News that the Pentagon is monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in the skies over the continental United States raises a series of questions – not least among them, what exactly it might be doing.
US officials have said the flight path of the balloon, first spotted over Montana on Thursday, could potentially take it over a “number of sensitive sites” and say they are taking steps to “protect against foreign intelligence collection.”
But what’s less clear is why Chinese spies would want to use a balloon, rather than a satellite to gather information.
This is not the first time a Chinese balloon has been spotted over the US, but this seems to be acting differently to previous ones, a US defense official said.
“It is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time, this time around, [and is] more persistent than in previous instances. That would be one distinguishing factor,” the official said.
Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries, said Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer.
But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion.
Or at least until now.
Recent advances in the miniaturization of electronics mean the floating intelligence platforms may be making a comeback in the modern spying toolkit.
“Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch” than satellites, Layton said.
Blake Herzinger, an expert in Indo-Pacific defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said despite their slow speeds, balloons aren’t always easy to spot.
“They’re very low signature and low-to-zero emission, so hard to pick up with traditional situational awareness or surveillance technology,” Herzinger said.
And balloons can do some things that satellites can’t.
“Space-based systems are just as good but they are more predictable in their orbital dynamics,” Layton said.
“An advantage of balloons is that they can be steered using onboard computers to take advantage of winds and they can go up and down to a limited degree. This means they can loiter to a limited extent.
“A satellite can’t loiter and so many are needed to criss-cross an area of interest to maintain surveillance,” he said.
According to Layton, the suspected Chinese balloon is likely collecting information on US communication systems and radars.
“Some of these systems use extremely high frequencies that are short range, can be absorbed by the atmosphere and being line-of-sight are very directional. It’s possible a balloon might be a better collection platform for such specific technical collection than a satellite,” he said.
Retired US Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst, echoed those thoughts.
“They could be scooping up signals intelligence, in other words, they’re looking at our cell phone traffic, our radio traffic,” Leighton told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Intelligence data collected by the balloon could be relayed in real time via a satellite link back to China, Layton said.
Analysts also noted that Montana and nearby states are home to US intercontinental ballistic missile silos and strategic bomber bases.
US officials say they have taken actions to ensure the balloon cannot collect any sensitive data. They decided against shooting it down because of the risk to lives and property by falling debris.
And if the US could bring down the balloon within its territory without destroying it then the balloon might reveal some secrets of its own, Layton added.
But maybe there are no secrets or spying involved. This could be just an accident, with the balloon blown off course or Chinese operators losing control of it somehow.
“There’s at least some possibility that this was a mistake and the balloon ended up somewhere Beijing didn’t expect,” Herzinger said.
For its part, China says it’s looking into things.
“We are aware of reports [of the balloon] and are trying to understand the circumstances and verify the details of the situation,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Friday. “I’d like to stress that before it becomes clear what happened, any deliberate speculation or hyping up would not help handling of the matter.”
WASHINGTON — The U.S. is tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been spotted over U.S. airspace for a couple days, but the Pentagon decided not to shoot it down due to risks of harm for people on the ground, officials said Thursday. The discovery of the balloon puts a further strain on U.S.-China relations at a time of heightened tensions.
A senior defense official told Pentagon reporters that the U.S. has “very high confidence” it is a Chinese high-altitude balloon and it was flying over sensitive sites to collect information. One of the places the balloon was spotted was Montana, which is home to one of the nation’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, provided a brief statement on the issue, saying the government continues to track the balloon. He said it is “currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”
He said similar balloon activity has been seen in the past several years. He added that the U.S. took steps to ensure it did not collect sensitive information.
The defense official said the U.S. has “engaged” Chinese officials through multiple channels and communicated the seriousness of the matter.
The incident comes as Secretary of State Antony Blinken was supposed to make his first trip to Beijing, expected this weekend, to try to find some common ground. Although the trip has not been formally announced, both Beijing and Washington have been talking about his imminent arrival.
It was not immediately clear if the discovery of the balloon would impact Blinken’s travel plans.
The senior defense official said the U.S. did get fighter jets, including F-22s, ready to shoot down the balloon if ordered to by the White House. The Pentagon ultimately recommended against it, noting that even as the balloon was over a sparsely populated area of Montana, its size would create a debris field large enough that it could have put people at risk.
It was not clear what the military was doing to prevent it from collecting sensitive information or what will happen with the balloon if it isn’t shot down.
The defense official said the spy balloon was trying to fly over the Montana missile fields, but the U.S. has assessed that the balloon has “limited” value in terms of providing China intelligence it couldn’t already collect by other means, such through spy satellites.
The official would not specify the size of the balloon, but said it was large enough that despite its high altitude, commercial pilots could see it. All air traffic was halted at Montana’s Billings Logan International Airport from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, as the military provided options to the White House.
A photograph of a large white balloon lingering over the area was captured by The Billings Gazette, but the Pentagon would not confirm if that was the surveillance balloon. The balloon could be seen drifting in and out of clouds and had what appeared to be a solar array hanging from the bottom, said Gazette photographer Larry Mayer.
The defense official said what concerned them about this launch was the altitude the balloon was flying at and the length of time it lingered over a location, without providing specifics.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte said he was briefed Wednesday about the situation after the Montana National Guard was notified of an ongoing military operation taking place in Montana airspace, according to a statement from the Republican governor and spokesperson Brooke Stroyke.
“From the spy balloon to the Chinese Communist Party spying on Americans through TikTok to CCP-linked companies buying American farmland, I’m deeply troubled by the constant stream of alarming developments for our national security,” Gianforte said in a statement.
Tensions with China are particularly high on numerous issues, ranging from Taiwan and the South China Sea to human rights in China’s western Xinjiang region and the clampdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong. Not least on that list of irritants are China’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its refusal to rein in North Korea’s expanding ballistic missile program and ongoing disputes over trade and technology.
On Tuesday, Taiwan scrambled fighter jets, put its navy on alert and activated missile systems in response to nearby operations by 34 Chinese military aircraft and nine warships that are part Beijing’s strategy to unsettle and intimidate the self-governing island democracy.
Twenty of those aircraft crossed the central line in the Taiwan Strait that has long been an unofficial buffer zone between the two sides, which separated during a civil war in 1949.
Beijing has also increased preparations for a potential blockade or military action against Taiwan, which has stirred increasing concern among military leaders, diplomats and elected officials in the U.S., Taiwan’s key ally.
The surveillance balloon was first reported by NBC News.
Some Montana residents reported seeing an unusual object in the sky around the time of the airport shutdown Wednesday, but it’s not clear that what they were seeing was the balloon.
From an office window in Billings, Chase Doak said he saw a “big white circle in the sky” that he said was too small to be the moon.
He took some photos, then ran home to get a camera with a stronger lens and took more photos and video. He could see it for about 45 minutes and it appeared stationary, but Doak said the video suggested it was slowly moving.
“I thought maybe it was a legitimate UFO,” he said. “So I wanted to make sure I documented it and took as many photos as I could.”
Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who were stripped of their positions on the House Intelligence Committee, and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, whom McCarthy is seeking to oust from the House Foreign Affairs panel, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that the California Republican’s actions were nakedly partisan.
“This is some Bakersfield BS,” Swalwell said in the interview, referring to the speaker’s hometown. “It’s Kevin McCarthy weaponizing his ability to commit this political abuse, because he perceives me, just like Mr. Schiff and Ms. Omar, as an effective political opponent.”
Schiff similarly cast their ouster as “all pretextual” and a result of McCarthy “catering to the most extreme members of their conference.”
“And I don’t accept the premise that this has anything to do with the conduct of any of the Democratic members. This is merely the weakness of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, that he’s so reliant on these extreme members,” Schiff said.
McCarthy has cited a “new standard” from Democrats for why he was stripping Schiff and Swalwell, both fellow Californians, of their Intelligence Committee assignments.
The speaker said in a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that it was his “assessment that the misuse of this panel during the 116th and 117th Congresses severely undermined its primary national security and oversight missions – ultimately leaving our nation less safe.” He said he wants the panel to be one of “genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people.”
McCarthy specifically targeted Schiff over his handling of the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”
Yet there is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, then a looming rival in the 2020 election.
“Apparently he believes I was very effective in exposing his misconduct, Donald Trump’s misconduct. And that’s what they’re trying to stop,” Schiff told Bash. “So, I think that he benefits from having these smears repeated. And that’s part of what he gains from it. But this is a pretext, and nothing more.”
Swalwell, meanwhile, rebuffed GOP claims that he shared sensitive information with a suspected Chinese spy – a charge McCarthy has repeatedly put forward.
“There’s nothing there,” the California Democrat said, noting that the FBI has relayed that “all I did was help them, and, also, I was never under any suspicion of wrongdoing.”
McCarthy was able to use his authority as speaker to unilaterally keep Schiff and Swalwell off the Intelligence panel because it is a select committee. Ousting Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee would require a vote of the full House. If all Democrats vote to oppose the move, it would only take a handful of GOP critics to block McCarthy from moving forward, given House Republicans’ razor-thin majority.
Asked Sunday about her past comments, which were condemned by both sides of the aisle as antisemitic, Omar noted that she had apologized and said she’s hopeful that any vote against her as a result of those comments will fall short.
“I might have used words at the time that I didn’t understand were trafficking in antisemitism. When that was brought to my attention, I apologized, I owned up to it. That’s the kind of person that I am,” the Minnesota Democrat said.
“What I do know is that the two Republicans that have been public and some that have privately said that they are not going to vote to remove me are doing so because they don’t want to be seen as hypocrites,” she added.
Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana said last week that she opposed the push to strip the three Democrats of their committee assignments, stressing the importance of ethics probes before taking disciplinary action against any elected member of Congress. South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace has said she has concerns about the resolution to oust Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. A third Republican, Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, has told NBC News he was “opposed to … the removal of Congresswoman Omar from committees.”
Most investors want to keep things simple, but digging a bit into details can be lucrative — it can help you match your choices to your objectives.
The JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF JEPI, +0.20%
has been able to take advantage of rising volatility in the stock market to beat the total return of its benchmark, the S&P 500 SPX, +1.19%,
while providing a rising stream of monthly income.
The objective of the fund is “to deliver a significant portion of the returns associated with the S&P 500 Index with less volatility,” while paying monthly dividends, according to JPMorgan Asset Management. It does this by maintaining a portfolio of about 100 stocks selected for high quality, value and low price volatility, while also employing a covered-call strategy (described below) to increase income.
This strategy might underperform the index during a bull market, but it is designed to be less volatile while providing high monthly dividends. This might make it easier for you to remain invested through the type of downturn we saw last year.
JEPI was launched on May 20, 2020, and has grown quickly to $18.7 billion in assets under management. Hamilton Reiner, who co-manages the fund with Raffaele Zingone, described the fund’s strategy, and its success during the 2022 bear market and shared thoughts on what may lie ahead.
Outperformance with a smoother ride
First, here’s a chart showing how the fund has performed from when it was established through Jan. 20, against the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, +1.20%,
both with dividends reinvested:
JEPI has been less volatile than SPY, which tracks the S&P 500.
FactSet
Total returns for the two funds since May 2020 pretty much match, however, JEPI has been far less volatile than SPY and the S&P 500. Now take a look at a performance comparison for the period of rising interest rates since the end of 2021:
Rising stock-price volatility during 2022 helped JEPI earn more income through its covered call option strategy.
FactSet
Those total returns are after annualized expenses of 0.35% of assets under management for JEPI and 0.09% for SPY. Both funds have had negative returns since the end of 2021, but JEPI has been a much better performer.
““Income is the outcome.””
— Hamilton Reiner
The income component
Which investors JEPI is designed for? “Income is the outcome,” Reiner responded. “We are seeing a lot of people using this as an anchor tenant for income-oriented portfolios.”
The fund quotes a 30-day SEC yield of 11.77%. There are various ways to look at dividend yields for mutual funds or exchange-traded funds and the 30-day yield is meant to be used for comparison. It is based on a fund’s current income distribution profile relative to its price, but the income distributions that investors actually receive will vary.
It turns out that over the past 12 months, JEPI’s monthly distributions have ranged between 38 cents a share and 62 cents a share, with a rising trend over the past six months. The sum of the past 12 distributions has been $5.79 a share, for a distribution yield of 10.53%, based on the ETF’s closing price of $55.01 on Jan. 20.
JEPI invests at least 80% of assets in stocks, mainly selected from those in the S&P 500, while also investing in equity-linked notes to employ a covered call option strategy which enhances income and lowers volatility. Covered calls are described below.
Reiner said that during a typical year, investors in JEPI should expect monthly distributions to come to an annualized yield in the “high single digits.”
He expects that level of income even if we return to the low-interest rate environment that preceded the Federal Reserve’s cycle of rate increases that it started early last year to push down inflation.
JEPI’s approach may be attractive to investors who don’t need the income now. “We also see people using it as a conservative equity approach,” Reiner expects the fund to have 35% less price volatility than the S&P 500.
Getting back to income, Reiner said JEPI was a good alternative even for investors who were willing to take credit risk with high-yield bond funds. Those have higher price volatility than investment-grade bond funds and face a higher risk of losses when bonds default. “But with JEPI you don’t have credit risk or duration risk,” he said.
An example of a high-yield bond fund is the iShares 0-5 Year High Yield Corporate Bond ETF SHYG, -0.10%.
It has a 30-day yield of 7.95%.
When discussing JEPI’s stock selection, Reiner said “there is a significant active component to the 90 to 120 names we invest in.” Stock selections are based on recommendations of JPM’s analyst team for those that are “most attractively priced today for the medium to long term,” he said.
Individual stock selections don’t factor in dividend yields.
Covered call strategies and an example of a covered-call trade
JEPI’s high income is an important part of its low-volatility total-return strategy.
A call option is a contract that allows an investor to buy a security at a particular price (called the strike price) until the option expires. A put option is the opposite, allowing the purchaser to sell a security at a specified price until the option expires.
A covered call option is one an investor can write when they already own a security. The strike price is “out of the money,” which means it is higher than the stock’s current price.
Here’s an example of a covered call option provided by Ken Roberts, an investment adviser with Four Star Wealth Management in Reno, Nev.
You bought shares of 3M Co. MMM, +1.63%
on Jan. 20 for $118.75.
You sold a $130 call option with an expiration date of Jan. 19, 2024.
The premium for the Jan. 24, $130 call was $7.60 at the time that MMM was selling for $118.75.
The current dividend yield for MMM is 5.03%.
“So the maximum gain for this trade before the dividend is $18.85 or 15.87%. Add the divided income and you’ll get 20.90% maximum return,” Roberts wrote in an email exchange on Jan. 20.
If you had made this trade and 3M’s shares didn’t rise above $130 by Jan. 19, 2024, the option would expire and you would be free to write another option. The option alone would provide income equivalent to 6.40% of the Jan. 20 purchase price in the period of a year.
If the stock rose above $130 and the option were exercised, you would have ended up with the maximum gain as described by Roberts. Then you would need to find another stock to invest in. What did you risk? Further upside beyond $130. So you would have written the option only if you had decided you would be willing to part with your shares of MMM for $130.
The bottom line is that the call option strategy lowers volatility with no additional downside risk. The risk is to the upside. If 3M’s shares had doubled in price before the option expired, you would still wind up selling them for $130.
JEPI pursues the covered call options strategy by purchasing equity-linked notes (ELNs) which “combine equity exposure with call options,” Reiner said. The fund invests in ELNs rather than writing its own options, because “unfortunately option premium income is not considered bona fide income. It is considered a gain or a return of capital,” he said.
In other words, the fund’s distributions can be better reflected in its 30-day yield, because option income probably wouldn’t be included.
One obvious question for a fund manager whose portfolio has increased quickly to almost $19 billion is whether or not the fund’s size might make it difficult to manage. Some smaller funds pursuing narrow strategies have been forced to close themselves to new investors. Reiner said JEPI’s 2% weighting limitation for its portfolio of about 100 stocks mitigates size concerns. He also said that “S&P 500 index options are the most liquid equity products in the world,” with over $1 trillion in daily trades.
Summing up the 2022 action, Reiner said “investing is about balance.” The rising level of price volatility increased options premiums. But to further protect investors, he and JEPI co-manager Raffaele Zingone also “gave them more potential upside by selling calls that were a bit further out of the money.”
The US Coast Guard says it is tracking a suspected Russian spy ship off the coast of Hawaii in international waters as heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow remain over Russian’s war in Ukraine.
“In recent weeks, the U.S. Coast Guard has continued to monitor a Russian vessel, believed to be an intelligence gathering ship, off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands,” the USCG said in a news release.
The Coast Guard noted the situation is not unusual but that it is tracking it closely. “While foreign military vessels may transit freely through the U.S. economic exclusive zone (EEZ), as per customary international laws, foreign-flagged military vessels have often been observed operating and loitering within Coast Guard District Fourteen’s area of response,” the release stated.
This is not the first time suspected Russia spy ships have sailed off the coast of the United States. In 2019, a Russian spy ship off the southeastern coast of the United States was observed operating in what two US officials told CNN was an “unsafe manner.”
Watch: Russian spy ship sails recklessly off US (December 2019)
The actions of the Viktor Leonov, a Russian surveillance ship sailing off the coast of South Carolina and Florida, were determined to be unsafe because it was not using running lights in low visibility weather and was not responding to commercial vessels’ attempts to communicate to avoid potential accidents.
The USCG said in the release that it “continues to coordinate with Department of Defense partners, providing updates to foreign vessel movements and activities and to appropriately meet presence with presence to encourage international maritime norms.”
Military: Russian spy ship moving toward US (2018)
The Iranian official, Alireza Akbari, was executed for crimes including “corruption on earth,” according the Iranian judiciary-affiliated outlet Mizan. Akbari was charged with working as a spy for MI6, the British intelligence agency, and reportedly paid more than $2 million in various currencies – 1.805 million euros, 265,000 British pounds and $50,000 – Iranian state media reported Saturday.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “appalled by the execution.” He added on Twitter: “This was a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people. My thoughts are with Alireza’s friends and family.”
Akbari allegedly provided information to foreign officials about 178 Iranian figures, including country’s chief nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iranian media reported. Fakhrizadeh was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun operating out of a car in 2020, according to state-affiliated Fars News. Iran’s top officials accused Israel of masterminding the plot at the time, without providing evidence.
Akbari purportedly carried out his intelligence work through the veneer of a private company focused on research and trade activities, working directly with research institutes in London that Iran claimed were headed by intelligence officials, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported. IRNA also cited allegations that Akbari had meetings with an MI6 intelligence officer and former British Ambassador to Iran Richard Dalton.
Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the death penalty handed down to Akbari after deeming it to be based on “substantiated evidence,” according to IRNA.
Mizan did not specify when the execution was carried out. Akbari’s death sentence was announced just days ago, on January 11, after his conviction on spying for the United Kingdom. Akbari had denied the charges.
According to allegations published in Mizan on Wednesday, Akbari had been arrested “some time ago.” The BBC reported Akbari was arrested in 2019.
“On this basis and after filing an indictment against the accused, the file was referred to court and hearings were held in the presence of the accused’s lawyer and based on the valid documents in this person’s file, he was sentenced to death for spying for the UK,” Mizan said.
Akbari previously served as Iran’s deputy defense minister and was the head of the Strategic Research Institute, as well as a member of the military organization that implemented the United Nations resolution that ended the Iran-Iraq war, according to Iranian pro-reform outlet Shargh Daily. He served under Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who was in office from 1997 to 2005, according to the BBC.
Though Iran does not recognize dual nationality, the execution of an individual holding British citizenship will likely further fuel tensions between Tehran and Western democracies, which have been critical of the regime’s response to anti-government demonstrations that began in September last year.
Iran has long ranked among the world’s top executioners, and Akbari is one of three individuals to receive a death sentence in the first weeks of 2023. Two young men, a karate champion and a volunteer children’s coach, were hanged last weekend after being convicted of killing a member of the country’s Basij paramilitary force. Both had allegedly taken part in the protests that began after a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of the country’s morality police.
Amini’s death sparked massive nationwide demonstrations against a regime often criticized as theocratic and dictatorial.
Critics have accused Tehran of responding to protests with excessive force – activist groups HRANA and Iran Human Rights say that 481 protesters have been killed – and using the country’s unjust judicial system to intimidate would-be demonstrators. United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk alleged that Tehran was “weaponizing” criminal procedures to carry out “state-sanctioned killing” of protesters.
As many as 41 more protesters have received death sentences in recent months, according to statements from both Iranian officials and in Iranian media reviewed by CNN and 1500Tasvir, but the number could be much higher.
Iranian state media has reported that dozens of government agents, from security officials to officers of the basij paramilitary force, have been killed in the unrest.
Though Akbari’s execution was, on its surface, unrelated to the recent protests, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverley alleged that the act was “politically motivated.” He said Iran’s charge d’affaires would be summoned over the execution “to make clear our disgust at Iran’s actions.”
“The execution of British-Iranian Alireza Akbari is a barbaric act that deserves condemnation in the strongest possible terms. Through this politically motivated act, the Iranian regime has once again shown its callous disregard for human life,” Cleverly said on Twitter. “This will not stand unchallenged.”
The UK government had urged Iran not to execute Akbari, and the Foreign Office said it would continue to support his family.
Amnesty International called Akbari’s execution “particularly horrific” and an “abhorrent assault on the right to life.” The rights group claimed that Akbari had said he was forcibly administered chemical substances, held in prolonged solitary confinement and forced to make recorded “confessions” repeatedly.
Amnesty urged the UK government to “fully investigate” these allegations of torture and ill treatment and “pursue all avenues to hold the Iranian authorities to account.”
A Greek court dropped espionage charges against a group of aid workers who rescued migrants from the sea, in a move hailed by rights groups and lawmakers.
Irish-German citizen Sean Binder and 23 other humanitarian workers had their misdemeanor charges set aside by a court on the island of Lesbos Friday, however felony charges against the group remain pending.
The court in the island’s capital Mytilene called a halt to the prosecution of the some of the misdemeanor charges due to “procedural irregularities” in the investigation, Binder’s lawyer, Zacharias Kessas, said outside the court.
“They recognized that there are certain procedural irregularities that made it impossible for the court to proceed on the core of the accusation, so concerning the misdemeanors, somebody can say that the accusations are dropped,” Kessas said.
“But we cannot feel happy about this because really they just realized what we were shouting for the last four years, so there are still many things to be done in order to reach the final step which is the felonies that are still ongoing, and the investigation is still in process.”
A statement from Amnesty International Friday said the Lesbos court “sent the indictment back to the prosecutor due to procedural shortcomings, including a failure to translate the indictment.”
Binder and Syrian refugee Sarah Mardini were arrested in 2018 after participating in several search and rescue operations with non-profit organization Emergency Response Center International near Lesbos, an island in the Aegean Sea.
The group had faced four charges classified by Greek judicial authorities as “misdemeanors”: espionage, disclosure of state secrets, unlawful use of radio frequencies and forgery, according to a UN Human Rights Office statement.
The court’s move was welcome by rights group and politicians.
Lawmakers from the European Union said it was “a step toward justice.”
The spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Liz Throssell, welcomed the court’s recommendation to drop some of the charges but reiterated the UN’s call “for all charges against all defendants to be dropped.”
Binder’s elected representative, MEP Grace O’Sullivan, said the prosecution “essentially was full of holes” in a video posted to Twitter.
“Good news from Greece. We’ve just heard that Sean Binder and the other search and rescue humanitarian workers have had their charges dropped,” she said.
While the misdemeanor charges were dropped on Friday, an investigation into felony charges against the humanitarian workers remains pending, Amnesty International said in a statement.
The aid workers stand accused of assisting smuggling networks, being members of a criminal organization, and money laundering – charges that could result in up to 25 years in prison if they are found guilty, according to a European Parliament report published in June 2021.
Referring to the felony charges that remain pending, O’Sullivan said while they didn’t know how long that would take, “today is actually a step in the right direction. A step towards justice.”
“All we want is justice. We want this to go to trial and it doesn’t seem like this will happen anytime soon given what happened today,” Binder said outside the courthouse.
“At the same time, we have been so lucky to have so much support internationally, everywhere, and I think that has forced the prosecution of this court to at least recognize the mistakes made and at least to some extent there has been less injustice.”
Mark Zuckerberg considered disclosing in 2017 that Facebook
(FB) was investigating “organizations like Cambridge Analytica” alongside Russian foreign intelligence actors as part of an election security assessment before ultimately removing the reference at his advisers’ suggestion, according to a 2019 deposition conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and reviewed by CNN.
The omitted reference provides insight into Zuckerberg’s thinking on Cambridge Analytica in the critical months before press reports would reveal that the data analysis firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had improperly gained access to tens of millions of Facebook users’ personal information. The data leak prompted a global outcry that led to hearings, an apology tour from Zuckerberg and Facebook’s $5 billion privacy settlement with the US government.
The deposition transcript suggests that in 2017, Zuckerberg considered Cambridge Analytica a potential election concern on par with Russian election meddling efforts even though he said he did not know about the data leak first discovered by Facebook staffers in 2015. It also points to how Facebook staffers had opportunities to brief Zuckerberg on that leak, but chose not to, prior to reports about the incident that surfaced in 2018.
Zuckerberg’s remarks in the deposition offer the clearest picture yet of what Zuckerberg knew about Cambridge Analytica, and when. The timeline of events has previously been scrutinized intensely by US lawmakers, state attorneys general and investors who have sued Facebook, now known as Meta, for allegedly breaching its fiduciary duties in connection with the data leak incident.
Meta declined to comment on the release of the transcript, saying its case with the SEC involving the deposition had been settled for more than three years. The settlement in 2019 for $100 million resolved US government allegations that Facebook had misled investors for years after staffers first discovered the data leak.
The SEC deposition transcript was released Tuesday by the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog group, that had obtained the document via a public records request. The transcript was first reported on Tuesday by Reuters, which had obtained the document through a separate records request.
“This transcript reveals that something changed between January 2017 and September 2017 for Zuckerberg to deem Cambridge Analytica a threat commensurate with Russian Intelligence,” said Zamaan Qureshi, policy advisor at the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “But for reasons the Facebook CEO has still not disclosed, the world would only learn about Cambridge Analytica in March 2018.”
In September 2017, Zuckerberg released a public statement about Facebook’s efforts to safeguard election integrity, saying the company would look into the impact that foreign actors, “Russian groups and other former Soviet states,” and “organizations like the campaigns” had on Facebook during the 2016 elections.
But according to the court documents, Zuckerberg had originally proposed naming Russian foreign intelligence and Cambridge Analytica in the same breath.
“We are already looking into foreign actors including Russian intelligence, actors in other former Soviet states and organizations like Cambridge Analytica,” Zuckerberg initially wrote, according to the draft the SEC produced in the deposition and that Zuckerberg testified was authentic.
Zuckerberg testified that the reference to Cambridge Analytica was removed after a staffer recommended against naming specific organizations. “This was not something I think was particularly important to the overall communication,” he said, according to the transcript. “So I think when people raised this, I just took it out.”
The testimony suggests he became aware of Cambridge Analytica around the same time as the general public, through press reporting around the 2016 election on the firm’s marketing claims. But it also suggests that he was kept in the dark about the Cambridge Analytica-linked data leak that predated the election and would eventually lead to Facebook’s broader reckoning with regulators and policymakers.
The Cambridge Analytica saga began with a psychology professor who harvested data on millions of Facebook users through an app offering a personality test, then gave it to a service promising to use vague and sophisticated techniques to influence voters during a high-stakes election where the winning presidential candidate won narrowly in several key states.
A 2020 report by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office later cast significant doubt on Cambridge Analytica’s capabilities, suggesting many of them had been exaggerated. But the improper sharing of Facebook data triggered a cascade of events that has culminated in numerous investigations and lawsuits.
After hearing about Cambridge Analytica’s claims that it could use personal data to build “psychographic profiles” of voters who could then be targeted with effective political advertising, Zuckerberg began asking subordinates whether the firm’s marketing had any merit.
In one January 2017 email produced by the SEC, Zuckerberg asked staffers to “explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ad perspective and how advanced it was.”
Explaining his thought process further, Zuckerberg testified: “Like, are these folks actually doing anything novel? Or are they just talking about data in a puffed-up way …. My understanding from those conversations is that, to summarize it very quickly, it was much closer to the latter.”
But even though Facebook as an organization knew by that point, in 2017, that Cambridge Analytica had obtained Facebook users’ personal information in violation of the platform’s policies, that incident was never raised to Zuckerberg as a piece of potentially relevant context, according to the deposition. Following Facebook’s discovery of the leak, the company required Cambridge Analytica to delete the data it had improperly obtained through a third party and ordered the firm to sign a certification indicating its compliance.
Zuckerberg testified that he did not get “fully up to speed” on the 2015 data leak, and Facebook’s response to it, until March 2018, when public reports about the incident emerged.
In the deposition, Zuckerberg explained that he was not briefed earlier likely because Facebook considered the 2015 incident a “closed case until 2018, when new allegations came up that suggested that maybe Cambridge Analytica had lied to us” about having deleted the Facebook data. (The UK ICO’s report later found that Cambridge Analytica did appear to take some steps toward deleting the data, but it also expressed doubts about whether those steps were effective enough.)
Zuckerberg reaffirmed in his testimony that had Facebook moved more swiftly to implement an existing and separate plan restricting app developers’ access to Facebook information, the data leak could likely have been avoided from the start.
Europe’s largest economy Germany hasn’t kicked its habit of using Chinese kit for its 5G telecoms networks yet.
A new study analyzing Huawei’s market share in Europe estimates that Germany relies on Chinese technology for 59 percent of its 5G networks. Other key markets including Italy and the Netherlands are also among eight countries where over half of 5G networks run on Chinese equipment.
The study, by Copenhagen-based telecoms consultancy Strand Consult, offers a rare glimpse of how some telecoms operators have relied on Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE in the early stage of Europe’s 5G rollout. The figures also underline one of Western officials’ fears: that Europe’s pushback against Chinese technology for communications networks was slow to wean operators off Huawei.
“It’s easier to preach than to practice,” said John Strand, founder of the consultancy, of EU governments’ hesitance to throw up clear barriers to using Chinese telecoms equipment.
“It is more dangerous to be dependent on Chinese telecoms networks than to be dependent on Russian gas. Digital infrastructure is the fundament of society,” Strand said.
The study matches a warning by the European Commission’s digital chief Margrethe Vestager, who said last month that “a number of countries have passed legislation but they have not put it into effect … Making it work is even better.”
“It is not only Germany, but it is also Germany,” Vestager said in November.
Germany’s ministries of digital affairs, interior and economic affairs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Huawei also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Clinging to Huawei kit
European governments in the past two years have imposed security policies on the telecoms industry to cut down on Chinese kit.
In some countries, this has led to a full stop on using Huawei and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE. Strand’s study estimates that nine EU countries, as well as Norway and the Faroe Islands, have no Chinese equipment in new 5G networks at all. France (17 percent) and Belgium (30 percent) have a much lower presence of Chinese kit in 5G than was the case in their 4G and 3G networks.
But the EU regime on using Chinese technology in 5G is a patchwork. In other EU countries those policies either allow for operators to still rely on Huawei for parts of their networks or require the government to actively step in to stop deals.
The Berlin government in the past two years was criticized for being slow in setting up the legal framework that now allows it to intervene on contracts between operators and vendors if ministers choose to do so. Olaf Scholz’s government has taken a more critical stance on Chinese technology and just last month blocked Chinese investors from buying a German chip plant over potential security threats.
But Germany’s largest operator Deutsche Telekom has also maintained a strategic partnership with Huawei for years and it and others have worked with Huawei on the early stages of rolling out 5G, Strand’s report suggests.
In Italy, the government has “golden powers” to stop contracts with Huawei. The former government led by Mario Draghi, seen as close to the U.S., intervened on a couple of deals but it is still unclear how the current government led by far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will position itself.
In other, smaller countries like the Netherlands, operators were quick to launch 5G networks and some did so using Huawei, especially in “radio access network” (RAN) parts — effectively preempting EU and national decisions to cut down on Chinese kit.
Strand’s data, gathered from European industry players in the past months, show Huawei was quick to provide operators with 5G gear in the first stages of Europe’s rollout.
But another boutique telecoms consultancy, Dell’Oro, compiled data recently that showed the firm in the past year started running into serious obstacles in selling its kit.
As of early last year — right as European officials were changing direction on 5G security — Sweden’s Ericsson overtook Huawei in market share of new European sales of radio access network (RAN) equipment for 3G, 4G and 5G equipment, according to updated figures Dell’Oro compiled this summer, shared with POLITICO by an industry official. Radio access networks make up the largest chunk of network investment and include base stations and antennas.
For 5G RAN specifically, Huawei lost its initial position as a market leader at the start of the rollout; it now provides 22 percent of sales, with Ericsson at 42 percent and Nokia at 32 percent in Europe, Dell’Oro estimated.
A POLITICO investigation last month revealed how the Chinese tech giant was consolidating its operations in Europe and scaling down its lobbying and branding operations across a series of important markets, including France, the United Kingdom and its European representation in Brussels.
Pressed by the United States and increasingly shunned on a continent it once considered its most strategic overseas market, Huawei is pivoting back toward the Chinese market, focusing its remaining European attention on just a few countries, among them Germany.
China hawks, however, fear that Huawei could continue to supply 5G equipment because of the loopholes and political considerations of national governments.
The new figures could serve as “an eye opener for a lot of governments and regulators in Europe,” Strand said.
PARIS — A Moroccan secret service agent, identified as Mohamed Belahrech, has emerged as one of the key operators in the Qatar corruption scandal that has shaken the foundations of the European Parliament. His codename is M118, and he’s been running circles around European spy agencies for years.
Belahrech seems at the center of an intricate web that extends from Qatar and Morocco to Italy, Poland and Belgium. He is suspected of having been engaged in intense lobbying efforts and alleged corruption targeting European MEPs in recent years. And it turns out he’s been known to European intelligence services for some time.
Rabat is increasingly in the spotlight, as focus widens beyond the role of Qatar in the corruption allegations of European MEPs, which saw Belgian police seizing equipment and more than €1.5 million in cash in raids across at least 20 homes and offices.
Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne last week provided a scarcely veiled indication that Morocco was involved in the probe. Speaking to Belgian lawmakers, he referred to “a country that in recent years has already been mentioned … when it comes to interference.” This is understood to refer to Morocco, since Rabat’s security service has been accused of espionage in Belgium, where there is a large diaspora of Moroccans.
According to Italian daily La Repubblica and the Belgian Le Soir, Belahrech is one of the links connecting former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri to the Moroccan secret service, the DGED. The Italian politician Panzeri is now in jail, facing preliminary charges of corruption in the investigation as to whether Morocco and Qatar bought influence in the European Parliament.
In a cache of Moroccan diplomatic cables leaked by a hacker in 2014 and 2015 (and seen by POLITICO), Panzeri is described as “a close friend” of Morocco, “an influential ally” who is “capable of fighting the growing activism of our enemies at the European Parliament.”
Investigators are now looking at just how close a friend Panzeri was to Morocco. The Belgian extradition request for Panzeri’s wife and daughter, who are also allegedly involved in the corruption scandal, mentions “gifts” from Abderrahim Atmoun, Morocco’s ambassador to Warsaw.
For several years, Panzeri shared the presidency of the joint EU-Morocco parliamentary committee with Atmoun, a seasoned diplomat keen on promoting Morocco’s interests in the Brussels bubble.
But it’s now suspected that Atmoun was taking orders from Belahrech, who is “a dangerous man,” an official with knowledge of the investigation said to Le Soir. It’s under Belahrech’s watch that Panzeri reportedly sealed his association with Morocco’s DGED after failing to get reelected to the Parliament in 2019.
Belharech may also be the key to unraveling one of the lingering mysteries of the Qatar scandal: the money trail. A Belgian extradition request seen by POLITICO refers to an enigmatic character linked to a credit card given to Panzeri’s relatives — who is known as “the giant.” Speculation is swirling as to whether Belahrech could be this giant.
The many lives of a Moroccan spy
Belahrech is no newbie in European spy circles — media reports trace his presence back to several espionage cases over the past decade.
The man from Rabat first caught the authorities’ attention in connection to alleged infiltration of Spanish mosques, which in 2013 resulted in the deportation of the Moroccan director of an Islamic organization in Catalonia, according to Spanish daily El Confidencial.
Belahrech was allegedly in charge of running agents in the mosques at the behest of the DGED, while his wife was suspected of money laundering via a Spain-based travel agency. The network was dismantled in 2015, according to El Mundo.
Not long after, Belahrech reemerged in France, where he played a leading role in a corruption case at Orly airport in Paris.
A Moroccan agent, identified at the time as Mohamed B., allegedly obtained up to 200 confidential files on terrorism suspects in France from a French border officer, according to an investigation published in Libération.
The officer, who was detained and put under formal investigation in 2017, allegedly provided confidential material regarding individuals on terrorist watchlists — and possible people of interest transiting through the airport — to the Moroccan agent in exchange for four-star holidays in Morocco.
French authorities reportedly did not press charges against Belahrech, who disappeared when his network was busted. According to a French official with knowledge of the investigation, Belahrech was cooperating with France at the time by providing intelligence on counterterrorism matters, and was let off for this reason.
Moroccan secret service agents may act as intelligence providers for European agencies while simultaneously coordinating influence operations in those same countries, two people familiar with intelligence services coordination told POLITICO. For that reason, European countries sometimes turn a blind eye to practices that could be qualified as interference, they added, so long as this remains unobtrusive.
Contacted, the intelligence services of France, Spain and Morocco did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
As to Belahrech: Five years after his foray in France, the mysterious M118 is back in the spotlight — raising questions over his ongoing relationship with European intelligence networks.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday wrestled with a politically tinged dispute over a Biden administration policy that would prioritize deportation of people in the country illegally who pose the greatest public safety risk.
At the center of the case is a September 2021 directive from the Department of Homeland Security that paused deportations unless individuals had committed acts of terrorism, espionage or “egregious threats to public safety.” The guidance, issued after Joe Biden became president, updated a Trump-era policy that removed people in the country illegally regardless of criminal history or community ties.
On Tuesday, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer told the justices that federal law does “not create an unyielding mandate to apprehend and remove” every one of the more than 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said it would be “incredibly destabilizing on the ground” for the high court to require that. Congress has not given DHS enough money to vastly increase the number of people it holds and deports, the Biden administration has said.
But Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone told the court the administration is violating federal law that requires the detention and deportation of people who are in the U.S. illegally and who have been convicted of any serious crime, not just the most serious, specifically defined ones.
Chief Justice John Roberts was among the conservative justices who pushed back strongly on the Biden administration’s arguments. “It’s our job to say what the law is, not whether or not it can be possibly implemented or whether there are difficulties there, and I don’t think we should change that responsibility just because Congress and the executive can’t agree on something … I don’t think we should let them off the hook,” he said.
Yet Roberts, in questioning Stone, also called Prelogar’s argument compelling.
“It’s impossible for the executive to do what you want it to do, right?” Roberts asked.
Roberts wasn’t totally satisfied when Stone said the number of people potentially affected total 60,000 to 80,000.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that whatever the actual number, “the resources still aren’t there.”
The court’s three liberal justices, on the other hand, were sympathetic to the Biden administration’s arguments. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, made clear they believed that Texas and Louisiana, which joined Texas in suing over the directive, weren’t even entitled to bring their case.
The case is the latest example of a Republican litigation strategy that has succeeded in slowing Biden administration initiatives by going to GOP-friendly courts. Kagan picked up on that during arguments, saying that Texas could file its suit in a courthouse where it was guaranteed to get a sympathetic hearing and that one judge stopped “a federal immigration policy in its tracks.”
In a separate ongoing legal dispute, three judges chosen by then-President Donald Trump are among the four Republican-appointed judges who have so far prevented the administration’s student loan cancellation program from taking effect.
The states said they would face added costs of having to detain people the federal government might allow to remain free inside the United States, despite their criminal records.
Federal appeals courts had reached conflicting decisions over DHS guidance.
The federal appeals court in Cincinnati earlier overturned a district judge’s order that put the policy on hold in a lawsuit filed by Arizona, Ohio and Montana.
But in the separate suit filed by Texas and Louisiana, a federal judge in Texas ordered a nationwide halt to the guidance and a federal appellate panel in New Orleans declined to step in.
In July, the court voted 5-4 to leave the immigration policy frozen nationwide. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in saying they would have allowed the Biden administration to put in place the guidance.
At the same time, the court said it would hear arguments in the case in late November.
The justices have several questions to sort through, whether the states should have been permitted to file their challenge in the first place, whether the policy violates immigration law and, if it does, whether it was appropriate for the Texas-based judge to block it.
On that last point, Prelogar said the judge’s decision to “vacate” the policy was wrong, and her argument questioned whether judges have been getting it all wrong for decades.
The issue touched a nerve, especially among Roberts, Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justices who once served on the federal appeals court in Washington that regularly vacates policies it determines are unlawful.
“Fairly radical,” Roberts said. “Pretty astonishing,” Kavanaugh said. Jackson, more restrained, also questioned Prelogar’s reasoning.
“There seems to be a kind of D.C. Circuit cartel,” Kagan joked.
A decision in U.S. v. Texas, 22-58, is expected by late June.
Hikvision, a leading Chinese surveillance company, has denied suggestions that it poses a threat to Britain’s national security after the UK government banned the use of its camera systems at “sensitive” sites.
The restrictions, announced Thursday, will prevent authorities from installing technology that is produced by companies subject to China’sNational Intelligence Law, which requires Chinese citizens and organizations to cooperate with the country’s intelligence and security services.
In a statement to CNN Business on Friday, Hikvision said it was “categorically false to represent Hikvision as a threat to national security.”
The company said it was hoping to engage with UK officials“urgently” to understand the decision, and had previously spoken with the UK government to clear up what it saw as misunderstandings about its business.
“Hikvision is an equipment manufacturer that has no visibility into end users’ video data,” the Hangzhou-based company said. “Hikvision cannot access end users’ video data and cannot transmit data from end-users to third parties. We do not manage end-user databases, nor do we sell cloud storage in the UK.”
In a statement to the UK parliament on Thursday, Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Dowden said that after a security review, government departments had been instructed to stop deploying equipment produced by companies that are subject to the National Intelligence Law.
Dowden cited “the threat to the UK and the increasing capability and connectivity of these systems,” without specifying further.
Government departments have also been advised toconsider whether to “remove and replace such equipment where it is deployed on sensitive sites rather than awaiting any scheduled upgrades,” he said. The minister added that departments could review whether sites not deemed sensitive should also be taking similar measures.
The move comes months after UK lawmakers called for a ban on technology by Hikvision and Dahua, another Chinese surveillance camera maker, citing allegations that the firms had been involved in enabling human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The United States in 2019 placed Hikvision and other Chinese companies on a trade blacklist, prohibiting them from importing US technology over similar allegations.
In a statement released in July by Big Brother Watch, a British nonprofit group that investigates the use of surveillance systems, 67 members of the UK parliament said the Chinese companies should be prohibited from selling their products in the country.
Big Brother Watch said at the time that it had “found that the majority of public bodies use CCTV cameras made by Hikvision or Dahua, including 73% of councils across the UK, 57% of secondary schools in England, 6 out of 10 National Health Service Trusts, as well as UK universities and police forces.”
Earlier this year, a UK health minister disclosed that there were 82 Hikvision products in use in his department.
Hikvision, in its statement, said its cameras were compliant with UK laws and “subject to strict security requirements.”
Dahua did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
STOCKHOLM — A trial opened Friday in Sweden in the case of two Iranian-born Swedish brothers who have been charged with spying for Russia and its military intelligence service GRU for a decade.
Peyman Kia, 42, and Payam Kia, 35, appeared before the Stockholm District Court to face accusations of having worked jointly to pass information to Russia between Sept. 28, 2011, and Sept. 20, 2021.
Between 2014 and 2015, Peyman Kia worked for Sweden’s domestic intelligence agency but also for Sweden’s armed forces. Sweden’s prosecutors allege that the data they gave the Russians originated from several authorities within the Swedish security and intelligence service, known by its acronym SAPO.
Swedish media said that Peyman Kia worked for the armed forces’ foreign defense intelligence agency, whose Swedish acronym is MUST, and reportedly worked with a top secret unit under MUST which was dealing with Swedish spies abroad.
Intelligence expert Joakim von Braun told Swedish broadcaster SVT as the trial opened that even though many details remain unknown, it appeared to be one of most damaging cases of espionage in Sweden’s history because the men compiled a list of all the employees within SAPO.
“That alone is a big problem because Russian intelligence focuses on human sources,” von Braun said.
Peyman Kia was arrested in September 2021 and his brother in November 2021. Both denied any wrongdoing, their defense lawyers told the court.
Payam Kia, 35, helped his brother and “dismantled and broke a hard drive which was later found in a trash can” when his brother was arrested, according to charge sheet obtained by The Associated Press.
The naturalized Swedish citizens face sentences up to life imprisonment if convicted.
In another case, Swedish authorities on Thursday released one of two people arrested this week on suspicions of spying against Sweden and another foreign power, but that the freed person remains a suspect.
The two were arrested Tuesday in a predawn operation in the Stockholm area. Authorities have given few details about the case, but Swedish media cited witnesses who described elite police rappelling from two Black Hawk helicopters to arrest them.
According to the Swedish reports, the two were a couple and are both Russians who arrived in Sweden in the late 1990s. The AP could not confirm these reports.
The Swedish Prosecution Authority said late Thursday that one of the two had been released but was still a suspect. It did not explain the reasoning for releasing one and but keeping the other in detention.
The investigation had been under way for some time, SAPO said. It said that one of those arrested was suspected of aggravated espionage against Sweden and against “a foreign power.” Authorities did not identify the other country allegedly spied on.
Authorities in Sweden have said that that case was not related to other cases of espionage.
Pakistan on Thursday named former spy chief Lt. Gen. Syed Asim Munir as chief of the South Asian country’s army, ending weeks of speculation over an appointment that comes amid intense debate around the military’s influence on public life.
In a Twitter post, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said Munir’s appointment would be ratified once a summary sent by Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif had been signed by the country’s president.
Munir, a former head of the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, will take over from Army Chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, who will retire on November 29 after six years in what is normally a three-year post.
The Pakistani military is often accused of meddling in the politics of a country that has experienced numerous coups and been ruled by generals for extended periods since its formation in 1947, so the appointment of new army chiefs is often a highly politicized issue.
Munir’s appointment may prove controversial with supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was ousted from office in April after losing the backing of key political allies and the military amid accusations he had mismanaged the economy.
Munir was removed from his office at the ISI during Khan’s term and the former prime minister has previously claimed – without evidence – that the Pakistani military and Sharif conspired with the United States to remove him from power. After Khan was wounded in a gun attack at a political rally in early November, he also accused a senior military intelligence officer – without evidence – of planning his assassination.
Both the Pakistani military and US officials have denied Khan’s claims.
Khan is yet to comment on Munir’s appointment, though his party the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) said in a tweet Thursday that he would “act according to the constitution and laws.”
Khan aside, the new army chief will have plenty on his plate, entering office at a time when – in addition to a burgeoning economic crisis – Pakistan faces the aftermath of the worst floods in its history. He will also have to navigate the country’s notoriously rocky relationship with its neighbor India.
On Wednesday, outgoing army chief Bajwa said the army was often criticized despite being busy “in serving the nation.” He said a major reason for this was the army’s historic “interference” in Pakistani politics, which he called “unconstitutional.”
He said that in February this year, the military establishment had “decided to not interfere in politics” and was “adamant” in sticking to this position.
Pakistan, a nation of 220 million, has been ruled by four different military rulers and seen three military coups since it was formed. No prime minister has ever completed a full five-year term under the present constitution of 1973.
Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said the military institution “has lost so much of its reputation,” and the new chief had plenty of battles ahead.
“In historical terms an army chief needs three months to settle into his role, the new chief might not have that privilege,” Younus said. “With ongoing political polarization there might be the temptation to intervene politically again.”
The Chinese telecoms giant is pushing out its pedigreed Western lobbyists, retrenching its European operations and putting its ambitions for global leadership on ice.
The reasons for doing this have little to do with the company’s commercial potential — Huawei is still able to offer cutting-edge technology at lower costs than its competitors — and everything to do with politics, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former staff and strategic advisers to the company.
Pressed by the United States and increasingly shunned on a Continent it once considered its most strategic overseas market, Huawei is pivoting back toward the Chinese market, focusing its remaining European attention on the few countries — Germany and Spain, but also Hungary — still willing to play host to a company widely viewed in the West as a security risk.
“It’s no longer a company floating on globalization,” said one Huawei official. “It’s a company saving its ass on the domestic market.” Like most of the other Huawei employees interviewed for this article, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe the company’s travails.
Huawei’s predicament was summed up by the company’s founder Ren Zhengfei in a speech to executives at the company’s Shenzhen headquarters in July. He laid out the trifecta of challenges the company has faced over the last three years: hostility from Washington; disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which upended global supply chains and heightened European concerns about over-dependence on countries like China.
“The environment we faced in 2019 was different from the one we face today,” Ren said in his speech, which wasn’t made public but was seen by POLITICO. “Don’t assume that we will have a brighter future.”
“We previously had an ideal for globalization striving to serve all humanity,” he added. “What is our ideal today? Survival!”
‘The moment globalist Huawei died’
As the company goes into hibernation in the West, it’s sidelining or pushing out the senior Western managers it hired just a few years ago to counter the U.S. assault on its business.
“Westerners were listened to,” one Huawei official working in Europe said. “This is no longer the case … No one is listening.”
Huawei’s Brussels office — once a key hub for the company to lobby against European restrictions on its kit — has been folded fully into European management, now headquartered in Düsseldorf.
The office this summer lost its head of communications, Phil Herd, a former BBC journalist who joined the company in October 2019 at the start of its pushback against political pressure in Europe. The office has also recently lost at least three other key staff members handling lobbying and policy. (Tony) Jin Yong, the chief representative to the Brussels institutions, is now in charge of government affairs across Western Europe and spends most of his time in the Düsseldorf office.
Employees sits in a meeting room inside Huawei Technologies Co. Cyber Security Transparency Centre in Brussels | Yuriko Nakao/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In London, Huawei’s U.K. Director of Communications Paul Harrison left his role in October, with other officials leaving around the same time. Harrison joined Huawei from a senior news editing job at U.K. broadcaster Sky News in 2019.
In Paris, the company’s Marketing and Communications Director Stéphane Curtelin left his role in September, the local magazine Challenges reported. Before then, the Paris office lost its Head of Government and Security Affairs Vincent de Crayencour, a veteran French cybersecurity official with extensive government experience who joined Huawei in 2020. The company’s Chief Representative of the Paris Office Linda Han also left her role before the summer.
In Warsaw, the company’s local PR manager Szymon Solnica departed Huawei in September. “The crises I’ve dealt with on a daily basis in recent years were colossal ones,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing his departure.
Huawei officials speaking in authorized interviews dismissed the departures as regular turnover. “There is a fluctuation always in companies, not only in Huawei … Some people are leaving and some other people are coming,” a spokesperson for Huawei Europe said in an authorized interview last week.
But others in the company privately acknowledged the departures reflect a radical shift that began in September 2021.
“The moment Meng got off the plane was the moment the globalist Huawei died,” one official said.
As the daughter of the founder — and the presumptive heir to the company’s leadership — Meng had played a key role in the legal and public relations fight between Huawei and Washington. Since returning from Canada, she reached Huawei’s top ranks as deputy chairwoman at the company’s headquarters and triggered a corporate reshuffle at the top.
(Catherine) Chen Lifang, who led the firm’s global communications department during the height of American pressure, was moved off the board of directors and into a role on the supervisory board.
The global comms department is now represented on Huawei’s board by Peng Bo, known in Europe as Vincent Peng, the former president of Huawei’s Western Europe region. Peng’s ascendency is part of the company’s efforts to move its European operations closer to Shenzhen.
The agenda to streamline public affairs in Europe is led by Guo Aibing — a former journalist for Bloomberg News in Hong Kong. Guo was parachuted into Europe and is executing cuts and consolidation of the firm’s lobbying and communication across the Continent.
The company is also restructuring its activities in Europe. The company’s plans — previously unannounced — are to consolidate the entire Continent into just one area of operations, headquartered in Düsseldorf.
Hampers and gifts at the new Huawei store in Barcelona | Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Huawei currently divides the Continent into two markets: Western Europe, run from Düsseldorf; and Eastern Europe and the Nordics, with a top executive based in Warsaw.
The restructuring “will help us to bring more synergies within the whole European business operation; will bring more value more directly to our customers here in Europe,” said the Huawei Europe spokesperson.
Broadly, the company’s staffing levels, currently around 12,000 people, will remain “stable,” the spokesperson said.
The company is also retrenching elsewhere, according to Ren. “We will give up markets in some countries,” the firm’s founder said in his speech this summer. “For example, we will give up markets in the Five Eyes countries and India.”
The “Five Eyes” refers to an intelligence-sharing arrangement between the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. All five countries have banned or are in the process of banning Huawei and other Chinese companies from their critical infrastructure because of security concerns.
Instead, Huawei is concentrating on its domestic market, which accounts for a large proportion of global 5G and where Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia are struggling to maintain market share.
Trump effect
Huawei’s strategic retreat is remarkable for a company that until recently poured millions of euros into lobbyists and PR campaigns in an effort to expand and maintain its European foothold.
Throughout most of the 2010s, Huawei was considered by many in Europe to be a friendly face among the tech firms cuddling up to power. Peculiar in its approaches, yes, but cordial and — to many — beneficial to the Continent’s interests because it increased competition and cut the price tag on the next generation of telecoms networks.
The company became known for its generous gift bags, often including a Huawei phone, and lavish parties in glamorous venues featuring fancy buffets and dance performances — like its reception celebrating the Chinese new year at the Concert Noble in Brussels.
Glitzy bashes later became part of a supercharged response to political headwinds from Washington over concerns that the Chinese-built telecoms infrastructure poses a serious security and spying risk.
Those headwinds started blowing under U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration but reached hurricane force following Donald Trump’s election. By 2019, the company was under American sanctions, with Ren’s daughter Meng in Canada awaiting the result of a U.S. extradition request.
Keith Krach, a former under-secretary of state in the Trump administration, recalled how Washington was “hitting the panic button.”
He recalled asking European ministers about their relationship with China. “And they’d say, ‘Well, they’re an important trading partner’ and all that. And then they looked at both sides of the room, there’s nobody in the room, and whispered to me: ‘But we don’t trust them.’”
To navigate the geopolitical storm, the firm offered six-figure salaries to top operators across the Western world. It assembled a high-caliber team of former Western journalists and politicians with direct lines to places of power like the Elysée and Westminster, POLITICO learned from several who received such offers.
Initially, the gambit seemed to work.
Huawei’s message — that the U.S. itself posed spying risks and that Washington’s aggression was driven by economic interests — gained traction, particularly in places like Germany, where Trump proved a useful foil.
“The case that Trump made was almost more counterproductive,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. Huawei also received support from big telco operators, who saw value in the cheap equipment combined with responsive customer service.
By the beginning of 2020, Huawei seemed to have weathered U.S. calls for all-out bans. On January 28, then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave the company the green light to build part of the country’s 5G infrastructure. Just a day later, the European Union presented a plan to shift away from over-reliance on Chinese vendors but left the door open for Huawei to lobby national governments to keep market access for its technology.
Keith Krach said the U.S. was hitting the panic button | Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Then came the pandemic. With the coronavirus originating from Wuhan killing thousands, Trump ramped up his anti-China broadside in May 2020 with fresh sanctions against Huawei that basically cut off their supply of semiconductors.
By July, the U.K.’s Johnson completely reversed course and announced all Huawei equipment would have to be stripped from British 5G networks, even as the government estimated the move would delay the rollout of the technology and add half a billion pounds in costs.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, European governments including France, Sweden, Romania, the Baltic countries, Belgium and Denmark either banned Huawei equipment in key parts of the country’s 5G network or required its operators to wean themselves off its kit in the medium term.
Huawei’s smartphone business — once on its way to challenging Apple and Samsung in Europe — meanwhile was crushed by U.S. sanctions that cut its devices off from Android, the Google-owned operating system.
Putin changes the calculus
These setbacks were painful, but they weren’t yet considered fatal. Trump’s election loss and the ebbing of the pandemic in Europe seemed to offer an opportunity for a counteroffensive.
At the beginning of 2021, Huawei’s Brussels lobbyists were still optimistic that Europe’s hunger for cheap, speedy 5G installation would win out over security concerns. They even had meetings lined up in the European Parliament to make their case.
Those meetings got canceled on February 24, the day Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine. For many in Europe, the risk-benefit calculation regarding Huawei had changed overnight.
“The biggest change I’ve seen came from the realization that we’re dependent on Russian gas — especially in Germany,” said John Strand, a telecoms analyst who has tracked Huawei’s market impact in Europe for the past years. “It begs the question: What’s worse, being dependent on Russian gas or on Chinese telecoms infrastructure?”
Under President Joe Biden, pressure on Huawei only increased, and Washington’s warnings now come from a more sympathetic messenger. In October, the European Commission issued a fresh warning against using Huawei technology to underpin 5G networks, and the U.K. government reaffirmed its requirement to strip Huawei equipment from British telecoms infrastructure.
The company’s travails have knocked the legs from underneath its lobbying efforts — and eaten into its market share.
Before the pandemic, the company regularly hosted European politicians, journalists and business leaders at its Shenzhen headquarters, a massive campus with buildings in different European architectural styles showcasing its global ambitions.
China’s zero-COVID policy made that impossible.
The company for years was the biggest spender at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world’s largest telecoms industry event. This year, the company’s on-the-ground presence was a pale imitation of previous showings, which it used to launch new products with razzle-dazzle and astronomical marketing budgets.
But perhaps no high-flying event illustrates the extent of the turnaround than the World Economic Forum in Davos, which once counted Huawei among its main sponsors. On January 21, 2020, just a week before Johnson sided with Huawei over Trump, Ren was onstage at the alpine resort, discussing the future of AI with “Sapiens” author Yuval Noah Harari.
The next year, the global gathering of political power players and financial titans in Davos was, thanks to the pandemic, canceled. When it reconvened in the summer of 2022, Huawei top chiefs missed the gabfest. Under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, they couldn’t leave China.
Geopolitics hits the balance sheets
The firm still has a solid share in some big national markets, among them Germany and Spain, industry analysts say.
A 2020 study by Strand Consult — still the most comprehensive public overview of Huawei’s footprint in Europe — showed just how deeply the Chinese firm was ingrained in European markets: In 15 out of 31 countries Strand studied, more than half of all 4G radio access network equipment (RAN) came from Chinese vendors.
But in many of these markets, authorities have imposed measures forcing operators to phase out or at least significantly limit the use of “high-risk vendors” — commonly understood to be state-affiliated Huawei and the Chinese military-linked telecom ZTE — in coming years.
These are beginning to bite.
In the early race to implement 5G, Huawei outpaced its rivals in Europe. However, as of early last year — right as European officials were changing direction on 5G security — Sweden’s Ericsson overtook Huawei in market share of new European sales of radio access networks, according to proprietary figures compiled by boutique telecoms research firm Dell’Oro, shared with POLITICO by an industry official. Radio access networks make up the largest chunk of network investment and include base stations and antennas.
The latest update, from the second quarter of 2022, showed Ericsson at 41 percent, Huawei at 28 percent and Finnish Nokia at 27 percent. This includes new sales of base stations and antennas across 3G, 4G and 5G — some of which is part of running contracts with operators.
For 5G RAN specifically, the shift is even clearer: Huawei lost its initial position as market leader at the start of the rollout; it now provides 22 percent of sales, with Ericsson at 42 percent and Nokia at 32 percent in Europe, Dell’Oro estimated.
Industry analysts say Huawei’s move to consolidate and scrap key public affairs roles could hurt the company in countries where it still has skin in the game: Most importantly, Germany, Italy and Spain. In these large European markets, governments have been slow to impose measures on “high-risk vendors” — and particularly slow and soft in enforcing them.
Europe’s largest operators, like Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone, also have running contracts with Huawei, meaning the Chinese firm is at least still providing maintenance and keeping networks running — and potentially still supporting parts of the 5G rollout.
But in Germany, at least, Olaf Scholz’s new government has taken a more critical stance on Chinese technology. This month, Economy Minister Robert Habeck — who has taken a hawkish approach to China — formally blocked Chinese investors from buying a German chip plant over potential security threats.
Budapest nights
Huawei, of course, hasn’t completely given up on Europe.
Those still giving the company face time in Brussels this summer were presented with a weighty gift bag.
In addition to glossy hardcovers from the company’s PR operation — with titles like “Choose a Smarter Future: A contribution to Europe’s next digital policy” and “Ten Years of Connecting Europe” — the bag contained a memoir by Frédéric Pierucci. A former executive with the French infrastructure manufacturer Alstom, Pierucci was arrested by the FBI on bribery charges in 2013 — just as the American conglomerate General Electric was negotiating to take over Alstom’s nuclear operations.
Titled “The American Trap,” the book argues that its author was a hostage in Washington’s secret economic war on its allies.
“One after the other, some of the world’s largest companies are being actively destabilized to the benefit of the U.S., in acts of economic sabotage that seem to be the beginning of what’s to come…” reads the publisher’s summary.
It’s a narrative with deep appeal inside the company, and one that creates a natural rapport with other governments that see themselves as standing up to liberal superpowers. As Huawei searches for friends on the Continent, Hungary — increasingly in opposition to the rest of the EU on how to engage with China and Russia — remains a vocal ally, and the company is leaning into that relationship.
This year, in September, Huawei’s CEE & Nordic region unit held its annual Innovation Day event in Hungary, home to the company’s largest European logistics center.
On the banks of the Danube, tech entrepreneurs schmoozed in English and Hungarian, with some Chinese and German mixed in, over made-to-order coffee and plentiful canapés at Budapest’s cupola-topped Castle Garden Bazaar.
Inside the conference hall, bilingual hosts teed up mini-documentaries about protecting local salmon breeds in Norway and preventing floods in Hungary. Small business execs highlighted drones that monitor crops in Austria and potential forest fires in Greece, all on Huawei 5G networks.
With simultaneous translation available in Hungarian, Huawei featured research it commissioned from the Economist Intelligence Unit reiterating Europe’s laggard status on 5G use and implementation. It was an implicit reminder that dismantling Huawei’s infrastructure will have real consequences.
But the company also highlighted what it hopes will be a bigger part of its portfolio: products less likely to inspire security concerns, like inverters for solar panels.
Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó said Hungary will stand firm against international pressure | Laszlo Balogh/Getty images
“Huawei is committed to the vision of a green Europe,” said Jeff Wang, the company’s current head of public affairs and comms, in a video address to the Budapest crowd, where he noted the 10 years he spent working on the Continent.
For weeks leading up to the event, Huawei officials were pushing to get Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to speak. While that didn’t pan out, Orbán sent one of his top lieutenants — Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó — to deliver a message.
“We are not going to discriminate [against] any investing company because of their country of origin,” Szijjártó said. Budapest will stand firm against “international pressure” he added, to block “the presence of Huawei here in Hungary.”
Radoslaw Kedzia, Huawei’s vice president for the CEE & Nordic region (and the first non-Chinese to achieve CEO status inside the company, in the Czech Republic in 2015), said there was no political calculation behind the double-down in Hungary.
“Let’s not demonize us, OK? We are like any other company,” Kedzia said.
If a business assessment offers the “prospect of the next 10-20 years of stable operation, then you think it is good to concentrate some of your resources in that particular country,” he added.
Likewise, the European spokesperson insisted, Huawei communicates with every country in the “same way, on the same level.” The company focuses on technology and does “not engage,” he said, in “political games.”
One thing is certain: When it comes to the great European game, Huawei has lost — and sent all its political players home.
Peter O’Brien, Elisa Braun, Stuart Lau and Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed reporting.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A 34-year-old Russian was sentenced to 90 days in prison on Wednesday for flying a drone and thereby breaching sanctions which came into force after Russia went to war against Ukraine.
The man, who was not identified, was not suspected of espionage, the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende reported.
He admitted to flying the drone in southern Norway to photograph nature, the daily said, adding he claimed to be unaware that this was banned.
Under Norwegian law, it is prohibited for aircraft operated by Russian companies or citizens “to land on, take off from or fly over Norwegian territory.” Norway is not a member of the European Union but mirrors its moves and decided on the ban earlier this year after the invasion.
The prosecution had asked for a 120-day sentence. Prosecutor Marit Formo said she was “very satisfied with the verdict” of the Hordaland District Court.
Numerous drone sightings have been reported near offshore oil and gas platforms belonging to NATO member Norway, a major oil and gas producer, in recent weeks. Several Russian citizens have been detained over the past few weeks for flying drones or taking photographs of sensitive sites in Norway.
LONDON — A former security guard at the British embassy in Berlin has admitted spying for Russia and faces up to 14 years in prison.
David Ballantyne Smith, 58, pleaded guilty to eight charges under the Official Secrets Act. Prosecutors say he gave Gen. Maj. Sergey Chukhurov, Russia’s military attache in Berlin, information about the activities, identities, addresses and phone numbers of British civil servants.
Smith also collected intelligence, some of it classed secret, on the operation and layout of the embassy, which prosecutors said would be useful to “an enemy, namely the Russian state.”
Smith admitted guilt during a hearing last week at London’s Central Criminal Court, but the pleas were covered by reporting restrictions until Friday, when prosecutors dropped a ninth charge that Smith had denied.
Prosecutors say Smith was motivated by a hatred of Britain and its embassy, where he had worked for eight years, and had expressed sympathy with Russian authorities. They claim he was angry that the embassy flew the rainbow flag in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
Smith’s lawyer, Matthew Ryder, said his client denied prosecutors’ description of “why he did what he did and the seriousness of the allegations.” He said Smith did not have “a negative intention towards the U.K.”
Smith was arrested by German police at his home in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin in August 2021 and extradited to the U.K. in April.
He will be sentenced at a later date and faces a maximum 14-year sentence.
The UK government is facing calls to investigate after an unconfirmed media report claimed former British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ phone was hacked while she was foreign secretary.
The UK’s Mail on Sunday newspaper reported that private messages between Truss and international foreign ministers, including messages about the war in Ukraine, as well as messages with former finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng fell “into foreign hands.”
The paper claimed that the hack was discovered during the Conservative Party leadership campaign over the summer, which ultimately saw Truss named prime minister.
The paper also claimed that “agents suspected of working for the Kremlin” were behind the hack, citing unnamed sources.
CNN cannot independently verify the Mail on Sunday claims, whether a hack occurred or who might have been behind it.
CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
A UK government spokesperson told CNN that the government “do not comment on individuals’ security arrangements,” but added it had “robust systems in place to protect against cyber threats.”
Chair of the government’s Defense Select Committee, Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, told Sky News on Sunday that Russia is “getting better and better at these cyber-attacks and hacking.”
“We take the most stringent measures to make sure it doesn’t happen,” he said adding that “it is something for the intelligence and security committee to investigate further.”
UK opposition parties have demanded an investigation into the reported claims.
The Labour Party’s shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement the report raises, “immensely important national security issues… which will have been taken extremely seriously by our intelligence and security agencies.”
The Liberal Democrats foreign affairs spokesperson Layla Moran also called for an “urgent independent investigation to uncover the truth” in a tweet Saturday.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Norway’s domestic security agency has detained a man who entered the country as a Brazilian citizen but is suspected of being a Russian spy, a Norwegian broadcaster reported Tuesday.
The man was arrested Monday in the Arctic city of Tromsoe, Norwegian public broadcaster NRK said, adding that investigators believe he was in Norway under a false name and identity while working for one of Russia’s intelligence services.
Norwegian Police Security Service deputy chief Hedvig Moe told NRK that the man had been based at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsoe as “a Brazilian researcher” and would be expelled from the Scandinavian country “because we believe he represents a threat to fundamental national interests.”
The security service, known as PST, “is concerned that he may have acquired a network and information about Norway’s policy in the northern region,” Moe said, according to NRK. “Even if this network or the information bit by bit is a threat to the security of the kingdom, we are worried that the information could be misused by Russia.”
PST representatives were not immediately available to comment. In a statement, Arctic University of Norway administrator Jørgen Fossland said the person in question was “a guest lecturer” at the school. Fossland referred other questions to the security service.
Several Russian citizens have been detained in Norway in recent weeks. They include three men and a woman who were seen allegedly taking photos in central Norway of objects covered under a photography ban. They have since been released.
European nations have heightened security around key energy, internet and power infrastructure following underwater explosions that ruptured two natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea that were built to deliver Russian gas to Germany.
The damaged Nord Stream pipelines off Sweden and Denmark discharged huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the air.
