isaacon and Evan Thomas. This is a slow-cooked book. It depicts, not a  the wisdom of sudden, magical divination, but the stew of a decade, resulting  in their ability to see what others could not.

That resource for  North Korea does not exist. We have instead the reports of defectors, who, not being members of any intellectual establishment whatsoever, are treated more like raw data than people of respect. Their effect on the political establishment is by the conduit of the intelligence community. Defectors are like microdots. If you magnify them enough, you can see the message, but you can’t feel it. Empathy is lacking.

This conclusion risks being true: Lacking empathy, which is the skill of simulating the mind of another, we diminish the threat  by imagination. It’s analogous to the Stockholm Syndrome.

To be continued shortly.

In  search of a story the size and taste of a Chicken McNugget, the news has  the story wrong. If you lay 5 facts out on a table, and draw an arrow through them, people will think that A implies B implies C implies D implies E…. and you’ve got what looks like “story.”

But if you lay the facts out in another order, the Chicken McNugget looks the same, but underneath the fry batter, it’s completely different. Our McNugget is:

• A cavern in Mantapsan Mountain, created by a nuke test, collapsed.
• Man-made tunnels also collapsed.
• The mountain shifted.
• There is a chimney of fractured rock, what the China authors call a “hole.” What covers the hole is in a delicate state.
• The  mountain cannot contain further nuclear explosions.

So the Chicken McNugget headline is: (CNN) North Korea’s nuclear test caused collapse, study says. To an ambulance chaser, this could be as important as deliberately throwing banana peels on a busy sidewalk. But here it’s a mistake. When writing a story, news writers use the memory aid  “who-what-when-where-why”.  Everything’s OK except the what and why.

The CNN headline has the wrong “what”. The correct “what” is:

• The mountain is leaking, and is finished as a test site.

Why is this an important distinction? Because all underground nuclear explosions create caverns. Most of them eventually collapse. The U.S. Nevada test site is dotted with (pics) subsidence craters, each one indicating the collapse of a cavern. The nuclear explosion did not cause the cavern to collapse. It created the cavern in the first place.

The phrase “mountain collapsed” conjures something like a coal mining disaster, so it’s an attractive headline. But with Mantapsan Mountain, the environmental danger is not the collapse, but the chimney of fractured rock, and other fractures as well. If you knock a few feet off a mountain, is that a “collapse” ? It subsided. Non volcanic mountains cannot collapse in a big way. Tunnels collapsed, killing unlucky slaves.

The writers of the China paper doubtless know this. They may have assented to the headline in response to a leading question, or simply despaired of explaining it properly to reporters.

This is the why, which builds to the ultimate reason why the site has been abandoned:

• The rock fractured so severely not because the blast was particularly powerful, but because it wasn’t deep enough.  There wasn’t enough overburden, rock above the blast. So the rock heaved upwards many more feet than it would have if there had been more rock holding it down.

In search of drama, CNN supply a graphic in which the last North Korean test is the largest of the chart, implying that the explosion was huge. On the scale of things nuclear, the 160KT yield is actually quite small. The underground U.S. Cannikin test at Amchitka Island was roughly 50X stronger. The graphic is devoid of context.

Now if you’re a liberal arts guy, your sense of Aristotelian logic (or sophistry) has you argue, “But if there were no blast, there would have been no cavern to collapse. Therefore, the nuke is responsible.”

Although I firmly believe in the innate cussability of inanimate objects (as in “By gum, another damn infernal contraption”), this is not a useful chain of cause-and-effect.  That thinking might be useful to a trial lawyer. But what we want to know is:

• Why did North Korea get into this situation? Why was the decision made to test at Mantapsan Mountain? Have a look at 41°16′47.87″N 129°5′10.51″E .  You can park your news truck in the lot 700 feet to the south. Be sure and tell them you’re coming.

Hint: Clues are in plain view. Once  the “why” is nailed down:

• What are the North Koreans going to do about it? What are their alternatives for testing nukes?

To news writers who find this too daunting, try  writing up NYC crane collapses.  Easy to get to, and pretty simple; they get blown over by the wind, cables break, pedestrians get mashed, plenty of nice flashing lights, street barricades, and human interest.

These guys know the who and the what-like nobody’s business. They even know why. Don’t ask me who.

Taking a tip from  Abbott & Costello, we’ll get to the why shortly.

Since more posts on North Korea will follow, it’s best to clear the air.  The vociferous tone of the past two posts,

• N. Koreans Giving Up Test Site — Baloney! 
• Could North Korea’s Nuke Program be Hidden? Syria Analogy

and the Donald Duck cartoons have nothing to do with criticism of Administration policy,  but may have been misinterpreted  by some. The ultimately correct course of action is a complex matrix of benefit and risk to U.S. security, heavily reliant on clandestine methods, and the realities and limitations of power projection. It is partly embedded in the international ecosystem. It cannot be discerned from open sources. Too often, politics is made of what is known to decision makers, but cannot be revealed. The Missile Gap, invented by JFK for his political benefit, is the classic.

So although my assessment is similar to what is publicly known of the CIA assessments,  I refrain from having an opinion about North Korea. Dirty Harry said it best. But the astute open source observer can still call bullshit when it’s obvious.

Even when operating in non interpretive mode, good journalism has a story. Quoting the American Press Institute,

A good story is about something the audience decides is interesting or important. A great story often does both by using storytelling to make important news interesting.

I differ a trifle with the Institute, preferring to substitute or add the word “relevant”. Make important news interesting and relevant.

Had the article authors looked back at their own previous articles, as cited in N. Koreans Giving Up Test Site — Baloney!, they would have seen the implication: Rather than the joyous note of a new leaf for North Korea, the gesture of closing the test site is not motivated by goodwill. It’s a geological necessity dressed up as a gesture.

Can disposal of a worthless test site also be a gesture of good will? By failing to include all the relevant aspects of the story, the articles were actually free publicity for Kim Jong-un.  North Korea has no friends in the Western press, but omissions of relevant parts of the story can result in a powerful bias, even if totally unintentional.

Although castigating the press is an occasional sport, this blog is about open source intelligence — not just the results, but how to get it. In some articles, the focus on methods is explicit. In this series, it’s been example. The note of technique is  that while modern media is all too focused on the immediate here-and-now, much can be gleaned simply by scanning back the past few months.

In pursuit of open source, it’s helpful to have broad enough interests to remember what at the time may have seemed divorced from geopolitics. When North Korea’s test site was discovered to have become unstable, it seemed an irrelevant geological curiosity. Politicians are not typically interested in geology, unless related to oil. Yet it became the centerpiece of a bogus negotiating offer by an adversary.

To be continued shortly.

Suppose there was a successful negotiation to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Could North Korea successfully hide the continuation of such a program? Such an exploit relies on the interplay of two factors:

• A  conflation of the rights of the accused in Western legal systems, with the corresponding standard of “guilt” of international law. A confusion in language, used by the press and exploited by our adversaries,  is rampant.
• A change in the character of North Korea’s nuclear program. Modification of goals, with clandestine  techniques, to make invisible to international inspection continuance of  part of the program.

The two factors interlock, creating a technical twist on word play in a neglected corner of legal thought.

The language of international law tends to follow the customs of Western legal systems. This influences the vocabulary of journalism. For example, Syrian use of poison gas in Ghouta is described by major news outlets as “alleged.” With this word, the media offers protection in language analogous to the protection in law given to the accused. In short,

An “alleged” violation of international law derives from protection of the accused in Western legal systems.

Autocratic regimes know this confusion of words and standards, and exploit it extensively as a weakness of Western thought. When a consumer of Western media reads or hears the word “alleged” in connection with an international act, there is little chance of distinguishing it from the presumption that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty.

We can have multiple volumes of intelligence data about Syrian chemical attacks, yet like as not, Reuters et al will use the word “alleged.” The likelihood that a slowly deployed UN inspection team succeeds in recovering CBW agents from an area the Russians and Syrians have spent a week cleaning is small to zero. When Russia says, “You have no proof”, they exploit the  conflation in language. They have discovered the loophole and use it: In the domain of international law, proof  by the standards of Western domestic legal systems  is rare.

That this situation persists, created by confusion in language, stems from the whimsical desire to pretend that international law approaches domestic law in constancy and fairness. While international law is not a complete fiction, some of the common memes are lie, cheat, and steal. The occasional successful prosecution of a war criminal does not imply that it is actually a legal system. It might be a negotiating framework.

The media do not invent vocabulary. If they are at a loss for words, having to resort to “alleged” for Ghouta gas attacks, the responsibility is with the intellectual establishment, who have failed to render the distinction between the rights of the accused in Western legal systems, and the “rights” of Assad’s regime. The conflation of “rights of the accused” stems from a language void, which we cannot expect the press to fix on their own.

Now for the reductio ad absurdum . Reuters et al call the Ghouta gas attacks “alleged”, yet there has been a multinational strike against Syrian CBW targets, in direct retaliation for the “alleged” attacks. This shows that Reuters et al extend the term “alleged” to what are, to very high probability, actionable facts.

But while press vocabulary is the day-to-day, there is no fixed barrier in the human mind between different spheres of discourse. The languages of the press and of diplomatic forums cross-fertilize and recirculate. The press reports on diplomacy; diplomats read the press. The linguistic error of legalese is a recirculating loop.

This is the strata of words and logic in which a North Korean nuke program could be hidden, buried beyond  what in domestic legal systems is called “proof.” Detected, yet not proven, the Morlocks dig deeper.

Next, the technical changes that make this possible.

While we’re on the subject of The Donalds & N. Korea, consider whether “Donald’s Penguin” is a relevant allegory. 

• Donald plays Donald.
• The penguin, the un-asked-for gift from “Admiral Bird”, plays the part of Kim Jong-un.
• The goldfish are the sanctions.
• Donald attempts to punish the penguin to no effect.
• The shotgun requires no explanation.
• The outcome is something we wouldn’t wish for.

(Reuters) North Korea says will stop nuclear tests, scrap test site.

This is to appear as a gesture of goodwill, but it is not. Abandonment of the test sight is forced upon  North Korea by geology.

After the last test, other tunnels in the same area suffered cave-ins, with  substantial loss of life. (Reuters)  Tunnel collapse may have killed 200 after North Korea nuclear test: Japanese broadcaster.

The cause was fracturing of the rock, from a combination of susceptibility of the strata with too many tests in one area. The mountain has, in effect, been converted into  a huge pile of rubble. Rubble has no bearing strength for voids. A new tunnel would collapse around the time the tunnel head enters a fracture zone. While tunneling through weak rock is possible, it requires techniques that are completely unfeasible for a single use tunnel.

If’ you’d like an official citation, refer to (USGS) OPEN FILE REPORT 01-312, The Containment of Soviet Underground Nuclear .Explosions. Quoting from page 37,

These changes in properties of rocks and rock masses in the vicinity of previously conducted underground explosions impose certain requirements on selection of a location for conducting underground tests. The location of a new test must be chosen such that zones of increased fracturing of the rock mass from previously conducted explosions do not intersect with the planned explosion. However, even with such a site selection, the new test is not always fully contained. For example, in the case of emplacement in Degelen tunnel 113 (16 Feb 73), leakage of gaseous products was observed through ground zero of tunnel 510, where a test had been conducted previously (28 Jun 70). A similar phenomenon was observed at the Novaya Zemlya test site, where the gaseous products of an explosion in tunnel A-3 (7 Nov. 68) escaped into the atmosphere through an adjacent tunnel (A-8) in the same rock mass. In the subsequent test in tunnel A-8, on 27 Sep 71, allowances were made for the nearby location of tunnel A-3.

This means that even if you succeed in digging the tunnel, the explosion may not be contained. Hence the fears reported by (Independent) North Korea tunnel collapse at nuclear test site could cause serious radiation leak.

So the North Koreans are giving up what they are forced to give up, and hoping we will see it as a generous gesture.

Will the North Koreans work around it? Inside  a North Korean gold mine.  More later.

I am surprised that I can be the first to write something with such a buzzy title.  Russian foreign policy has stumbled: Russia has lost control of the narrative. In an unprecedented way, the loss intertwines with Russian prospects in Syria. A  prerequisite article is  (U.S. Army) What Kind of Victory for Russia in Syria?

With the poisoning of the Skripals with a nerve agent, and the implied Russia defense of Assad’s chemical warfare against his own citizens, there is a bad smell in the fridge. Is it the kasha that has overstayed its welcome, or the kvass? Whatever it is, something has gone wrong with Russia’s foreign policy in the way it presents to the world. The ice box needs to be cleaned out.

Immorality aside, when a sane person realizes that some activity is not working, the person stops. One of the definitions of insanity is continuation of behavior that does not work. This is when the insane start banging their heads.

This is entirely apart from whether Russia’s foreign policy is ever beneficial to us. While generally it is not, Sergei Lavrov has said (citation missing, paraphrase) that if it weren’t for Russia, the black flag of ISIS would be flying over Damascus.  This could be correct, in which case Russia has done the dirty work for both the U.S. and Russia. Assad, their proxy, employed methods that we could not condone or allow. The most reprehensible of these methods is poison gas, which has been condemned by international declaration since 1925. The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention bans them. But Assad has been bombing civilians with makeshift ordinance since the start of the rebellion. Clearly, this is a mockery of a sovereign state.

Early in the Russian intervention, with the first use of chemical weapons by the Syrians,, the Russians publicly  encouraged Syria to honor the obligations of the 1997 CWC, to which Syria is signatory. In a public statement, Lavrov said (citation missing, quote from memory), “Assad, honor your obligations.” What has happened since, that would cause Russia to defend the indefensible, by the usual means of obfuscation and statements that are counter to the facts?

There are two completely separate reasons. The one of longer duration is Russian confidence that they can control the narrative. While Vladimir Putin is not responsible for all things Russian, he is largely responsible for renovating the image of Russia into one of a progressive state, an image which held until the Ukraine incursions. Before and concurrently with aggression against Ukraine, a number of actions,  including threatening statements and behavior, unsafe intercepts, and assassinations, contributed to the tear-down of the progressive image.

The tear-down is almost complete among those who bother to inform their opinions. There will always be exceptions, like Dana Rohrabacher and Jeremy Corbyn, but  remnants offer no chance of the return of Putin’s former stature as a progressive leader. Given the Kremlin’s savvy in PR, why was  it not anticipated? Russian success in shaping and controlling domestic opinion is the likely reason. The propaganda methods used with such success internally were exported, and augmented with the sophisticated manipulations of the Internet Research Agency.

The unrecoverable disintegration of Russia’s image among those who choose ranks with the lost battles and strategic defeats suffered by all of the great powers, and those that wanna be. It makes impossible a coverup by Russia of Assad’s use of poison gas. The only support Russia receives in the international forum is from those who owe Russia,  those of vaguely conceived tilts, such as China, and those nations that habitually commit atrocities themselves.  But you are known by the company you keep.

For the second reason, refer to (U.S. Army) What Kind of Victory for Russia in Syria? Quoting,

“Ambition creep” is a common illness afflicting most great powers when they deploy military forces. Russia may not have come to Syria with hopes of regaining power and status in the Middle East at the top of its agenda, but regional aspirations grew with each success on the battlefield. As a consequence, Russia has become a potential powerbroker, and perhaps a balancer against U.S. influence, even if it did not embark on the Syrian campaign with those goals in mind.

At the beginning of the intervention, the Russians advised Assad that he could not expect to regain control of all of Syria.  But with unexpected success, aided by the disintegration of ISIS in Iraq, there came about ambition creep.  The Assad regime now has presence, or control, of most of Syria. But it is tenuous. Given the minority status of the Alawite ruling class, how thinly spread they are, how can Assad actually impose a civil structure?

As always, carrot and stick. Money, missing as long as the Kurds sit on the oil fields, to buy the tribes and oil the mukhabarat death machine. Poison gas, to hammer the populace wherever a no-go zone  spontaneously appears. Without gas, there simply aren’t enough Alawites for continual active suppression. The Syrian fire, which began with the graffiti of a child, occurs as spontaneous combustion.

Had Russia not been a victim of ambition creep, had Assad been less successful, had the Syria situation stabilized with regime control of Damascus, Latakia, and a little bit more, the Russians would not now be victims of their own success, forced into complicity with the most odious means of repression, poison from the sky. For without poison gas, there is no exit strategy.

Russia’s situation in Syria is not a strategic failure, but it is a major setback. It is the unprecedented result of  failure to control the narrative. Prior regimes that attempted  to control the narrative via propaganda were not much bothered by such failures. Nazi Germany just kept rolling along, even when the “big lie” of Herr Goebbels became a big joke. So why is Russia affected so deeply?

Russia is caught, not between East and West (for there is very little of the East in Russia) but between Russia and the West. Since the founding of Saint Petersburg in 1703,  Russia has yearned for things Western. But the imports were selective, preserving the autocracy, with truth-as-diktat, that in the West began to dissolve with the Enlightenment. Transplanted to the West, Russians find themselves highly compatible, distinguished mainly by their accents. Yet Russian business practices are, for many reasons not fixable by regulation, incompatible with the West.

Oblivious to these contradictions, Russia wants the West on its own terms. It expects, or expected, money and commerce without the moral conflicts seen by Western observers. This explains the petulant cry (Reuters)  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ Russia tells Britain at U.N. nerve agent attack meeting. The last time I said something like that was as a small child.

The East is not an alternative, since it augurs inevitable absorption by China. But without outside stimulus of dynamic societies, the socially extinct volcano that is Russia will freeze solid. So how can Russia have the part of the West it wants, while absorbing at least some of what it needs so desperately without knowing it?

It would take a third Glasnost. There  have been two already, the first under Khrushchev, the second under Gorbachev.

Perhaps the third time’s the charm.

(CNN) Dozens dead in possible gas attack in Syria; regime denies allegation. Since the Assad regime has the means, motive, and history of prior use of chemical weapons, there is little reason to doubt a serial offense.

Now the words are flying. (CNN) McCain: Trump ’emboldened’ Assad with comments on US withdrawal from Syria. Possibly so, but only in the sense of this specific incident, at this moment in time. Had this not occurred, there would still be the inevitability of Future Crime. It doesn’t take  Minority Report to  predict a Syrian future of genocide. Focusing on the current gas attack is a natural response to the horror, but it is merely a taste of what is yet to come, when Assad’s mukhabarat attempts to “reconstruct” Syria by traditional means of repression. Is it more significant that 20 innocents die by gas, as opposed to a 1000 by traditional tortures and hangings?

The 2017 Shayrat missile strike,  a year ago, arguably saved civilian lives by deterring major use of gas, for a year. Another strike could have a similar effect of time limited deterrence. For Assad, deterrence is not a lesson to be learned, but a calculation of risk and reward, subject to continuous recalculation.

The great advantage the Russians, and Assad, have over the U.S. is that they know what they want, and how to get it. And until recently, U.S. strategy contained a fatal flaw, the empowerment of elements so close to the jihadist mainstream that  two of the three components, with banner titles of “political opposition” and “jihadist”,were largely compatible.  The third incompatible component had another flaw, lack of will for violent struggle, which means, they weren’t very good at fighting. In fact. they were terrible. A fix for these two flaws can now be envisioned.

Retaliation for the gas attacks is a  balm for our souls, and would in the short term save some lives from gas. The lives we save face a terrible future. But while these days the parties give scant credit to each other for durable aspects of foreign policy, the disengagement of the U.S. from the role of world policeman was actually initiated with Obama’s “lead from behind” stance. Named and described differently, much of this continues with the Trump administration. The distinction between the former administration, and the present, is that the use of proxies is now  far more skillful.

The major U.S. proxies in Syria, which the Obama administration shied from under Turkish pressure, are the Kurds, They are remarkably more compatible with Western values than the jihadist mix of the previous administration.   The compatibility of their culture extends to potency as a fighting force. While the many Reuters photos reveal staged photos of jihadists striking poses as they spray a street on full automatic, these caricatures are absent with the Kurds. They fight to live, not to die, a large part of their superiority in combat.

This is why the Kurds are (CNN) sitting on the largest part of Syria’s oil fields, depriving Assad of the revenue he needs to oil his mukhabarat death  machine. With iron-clad U.S. support, the fields can be held indefinitely. Should political leverage ever become a meaningful concept in Syria, the fields offer it in spades. The fields can also be the centerpiece of a new nation, Eastern Syria, Western Kurdistan, o something like that.

So here are three options for U.S. policy, which are at least expressible as compact, well defined objectives.

• Build a new nation. Drop our sanctimonious respect for the inviolability of  fictitious nations (Sykes Picot Agreement) ruled by  murderous tin-pot dictators. Tear up the map and draw your own lines. The men in striped pants may wring their hands. So what?
• Make the oil fields held by the Kurds an impregnable bastion. This would deprive the rest of Syria of economic viability. It would make Assad’s Syria a perpetual drain on the Russians and Iranians. It would also have value as an anchor point for anti-Iranian proxies. Ten or twenty years down the road, the Russians might decide to talk to us honestly.
• Blow up Assad’s air force, and tell ourselves we’ve done a good deed. Get out. Plug our ears and cover our eyes to the future of Syria.

I’m not choosing. That’s up to you.

(NY TImes) Poisoned Door Handle Hints at High-Level Plot to Kill Spy, U.K. Officials Say. The article is behind a paywall; for a substitute, try this Google search.

One purpose of this blog is to promote  open source analysis as a teachable skill.   The article presents opinions that are open to challenge. The authors make no attempt to disentangle the assumptions of the opinions. They may be presented as opinions  to cloak clandestine methods and sources. But let’s consider the opinions of the article as if they are what they are claimed to be, opinions, and tear them apart. Quoting:

• Because the nerve agent is so potent, the officials said, the task could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with chemical weapons.

Rebuttal. Application of Novichok to the doorknob could be accomplished with a gadget. Gadgets of similar purpose are described in  (CIA Reading Room) Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping, and in other declassified documents.  Here’s a design for a handy-dandy poison applicator:

• The gadget is a  container shaped conveniently for the hand. Within, there is a motorized apparatus.
• The Novichok variant has negligible volatility; it cannot become airborne easily. So it is only necessary to protect the operator from accidental contact via “splash” on the exterior of the gadget.
• On pressing a trigger button, a port, protected by a door, opens. A probe extends.
• The tip of the probe contains a second door to a second port. This door also opens.
• A felt pad saturated in Novichok, extends from the tip of the probe.
• With a wiping motion,  the operator applies the applicator to door knob.
• On releasing the button, the  above operations reverse; the probe retracts and the port doors close.
• The operator drops the entire gadget into a container of neutralizing solution, and discards  it.

So the task is reduced from requiring skill to merely requiring nerve.

Quoting,

• This operation is seen as so risky and sensitive that it is unlikely to have been undertaken without approval from the Kremlin, according to officials who have been briefed on the early findings of the inquiry.

Rebuttal. The implied assumptions are:

• Freelancers, rogue groups, and clans, all from within the Russian government, do not engage in risky behavior, but authorized Kremlin operatives do. This is absurd.
• The Novichok dose was unlikely to have been stolen. Yet (Reuters) Ivan Kivelidi was killed in 1995 by a stolen  nerve agent.

Quoting,

• But the assassins knew the nerve agent would be identified, and knew it would be linked to Russia, the officials said. That was meant to send a chilling message to others who would think of defecting to, or informing, the West.

Rebuttal. Withe the sole exception of Novichok, relatively simple tests for all  the weaponized nerve agents exist. In the case of VX, it’s as simple as a sensitized strip of paper. The identification of Novichok  in the Skripal poisoning was a complex problem of analytic chemistry.  With 14 unsolved murders of Russian expats in Britain, which may be  14 undetected assassinations, there is no reason for the Russians to assume this attack would be solved.

Quoting,

• The boldness of the attack on Mr. Skripal, which took British authorities by surprise, has caused them to reassess Mr. Putin’s use of what has come to be called “hybrid warfare.”

Rebuttal. This conflates the hypothesis that Putin approved the action with his established use of hybrid warfare. This may be true, actually established by clandestine means, but there is no way to tell. The distinction is important to readers of open source.

In articles such as the NY Times piece, the reader is challenged to distinguish between

• Opinions that are uninformed by facts.
• Informed opinions.
• Facts established by clandestine means that masquerade as opinions to protect sources and methods.

Nothing in the article suggests a way to distinguish between these possibilities. Had the article never been published, the body of open-source evidence  is adequate for these conclusions:

• The poison was made in Russia, now established as fact by Porton Downs (Google search.) By some reports the plant is located at Shikhani.
• The motive, revenge for treason, strongly implicates the Russian government, or  rogues or clans from within the government, with or without approval at the highest level.

So what does the article add? The NY Times, a “newspaper of record”, reports that some sources think some things.  It may be fit to  print, but is it worth printing? Most readers can also think some things.  Times, your grade is a solid C. Dig deeper next time.

We continue from Putin Wins; Russian Politics & Novichok Part 1. 

Much of what follows was originally written as the unpublished part 7 of Advice to a New Secretary of State. It is re-purposed here as continuation of Putin Wins; Russian Politics & Novichok Part 1, on the road to developing a comparison of Russia with the old Soviet Union.

Part and parcel with the national identity of all nations is national narcissism,  ignoring the existence of trace elements or features, or more than traces, of that which we abhor. In the U.S., respect for human rights and individual liberties has been subject to wide gyrations. The U.S. ranks near the top  in acceptance, learning, and reform from self criticism of past and current national tragedies. It is a process that must continue indefinitely. What follows is not intended to narrow the moral disparity between the U.S. and Russia. We debate and learn; the Russians deny and lie.

It is nevertheless the case that trace elements of due legal process, and respect for rights of individuals, while limited in scope, existed in limited contexts in the Soviet Union. The existence, disappearance, and reappearance of trace elements of a society can be important markers of social evolution. What follows was written before the  March 4 poisonings  of the  Skripals with Novichok. Don’t forget the attempts to poison Fidel Castro. Although the U.S. death-by-poison  body count may be zero or close to it, it’s nevertheless important to the analytical mindset to acknowledge. It is a trace feature of our society. I leave it to you to make the appropriate insertions.

To us, Russian subversion of democracies is unethical, while a counter strategy based operant conditioning (the Skinner Box) is ethically  beyond reproach. But there is always a chance that the Russians might eventually open up a little, as during Perestroika. As dim as  the outlook is, as suggested by current events, let’s not completely negate the possibility.  Vladimir Putin still seems a combination of a modern man with a nationalist in the historical mold. People who are combinations contain the possibility of change. But note, Vladimir Putin is not synonymous with Russia.

Let’s consider what forms the external image of the U.S., and circle back to Nikki Haley’s “…that is warfare.”

Between 1920 and 1950, reservoirs of romantic sympathy  in the West for Bolshevik revolution gradually faded away, replaced by a true appreciation of the horrors. Six years later, on February 2, 1956, the first official denunciation within the Soviet Union came in Khrushchev’s secret speech. This was really the first “perestroika.” But starting from the base of an historic brutality, it was only an increment. Three generations have passed since that speech, enough time for Western Europe to abandon the nationalism of conflict dating to the Treaty of Westphalia.

With three generations, the salt of Russia’s earth still have one foot in the past.  That foot threatens to drag us all back to the conflicts of centuries. This is why we are so unnerved by Russian subversion. But perhaps the Russians don’t appreciate the value of what they are trying to destroy.

Historical comparisons can be made between  human rights violations in Soviet Russia, and in the West. There  is the appearance of qualitative overlap, but this neglects the numbers. Russia had Stalin’s purges. The U.S. had racial lynching. Russia had extrajudicial capital punishment, via the infamous NKVD “troika.”  In the U.S., capital punishment is inconsistently applied, in some cases, to innocents. Neither society is perfect, but numbers tell the story.

• While 20+ millions died in Stalin’s purges, the Tuskegee Institute documents a total of 4,733 lynchings since 1882.
• According to  a study cited by Newsweek, U.S. miscarriage of justice in cases involving capital punishment since 1973 has been about 4.1%. Since 1973, 144 people on death row have been exonerated.
• Estimates of the Gulag population in the 1990’s vary,  the lowest cited in Wikipedia as 4.5 million. In the U.S.,  people have gone to jail for political reasons, for participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War  movements, and some as almost purely as prisoners of conscience. Let the Russians come up with a list and we’ll do numbers.
• Soviet psychiatric hospitals, used during the Brezhnev era for political control, analogize (though with no relation to politics) to the abuses of U.S. mental institutions in the same time frame.
• U.S. and Russian covert activities in the Third World during the Cold War have significant symmetry. Manipulations of print and broadcast media correspond to social media manipulations. A good picture of this is given in the books by C.I.A. plank owner Miles Copeland. This epoch was swept away by the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and so forth. Since then, concerns illuminated by legislative and public scrutiny, and leaks, have alternated in importance with the exigencies of 9/11.
• The Russians may compare the former U.S. dominance in Latin America, interventions there, and the general attitude of the Monroe Doctrine, to the Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe. We don’t.

The current propaganda drumbeat of Russian government media is unrelated to the specifics of the list, but the mindset that engenders the propaganda endures.

The list implies varying shades of gray, with occasional marks of black. The blackest mark on our record is the Vietnam War. Can we exonerate our fathers  by saying, “We were fighting communism”? This is not to argue with you if you think we can, but the Russians, and many others, do not share the thought.

As Americans, we are free to vigorously defend the above, to be shamed,  or accept them as bygone attitudes engendered by the Soviet threat. The purpose of this recapitulation is to understand Russian attitudes, particularly of the overhang of older individuals in the Russian government.

Now we have developed moral relativism, not to blur the moral disparity between the U.S. and Russia, but for the sake of the analytical mindset. To be continued shortly.