TEL AVIV — Israeli officials are becoming guardedly optimistic that a hostage deal with Hamas can be reached, but any agreement is likely to be interim and limited.
A deal is likely to involve just a few dozen captive Israeli children and elderly, among them some dual nationals, including Americans, according to two Israeli officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic of hostages.
The formalizing of humanitarian pauses in northern Gaza has helped progress the talks via the Qataris and Egyptians, the two officials acknowledged. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week agreed to put in place four-hour daily humanitarian pauses in its bombings in Gaza after almost two weeks of pressure from the Biden administration.
But the two officials cautioned that there are still several outstanding issues that could easily derail a deal, including the Hamas militants withholding a complete list of the hostages being held in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas military leadership is also demanding a cease-fire, or a longer humanitarian pause of as much as a week, the Israeli officials said.
David Meidan, a former Mossad intelligence officer, who served for a time as Benjamin Netanyahu’s coordinator on hostage issues, believes that “something is moving under the surface” regarding the hostages. The humanitarian pauses that Netanyahu has agreed to “might lead to some positive steps,” Meidan said in an exclusive interview with POLITICO.
More than a decade ago, Meidan negotiated the deal to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Meidan, who has been counseling the families of the Israeli hostages, has been consulted by U.S. diplomats and Netanyahu’s newly appointed hostage envoy, Gal Hirsch.
Meidan advised Hirsch and the Americans not to waste time juggling different channels of communication and to focus their efforts on identifying mediators able to reach the key decision-makers — namely the Hamas military leaders in Gaza. He said he told them that “the political leaders outside Gaza in Qatar are not so relevant.” They can serve just as go-betweens for messages to the Hamas military leaders, Meidan explained.
The key players
“When I led negotiations 12 years ago, I did not understand in the beginning exactly who the key players were. Finally, I understood that the key person at the time was Ahmed Jabari,” Meidan said.
Jabari in 2006 was commander of the military wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. He was killed subsequently in 2012 in a targeted Israeli airstrike. Now Meidan says Yehya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in the Gaza Strip and one of the founders of the organization’s military wing, is the key player — along with Mohammed Deif, who planned the October 7 terror attack on southern Israel, and Marwan Issa, who is the deputy chief of Hamas’ military wing. “It is those three,” he said.
“The Americans are deeply involved. I have the impression that on the American side there’s a very high level of engagement and it is coming straight from the top,” Meidan said. But the American role can only be limited, and Washington is not best placed to be a negotiator. “What it can do is pressure the Egyptians and Qataris and instill a sense of urgency,” he says. Last week, Mossad chief David Barnea and CIA Director William Burns were in Qatar to discuss ways to win the release of the hostages in Gaza with the Qatari prime minister, according to media reports.
Meidan said the negotiations this time round will be more difficult than what he encountered a dozen years ago. First, he was bartering for just one soldier, not for around 240 captives, mostly civilian; and he wasn’t negotiating against the backdrop of an all-out war.
And though he couldn’t sit opposite Jabari because of Israeli laws, he and the Hamas leader were in adjacent rooms in Cairo during the final stages with the Egyptians ferrying messages back and forth as they bargained. Meidan knew a deal was near when Jabari started to accept that it would be impossible for Israel to release some of the Palestinians that Hamas wanted freed. “That was when I knew he was turning pragmatic,” he said.
‘More complex’
Egyptian generals were crucial in pulling off the Shalit deal, according to Meidan. He thinks they will be key again — including one general who led the Egyptian team in 2006.
“Now it is even more complex,” Meidan said. No one is in adjacent rooms, and it is much more laborious and time-consuming.
“What you have now is the Israelis and the Americans talking with the Qataris, who are then passing messages to the Hamas political leaders in Doha, who then communicate with Gaza. And you have Egyptians talking with Hamas leaders in Gaza. The Israelis draft proposals and the Americans tweak them. The Qataris and the Egyptians make suggestions. The final version is sent to Gaza via the Hamas leaders in Doha,” he added.
Hamas has different ways of communicating between the political and military leaders, including using cell phones, which are easily monitored. “Each round of bargaining takes two to three days” slowing the process and drawing out the bargaining, says Meidan. “It takes a lot of time but, alas, time is of the essence,” he said.
Meidan had wanted Israel to prioritize hostage negotiations much sooner — and before Israel started to pummel Gaza and launch military ground operations.
“Now we are in a different situation,” he said. He faults Netanyahu for dragging his feet. “I listened carefully to the statements of the Hamas leaders, and I got the impression they were taken aback at the international outrage after the terrible October 7 attack and were trying to argue that the worst of what happened wasn’t carried out by their fighters,” Meidan said.
Meidan said the best way to engineer a deal now is to use the humanitarian pauses to push a humanitarian line on Hamas and argue they should reciprocate by freeing captive babies, children, the elderly and the infirm. “But it is very difficult,” he said.
‘Rollercoaster of emotions’
The families of the hostages are getting ever more impatient and desperate, he said. Most are holding off calling for a cease-fire, leaving it to the government to determine the best ways of getting their relatives back, Meidan said. Most are arguing that Netanyahu should release all and any Palestinians held in Israeli jails that Hamas wants freed.
But that could change soon. “They are going through a rollercoaster of emotions and can say different things from day to day — you have to remember there are many relatives involved and they don’t all agree,” Meidan said. But with each passing day, more are saying to me that there should be a cease-fire to save as many hostages as possible,” he said.
If the hostage families as a group begin to call for a cease-fire, it could shift domestic Israeli politics dramatically, presenting Netanyahu with a potentially explosive political moment, say opposition politicians. The war aims to wreck Hamas’ military capabilities, defang the organization to prevent any repetition of October 7 has enormous public backing, but if Israel is faced with a stark choice of choosing between the hostages and the military campaign, then Israelis will prioritize getting the captives released, say some opposition politicians.
“Basically, if you ask me, the hostages have to come first, we should get them home,” Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party and leader of the opposition, told POLITICO. Although he said he thought in practical terms Israel won’t be faced with such a black-and-white dilemma. But if it is, “we will have our chance to kill whoever we need to kill afterwards. If we are faced with a choice, then we must go with the hostages because that is the basic contract the country has with the families,” he added.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agrees that there doesn’t have to be a clear-cut choice. “I am not sure it will come to an either-or. I don’t think that if Israel stops now, then we’ll get the hostages. And I don’t think that if we don’t stop, we will lose the hostages,” he said.
“When we negotiated the release of Gilad Shalit, we were still confronting Hamas and killing terrorists and they never harmed him because they understood he was an asset and a bargaining chip which they didn’t want to lose. They protect the assets,” he said. But he and other politicians acknowledge say that if the families of the hostages call en masse for a cease-fire, it will roil Israel’s domestic politics.
LONDON — The U.K. has delivered long-range missiles to Ukraine in a move which grants Kyiv the ability to strike targets in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the House of Commons Thursday that the Storm Shadow missiles, promised by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in February, “are now going into or are in the country itself” and will complement other long-range systems already gifted to the country including HIMARS and Harpoon missiles.
“The donation of these weapons systems gives the Ukrainians the best chance to defend themselves against Russia’s continued brutality, especially the deliberate targeting of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, which is against international law,” Wallace said.
The Storm Shadow missiles, jointly developed by Britain and France, have arrived in time for Ukraine’s long-anticipated spring counter-offensive against Russian forces. They have a range of about 560 kilometers — the necessary range to strike deep into Russian-occupied territories in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, including Crimea.
Wallace said these systems “are not even in the same league” as some missiles being used by Russia, including its AS-24 or Killjoy hypersonic missiles or even the Kalibr-cruise missile with a range of over 2,000 km.
And the British defense secretary described the move to donate these weapons as a “calibrated and proportionate response to Russia’s escalations.”
Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, warned Britain’s move would “demand an adequate response from our military, which will, naturally, from a military point of view, find corresponding solutions.” He did not provide further details.
‘Push back’
Kyiv has long lobbied allies, including Britain and the U.S., for longer-range missiles — and it is still trying to obtain U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile Systems {ATACMS). But some Western allies harbor concerns Ukraine could use long-range missiles to strike against Russian territory, potentially triggering a further escalation in Moscow’s response.
Wallace stressed that “the use of Storm Shadow will allow Ukraine to push back Russian forces based within Ukrainian sovereign territory” — but stopped short of clarifying whether this meant the British government now expects Ukraine to use them to strike Russian-occupied regions.
The British move has U.S. President Joe Biden’s team breathing a quiet sigh of relief, according to multiple U.S. officials who spoke to POLITICO. They hope it will silence critics who want the U.S. to send ATACMS since Ukraine may soon get the long-range capability from London.
Asked if the administration might follow Britain’s lead in sending long-range missiles, one U.S. official, who like others wasn’t authorized to detail internal deliberations, said “our policy on ATACMS has not changed.” Instead, the official said the U.S. will continue to provide air-defense capabilities like Patriots, ammunition and armored vehicles.
Alexander Ward contributed reporting from Washington D.C.
HONOLULU (AP) — USS Arizona sailor Lou Conter lived through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor even though his battleship exploded and sank after being pierced by aerial bombs.
That makes the now 101-year-old somewhat of a celebrity, especially on the anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, assault. Many call him and others in the nation’s dwindling pool of Pearl Harbor survivors heroes.
Conter rejects the characterization.
“The 2,403 men that died are the heroes. And we’ve got to honor them ahead of everybody else. And I’ve said that every time, and I think it should be stressed,” Conter said in a recent interview at his Grass Valley, California, home north of Sacramento.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Navy and the National Park Service will host a remembrance ceremony at Pearl Harbor in honor of those killed.
Last year about 30 survivors and some 100 other veterans of the war made the pilgrimage to the annual event. But the U.S. Navy and the National Park Service anticipate only one or two survivors will likely attend in person this year. Another 20 to 30 veterans of World War II are also expected to be there.
Conter won’t be among them. He attended for many years, most recently in 2019. But his doctor has told him the five-hour flight, plus hours of waiting at airports, is too strenuous for him now.
“I’m going on 102 now. It’s kind of hard to mess around,” Conter said.
Instead he plans to watch a video feed of this year’s 81st anniversary observance from home. He’s also recorded a message that will be played for those attending.
Conter’s autobiography “The Lou Conter Story” recounts how one of the Japanese bombs penetrated five steel decks on the Arizona and ignited over 1 million pounds of gunpowder and thousands of pounds of ammunition.
“The ship was consumed in a giant fireball that looked as if it engulfed everything from the mainmast forward,” he wrote.
He joined other survivors in tending to the injured, many of whom were blinded and badly burned. The sailors only abandoned ship when their senior surviving officer was sure they had rescued all those still alive.
The Arizona’s 1,177 dead account for nearly half the servicemen killed in the bombing. The battleship today sits where it sank 81 years ago, with more than 900 of its dead still entombed inside.
Conter wasn’t injured at Pearl Harbor, during World War II or the Korean War.
This year’s remembrance ceremony is the first to be open to the public since the 2019. The pandemic forced the adoption of strict public health measures for the last two years.
David Kilton, the National Park Service’s chief of interpretation for Pearl Harbor, said he’s not sure how many people will attend but they’re anticipating between 2,000 to 3,000 people.
It will be held at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial visitors center which overlooks the water and the white structure built to honor those killed on the Arizona.
Organizers have set a theme of “Everlasting Legacy” for this year’s ceremony, highlighting how fewer and fewer survivors remain.
“We honestly have to know and be prepared that eventually we won’t have the ability to connect with their stories and have them with us anymore,” Kilton said. “And it’s hard to to come to grips with that reality.”
Conter went to flight school after Pearl Harbor, earning his wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to look for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with a “Black Cats” squadron, which conducted dive bombing at night in planes painted black.
One night in 1943 he and his crew had to avoid a dozen or so nearby sharks after they were shot down near New Guinea.
When one sailor expressed doubt they would survive, Conter responded “baloney.”
“Don’t ever panic in any situation. Survive is the first thing you tell them. Don’t panic or you’re dead,” he said. They were quiet and treaded water until another plane came and dropped them a lifeboat hours later.
In the late 1950s, he was made the Navy’s first SERE officer — which is an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. He spent the next decade training Navy pilots and crew on how to survive if they’re shot down in the jungle and captured as a prisoner of war. Some of his pupils used his instruction to live through years as POWs in Vietnam.
These days, he spends his time going to his favorite breakfast spot twice a week and going out for Mexican food every Friday night. He enjoys visiting with friends and watching TV.
Conter hasn’t forgotten his shipmates. He said he’d like the military to try to identify 85 Arizona sailors who were buried as unknowns in a Honolulu cemetery after the war.
“They should never give up on that issue. If they’re ever identified, I’m sure their families would want to bury them at home or wherever, but they should never give up on trying to identify them,” he said.
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.”
HONOLULU — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Hawaii this week amid lingering community frustration and distrust after jet fuel from a military storage facility last year spilled into Pearl Harbor’s drinking water, poisoned thousands of military families and threatened the purity of Honolulu’s water supply.
Austin traveled to the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in the hills above Pearl Harbor on Friday and met the commander of the joint task force in charge of draining its tanks so it can be shut down.
He also met with several families affected by the fuel spill and Hawaii state officials, the military said in a news release. The meetings were closed to the media, and Austin didn’t hold a news conference afterward.
Outside Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, several dozen protesters held signs saying “Navy Lies” and “Shut Down Red Hill.” People driving by — including many exiting the base — honked in support.
Samantha McCoy, whose husband is in the Air Force, said her family suffered migraines, rashes, skin sores and gastrointestinal problems that only subsided when they moved out of military housing last month.
She called on Austin to make more medical care available to families.
“It took four months of daily migraines to even get a referral to a neurologist. And that’s really unacceptable,” she said at the protest.
Cheri Burness, who lives in Navy housing, won’t drink the tap water in the house she shares with her sailor husband and their two teenage children because she doesn’t believe that it’s safe 10 months after the spill.
Her family has spent $3,000 of their own money to install filters on all the faucets in the house so they can bathe, brush their teeth and wash their dishes. She spends $70 to $100 a month to have water delivered to their home for drinking. They also use bottled water.
She recalled how Navy leaders initially told Pearl Harbor water users their water was safe to drink after the November spill. The Navy only told people to stop drinking their tap water after the state Department of Health stepped in.
The Navy later flushed clean water through its pipes to cleanse them. In March, the state Department of Health said the tap water in all residential areas served by the Navy’s water system was safe to drink.
But Burness said she never got to see the reports for her house after it was tested. She was only told her water was good.
“I don’t trust them because cause they did nothing to show me that it ever was fine,” Burness said in a telephone interview.
A Navy investigation released in July showed a cascading series of errors, complacency and a lack of professionalism led to the fuel spill, which contaminated tap water used by 93,000 people on the Navy’s water system.
Nearly 6,000 sought medical attention for nausea, headaches and rashes. Some continue to complain of health problems.
The military put families up in hotels for several months, but stopped paying once the health department cleared people to resume drinking their tap water.
Kristina Baehr, an attorney with Texas-based Just Well Law, sued the federal government last month on behalf of four families but said she will be adding more individuals from among the 700 clients she represents. Burness and McCoy are among her clients.
“They didn’t warn them to stop drinking it, and 6,000 people went to the emergency room,” she said. “Then, many of these people have only gotten sicker over time.”
Baehr said her clients were not among those chosen to speak to Austin. If they had such an opportunity, she said they would tell him to have officials stop saying no one is medically affected by the spill and that there are no long-term effects.
They would also encourage him to provide appropriate medical care to families, safe housing because families claim the homes were not properly remediated, and compassionate reassignment to other bases to all those who ask.
“A lot of people are still stuck in the houses that made them sick,” she said. “So it’s very simple, let people out of the houses that made them sick and fix the houses so that they’re safe for the next people.”
The spill upset a broad cross-spectrum of Hawaii, from liberals to conservatives and veterans to environmentalists. Many Native Hawaiians have been angered given the centrality of water in Hawaii’s Indigenous traditions. It has also increased deep-seated distrust of the U.S. military among many Native Hawaiians that dates to the U.S. military-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.
Dani Espiritu, who was also at Friday’s protest, said the military was taking risks with Native Hawaiian lives, land and culture.
“All of our cultural practices are tied to aina,” she said, using the Hawaiian word for land. “And so as you poison aina and jeopardize the health and well-being of communities, you are also jeopardizing every traditional practice that are tied to those places.”
The military plans to drain fuel from the tanks by July 2024 to comply with a Hawaii Department of Health order to shut down the facility.
Honolulu’s water utility and the Sierra Club of Hawaii have expressed concerns about the threat Red Hill poses to Oahu’s water supply ever since 2014, when fuel leaked from one of the storage tanks. But the Navy reassured the public that their water was safe and that it was operating the storage facility properly.
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Associated Press writer Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.
