A construção de um megaempreendimento de energia eólica ameaça soterrar sítios arqueológicos pré-históricos, secar nascentes de rios e devastar áreas de vegetação preservada entre o sertão da Paraíba e do Rio Grande do Norte – além de expulsar populações quilombolas e de agricultores familiares descendentes de indígenas ali estabelecidos.

Batizado de Complexo Eólico Pedra Lavrada, o projeto prevê a instalação de 372 aerogeradores, em aproximadamente 1,6 mil hectares, numa região conhecida como Seridó. Atualmente, o empreendimento aguarda a emissão da licença pela Superintendência de Administração do Meio Ambiente da Paraíba, onde tramita o processo, para iniciar as obras. O prazo estimado para conclusão da implantação do projeto é de 26 meses, a partir da obtenção da licença.

A empresa responsável é a Ventos de São Cleófas Energias Renováveis, um braço da Casa dos Ventos – gigante brasileira do setor, com 35% de capital da multinacional de combustíveis francesa TotalEnergies.

Oito cidades do Seridó fazem parte do projeto. No Rio Grande do Norte: Currais Novos, Acari, Carnaúba dos Dantas e Parelhas; e, na Paraíba, Pedra Lavrada, Nova Palmeira, Picuí e Frei Martinho.

As torres e acessos, quando instalados, vão ficar bem próximos de um conjunto de 40 sítios arqueológicos, visto como um dos principais patrimônios histórico-culturais do país, segundo o historiador e arqueólogo Joadson Vagner Silva, que já prestou consultoria para outros projetos eólicos. São lugares de vestígios únicos no mundo, com a presença de pinturas e gravuras rupestres em grutas, fragmentos de rochas lascadas utilizadas como ferramentas, restos de fogueiras e sepultamentos de populações ancestrais que ali viviam. Um dos restos ósseos mais antigos é de uma criança e remonta a aproximadamente 9,4 mil anos, de acordo com pesquisadores que fizeram as escavações no local.

Uma análise dos bens arqueológicos indica que, naquele território, houve densas populações indígenas nômades, divididas em pequenos grupos que viviam com base na caça e na coleta de frutos e plantas silvestres.

“O modo de vida deles era baseado em acampamentos e um dos principais vestígios deixados por eles são fogueiras, muito presentes aqui. A mais antiga identificada tem 3.600 anos. Isso tudo está em risco agora. O que causa estranheza é que a empresa não identificou nenhum desses vestígios”, afirmou Silva.

Ele faz parte de um grupo de 49 membros da sociedade civil que se uniram para tentar barrar o projeto como foi apresentado. Eles redigiram uma nota técnica, enviada ao Ministério Público Federal, às promotorias estaduais, a órgãos do governo dos dois estados envolvidos e a institutos como o Iphan e o Incra na qual apontam uma série de falhas e inconsistências no estudo e no relatório de impacto ambiental apresentados pela Ventos de São Cleófas.

‘O que nos preocupa é a proximidade do empreendimento com essas áreas. O patrimônio arqueológico é um testemunho, uma página de um livro da história de toda a população brasileira’.

Uma das inconsistências diz respeito justamente à falta de identificação dos sítios, especialmente das fogueiras, todas ignoradas pela empresa no primeiro estudo apresentado. No relatório de avaliação de impacto entregue ao Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, o Iphan, a companhia cita apenas a Cachoeira do Pedro, um dos 40 sítios arqueológicos do local. E, nessa única indicação, a distância entre o sítio e a área diretamente afetada pelo empreendimento está errada. A empresa indica que a localidade fica a 1,2 quilômetro do parque, quando fica bem mais próximo, a 290 metros, de acordo com os pesquisadores do Seridó Vivo.

“O que nos preocupa é a proximidade do empreendimento com essas áreas. O patrimônio arqueológico é um testemunho, uma página de um livro da história de toda a população brasileira”, defendeu Silva.

Outros sítios ignorados pela empresa ficam ainda mais próximos da área afetada, como o Casa de Pedra e o Sítio Pote, respectivamente a 40 metros e 60 metros da área onde serão instalados os aerogeradores. Há ainda um conjunto de 20 sítios pré-coloniais, que circundam os riachos do Bojo e Olho d’Água, por onde se pretende abrir uma estrada exclusiva para a operação do parque eólico. O sítio Casa Santa, por exemplo, um dos mais importantes da região, está situado a 530 metros de uma área reservada para três torres de produção de energia, segundo o arqueólogo Silva.

Próximos a essas localidades está o cemitério das Cruzes, um lugar de peregrinação no qual foram sepultadas vítimas de uma epidemia de cólera, no fim do século 19. E vizinho a ele, a 650 metros do complexo eólico, está o sítio Pedra do Alexandre, um cemitério indígena pré-histórico com registros de enterramentos feitos ao longo de 8 mil anos. Os possíveis danos a esses locais também estão ausentes no estudo de impacto elaborado pela Ventos de São Cleófas.

Os sepultamentos indígenas, comuns em todo o Seridó, rememoram um grande massacre cometido entre os séculos 17 e 18, que ficou conhecido como Guerra dos Bárbaros. Os pesquisadores julgam ser um dos episódios de resistência nativa contra a invasão portuguesa, com um fim comum à história de colonização no país: a escravização e a consequente dizimação das populações indígenas.

“Esse patrimônio arqueológico é o testemunho da grandeza de todos esses povos originários que existiam na área e deve ser visto com respeito e consideração a essas populações”, explicou Silva.

O arqueólogo se diz bem preocupado com as as grandes explosões necessárias para a abertura das estradas e das covas onde serão construídas as bases dos aerogeradores, equipamentos com 105 metros de altura por 150 metros de diâmetro, cada um.

“Nos estudos de impacto ambiental e na audiência pública não foi mencionada a autorização para os explosivos. Mas as explosões, em áreas montanhosas com rocha, são imprescindíveis em um empreendimento dessa envergadura”, alertou o arqueólogo.

Procurada, a Casa dos Ventos disse que não há risco de soterramento de bens arqueológicos , “visto que o projeto está sendo concebido a uma distância segura dos sítios identificados, o que será ratificado tempestivamente dentro do trâmite do licenciamento arqueológico junto ao Iphan”.

Afirmou ainda que as atividades de detonação e movimentação de terra serão assistidas por programas ambientais seguindo “as melhores práticas da engenharia”. Questionada sobre a ausência dos sítios no relatório, a Casa dos Ventos informou que trata-se de um “arranjo preliminar” seguindo “a legislação vigente para esta etapa de análise”. A empresa reforçou que não identificou nenhum sítio na área diretamente afetada pelo projeto e que novos estudos serão feitos posteriormente com assistência do Iphan.

Patrimônio natural

A s serras buscadas pelo empreendimento contradizem o senso comum sobre a Caatinga, de que por lá só existem terra seca e pequenos arbustos retorcidos. O trecho de interesse da Ventos de São Cleófas é predominantemente úmido, esverdeado e possui um ecossistema rico em plantas e animais em risco de extinção.

Nesse local, a empresa planeja desmatar 1.477 hectares de vegetação nativa. A supressão vegetal nessa área para instalação do parque eólico pode decretar a morte da biodiversidade, transformando essa faixa preservada em deserto.
“A grande preocupação é que a Caatinga acabe desaparecendo”, explicou o biólogo Damião de Oliveira, mestre em Ecologia pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, e também integrante do projeto Seridó Vivo.

Embora a preservação vegetal conserve a umidade nas serras, o Seridó está no semiárido brasileiro e, naturalmente, sofre com a falta de chuvas. A média pluviométrica da região é de no máximo 600 milímetros ao ano – para fins de comparação, é a mesma quantidade de água registrada em três dias durante a trágica tempestade no litoral norte de São Paulo, no fim de fevereiro, de acordo com o Centro de Pesquisas Meteorológicas e Climáticas Aplicadas à Agricultura da Unicamp.

Grandes empreendimentos, como o Complexo Pedra Lavrada, demandam muita água local para a construção das estruturas dos aerogeradores e das estradas. Para suprir a falta de chuva, a Ventos de São Cleófas sugeriu a perfuração generalizada de poços artesianos. O problema é que a água subterrânea é um bem raro na região, já que, além da estiagem, a estrutura rochosa do Seridó naturalmente dificulta a infiltração da água no solo.

’A história dessas pessoas está inscrita nos territórios. Se você tira o território, não tem mais história, não tem mais memória, não tem mais marcas’.

Além do risco de secar os rios, existe a possibilidade de contaminar a água com o óleo que cai dos aerogeradores e do maquinário, conforme a própria empresa prevê no estudo ambiental. O documento indica que o projeto terá interferência direta em 16 cursos d’água que abastecem a bacia do rio Piranhas-Açu, a principal fonte hídrica das comunidades ali instaladas.

O parque também ameaça o movimento de aves que migram para a região nos períodos chuvosos em busca de refúgio para fazer seus ninhos. Além disso, aves de rapina são comumente vítimas das pás dos aerogeradores em parques eólicos já em funcionamento.

Populações de morcegos também podem ser drasticamente afetadas com a chegada do complexo – tanto pelo risco de colisão quanto pela destruição do habitat. Sem eles, a engrenagem da Caatinga não gira.

“Os morcegos realizam uma parte significativa da polinização de muitas plantas do bioma. Quanto mais empreendimentos, mais impacto a essas populações. Isso pode levar a um colapso desse ecossistema”, afirmou o biólogo.

A Casa dos Ventos diz que realizou estudos suficientes para avaliação “de todos os impactos ambientais para o empreendimento”. A empresa afirmou que o estudo foi conduzido por mais de 30 profissionais, ao longo de três anos de trabalho, e que, por meio dele, foram propostos 31 programas ambientais e ações de para garantir a viabilidade do projeto.

Síndrome de turbina e ameaça aos quilombolas

À s margens da área prevista para o complexo eólico, estão comunidades quilombolas e de agricultores familiares com ascendência indígena, em ao menos seis dos oito municípios envolvidos no projeto. Muitas comunidades não são tituladas pelo Incra, embora sejam reconhecidas por si próprias e pela tradição oral que se manteve dos antepassados. De acordo com os pesquisadores do Seridó Vivo, muitas não foram consultadas adequadamente sobre o projeto, conforme prevê a Convenção 169 da Organização Internacional do Trabalho, a OIT.

“O relatório de impacto ambiental só conta as comunidades cadastradas no Incra. Como poucas comunidades são tituladas, eles não levam em conta quase nenhuma comunidade quilombola, nem os descendentes de indígenas. Eles tentam apagar que existem comunidades tradicionais que vão ser afetadas”, criticou a antropóloga Julie Antoinette Cavignac, professora da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande Norte.

Alguns aerogeradores estão projetados para ficar distantes 400 ou 500 metros das casas dos quilombolas, o que pode comprometer as estruturas dos imóveis e gerar distúrbios mentais relacionados ao constante barulho das hélices. O principal deles é conhecido pela comunidade científica como “síndrome da turbina”, que gera dores de cabeça, náuseas, raiva, ansiedade, insônia e falta de concentração.

Os efeitos, de acordo com Cavignac, tendem a expulsar gradualmente as populações tradicionais do território .“A história dessas pessoas está inscrita nos territórios. Se você tira o território, não tem mais história, não tem mais memória, não tem mais marcas”, analisou a antropóloga.

Uma das comunidades diretamente afetadas, não reconhecida pelo Incra, é a Comunidade Negra Serra do Abreu, onde a Ventos de São Cleófas planejou abrir uma estrada. Lá, atualmente, vivem 34 famílias.

Diana Barbosa dos Santos, presidente da Associação Comunidade Negra Serra do Abreu, contou que, há alguns anos, representantes da Casa dos Ventos começaram a visitar a comunidade e a apresentar o projeto eólico como se fossem mil maravilhas.

“Procuraram meu sogro diversas vezes para ele assinar documentos. Ele assinou vários papéis sem ler, porque o estudo dele é pouco. Diziam que iam pagar alguma coisa, mas nunca recebeu um centavo”, detalhou.

Para Maria das Neves Valentim, articuladora do Fórum Mudanças Climáticas do núcleo do Rio Grande do Norte, a possível repulsão das comunidades tradicionais é a continuidade de uma história de exploração e descaso no semiárido nordestino.
“A natureza desse projeto é a atualização, com a falácia da sustentabilidade, do velho colonialismo extrativista, como foi com a cana-de-açúcar. Ou seja, somos um quintalzão. Agora, nós somos uma fazenda para produzir energia”, comparou.

The post Projeto de energia eólica ameaça destruir passado e futuro do Brasil numa tacada só appeared first on The Intercept .

When bureaucrats get big promotions, they tend to receive congratulations from their friends, but after Christopher Miller landed the biggest job of his life, his wife and some of his colleagues were horrified.

It was November 9, 2020, the day President Donald Trump fired his secretary of defense, Mark Esper. It was widely assumed that Trump would install an acolyte who would do whatever was needed to help the defeated president stay in power. Esper, just days before, had confided to a journalist, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real yes man. And then God help us.”

Trump appointed Miller, an unknown whose rise was so far-fetched that the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, had to Google his new boss to figure out who he was. Wikipedia was useless because at the time, Miller didn’t merit an entry.

After retiring from the Army as a Special Forces colonel in 2014, Miller moved from one mid-level job to another in Washington, D.C., a nobody in a city of somebodies. Things began to pick up after Trump’s election, and by August 2020, he was promoted to director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Just three months later, he was summoned to the Oval Office and put in charge of the world’s most powerful military.

“I’m at work on a Monday morning, and the phone rings, and they’re like, ‘Get your ass down here,’” Miller said in an interview, referring to the moment he was called to the White House. “I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”

Miller knew his name was circulating in the White House, but the announcement came abruptly and was not greeted with warmth by his life partner. “Yeah, my wife is like, ‘The only thing we have is our name and you’re ruining it,’” Miller recalled. “She’s like, ‘You’re an idiot. I think this is the stupidest thing that’s ever happened.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes dear, I know that.’”

As improbable Washington stories go, Miller’s blink-and-it’s-over journey from Beltway nothingness to what his detractors regard as a semi-witting participant in a plot to overthrow the constitutional order — well, it’s quite something. Miller was in charge of the Pentagon on January 6, 2021, and is accused of delaying the deployment of National Guard troops so the mob that beat its way into the Capitol might succeed in creating more than a pause in the Senate’s count of Electoral College votes. At a combative oversight hearing a few months later, Democratic members of Congress derided Miller as “AWOL,” “disgusting,” and “ridiculous,” to which he responded, “Thank you for your thoughts.”

As is customary, Miller has written a memoir of his extremely brief time in power, “ Soldier Secretary ,” published last month by Center Street, whose other authors include Newt Gingrich and Betsy DeVos. It’s a typical Washington book in many ways — revealing at times, suspect at others. For instance, Miller describes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as suffering a “total nuclear meltdown” during a phone call with him on January 6, but there is no evidence for that characterization. His book sticks closely to the Beltway norm of having a principal character who displays calmness and reason while others go nuts; the principal character is the author.

His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

But just as Miller’s journey to the top is atypical, so too is his obscenity-flecked memoir, because the retired soldier emerges as a scorched-earth critic of the institution he served for more than three decades and presided over for 73 days. He wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex, and he describes the invasion of Iraq as an unjust war based on lies. His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

“Today, there are virtually no brakes on the American war machine,” Miller writes. “Military leaders are always predisposed to see war as a solution, because when you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail. The establishments of both major political parties are overwhelmingly dominated by interventionists and internationalists who believe that America can and should police the world. Even the press — once so skeptical of war during the Vietnam era — is today little more than a brood of bloodthirsty vampires cheering on American missile strikes and urging greater involvement in conflicts America has no business fighting.”

I was as surprised as everyone else when I heard the news about Miller’s appointment, but it’s not because I had to Google him. I knew who he was. We first met in Afghanistan in 2001, when he was a leader of the Special Forces unit that chased the Taliban out of their final stronghold, and I was reporting on that for the New York Times Magazine. I got to know him and wrote an article in 2002 about his Afghan combat and his preparations for the Iraq invasion the following year. With the publication of his memoir, Miller is now making the media rounds, so we got together again.

After more than two decades of the forever wars, Miller is pissed off in the way a lot of former soldiers are pissed off — and, I have to say, in the way a lot of former war reporters are pissed off too. It’s hard to have been a participant in those calamities and not feel betrayed in some fashion, as pundits attempt to whitewash the disaster and promotions are announced for officials who masterminded it. Miller’s evolution from Special Forces operator to Trump Cabinet member is a forever wars parable that helps us understand the moral injury festering in our political corpus.

A Historic Error

Miller’s 9/11 journey got into literal high gear when he roared into Kandahar in a Toyota pickup with blown-out windows. It was December 2001, he was a 36-year-old major in the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, and this was his first combat deployment.

I spotted Miller at the entrance to a compound on the outskirts of the city. Until a few days earlier, it had been the residence of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban who, after Osama bin Laden, was the most hunted man in the country. The scene was surreal because the compound was now the temporary home of Hamid Karzai, the soon-to-be leader of Afghanistan, whose security was guaranteed by Miller’s soldiers. These just-arrived Americans were dressed half in camouflage, half in fleece jackets, and they sported the types of accessories that ordinary GIs were prohibited from having, such as beards and long hair. Mixed among them were Afghan fighters with AK-47s who had fought with the Taliban not long ago but switched loyalties, which is an accepted practice in Afghanistan when your team is losing.

I struck up a conversation with Miller, a tall officer with bushy red hair and a wicked-looking assault weapon slung over his shoulder. Most of his soldiers were silent and grim — they weren’t happy about the journalists who had shown up — but Miller, who recognized my name because he had read my memoir on the Bosnian war, was friendly and answered a few questions. I asked if he had been to Bosnia, and he gave me a vague special operator laugh and said, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” As it turned out, he’d worked undercover in Bosnia in the late 1990s alongside CIA operatives tracking Serb war criminals.

I stayed in Kandahar for a while longer, as did Miller. We were both spending time around the city’s U.S.-installed warlord, Gul Agha Shirzai , whom Miller describes in his book as “a self-serving piece of shit,” which is totally accurate. After we both returned to America, I got Miller to invite me to spend a few days at his battalion’s headquarters at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We talked for hours about what happened in Afghanistan, about the soldiers he lost, about the Al Qaeda fighters he helped kill, and about the next war on the horizon (this was a year before the illegal invasion of Iraq). Miller was as friendly and transparent as I could hope for from a Special Forces officer. His favorite word was “knucklehead,” which he sometimes used to describe himself .

Miller didn’t know it at the time, but he was at the cusp of a profound disenchantment with the country’s military and political leaders, a disillusionment he shared with a lot of soldiers, thanks to the deceptions and errors embedded in the wars they fought. Miller is exceptional only in his Cabinet-level end point. While it’s important to remember that the vast bulk of these veterans are law-abiding, a small but influential group have been radicalized to violence rather than government service.

Veterans are one of the key subjects in historian Kathleen Belew’s lauded book about right-wing extremism, titled “ Bring the War Home .” American history teaches us a consistent lesson: There will almost always be blowback at home from wars fought elsewhere. Of 968 people indicted after the storming of the Capitol, 131 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Due to the respect military service generates among civilians in right-wing movements, veterans composed a disproportionately large number of the ringleaders on January 6, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes , who was convicted of seditious conspiracy last year.

Soon after we met in 2001, Miller noticed omens of dysfunction in the American war machine. It began, he wrote in his book, with a visit to the airport that U.S. Marines seized outside Kandahar a few days after the Special Forces sped into town in their four-wheel-drive vehicles. Miller and one of his sergeants had to pick up supplies at the airport, and they saw Marines putting up a big tent. The sergeant told Miller, “Sir, it’s time for us to get the fuck out of here.” Miller asked why, and the sergeant replied, “They’re building the PX. It’s time for the Green Berets to leave.”

“We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater.”

He meant the military was settling in for the long haul. Sprawling bases would be constructed with Burger King and Pizza Hut outlets, staffed by workers flown in from Nepal, Kenya, and other countries. There would be more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the peak of President Barack Obama’s surge, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the country, yielding decades of full employment for generals and executives in the weapons industry. Miller had a front-row seat at this carnival. “We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater,” he told me. In other words, quickly arrange a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban rather than try to eliminate the Taliban and leave a small number of special operators to find and kill Osama bin Laden and the remnants of Al Qaeda.

I don’t think Miller sensed all this when he saw that tent going up; nobody knew what was going to happen that early in the game. And remember, you can’t trust Beltway memoirs; they’re a racket of myth construction. But locating the exact moment of Miller’s awareness is less important than the fact he eventually recognized, as most of us did, a historic error that he blamed on his leadership. “As soon as we went conventional, that war was lost,” Miller said. “That’s what I’ll take to my grave. As soon as we brought in the Army generals and all their big ideas — war was over at that point.”

The Betrayal

Like many veterans, Miller participated in not just the Afghanistan disaster, but also the one in Iraq. There he had an even stronger sense of betrayal.

As the invasion neared, Miller was responsible for operational planning for his Special Forces battalion, and he put together a blueprint for seizing an airfield southwest of Baghdad as an advance position for the capture of Iraq’s capital. He thought the buildup was a bluff to coerce Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein into giving up the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration insisted he possessed (though he did not). In Miller’s telling, it wasn’t until he was geared up in an MH-53 helicopter at night, heading deep into Iraq, that he knew it was on. The future acting defense secretary turned to a soldier next to him and said, “We’re really doing this. I can’t believe we’re fucking doing this.” According to Miller, the soldier replied, “Me neither.”

Miller and I were sitting in a café at the public library in Westport, Connecticut — he lives in northern Virginia and was visiting this wealthy suburb for a fundraiser for a play about the Special Forces. He was dressed in khaki pants and a casual shirt, and his shag of red hair from 20 years ago was gone; it had thinned out to a distinguished-looking silver. He is 57 years old now and looks no different from any other close-to-senior citizen killing time at a library (same goes for me, I should confess). He sipped his coffee and continued, “Invading a sovereign country is a big deal, you know. We typically don’t do that except in extenuating circumstances. I thought it was all coercive diplomacy. Then when it goes down, you’re like, ‘Damn.’” As he writes in his book, “I had been an active participant in an unjust war. We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a god-damned lie.”

“You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army. But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If your nation calls on you to send your comrades to their deaths in battle, you expect it will be for a good reason; soldiers have a lot more at stake than Beltway hawks for whom a bad day consists of getting bumped from their hit on CNN or Fox. That’s why Miller describes himself as “white-hot” angry toward the leaders who lied or dissembled and suffered no consequences; many have profited in retirement, thanks to amply compensated speaking gigs and board seats . “You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army,” Miller told me. “But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If that line came from a pundit, it would be a platitude. But Miller described to me the case of a soldier he knew well who was forced out of the military for not having the paperwork for a machine gun he left in Afghanistan for troops replacing his unit. The soldier was trying to help other soldiers who didn’t have all the weapons they needed. It didn’t matter; he was gone, and Miller couldn’t stop it.

Miller trembled a bit as he narrated this story. Maybe he was on the verge of tears; I couldn’t be sure. There’s a saying in journalism that if your mother says she loves you, check it out. Never trust a source, especially one selling a book and an image of himself. As these things always are, our conversation was a bit of a performance by each of us, both trying to get out of the other as much as we could. Miller’s intentions were hard to pin down, but his anger was not. I had seen some of what he had seen.

In 2014, after three decades in the Army and more than a dozen deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bosnia, and elsewhere, Miller retired. He had a lot of baggage to deal with. As he writes, “For years I had been cramming unpleasant memories into a box and storing them on a shelf deep in the recesses of my psyche, knowing that someday I’d have to unpack each one.”

He set a goal: Complete a marathon in less than three hours. His long practice runs of 15-25 miles were, as he put it, therapy sessions to work through the wreckage of the wars he fought and “a simmering sense of betrayal that every veteran today must feel — the recognition that so many sacrifices were ultimately made in the service of a lie, as in Iraq, or to further a delusion.” After running that marathon, he entered a 50-mile race on the Appalachian Trail and finished in less than eight hours, ranking second in his age group .

There were no epiphanies at the end. Physical exhaustion would not eliminate his bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan. “It still makes my blood boil,” he writes, “and it probably will until the day I die.”

More Juice

While Miller describes himself as falling “ass-backwards” into the job of acting secretary of defense, you don’t rise to the top by mistake in Washington, and people who run ultramarathons don’t tend to be lily pads just floating along. Miller has a gosh-darn way of talking, and even his detractors describe him as affable, but he’s a special operator, and you shouldn’t forget that. After retiring from the military, he made a series of canny moves to join the National Security Council, at the White House and pair up with a key figure in Trump’s orbit, Kash Patel.

Patel became Washington famous in the first years of the Trump era because, as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, he played a behind-the-scenes role in the GOP effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In early 2019, Patel was rewarded with a job on the NSC, reportedly on direct orders from Trump. Miller had joined the NSC the previous year as senior director for counterterrorism and transnational threats, and Patel became his deputy. Miller claims that initially, he was wary.

“I got online and Wikipedia’d him, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is the crazy guy,” he told me with a laugh.

What happened next could be a how-to guide for Beltway strivers.

“I just had convening authority,” Miller recalled of his time at the NSC. “I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit.’ So I went to the Pentagon and took a job as a political appointee because I needed to have money and people.”

It was early 2020 when he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism. This gave him greater influence over the hunt for ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, which had been his obsession at the NSC. Yet it wasn’t enough. As Miller describes it, “Now I had people, now I had money, but still not being very successful. … I still need more juice.”

One of his friends in the administration made a suggestion: Why don’t you shoot for a Senate-confirmed position?

“I was like, ‘That gives me more wasta , right?’” Miller said, using an Arabic word for clout. “And I’m like, ‘Shit yeah.’”

Trump nominated him to head the National Counterterrorism Center, and on August 6, the Senate confirmed him in a unanimous voice vote.

“So now I’ve got more fucking throw weight,” Miller continued. “Patel’s working in the National Security Council with the president. We’re starting to grind down the resistors.” The resistance, he said, was against a heightened effort he and Patel advocated to finish off the remaining leaders of Al Qaeda and rescue a handful of remaining American hostages.

Miller was invited for a talk with Johnny McEntee, the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. In the twilight of the Trump era, McEntee was one of the president’s most loyal confidantes; though just 29 years old at the time, he was described, in a magazine article , as the “deputy president.” Miller knew through the grapevine that he might be in line for Esper’s job because the administration had just a few Senate-confirmed officials with national security credentials. McEntee was sizing him up.

“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ because I didn’t want the job,” Miller told me.

This was part of Miller’s “ass-backwards” shtick. Why grind as hard as he did to stop short of the biggest prize of all? I pushed back, and he acknowledged that while the job might “suck really, really badly,” it could be worthwhile even if Trump lost the election. “I had a work list,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘I can get a lot of shit done.’” His main tasks, he told me, included stabilizing the Pentagon after Esper’s ouster; withdrawing the remaining U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia; and elevating special operations forces in the Department of Defense’s hierarchy.

Just before the election, he heard the shuffle was imminent.

“The word comes down: They’re getting rid of Esper, win or lose,” Miller said. “It’s payback time.”

On Monday morning, six days after Trump lost the election, Miller’s phone rang. Come to the White House, now.

Murderer’s Row

Miller suffered a literal misstep his first day on the job: Walking into the Pentagon, he tripped and nearly fell on the steps in front of the mammoth building. That prompted laughs online , but the bigger issue was the entourage that surrounded him as he took charge of the nearly 3 million soldiers and civilians in the Department of Defense.

He was accompanied by a murderer’s row of Trump loyalists. Patel was his chief of staff. Ezra Cohen, a controversial analyst, got a top intelligence post. Douglas Macgregor, a Fox News pundit, became a special assistant. Anthony Tata, a retired general who called Obama a “terrorist leader,” was appointed policy chief. Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was reportedly so alarmed that he told Patel and Cohen, “Life looks really shitty from behind bars. … And if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.”

Miller, when I asked about his advisers, waved off the concerns and said, “Complete misappreciation of those people.”

Cutting the U.S. footprint overseas was one of his top priorities, the residue of his long journey through the forever wars. It was a big part of his support for Trump, who was far more critical of those wars than most politicians. In the 2016 primaries, Trump distanced himself from other Republicans by accusing the George W. Bush administration of manufacturing evidence to justify the Iraq invasion. “They lied,” Trump declared at a debate in South Carolina, drawing boos from the Republican audience. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.” This was an occasion on which Trump’s political interests — trying to embarrass front-runner Jeb Bush, the brother of the former president — aligned with something that was actually true.

Once he got to the White House, though, Trump didn’t make a lot of changes. Since 9/11, the generals who oversaw America’s wars had resisted when civilian leaders said it was time to scale back. And Trump actually quickened the tempo of some military operations by offering greater support to the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and taking an especially hawkish position on Iran. But he was stymied on Iraq and Afghanistan, not just by active-duty generals at the Pentagon, but also by the retired ones he appointed to such key posts as national security adviser, chief of staff, and secretary of defense. They were all gone by the final act of his presidency.

By the time Miller left the Pentagon when President Joe Biden was sworn in, U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq had been cut to 2,500 troops in each country (from about 4,000 in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq). The approximately 700 soldiers based in Somalia were withdrawn. But that would not be Miller’s most memorable legacy.

The Phantom Meltdown

It was mid-afternoon on January 6, 2021. A pro-Trump mob had bashed its way through police barricades and invaded the Capitol . Ashli Babbitt had been shot dead. The rioters who occupied the Senate chamber included a half-naked shaman wearing a horned helmet and carrying a spear. Where was the National Guard?

Miller was the one to know, which is why he was on the phone with Nancy Pelosi at 3:44 p.m.

“I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon holding a phone six inches away from my ear, trying my best to make sense of the incoherent shrieking blasting out of the receiver,” he writes on the first page of his book. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on the line, and she was in a state of total nuclear meltdown. To be fair, the other members of congressional leadership on the call weren’t exactly composed either. Every time Pelosi paused to catch her breath, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Congressman Steny Hoyer took turns hyperventilating into the phone.”

That passage in Miller’s five-page introduction got a bit of attention on social media when it was first excerpted in January, and not all of it was positive. Wonkette described Miller’s account as “verifiably false” and pointed its readers to a video released by the January 6 committee showing Pelosi and other congressional leaders speaking in urgent but calm voices with Miller. They asked him to send troops immediately and demanded to know why it was taking so long. Pelosi is intense but not melting down; McConnell, Schumer, and Hoyer are not hyperventilating.

When I met Miller in Westport, I asked if he was aware of this discrepancy. He became slightly agitated.

“The one they show is a different call,” he replied. “The one used [by] the January 6 committee is a later phone call where they’re much calmer. The first call was frantic. Like literally losing their shit. … So that’s bullshit, dude.”

He told me to look into it.

The January 6 committee released partial footage of two calls that show Pelosi speaking with Miller. The first call, according to the time stamp on the committee’s video , occurred at 3 p.m. The sequence begins with Pelosi sitting near Schumer, who is holding a cellphone and saying, “I’m going to call up the effing secretary of DOD.” The next shot shows Schumer, Pelosi, and Hoyer huddled around the phone talking with Miller in measured voices; McConnell is not shown in this clip. The second call for which the committee released some footage is the one Wonkette pointed to. The participants in this second call are the ones mentioned by Miller in his book: McConnell is in this footage, along with Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer. There are no meltdowns. The committee’s time stamp for this call is 3:46 p.m., which is a nearly exact match for the time Miller provides in his book: 3:44 p.m.

What this means is that the phone call Miller described in his book almost certainly is the one Wonkette pointed to and did not occur the way Miller describes, unless there is an incriminating portion of the video we have not seen, which is what Miller claims. Yet that seems unlikely because there is no mention, in the multitude of testimonies and articles about that day, of Pelosi melting down at any moment. And that makes another passage in Miller’s introduction problematic too.

“I had never seen anyone — not even the greenest, pimple-faced 19-year-old Army private — panic like our nation’s elder statesmen did on January 6 and in the months that followed,” Miller wrote. “For the American people, and for our enemies watching overseas, the events of that day undeniably laid bare the true character of our ruling class. Here were the most powerful men and women in the world — the leaders of the legislative branch of the mightiest nation in history — cowering like frightened children for all the world to see.”

Except they weren’t cowering. They had been evacuated by security guards to Fort McNair because a mob of thousands had broken into the Capitol screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Pence!” Miller makes no mention in his book of the speech Trump delivered on January 6 that encouraged his followers to march on the Capitol. There is no mention of the fact that while Pelosi and others, including Vice President Mike Pence, urged Miller to send troops, Trump did not; the commander in chief did not speak with his defense secretary that day. Although Miller has elsewhere gently described Trump’s speech as not helping matters, his book mocks the targets of the crime rather than criticizing the person who inspired and abetted it.

“Prior to that very moment, the Speaker and her Democrat colleagues had spent months decrying the use of National Guard troops to quell left-wing riots following the death of George Floyd that caused countless deaths and billions of dollars in property damage nationwide,” he writes. “But as soon as it was her ass on the line, Pelosi had been miraculously born again as a passionate, if less than altruistic, champion of law and order.”

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

This is unbalanced because the violence in the summer of 2020 — on the margins of nationwide protests that were overwhelmingly peaceful — did not endanger the transfer of power from a defeated president to his duly elected successor. The buildings that were attacked were not the seat of national government. And there weren’t “countless deaths” — there were about 25 , including two men killed by far-right vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The rhetoric in Miller’s book has the aroma of reheated spots from Fox News.

The contours of his political anger comes into clearer focus after reading a passage from his chapter on Iraq. He recalled his pride in the swift capture of Baghdad, but as he flew home in a C-17 aircraft, he couldn’t fully enjoy the triumph, couldn’t really unwind. “The further we got from the war zone, the more my stress turned into burning white-hot anger,” he wrote. He returned to an empty house in North Carolina — his family was in Massachusetts for the July 4 holiday — so he worked out, drank some beer, and read a lot. It didn’t help much. There was, as he put it, “a rage building inside me” that was directed at two groups. The first was the group he regards as the instigators, “the neoconservatives who bullied us into an unjust and unwinnable war.” The second was Congress “for abrogating its constitutional duties regarding the declaring, funding, and overseeing of our nation’s wars.”

Miller’s homecoming was reenacted by a generation of bitter soldiers, aid workers, and journalists. His list of culprits is a good one, though I would add the names of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the top, because they issued the orders that destroyed Iraq. Their omission from Miller’s list, combined with his rant against Pelosi, reveals how his outrage follows a strange path, focusing on a political party that, while energetically backing the wars, was not the one that started them. And Democrats did not foment the storming of the Capitol either.

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

The Clusterfuck

Just as the Watergate scandal had its 18-minute gap , there’s a now-infamous gap of more than four hours between the storming of the Capitol and the arrival of National Guard troops around 5:30 p.m. Miller is at the center of the controversy because the singular status of the District of Columbia means the Pentagon controls its National Guard — and Miller was the Pentagon boss on January 6.

The January 6 committee, which deposed Miller and other military and police officials, said in its 814-page final report that it “found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard.” The committee blamed the delay on “a likely miscommunication” between multiple layers of civilian and military officials. The abundant depositions reveal that the committee was being extremely kind when it chose the word “miscommunication.” Soldiers have a special word to describe what seems to have happened at the Pentagon: a clusterfuck.

At 1:49 p.m., as pro-Trump demonstrators beat their way past police lines, the head of the U.S. Capitol Police force called the commander of the D.C. National Guard, Gen. William Walker, and notified him there was a “dire emergency” and troops were needed immediately. Walker alerted the Pentagon, and a video conference convened at 2:22 p.m. among generals and civilian officials, though not Miller. Walker told the January 6 committee that generals at the Pentagon “started talking about they didn’t have the authority, wouldn’t be their best military advice or guidance to suggest to the Secretary that we have uniformed presence at the Capitol. … They were concerned about how it would look, the optics.”

The “optics” refers to the Pentagon being sharply criticized after National Guard soldiers helped suppress Black Lives Matters protests in the capital on June 1, 2020. Lafayette Square, just outside the White House, was violently cleared in a controversial operation that even involved military helicopters flying low at night to disperse protesters. At one point, Trump triumphantly emerged from the White House with a retinue that included Defense Secretary Esper and Milley; later, both men apologized for allowing themselves to be connected to the crackdown. After that debacle, the Pentagon was reluctant to involve troops in any crowd control in the capital, and local leaders made clear that they opposed it too; there was no appetite to amass troops that Trump might misuse.

Yet the storming of the Capitol, taking law enforcement by surprise, created an emergency that justified using the Guard. As Walker told the committee, “I just couldn’t believe nobody was saying, ‘Hey, go.’” Walker testified that he admonished the generals and officials on the 2:22 p.m. call: “Aren’t you watching the news? Can’t you see what’s going on? We need to get there.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy — who two months earlier had to Google Miller’s name to figure out who he was — testified that he joined the 2:22 p.m. call and then ran a quarter mile through Pentagon hallways to Miller’s office, arriving there out of breath (“I’m a middle-aged man now,” he told the committee. “I was in a suit and leather shoes.”). At 3:04 p.m., Miller gave a verbal order for the mobilization of the D.C. Guard. It was an hour-and-a-quarter since the Capitol Police’s first plea for help, but it would take more than two additional hours for the troops to get there. This is the delay Miller has been particularly blamed for, though it does not appear to have been his fault alone.

Miller regarded his 3:04 p.m. order as final; Walker and his direct civilian commander, McCarthy, now had a green light to move troops to the Capitol, Miller testified . Some troops were already prepared to go there, according to the committee report. A ground officer, Col. Craig Hunter, was ready to move with a quick reaction force of 40 soldiers and about 95 others who were mostly at traffic control points in the area. Despite Miller’s 3:04 p.m. order, it would be hours before Hunter would be told to roll.

The committee’s report includes a 45-page appendix that’s a catalogue of recriminations among Walker, McCarthy, Miller, and others. Their depositions offer conflicting accounts of what was said in chaotic conversations that day, and they even disagree about whether certain conversations took place. They also express contrary views on who had the authority to issue orders, precisely what orders were needed, and what some orders even meant. The depositions were taken under oath, so despite their contradictions, they are the best record we have about what happened and far more reliable than most of the books and interviews that some of the principals have produced.

McCarthy prioritized the time-consuming task of drawing up an operational plan that doesn’t appear to have been necessary because Hunter’s troops were already equipped for riot control and knew what to do and where to go. McCarthy also spent a lot of time talking on the phone to politicians and journalists, as well as joining a press conference. As he told the committee, “So it went into the next 25 minutes of literally standing there, people handing me telephones, whether it was the media or it was Congress. And I had to explain to all of them, ‘No, we’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming.’ So that chewed up a great deal of time.”

Meanwhile, Walker said he couldn’t reach McCarthy to find out whether he had permission to send his troops to the Capitol. Testifying on April 21, 2022, Walker said he was never called by McCarthy and was unable to contact him directly because the work number he had for McCarthy didn’t function: An automated message said, “This phone is out of service.” One of his officers happened to have McCarthy’s private cellphone number, but there was no answer on it. “The story we were told is that he is running through the Pentagon looking for the secretary of defense,” Walker testified. “That’s why he wasn’t answering his phone.” (McCarthy insisted in his testimony that they had talked.)

The delay wasn’t due to faulty telecommunications alone. McCarthy told the committee that he believed he needed another order from Miller, beyond the one issued at 3:04 p.m., before he could tell Walker to move. Miller issued an additional order at 4:32 p.m., but McCarthy failed to immediately inform Walker; the order didn’t reach the National Guard commander until 5:09 p.m., when a four-star general happened to notice Walker in a conference room and said, “Hey, we have a green light, you’re approved to go.” By the time Walker’s troops arrived at the Capitol, the fighting was over, and they were asked to watch over rioters already arrested by the bloodied police.

Toward the end of his testimony to the January 6 committee, Miller was asked why Walker had not scrambled his troops sooner. “Why didn’t he launch them?” Miller replied. “I’d love to know. That’s a question I was hoping you’d find out. … Beats me.”

“Blah Blah Bluh Blah”

One of the people I interviewed for this story was Paul Yingling, who, in 2007, became famous in military circles for writing an article titled “ A Failure in Generalship .” Yingling was serving as an Army officer at the time and broke the fourth wall of martial protocol by calling out his wartime commanders. In a line that’s been quoted many times since — Miller repeated a variation of it to me — Yingling wrote, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Yingling wasn’t particularly flattered by Miller’s embrace of his idea. Miller is right about the generals, Yingling said, but “much of the criticism he’s made has been made elsewhere earlier and better. … It’s not original work.” That wasn’t Yingling’s main beef with Miller; he was incensed over what he regards as a fellow officer’s involvement in an effort to overturn a presidential election. “I don’t think he is aware of his role to this day,” Yingling said. “He has spun a narrative for himself that justifies his actions on J6. He was in over his head in a political world that to this day he doesn’t understand.”

Yingling mentioned the story of Caligula appointing his horse as a consul in ancient Rome. That myth goes to the strategy of discrediting and disempowering institutions by filling them with incompetent leaders (or beloved equines). And Yingling is certainly right that Trump appointed D-list characters to sensitive positions: the internet troll Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, for instance, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser.

It’s also true that the January 6 clusterfuck seems to have had less to do with malignant decisions by Miller than with a parade of errors by officials under his command. As acting secretary of defense, he failed to ensure that his orders at 3:04 p.m. and again at 4:32 p.m. were carried out with greater speed, though Miller says he didn’t want to micromanage his subordinates. There may have been an element of subconscious bias, too.

“I’m African American,” Walker told the committee. “Child of the ’60s. I think it would have been a vastly different response if those were African Americans trying to breach the Capitol.”

Yet I hesitate to ignite the tinder around Miller. If we drop a match at his feet and walk away with a sense of satisfaction about the justice we think we’ve delivered, we have not changed or even recognized the political culture that gave us the forever wars and everything that flowed from them, including January 6. At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

Look, for instance, at who Joe Biden chose to fill the seat kept warm by Miller: Lloyd Austin, a retired general who earned millions of dollars as a board member of defense contractors Raytheon Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton. Look at Esper, who preceded Miller: He was a lobbyist for Raytheon Technologies, earning more than $1.5 million in salary and bonuses. Look at who came before Esper: Jim Mattis, who was on the board of General Dynamics (as well as Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing firm). And take a moment to read a few pages of Craig Whitlock’s “ The Afghanistan Papers ,” which uses government documents to reveal a generation of lies from America’s top generals and officials. The professional interests of these people have been closely connected to exorbitant defense spending and “overseas contingency operations” that account for the U.S. devoting more money to its military than the next nine countries combined — all while school teachers drive Ubers at night and people in Mississippi have to drink bottled water because the municipal system has collapsed.

Where are their bonfires?

A year ago, before Biden’s State of the Union address, Miller joined a press conference outside the Capitol that was organized by the GOP’s far-right Freedom Caucus and featured speakers against mask and vaccine mandates. The last to talk, Miller riffed for seven minutes, saying nothing about Covid-19 and focusing on Afghanistan instead. As he recalled being on a mountainside where an errant American bomb killed nearly two dozen U.S. and Afghan soldiers, a woman behind him shifted with visible unease as he angrily described in graphic terms what you don’t often hear from former Cabinet members: “I stood there and it looked as if someone had taken a pail of ground meat, of hamburger meat, and thrown it onto that hill. And those were the remains of so many who gave their lives on that day.”

Let’s agree, then, that Miller is a bit askew. One of his encounters with reporters in his final days as defense secretary was described by a British correspondent as a “gobsmacking incoherent briefing” that included the phrase “blah blah bluh blah,” according to the Pentagon’s official transcript . But if you’re not askew after going through the mindfuck of the forever wars, there’s probably something wrong with you. It’s an inversion of the “Catch-22” scenario in which the novel’s protagonist, Capt. John Yossarian, tries to be declared insane so that he can get out of the bomber missions that he knows are nearly suicidal, but his desire to get out of them proves he’s sane, so he’s not excused. In an opposite way, generals and politicians who emerge from the carnage of the forever wars without coarse passions, who speak in modulated tones about staying the course and shoveling more money to the Pentagon — they are cracked ones who should not operate the machinery of war.

So here we are, just a few days away from the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion on March 19, a cataclysm that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions of dollars, and began with lies. The Pentagon just decided to name a warship the USS Fallujah , after the city that suffered more violence at the hands of American forces than any other place in Iraq. And Harvard University has just decided to give a prominent position to Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bush administration official who helped design the invasion and occupation of Iraq and since 2017 has been a board member of — you may have heard this one before — Raytheon Technologies (for which she was paid $321,387 in 2021). It’s been 20 years and thanks in part to journalists who were complicit in spreading the first lies and were rewarded professionally for doing so, there has been neither accountability nor learning.

Individual pathologies determine how we medicate ourselves after traumatic events, and I think the politics we choose are forms of medication. Miller opted for service in the Trump administration, and while it strikes me as the least-admirable segment of his life since we met in Kandahar, he’s not an outlier among veterans. For as long as our nation is subordinate to its war machine, we’ll be hearing more from them. Forever wars do not end when soldiers come home.

The post Trump’s Last Defense Secretary Has Regrets — But Not About Jan. 6 appeared first on The Intercept .

If you ever plan to dart a wild wolf sprinting over a snow-covered mountain from a low-flying helicopter, there are a few things you need to know. The wolf should be running away, and you should be aiming for the back or butt. Never take a shot at a wolf that’s facing you. The risk of injuring the animal with a dart to the face is too high. Also, a dart shoots hard but it’s not a bullet; you need to loft your shot. Try to keep the chase under a quarter mile. Push a distressed wolf much farther and you’re being cruel. Finally, while you’re leaning out over the helicopter’s landing skids focusing on the wolf, don’t forget the treetops rushing by under your feet. If you get snagged, you’re done.

These were the lessons Doug Smith took home after a trip to the Alaskan outback in 1999. Smith had recently become director of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, the research program that followed the reintroduction of wolves into the national park four years earlier. At the heart of the nascent program was the winter study, when Smith and his team would track packs deep into the park, collect predation data, and fix individual wolves with radio collars.

The study relied heavily on aerial darting. Smith grew up shooting guns but hitting a moving wolf from an aircraft was different challenge. He phoned Layne Adams, a darting pro with the U.S. Biological Survey, who was doing work at Denali National Park, and asked if he could come to Alaska to study his craft. The pair spent a week in the air. Smith vividly remembers the first wolf he darted. It was an evasive alpha female. His first shot missed.

“Take those fucking gloves off!” the pilot shouted into his headset. Smith was wearing flying gloves. He ditched them. Below, the wolf stopped running, took shelter in a patch of brush, and faced the strange object hovering above her. The pilot was shouting at Smith to shoot. Smith was shouting at the pilot to reposition. The wolf took off. Smith can’t recall how many darts he fired, but he knows that the last one hit its mark.

Smith darted six more wolves in Denali that week. Back in Yellowstone, over the next two and half decades, he darted some 600 more. The captures became the backbone of the winter study — today a top contender for the world’s most respected predator research project. Smith spent all year waiting for the snow to come, thinking about what the last winter revealed, obsessing over how to improve. He took those lessons to heart. “I never computed my long-term average, but I was getting down to like 1.2, 1.3 darts per wolf,” he told me recently. “Two days in my career, I fired 10 darts and got 10 wolves.”

When future historians sit down to tell the story of how wolves regained a foothold in the United States after near total annihilation, they will find many names. Few, if any, are likely to surface as often as Doug Smith. For more than a quarter century, Smith was the face of one of the most historic and controversial government conservation initiatives of all time. In November, he retired.

When we met on an overcast morning in Bozeman, Montana, Smith was six weeks into his new post-Yellowstone life. His former colleagues were in the midst of their first winter without him. “It’s the first time since the beginning I wasn’t there to handle capture,” he said. Smith was not yet sure if stepping away was the right call. He wavered sometimes. “It was a very hard decision,” he said. “I’m still doubting it some days.”

Now free from the constraints of federal employment, the veteran biologist offered critical observations on the way wolves are seen, managed, and killed in the Northern Rockies, and the values that treatment reflects. Smith’s exit comes at a tumultuous time for wolves in the Northern Rockies and wildlife more broadly. Last winter, he and his colleagues recorded the deadliest season in Yellowstone history . With 25 wolves killed, more than double the previous record, roughly a fifth of the park’s entire wolf population was lost.

The killing was concentrated on Yellowstone’s northern border, which cuts into southwestern Montana. In the run up to the unprecedented season, a panel of wildlife commissioners appointed by Montana’s first Republican governor in a decade and a half, Greg Gianforte, abolished quotas that had limited the number of wolves that could be killed north of the park.

With its 2023 legislative session now underway, Montana’s new GOP supermajority remains intent on dramatically slashing the state’s wolf population with an array of highly controversial and recently legalized hunting and trapping methods. Many of the West’s most respected wildlife biologists have spoken out at what they see as a politicized wave of “ anti-predator hysteria ” sweeping the region. Meanwhile, mass habitat loss continues to fuel biodiversity loss at a staggering pace , leaving national parks like Yellowstone among the only places on Earth where large predators like wolves are both protected and studied in depth.

“Literally, if you get the wrong wolf at the wrong time, that pack can fall apart.”

In the weeks leading up to his retirement, Smith completed a major paper with more than a dozen biologists from national parks across North America. A decade in the making, the rare, interpark collaboration — titled “ Human-caused mortality triggers pack instability in gray wolves ” and published in “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” in January — tackled the question of how wolf hunting outside of national parks impacts the social stability of wolf packs living inside them. The research showed that while wolf populations are remarkably resilient, the loss of a single wolf can be devastating to an individual pack. This was especially true in the case of leaders. “Literally, if you get the wrong wolf at the wrong time, that pack can fall apart,” Smith said. The study also found that despite living in the most protected environs available, wolves in national parks experience “high levels” of human-caused mortality. Last winter, Smith and his colleagues witnessed those effects firsthand at an unprecedented scale.

The paper was a fitting exit for one the country’s most celebrated biologists. The entirety of Smith’s Yellowstone career was bound up in questions of how the outside world shaped the bubble of preservation he signed up to study and protect. Under his tenure, the park’s wolf program became an exemplar of predator preservation and research worldwide. Taking advantage of Yellowstone’s unmatched observational opportunities, Smith oversaw studies detailing how the return of apex predators — not just wolves, but grizzly bears and cougars as well — helped usher in an era of ecological recovery rarely witnessed in the modern world. At the same time, while always keeping an eye on the science and planning for the next winter study, Smith’s work required navigating a social and political minefield. “Cross-boundary management is a bugaboo in wildlife management,” he told me. “Most of the time, people go, ‘They’re not our jurisdiction anymore, so we’re not going to do anything’ — that doesn’t benefit the resource at all.”

The borders invite questions that policymakers generally try to avoid asking.

The boundaries that divide national parks and states are more than a delineation between jurisdictions. Those invisible lines represent different worlds, both for the animals that cross them and for the human institutions on either side. The borders invite questions that policymakers generally try to avoid asking. After two and a half decades on the front line, Smith firmly believes those discussions, uncomfortable though they might be, must happen for wildlife to have any chance of survival. The study, in addition to its scientific revelations, was an attempt to spur those conversations. “That was the other reason we did it,” Smith said. “It was like, ‘Let’s shine a light on this.’ You have to expose painful topics to solve them.”

People Riding Around With Guns

Early in Smith’s Yellowstone career, a legendary park ranger named Jerry Mernin offered him a piece of advice he would never forget. “You’re not doing your job. No one gives a shit about your science,” Mernin told him. “What you gotta do is you gotta go in the mountains, on horseback, and talk to the people riding around with guns. That’s conservation.”

Mernin was referring to the outfitting camps that ring Yellowstone’s border, providing guided hunts for paying clients, particularly those in pursuit of elk. Along with livestock interests, the outfitters were among the most vocal opponents of the federal program to repopulate the West with wolves. They didn’t ask for it, they didn’t want it, and they saw the wolves as a threat to their bottom line. Smith could see that Mernin was right. He needed to talk to them. Together, they loaded up their horses and rode out.

Like his winter study, Smith’s visits to the camps became a tradition. As it was with darting, the learning curve was steep. Smith quickly discovered that riding in with a list of points to hammer home never worked. “Literally, you had to go in and just establish contact, a rapport, a relationship,” he said. “Listen more than you talk.” Smith did not expect to uproot deeply held convictions. The goal was subtler, more human. “If you let those guys go, they will go,” he said. “So most of the time, you’re just rapping, and you’re trying to establish that I’m not as bad as they think I am, and even though I’m a government employee, they shouldn’t hate me for that — because they hate the government.”

Nothing was ever perfect, tensions and resentments remained, but bit by bit relationships were built. “I continued that almost until the day I retired,” Smith said. “I would consider it to be one of the more effective conservation efforts that I did in my career.”

Raised in rural northeastern Ohio on a horse camp that his parents ran, Smith began working with wolves as a teenager. He earned his Ph.D. studying under the legends of the field, old-school biologists whose groundbreaking insights were the product of handwritten notes compiled while trudging through deep snow in remote places. Among his mentors was L. David Mech. In an email, Mech, who is considered by many to be the most authoritative wolf expert in the world, described Smith’s predation studies in Yellowstone as “the most intensive and extensive wolf-prey system ever scientifically investigated.”

Smith lived for the science, but he also recognized that the most important decisions in wildlife management happen outside the realms of biology and ecology.

In 2011, facing a precarious vote in the upcoming midterm elections, Montana’s lone Democratic senator, Jon Tester, attached a rider to a must-pass budget bill reversing a federal judge’s order returning wolves in the Northern Rockies to the Endangered Species List. The move was unheard of — Congress had never intervened to remove an animal from the endangered species list before — and led to state authorization of wolf hunting and trapping seasons. The following year, Smith and his colleagues released a report unlike anything they had published before, documenting the then-unprecedented loss of 12 wolves to hunting and trapping, many just over the edge of the park’s boundary lines.

Smith understood well that the goal of the Endangered Species Act was delisting, and that delisting meant state management, and state management meant hunting. Still, there were elements to the way the states structured their approach that he found ethically unsettling. Smith was a lifelong hunter, using elk and deer to fill his fridge. The meat was the “resource value” of the animal he killed. A wolf’s resource value was ostensibly its pelt, and yet Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — then and now — started their seasons during the transition from summer to fall, when wolves’ pelts were at their least valuable. “You’re killing for a full two months for what?” Smith asked, before answering his own question. “Hatred.”

Boundary Lines

Following the deadly 2012 season, wolf advocates lobbied for hunting quotas north of Yellowstone. While most of the park’s boundaries lie in remote areas, well-removed from human settlement, Yellowstone’s iconic northern entrance is in the unincorporated community of Gardiner, Montana, where open access to wildlife moving out of the park is readily available. The region is but a tiny sliver of Montana. Still, opponents of wolf hunting quotas on Yellowstone’s boundary line argued that the park was pushing out its border and asked, with great frustration, where do you draw the line?

For Smith, it was the wrong question. Hard boundary lines didn’t make sense for wildlife in general and for wolves in Yellowstone specifically. The wolves spent 96 percent of their time in the park, with much of that time in Wyoming — meaning that killing those wolves to reduce Montana’s wolf population made little sense. There was limited livestock ranching in the pocket of Montana that the park pushed up against, and the state routinely reported healthy elk populations in the area. That meant two of the most common arguments for heavy wolf killing — livestock and elk protection — were shaky at best. Finally, because the wolves were born and raised in a national park, they grew up with little reason to fear humans watching them from a distance. This habituation raised serious ethical questions about the shooting of a wolf that stood 100 feet north of a line that it didn’t know existed by humans who it didn’t see as a danger. As an alternative, hunters and trappers in Montana still had access to the rest of the fourth largest state in the country, where they could stalk wolves that actually knew they were being pursued.

“They’re tolerant of having people watching, and so you can’t have an arbitrary line on a landscape — go from that, complete protection, to no protection,” Smith said. It was matter of fair chase , an ethical principle undergirding the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, a set of pillars revered by many hunters around the world. In a fair chase hunt, “an animal knows you’re after it,” Smith said. “You’re not riding a four-wheeler chasing it down. You’re not using walkie talkies to trap it. Those are all fair chase measures. This is one of them.”

In place of a hard line, Smith and others advocated for a zone of protection that gradually faded into the broader state management regime. For many, it was the economics of Yellowstone’s wolf program that served as the strongest argument for such an approach: According to an economic study published in 2022, wolf watching alone in Yellowstone generates $82 million a year in local ecotourism dollars.

Though he wouldn’t disagree with the value of ecotourism, Smith’s arguments tended to reflect his dual identity as a scientist and public servant. With the wolf reintroduction, Yellowstone, and by extension the broader public, gained an incomparable asset, allowing for deeper insights into the innerworkings of one of the last great ecosystems of North America. If there were ever an example of a National Park Service initiative achieving its mission of preservation and public access, it was the Yellowstone Wolf Project. “I believe in the mission,” Smith said. “I would argue — and I know the world does not work this way — don’t do a job unless you believe it.”

In his day-to-day work over the years, Smith routinely met with people whose opinions on that mission ranged from unaccommodating to outright hostile. For Kira Cassidy, who began her Yellowstone wolf career in 2008, it was Smith’s earnest interest in seeking out those conversations that made him indispensable. “For being such a science-focused person, he also has a very beautiful, philosophical way of looking at the human condition and human relationships with wildlife,” she said. “He’s not argumentative, but he’s convincing in what he believes.”

Gradually, through years of negotiations among an array of stakeholders, the number of wolves that could be killed in the two districts north of Yellowstone was pared down to one each. At the same time, statewide in Montana, wolf regulations were kept permissive, and hundreds of individual animals were hunted or trapped every year. Smith wasn’t an enthusiastic fan of the state’s wolf hunt, but he understood it as part of the complex world of trade-offs in which the Yellowstone Wolf Project was situated.

“That’s the give and take we need in our society,” he said. “The whole point here is reasonability, compromise,” he added. “I don’t think we’re being unreasonable by saying, ‘Look, you can kill them, you just can’t kill them all.’”

Mind Your Own Business

In 2016, the research into how human hunting affects wolves in national parks began to gather momentum. After a successful project with an Alaska-based biologist in Denali National Park, Smith and Cassidy began kicking around the idea of bringing in collaborators from around the continent. Eventually, they assembled a wide-ranging team of wolf researchers from Denali, Grand Teton, and Voyageurs national parks, as well as the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in remote eastern Alaska.

In addition to hunting, the biologists included vehicle strikes, poaching, lethal control by government agencies, and rare incidents of death during research capture in their analysis. With data stretching back to the 1980s, they had an extraordinary wealth of information to pull from. While Cassidy delved into the nitty-gritty of the research, Smith navigated the complexities of wrangling multiple national parks in a study that was inherently controversial.

“It was tough,” he said. “A lot of people were like, ‘Leave it alone. When they leave the park, they’re none of your business.’” To Smith, that response was premature. The research had not been done to determine the extent of the issue, so who was to say whether it was the business of national parks or not? “I’m OK with not doing anything,” Smith said. “But don’t you want the information to know?”

No adjustment to the status quo after reviewing data was one thing. “I’m actually OK with that,” he said. “But that’s different than ‘We don’t know, and everything’s fine.’”

As it turned out, everything was not fine. In August 2021, Montana eliminated the hunting quotas north of Yellowstone entirely. In the months that followed, the wolf project recorded an unprecedented 480 percent increase in mortality compared to previous seasons. Smith and Cassidy watched in real time as patterns they had traced for years emerged again and again across the park’s Northern Range.

The hunters would arrive at dawn or dusk, often with assault rifles, at known lookout points on the park’s border. They used predator calls to draw wolves over the line and often left the carcasses where they fell. Just as data coming in from parks around the country indicated, larger packs fared better in the face of the heavy human killing. Smaller packs did not.

The Phantom Lake Pack was a stark example. The pack was relatively small and traditionally held its ground on the northernmost edge of the park. Seven of its members were killed in two months. “We think that one of the first wolves that they lost during the hunting season was probably their breeding female,” Cassidy said. “They seemed to crumble after that.” With the Phantom Lake wolves gone, Yellowstone’s largest pack moved in. Though the Junction Butte Pack lost eight wolves to the hunt after taking the newly available territory, most of were pups or yearlings, and the pack had gone into the season with nearly 30 members. The pack persisted.

Most illustrative of all was the Eight Mile Pack. Unlike other packs in the park, the wolves were elusive and seemed to consciously avoid humans. Cassidy attributed the evasiveness to the seasoned alpha female that had led the pack for five years: “It seemed like for years she knew exactly how to avoid human-caused mortalities.” The wolf did not, however, appear to understand traps and was caught and killed late in the season. “Within 48 hours after the alpha female was trapped, the pack got up and traveled all the way until Lamar Valley,” Cassidy said. The journey was nearly 40 miles. “We have never recorded them doing that,” she said. “It seemed to be in reaction to this pretty severe disruption.”

As the biologists suspected, numbers alone failed to tell the full story of what happened inside packs when humans killed wolves. The process of confirming their hypothesis, however, was painfully grim. “This is the kind of study you don’t want to see succeed,” Smith said. “It relies on dead wolves being killed by people.”

The hunt marked the worst year of Smith’s career. It wasn’t just the loss of the individual wolves or the scientific setbacks, though both were brutal; it was also the damage done to the project of compromise and moderation in which he had invested so much time and effort.

Smith spent last summer working to convince the governor’s wildlife commissioners of the unique value of the Yellowstone’s wolf program and the important role quotas played in helping the Park Service achieve its mission. In August, at a hearing to establish this year’s regulations, he thanked the commissioners for hearing him out. In the end, the commissioners — some of whom had been prepared to begin another season with no quotas in place — agreed to a park proposal of a six wolf limit. Smith was sent to deliver the proposal. Following his remarks, a woman whispered to him that he had let the wolf advocates down. “That caused me to flinch,” he said.

At that point, the subject of retirement was already on his mind. Smith would be 62 soon, the age at which he and his wife had agreed to discuss a potential change in direction. Following the hearing, the couple took a canoe trip around Yellowstone Lake. The quotas may have been reinstated, but laws aiming to slash wolf populations in Montana and Idaho were still on the books. Smith knew that his words carried weight in the Northern Rockies. He thought hard on whether he should stick it out a little longer.

Though he managed to hold onto his flying and winter study captures until the very end, the fieldwork and research that gave him purpose had been subsumed in recent years. “I had become a supervisor and administrator and a bureaucrat,” Smith said. “More and more of my job became keeping the show on the road, and less and less biology, ecology.” As he and his wife took in Yellowstone’s late summer beauty, Smith decided the time had come. Three months later, he retired.

“This is really the first time in 44 years I haven’t had my finger on the button,” Smith told me. “And you know, that’s hard. I’m still thinking about what that looks like.”

Just as the loss of a longtime leader can disrupt the most experienced pack, the loss of Doug Smith rattled Yellowstone’s tight-knit core of wolf researchers. “It was hard for us to even bring up really,” Cassidy said. The park’s 55th winter study was just gearing up and the project had lost its most seasoned darter: counting Smith, there were only two.

Smith was uneasy when their paper finally published. The concluding paragraphs called for a “renewed interest in interagency collaboration … defined by compromise and based on science.” To the layperson, the language would appear inoffensive, but Smith knew it would ruffle feathers. He worried he’d be seen as coaching his former colleagues from the sidelines. That was not his intent. As usual, he was looking to start a conversation. “I think it’s critical,” he said. Smith is not done with wolves — far from it. He’s itching to get back in the field, somewhere new perhaps. “Credit is not what I’m after,” he said. After a lifetime of studying wolves — and people — he still has questions. He’d like to find some answers. “I’m interested,” he said. “That’s what I’m after.”

The post How to Save Yellowstone’s Wolves appeared first on The Intercept .

P ara quem olha do alto, a impressão é de uma serpente se embrenhando na mata. Mas basta se aproximar para visualizar a estrada aberta pelos tratores, ampla o suficiente para a passagem de um caminhão. É a partir dela que os operadores de motosserra entram na floresta para derrubar as espécies mais valiosas, como o ipê e o jatobá, cujos metros cúbicos são vendidos a 3 mil e a 1,5 mil dólares no mercado internacional, respectivamente. Abatidas, as árvores são trazidas até os caminhões pelo skidder, uma máquina com um grande gancho na ponta — perfeito para pinçar e arrastar as enormes toras.

Como cupins abrindo trilhos floresta adentro, os madeireiros saquearam 45 mil caminhões carregados de toras de uma área da União localizada no município de Lábrea, no sul do Amazonas — uma região que se tornou o epicentro do desmatamento da maior floresta tropical do mundo. Colocados um atrás do outro, os veículos formariam uma fila de 450 quilômetros, o equivalente à distância entre São Paulo e Curitiba. Um saque que não aconteceu à revelia das autoridades ambientais, mas sim entre a bênção e o desinteresse de órgãos que deveriam zelar pelo meio ambiente.

O volume retirado da área pública equivale a cinco operações Handroanthus, na qual a Polícia Federal, a PF, fez a maior apreensão de madeira ilegal da história . Em 2020, ano em que a maior quantidade de madeira foi retirada da gleba (200 mil metros cúbicos, 30% do total explorado), o órgão ambiental do Amazonas, o Ipaam, já havia sido alertado das irregularidades nos planos de manejo florestal sustentável da região, os PMFS – documento que detalha quantas e quais espécies de árvores podem ser derrubadas em uma determinada propriedade. A informação estava em uma recomendação do Ministério Público Federal , o MPF, de 2018. Enquanto o Ipaam ignorava as medidas propostas pelo órgão para estancar a sangria, os madeireiros aumentavam a ferida na floresta.

“Nesse meio tempo praticamente se esgotou todo o volume que tinha para ser explorado nos planos de manejo fraudulentos e essa madeira, que é ilegal, entrou no circuito de madeira como se fosse um produto legal“, afirmou Nilo D’Avila, pesquisador sênior do Greenpeace.

Do tamanho de duas cidades de São Paulo, a João Bento é uma área não-destinada, ou gleba — como são chamadas as terras públicas que não foram convertidas em áreas indígenas e quilombolas, unidades de conservação, assentamentos, concessões florestais ou propriedades privadas — e que se tornaram o alvo número um dos grileiros, como mostramos na primeira reportagem da série Ladrões de Floresta .

A estimativa da extração na gleba federal foi feita a partir das cicatrizes deixadas na mata pelos madeireiros, visíveis nas imagens de satélite, e abrange um período de nove anos, de 2013 a 2021. O levantamento foi feito com exclusividade para o Intercept pelo Center for Climate Crime Analysis , o CCCA — uma ONG que atua para responsabilizar judicialmente empresas que colaboram para o aquecimento global — e se baseou em taxas de exploração de madeira por hectare utilizadas em planos de manejo florestal da região. Na prática, o prejuízo pode ser bem maior, já que na extração ilegal o volume explorado pode ser até duas vezes superior àquele autorizado pelos órgãos ambientais.

De mãos dadas com a grilagem de terras, a ação dos madeireiros alimentou uma máquina de desmatamento que já colocou abaixo quase metade dos 295 mil hectares da gleba, que é a última barreira antes de um vasto bloco de áreas protegidas, onde há inclusive registros de indígenas isolados — o mais recente foi descoberto em 2021 na Reserva Extrativista do Médio Purus .

“Esta região abriga os últimos grandes maciços de floresta que temos na Amazônia, porque o resto já está muito fragmentado”, afirmou Antonio Oviedo, pesquisador do Instituto Socioambiental, o ISA.

As árvores saqueadas da gleba abasteceram dezenas de serrarias instaladas ao longo da BR-364, no trecho da rodovia que liga Porto Velho a Rio Branco. A região, conhecida como Ponta do Abunã, já foi alvo de diversas operações do MPF e da PF, que revelaram desde a existência de uma associação de madeireiros ilegais , em 2011 — com direito a CNPJ, estatuto social e pedágio para controlar o acesso à área pública —, até uma vaquinha da propina, em que os madeireiros juntavam dinheiro para subornar fiscais ambientais , em 2019.

No mesmo ano, também foi preso Chaules Pozzebon, dono de mais de 120 madeireiras na região norte e condenado a 99 anos de prisão pelos crimes de organização criminosa e extorsão. Em novembro deste ano, uma nova operação da PF e do Ministério Público de Rondônia desbaratou uma quadrilha que se utilizava de milícia privada para manter as atividades dos grileiros na Ponta do Abunã.

Benção de um, desinteresse do outro

A s análises do CCCA mostram que parte dessa madeira saiu da gleba de forma totalmente clandestina. Outra parcela, no entanto, foi extraída com a autorização do Ipaam, em uma fraude cuja origem está na grilagem de terras.

Provar a propriedade do imóvel é um dos pré-requisitos para a  aprovação do PMFS. “Se a terra não é sua, você não pode fazer manejo florestal nem nenhuma outra atividade”, esclareceu Alexandre Saraiva, delegado da PF que coordenou a Operação Arquimedes, a maior investigação já realizada no Brasil contra o comércio ilegal de madeira. “Por isso, a grilagem de terras é o primeiro passo”.

Em teoria, nenhuma licença poderia ser emitida na gleba João Bento, área da União situada na faixa de fronteira com o norte da Bolívia, e onde os processos de regularização fundiária não foram concluídos, segundo o Incra . Mesmo assim, o Ipaam emitiu licenças no Amazonas com base em documentos auto declaratórios que não têm validade como registro de terra, como é o caso do Certificado de Cadastro do Imóvel Rural , o CCIR.

Além de emitir licenças em terras griladas, o Ipaam o fez em uma área federal, extrapolando sua competência de órgão ambiental do estado. E esse problema está longe de ser exclusivo da gleba João Bento. Em 2018, uma análise do MPF concluiu que mais da metade dos 11.423 PMFS registrados no Amazonas estavam em áreas de interesse federal: 4.479 estavam sobrepostos a glebas federais; 1.130 sobre assentamentos do Incra; 420 sobre unidades de conservação federais; 116 sobre terras indígenas e 21 sobre áreas quilombolas. “A conduta do Ipaam trouxe nulidades insanáveis aos processos, porque as licenças foram emitidas sobre uma terra que foi roubada. É terra da União”, disse Saraiva.

A constatação das irregularidades levou o MPF a recomendar , ainda em 2018, que o Ipaam tomasse medidas administrativas em relação a todos os planos de manejo em sobreposição a áreas de interesse federal. Mas o órgão só foi agir dois anos depois, no final de 2020, quando a segunda fase da Operação Arquimedes revelou um esquema de pagamento de propina a servidores do Ipaam em troca da liberação dos planos de manejo .

Nesse meio tempo, a exploração explodiu na gleba João Bento, dentro e fora dos planos de manejo aprovados pelo Ipaam. Segundo o Greenpeace , parte dessa madeira foi vendida para a Madeireira Atalaia, de Vista Alegre do Abunã, em Rondônia, e depois exportada para Portugal, Bélgica e França.

“Se o órgão gestor ambiental não dá um recado dizendo que a partir de agora a regra do jogo mudou, o sujeito vai derrubar ainda mais”, lamentou Herbert Dittmar, perito criminal federal da PF.

Com a ajuda do Greenpeace, o Intercept identificou oito PMFS sobrepostos à gleba João Bento, dos quais pelo menos três acabaram suspensos pelo Ipaam entre o final de 2020 e o início de 2021. Procurado, o Ipaam não esclareceu quantas licenças foram suspensas por recomendação do MPF do Amazonas, nem por que demorou tanto tempo para fazê-lo.

Em nota enviada ao Intercept, o MPF afirmou que o Ipaam não cumpriu na íntegra a recomendação de adotar medidas contra as licenças sobrepostas a áreas federais, levando-o a abrir uma ação civil pública contra o órgão ambiental do Amazonas, que segue em tramitação.

Enquanto o órgão ambiental estadual autorizava a retirada ilegal de madeira da gleba João Bento, o órgão federal, responsável por proteger a área, deixava o desmatamento correr solto para depois abrir mão do poder de garantir proteção efetiva ao território. Em 2020, o Ministério do Meio Ambiente desistiu da prerrogativa de destinar a área para uma unidade de conservação em uma reunião da Câmara Técnica de Destinação e Regularização Fundiária de Terras Públicas Federais Rurais, cujo objetivo é justamente destinar essas áreas.

A decisão contraria as orientações do próprio ministério, cujos estudos concluíram que parte da gleba João Bento está em uma área de prioridade extremamente alta para a conservação da Amazônia e onde deveria ser criada uma unidade de conservação de proteção integral — por decreto , o mapa das áreas prioritárias de conservação deveria orientar as decisões do órgão sobre a criação de novas áreas protegidas. Questionado por email, ainda na gestão de Jair Bolsonaro, o ministério não respondeu ao Intercept.

Para trás, os madeireiros deixam uma floresta em pé, mas mutilada pelo corte de espécies inteiras. O corte seletivo, como é chamado, é um crime menos aparente e costuma ser ignorado pela sociedade — apesar de o Brasil já ter capacidade de detectar esse tipo de exploração.

“O que a gente vê na TV normalmente é o corte raso, que é quando está tudo derrubado e queimado. Só que o corte seletivo também é gravíssimo e a população não está enxergando”, alertou Dittmar. “O tamanho da área degradada anualmente na Amazônia brasileira é igual ou maior que o tamanho da área desmatada. E essa floresta vai perdendo biodiversidade e a capacidade de prover serviços ecossistêmicos, como a absorção de carbono e a regulação dos ciclos hídricos”, completou Clarissa Gandour, coordenadora de avaliação de políticas públicas de conservação do Climate Policy Initiative , o CPI, uma organização ligada à PUC-Rio que produz dados para orientar políticas ambientais.

Pressa para faturar

C om menos de seis quilômetros quadrados de área urbana e pouco mais de quatro mil habitantes (segundo o último censo, de 2010), Vista Alegre do Abunã concentra cerca de 15 serrarias. Basta observar imagens feitas por um drone para enxergar os pátios com diversas pilhas de toras, que do alto parecem palitos de fósforos, e os montinhos de fumaça saindo das estufas onde a madeira passa pelo processo de secagem.

Aproximar-se destes estabelecimentos, no entanto, pode criar problemas, como o enfrentado por nossa equipe quando fazíamos imagens da entrada de uma das serrarias. Sem se identificar, uma funcionária começou a gravar a placa do nosso carro com o celular, nos obrigando a deixar a localidade às pressas — possivelmente, em pouco tempo, aquele vídeo estaria no Whatsapp de todos os madeireiros da região.

É neste distrito de Porto Velho, um dos quatro da Ponta do Abunã, que começa o ramal Jequitibá, como é conhecida uma das estradas de terra mais utilizadas pelos madeireiros para acessar a gleba João Bento — em 2011, os empresários chegaram a instalar ali um pedágio para controlar o acesso à área .

O avanço pela via se mostrou um passeio didático e progressivo por diferentes estágios de expropriação do patrimônio público. Próximo à BR-364, onde começa o ramal, já há algumas áreas de cultivo de soja, na borda da gleba federal. Em seguida, vêm vastas fazendas ocupadas por rebanhos bovinos e, depois, imensas áreas recém-desmatadas — algumas com o chão ainda quente da queimada mais recente. Adentrando ainda mais a área da União, já nas proximidades do bloco de unidades de conservação, observamos os túneis típicos da exploração madeireira abertos na mata.

“Esse é o processo clássico do desmatamento na Amazônia”, explicou Heron Martins, coordenador do Laboratório de Análises Geoespaciais do CCCA. “Começa com a exploração madeireira e a degradação florestal, depois o corte raso para a criação de gado e, em regiões com contexto favorável, o cultivo de soja, que empurra as atividades anteriores cada vez mais para dentro da floresta”.

Mas esse passo a passo nem sempre é seguido à risca. Vastas áreas da gleba João Bento foram convertidas diretamente em pasto, sem passar pelo processo da retirada seletiva de madeira. E, assim como em outras partes do bioma, o desmatamento nunca foi tão intenso quanto no governo Bolsonaro: dos 135 mil hectares derrubados na gleba João Bento, 68.911, o que corresponde a 51%, vieram abaixo entre 2019 e 2022. “É impressionante a velocidade de abertura da área”, constatou  Martins. O Ibama, responsável pela proteção das áreas federais, não retornou nossos contatos.

A pressa em desmatar, que leva os grileiros a colocarem fogo na maior parte da madeira, está associada à expectativa de lucrar ainda mais com a venda da terra. Afinal, essa é uma das regiões do Brasil onde o hectare mais valorizou nos últimos anos . “Nesses casos, o que importa é assegurar a posse da área para então especular com a terra”, disse Martins.

Para Dittmar, a aptidão da região para a lavoura acentua ainda mais essa corrida dos grileiros. “Como o relevo é plano, as áreas não inundáveis são um convite ao plantio de soja. Esse é um dos motivos pelos quais Lábrea está sendo grilada e devastada”.

A destruição na gleba federal é apenas uma mostra do que acontece na região conhecida como Amacro, que fica na fronteira entre o sul do Amazonas, o norte de Rondônia e o leste do Acre. Dos 15 municípios da Amazônia Legal com maior incremento de derrubadas entre 2020 e 2021, sete estão nesta área. Lábrea, onde fica a gleba João Bento, foi o quarto município com maior aumento na área desmatada em 2021. “O que aconteceu em Lábrea é um desastre ambiental”, lamentou Saraiva.

Esta reportagem faz parte do projeto Ladrões de Floresta, que investiga a grilagem em terras públicas da Amazônia e conta com o apoio da Rainforest Investigations Network, do Pulitzer Center. Confira a primeira e a segunda reportagem da série.

The post Com Bolsonaro, Ministério do Meio Ambiente abriu mão de área na Amazônia onde madeireiros derrubaram 45 mil caminhões de árvores appeared first on The Intercept .

M arcel Lehel Lazar walked out of Federal Correctional Institute Schuylkill, a Pennsylvania prison, in August 2021. The 51-year-old formerly known only as Guccifer had spent over four years incarcerated for an email hacking spree against America’s elite. Though these inbox disclosures arguably changed the course of the nation’s recent history, Lazar himself remains an obscure figure. This month, in a series of phone interviews with The Intercept, Lazar opened up for the first time about his new life and strange legacy.

Lazar is not a household name by unauthorized access standards — no Edward Snowden nor Chelsea Manning — but people will be familiar with his work. Throughout 2013, Lazar stole the private correspondence of everyone from a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell.

There’s an irony to his present obscurity: Guccifer’s prolific career often seemed motivated as much by an appetite for global media fame than any ideology or principle. He acted as an agent of chaos, not a whistleblower, and his exploits provided as much entertainment as anything else. It’s thanks to Guccifer’s infiltration of Dorothy Bush Koch’s AOL account that the world knows that her brother — George W. Bush — is fond of fine bathroom self-portraiture .

“Right now, having this time on my hands, I’m just trying to understand what this other me was making 10 years ago.”

“I knew all the time what these guys are talking about,” Lazar told me with a degree of satisfaction. “I used to know more than they knew about each other.”

Ten years after his email rampage, Lazar said that, back then, he’d hoped not for celebrity but to find some hidden explanation for America’s 21st century slump — a skeleton key buried within the emails of the rich and famous, something that might expose those causing our national rot and reverse it. Instead, he might have inadvertently put Donald Trump in the White House.

When Guccifer — a portmanteau of Lucifer and Gucci, pronounced with the Italian word’s “tch” sound — breached longtime Clinton family confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s email account, it changed the world almost by accident. Buried among the thousands of messages in Blumenthal’s AOL account he stole and leaked in 2013 were emails to HDR22@clintonemail.com, Hillary Clinton’s previously unknown private address . The account’s existence, and later revelations that she had improperly used it to conduct official government business and transmit sensitive intelligence data, led to something like a national panic attack: nonstop political acrimony, federal investigations, and depending on who you ask, Trump’s 2016 victory.

In the end, the way Guccifer might be best remembered was in the cooptation of his wildly catchy name for a Russian hacker persona: Guccifer 2.0 . The latter Guccifer would hack troves of information from Democratic National Committee servers, a plunder released on WikiLeaks.

Eventually, a federal indictment accused a cadre of Russian intelligence operatives of using the persona Guccifer 2.0 to conduct a political propaganda campaign and cover for Russian involvement. As the Guccifer 2.0 version grew in infamy, becoming a central figure in Americans’ wrangling over Russian interference in the 2016 election, the namesake hacker’s exploits faded from memory.

When I reached Lazar by phone, he was at home in Romania. He had returned to a family that had grown up and apart from him since he was arrested by Romanian police in 2014.

“I am still trying to connect back with my family, with my daughter, my wife,” Lazar said. “I’ve been away more than eight years, so this is a big gap, which I’m trying to fill with everything that takes.”

He spends most of his time alone at home, reading about American politics and working on a memoir. His wife supports the family as a low-paid worker at a nearby factory. Revisiting his past life for the book has been an odd undertaking, Lazar told me.

“It’s like an out-of-body experience, like this Guccifer guy is another guy,” he said. “Right now, having this time on my hands, I’m just trying to understand what this other me was making 10 years ago.”

L azar has little to say of the two American prisons where he was sentenced to do time after extradition from Romania. Both were in Pennsylvania — a minimum-security facility and then a stint at the medium-security Schuylkill, which he described simply and solemnly as “a bad place.” He claimed he was routinely denied medical care, and says he lost many of his teeth during his four-year term.

On matters of his crime and punishment, Lazar contradicted himself, something he did often during our conversations. He wants to be both the righteous crusader and the steamrolled patsy. He repeatedly brought up what he considers a fundamental injustice: He revealed Clinton’s rule-breaking email setup and then cooperated with the Department of Justice probe, only to wind up in federal prison.

“Hillary Clinton swam away with the ‘reckless negligence’ or whatever Jim Comey called her ,” Lazar said. “I did the time.”

Lazar was quick to rattle off a list of other high-profile officials who either knew about the secret Clinton email account all along or were later revealed to have used their own . “So much hypocrisy, come on man,” he said. “So much hypocrisy.”

And yet he pled guilty to all charges he faced and today fully admits what he did was wrong — sort of.

“To read somebody else’s emails is not OK,” he said. “And I paid for this, you know. People have to have privacy. But, you see, it’s not like I wanted to know what my neighbors are talking about. But I wanted to know what these guys in the United States are speaking about, and this is the reason why. I was sure that, over there, bad stuff is happening. This is the reason why I did it, not some other shady reason. What I did is OK.”

“I was inspired with the name, at least, because my whole Guccifer project was, after all, a failure.”

Though he takes pride in outing Clinton’s private email arrangement, Lazar said he found none of what he thought he’d uncover. The inbox-fishing expedition for the darkest secrets of American power instead mostly revealed their mediocre oil paintings and poorly lit family snapshots. He conceded that Guccifer’s legacy may be that Russian intelligence cribbed his name.

“I was inspired with the name, at least,” Lazar said, “because my whole Guccifer project was, after all, a failure.”

I t can be difficult to tell where the Guccifer mythology ends and Lazar’s biography begins. Back in his hometown of Arad, a Transylvanian city roughly the size of Syracuse, New York, Lazar seems ambivalent about the magnitude of his role in American electoral history. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about me,” he told me. When I pressed in a later phone call, Lazar described 2016 as something of an inevitability: “Trump was the bullet in the barrel of the gun. He was already lingering around.”

While Lazar says James Comey’s October surprise memo to Congress — that Clinton’s emailing habits were still under investigation — was what “killed Hillary Clinton,” he didn’t deny his indirect role in that twist.

“Everything started with this mumbo jumbo email server, with this bullshit of email server,” he said. “So, if it was not for me, it was not for [Hillary’s] email server to start an investigation.”

Lazar now claims he very nearly breached the Trump inner circle in October 2013. “I was about to hack the Trump guys, Ivanka and stuff,” he told me. “And my computer just broke.”

How does it feel to have boosted, even accidentally, Donald Trump, a bona fide American elite? Though he described the former president as mentally unstable, a hero of Confederate sympathizers, and deeply selfish, Lazar is unbothered by his indirect role in 2016: “I feel like a regular guy. I don’t feel anything special about myself.”

At times, the retired hacker clearly still relishes his brief global notoriety. I asked him what it felt like to see his hacker persona usurped by Russian intelligence using the “Guccifer 2.0” cutout: Was it a shameless rip-off, or a flattering homage? Lazar said he first learned that Russia had cribbed his persona from inside a detention center outside D.C. He perked up.

“I was feeling good, it was like a recognition,” he said. “It made me feel good, because in all these 10 years, I was all the time alone in this fight.”

L azar described his fight — a term he used repeatedly — as a personal crusade against the corrupt and corrupting American elite, based on his own broad understanding of the idea pieced together from reading about it online. It’s hard to dismiss out of hand.

“Look at the last 20 years of politics of United States,” Lazar explained. “It’s all lies, and it went so low in the mud. You know what I’m saying? It stinks.”

The quest to find and expose some smoking gun that could explain American decline became an obsession, one he said kept him in front of a computer for 16 hours a day, guessing Yahoo Mail passwords, scouring his roughly 100 victims’ contact books, and plotting his next account takeover. He understood that it might seem odd passion for a Romanian ex-cabbie.

“I am Romanian, I am living in this godforsaken place. Why I’m interested in this? Why? This is a good question,” he told me. “For us, for guys from a Communist country, for example Romania which was one of the worst Communist countries, United States was a beacon of light.”

George W. Bush changed all that for him. “In the time after 2000, you come to realize it’s all a humbug,” he said. “It’s all a lie, right? So, you feel the need, which I felt myself, to do something, to put things right, for the American people but for my soul too.”

It’s funny, Lazar told me, that his greatest admirers seemed to have been Russian intelligence, not the American people he now claims to have been working to inform. “We have somehow the same mindset,” Lazar mused. “Romania was a Communist country; they were Communists too.”

Hackers are still playing a game Guccifer mastered.

Since Lazar began this fight, the playbook he popularized — break into an email account, grab as many personal files as you can, dump them on the web, and seed the juiciest bits with eager journalists like myself — has become a go-to tactic around the world. Whether it’s North Korean agents pillaging Sony Pictures’ salacious email exchanges or an alleged Qatari hack of Trump ally Elliott Broidy exposing his foreign entanglements , hackers are still playing a game Guccifer mastered.

Despite having essentially zero technical skills — he gained access to accounts largely by guessing their password security questions — Lazar knew the fundamental truth that people love reading the private thoughts of powerful strangers. Sometimes these are deeply newsworthy, and sometimes it’s just a perverse thrill, though there’s a very fine line between the two. Even the disclosure of an innocuous email can be damaging for a person or organization presumed by the public to be impenetrable. When I brought this up to Lazar, his modesty slipped ever so slightly.

He said, “I am sure, in my humble way, I was a new-roads opener.”

T he Lazar I’ve met on the phone was very different from the Guccifer of a decade ago. Back then he would send rambling emails to Gawker, my former employer, largely consisting of fragmented screeds against the Illuminati. The word, which he said he’s retired, nods to a conspiracy of global elites that wield unfathomable power.

“I’d like to call them, right now, ‘deep state,’” he said. “But Illuminati was back then a handy word. Of course, it has bad connotations, it’s like a bad B movie from Hollywood.”

Unfortunately for Lazar, the “deep state” — a term of Turkish origin, referring to an unaccountable security state that acts largely in secret — has in the years since his arrest come to connote paranoid delusion nearly as much as the word “Illuminati” does. Whatever one thinks of the deep state, though, the notion is as contentious and popular among internet-dwelling cranks — especially, and ironically for Lazar, Trump followers. Whatever you want to call it, Lazar believed he’d find it in someone else’s inbox.

“My ultimate goal was to find the blueprints of bad behavior,” he said.

Some would argue that, in Blumenthal’s inbox, he did. Still, after a full term of the Trump administration, the idea of bad behavior at the highest levels of power being something kept hidden in secret emails almost feels quaint.

While Lazar’s past comments to the media have included outright fabrications, racist remarks, and a reliance on paranoid tropes, he seemed calmer now. On the phone, he was entirely lucid, and thoughtful more often than not, even on topics that clearly anguish him. Prison may have cost him his teeth, but it seems to have given him a softer edge than he had a decade ago. He is still a conspiratorially minded man, but not necessarily a delusional one. He plans to remain engaged with American politics in his own way.

“I don’t care about myself,” he told me, “but I care about all the stuff I was talking about, you know, politics and stuff.” He said, “I’m gonna keep keeping one eye on American politics and react to this. I’m not gonna let the water just flow. I’m gonna intervene.”

This time, he says he’ll fight the powers that be by writing, not guessing passwords. “I am more subtle than I was before,” he tried to assure me.

“I’m gonna keep keeping one eye on American politics and react to this. I’m not gonna let the water just flow. I’m gonna intervene.”

At one point in our conversations, Lazar rattled off a sample of the 400 books he said he read in prison, sounding as much like a #Resistance Twitter addict as anything else: “James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Michael Hayden , James Clapper, all their biographies, which nobody reads, you know?”

While he still makes references to the deep state and “shadow governments” and malign influence of the Rockefeller family, he’s also quick to reference obscure FBI brass like Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap, paraphrase counterintelligence reports, or cite “Midyear Exam,” the Department of Justice probe into Clinton’s email practices.

It’s difficult to know if this more polished, better-read Lazar has become less conspiratorial, or whether the country that imprisoned him has become so much more so that it’s impossible to tell the difference. Lazar is a conspiracy theorist, it seems, in the same way everyone became after 2016.

Lazar, the free man, alluded to knowing that Guccifer was in over his head. He admitted candidly that he lied in an NBC News interview about having gained access to Clinton’s private email server, a claim he recanted during a later FBI interview, because he naively hoped the lie would grant him leverage to cut a better deal after his extradition. It didn’t, nor did his full cooperation with the FBI’s Clinton email probe.

When I asked Lazar whether he worried about the consequences of stealing the emails of the most famous people he could possibly reach, he said he believed creating celebrity for himself, anathema to most veteran hackers, would protect him from being disappeared by the state. In the end, it did not.

“At some point,” he said, “I lost control.”

The post Guccifer, the Hacker Who Launched Clinton Email Flap, Speaks Out After Nearly a Decade Behind Bars appeared first on The Intercept .

Q uando o coronel Julian Rocha Pontes furou a fila para tomar a vacina contra a covid-19 e, por isso, acabou demitido do comando da Polícia Militar do Distrito Federal, em abril de 2021, abriu-se uma oportunidade que políticos próximos ao presidente Jair Bolsonaro não deixaram passar.

Àquela altura, Júlio Danilo Souza Ferreira havia acabado de ser empossado como novo secretário de Segurança Pública do Distrito Federal. Ferreira é homem de confiança de Anderson Torres, seu antecessor no cargo – e, como ele, delegado licenciado da Polícia Federal. Torres tinha sido chamado havia poucos dias para ser ministro da Justiça de Bolsonaro. Com as bênçãos do governador Ibaneis Rocha, do MDB, aceitou o convite, mas cuidou de deixar o posto no governo do DF para seu antigo número dois , Ferreira. Que, nos primeiros dias no cargo, escolheu o coronel Márcio Cavalcante de Vasconcelos como novo comandante da PM.

Com Vasconcelos, em poucos dias a cúpula da corporação foi tomada por oficiais que têm com ele algo em comum. Todos foram colegas e são próximos, desde a Academia da Polícia de Brasília, de uma figura central do projeto de poder de Bolsonaro. Trata-se de Jorge Antônio de Oliveira Francisco, ex-ministro-chefe da Secretaria-Geral da Presidência da República entre 2019 e 2020, em seguida nomeado ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União pelo presidente.

Jorge Oliveira, como é conhecido, é oficial da reserva da PMDF: entrou na corporação em 1993 como aluno do curso de formação de oficiais da Academia da Polícia de Brasília. Exigência imposta pela Constituição de 1988, a formação superior dos oficiais da PM começou no Distrito Federal em 1990. Oliveira foi, portanto, aluno da que é conhecida internamente como a “quarta turma” – oficialmente, a Turma Benjamin Constant . Nela, conheceu e se tornou amigo de Vasconcelos – e de outras figuras de destaque no falho esquema de segurança que permitiu os ataques terroristas de domingo, 8 de janeiro.

No meio militar, a turma em que se formam os oficiais é fundamental para entender as ligações, conexões e amizades entre eles, porque a progressão na carreira é feita por antiguidade. Assim, colegas que se formam juntos irão progredir juntos até o penúltimo degrau da carreira. Nas PMs, só a promoção para a patente de coronel, a mais alta, é feita por merecimento.

Ibaneis, Torres e Oliveira são figuras-chave para entender a influência não apenas do bolsonarismo, mas do próprio Bolsonaro na cúpula da PM do Distrito Federal ao longo de pelo menos a última década. Não se trata de uma polícia militar como outras quaisquer. Por ser responsável pela segurança da capital do país, sede dos Três Poderes e de dezenas de representações diplomáticas de todo o mundo, é financiada integralmente pelo governo federal – nada menos que R$ 10 bilhões estão previstos no orçamento para 2023. Com isso, é também a mais bem paga do país – o salário líquido médio é de quase R$ 10 mil mensais. Ainda assim, falhou miseravelmente – ou, ainda pior, se omitiu – em uma de suas principais missões.

Da PM ao Tribunal de Contas da União

A quarta turma da Academia da Polícia de Brasília se formou em 1995. Poucos anos depois, em 2003, o oficial Oliveira mergulhou na política. Tornou-se assessor parlamentar da PMDF na Câmara. Na prática, um lobista dos interesses da corporação no parlamento federal. Não demorou nada para que se tornasse íntimo do mais vocal defensor da pauta militar na casa: o então deputado federal Bolsonaro, que iniciava o quarto de seus sete mandatos na casa. Para além do alinhamento ideológico, havia uma questão familiar. O pai do policial, o capitão do Exército Jorge Oliveira Francisco, foi chefe do gabinete de Bolsonaro por longos 20 anos.

Em 2013, já formado em Direito, Oliveira pediu para ir à reserva – isto é, para se aposentar – da PM do Distrito Federal. Àquela altura, já era major, a terceira mais alta patente nas PMs. Mas não deixou a Câmara: foi contratado como assessor jurídico do gabinete de Bolsonaro.

– Encaminhei mensagem para o Senado Federal indicando o Maj R/1 PMDF, atual Ministro da Secretaria Geral, Jorge Oliveira para exercer o cargo de Ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União. pic.twitter.com/9HeASQJjPZ

— Jair M. Bolsonaro 2??2?? (@jairbolsonaro) October 7, 2020

A lealdade canina a Bolsonaro foi recompensada. Em 2019, o presidente não deixou Oliveira na mão e lhe entregou a chefia de gabinete do filho e deputado federal Eduardo – de quem também viria a ser padrinho de casamento. Mas ele não ficaria muito tempo com o 03. Em junho, Bolsonaro se lembraria de Oliveira quando teve de escolher seu terceiro ministro-chefe da Secretaria-Geral da Presidência em menos de seis meses no cargo, procurando apagar a crise que se havia iniciado ainda em fevereiro com a demissão do primeiro deles, Gustavo Bebianno.

Assim, Oliveira virou ministro. Em pouco tempo, passou a ser visto em Brasília como o auxiliar com mais influência sobre o presidente . O que lhe rendeu, menos de um ano e meio depois, uma das cadeiras mais cobiçadas de Brasília: a de ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União, um cargo vitalício – e, novamente, por indicação de Bolsonaro. (No TCU, por ironia, ele substituiu outro personagem central dos ataques terroristas de domingo, o atual ministro da Defesa José Múcio Monteiro.)

Os homens de Oliveira

Empossado como comandante da PM do Distrito Federal em 3 de abril de 2021, o coronel Márcio Cavalcante de Vasconcelos não é apenas bom amigo de Jorge Oliveira. É também próximo de Anderson Torres e, segundo noticiou à época da nomeação o site Metrópoles, já havia feito “serviços de inteligência” para o governo Bolsonaro .

Em edição extra publicada poucos dias após sua nomeação, em 7 de abril de 2021, o comandante-geral da PM indicou novos ocupantes para seis postos-chave da corporação – o subcomando geral e os comandos do Estado Maior; do Departamento Operacional; do Departamentos de Controle e Correção; do Departamento de Logística e Finanças; do Departamento da Diretoria de Execução Orçamentária e de Finanças; e da Seção de Pessoal. Para todos eles, indicou colegas da quarta turma. A dele mesmo – e de Jorge Oliveira. Poucos dias depois, o ministro do TCU fez uma visita ao amigo que começava a comandar a PM.

Um desses nomes é extremamente relevante: o do coronel Jorge Eduardo Naime Barreto, escolhido por Vasconcelos para chefiar o Departamento Operacional da corporação. É a ele que cabe planejar operações especiais de segurança, como a que deu muito errado no domingo passado. (A favor do oficial, é preciso dizer que ele também esteve à frente da estratégia de policiamento em momentos sensíveis, como a posse de Lula e Geraldo Alckmin e os protestos golpistas de 7 de setembro de 2021 e 2022 em Brasília.)

Naime é mais um oficial cuja proximidade com Oliveira é patente. Foi recebido por ele para encontros fechados no TCU em duas ocasiões, em fevereiro e agosto de 2022 – novamente, sem que haja registro da pauta das reuniões.

Antes de chegar ao comando-geral da PM, Vasconcelos liderava uma área nevrálgica da Segurança Pública distrital: a Subsecretaria de Operações Integradas, conhecida pela sigla Sopi, diretamente subordinada a Torres. O antecessor de Vasconcelos na Sopi é outro personagem dessa história a colocar a PMDF na esfera de influência de Bolsonaro, o coronel Carlos Renato Machado Paim.

Paim embarcou no governo da extrema direita em abril de 2020, quando passou a ser secretário nacional da Segurança Pública , um dos cargos mais importantes do Ministério da Justiça. Foi nomeado por Walter Braga Netto , o general da reserva do Exército que tentaria ser vice-presidente na fracassada tentativa de reeleição de Bolsonaro. Àquela altura, Jorge Oliveira já era tido como o auxiliar mais próximo do presidente. Já ministro do TCU, ele recebeu no gabinete Paim, seu colega na quarta turma, em janeiro de 2022 . O portal da transparência não informa o motivo da reunião.

Pouco depois de Paim, chegou ao governo federal outro coronel da PMDF: André de Sousa Costa – este, da terceira turma, um ano veterana daquela de Oliveira –, tido como um dos oficiais mais radicais à direita da corporação. Em junho de 2020, ele ganhou o cargo de assessor-chefe adjunto na Assessoria Especial de Bolsonaro. Menos de um ano depois, em abril de 2021, foi promovido a chefe da Secretaria Especial de Comunicação Social, a Secom, do Ministério das Comunicações. Já na Secom, Costa também foi recebido por Oliveira em seu gabinete no TCU . Novamente, não se sabe qual a pauta da reunião.

Empossado na chefia da Secom, Costa mandou buscar outro coronel formado na quarta turma para ser seu braço direito como secretário-adjunto: Anderson Vilela. Foi mais um a se sentar para uma conversa privada e de teor não divulgado com Oliveira no TCU, em agosto de 2021 . Costa e Vilela também foram registrados, juntos, em visita à cúpula da TV Record , simpática ao governo Bolsonaro.

Além da provável influência em nomeações que envolvem PMDF, Oliveira é tido como um dos responsáveis pela ascensão de Anderson Torres ao grupo de auxiliares próximos de Bolsonaro. Os dois se conheceram na Câmara por volta de 2015, quando Torres foi ser chefe de gabinete do deputado federal Fernando Francischini, do União Brasil do Paraná, outro delegado bolsonarista da Polícia Federal que virou político ( ele acabou cassado por distribuir mentiras sobre as urnas eletrônicas).

Àquela época, Torres estava desgastado na PF por ter sido acusado de sequestrar e torturar os suspeitos de terem assaltado colegas da corporação. Assim, viu na política – e, logo, em Bolsonaro, para quem Oliveira já trabalhava – sua chance de crescer. Com a saída de Sergio Moro do Ministério da Justiça, em 2020, Oliveira trabalhou para fazer de Torres o novo delegado-geral da Polícia Federal. Aquela tentativa não vingou, mas ele acabaria ministro quando o sucessor de Moro, o terrivelmente evangélico André Mendonça, ganhou uma vaga no Supremo Tribunal Federal. Por isso, tornou-se um soldado fiel de Bolsonaro, disposto até a melar eleições pelo chefe (ou, no mínimo, fingir que não viu, o que é crime de prevaricação para quem ocupava seu posto).

Via assessoria de imprensa do TCU, perguntei a Jorge Oliveira quais foram as pautas das reuniões com os colegas da PMDF em seu gabinete, e porque elas foram omitidas, o que contraria a lei. Questionei-o, ainda, sobre sua eventual interferência nas nomeações de oficiais para o comando da PMDF e de policiais da corporação para cargos de indicação política no governo Bolsonaro. Ele respondeu que não faria comentários.

Chega o interventor – mas a quarta turma fica

Em abril do ano passado, o coronel Vasconcelos deixou o comando da PM para se aventurar na política. Resolveu erguer a bandeira da truculência policial em busca de uma mandato parlamentar. Candidato a deputado federal pelo MDB de Ibaneis Rocha, fez pífios 3.363 votos e acabou suplente da bancada. (Para efeitos de comparação, Alberto Fraga, do União Brasil, um ex-oficial da PM distrital que é deputado federal desde 1999 e fundador da bancada da bala, teve 28.825 votos e quase não conseguiu renovar seu mandato.)

Para o lugar, Ibaneis e o secretário Ferreira mandaram buscar o coronel Fábio Augusto Vieira , que estava no comando da Sopi após a promoção de Vasconcelos. Vieira é mais um colega de Oliveira na quarta turma da Academia de Polícia. Após os ataques terroristas de domingo, foi um dos que tiveram a prisão decretada pelo ministro Alexandre de Moraes, do Supremo Tribunal Federal.

Já Anderson Torres, que havia voltado ao comando da Secretaria de Segurança Pública após o fim do governo Bolsonaro, fugiu para os Estados Unidos um dia antes dos ataques aos Três Poderes. Também por ordem de Moraes, será preso assim que pisar no Brasil. Na casa dele, a Polícia Federal encontrou um esboço de documento que serviria para Bolsonaro melar a eleição. No Twitter, Torres anunciou em 10 de janeiro que voltará ao país para se entregar e cuidar de sua defesa .

A cordialidade com que a PM assistiu Brasília ser destruída no domingo levou o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a decretar, ainda naquele dia, intervenção federal na Secretaria de Segurança Pública de Júlio Danilo Ferreira (horas depois, o ministro Moraes também afastou Ibaneis Rocha do cargo de governador por ao menos 90 dias).

Nomeado interventor, o jornalista Ricardo Cappelli chegou já com a missão de nomear um sucessor para o coronel Vieira. A escolha dele foi conservadora: o coronel Klepter Rosa Gonçalves, primeiro na linha da sucessão – era, desde outubro passado, o subcomandante-geral da corporação. Klepter é mais um oficial formado na quarta turma e havia sido alçado pelo coronel Vasconcelos, em 2021, a chefe do Departamento de Gestão de Pessoal.

No mesmo decreto em que levou Klepter ao comando da PM, o interventor Cappelli retirou do coronel Naime a chefia do Departamento Operacional. Outros oficiais subordinados a ele também caíram, entre eles o coronel Paulo José Ferreira de Sousa Bezerra, o número dois do departamento.

‘Tenho plena confiança nas forças de segurança do Distrito Federal, diz o interventor.

Dois experientes coronéis da PM do Distrito Federal com quem conversei para esta reportagem veem como um problema a hegemonia de uma turma da Academia de Polícia no comando. Argumentam, com a ressalva de se tratarem de visões pessoais, que a convivência entre oficiais de gerações diferentes enriquece a corporação, e que dificilmente uma só turma terá os policiais mais preparados para chefiar as diferentes áreas e especialidades da atividade. Entre os 30 coronéis em atividade na corporação, há oficiais formados em quatros diferentes turmas – da segunda, de 1991, à quinta, de 1994.

Enviei à PMDF questões sobre a proeminência da quarta turma de oficiais e sua relação com Jorge Oliveira, mas ouvi, numa resposta por telefone, que a corporação não iria comentar o caso por estar sob intervenção. Já o interventor Cappelli, que recebeu as mesmas perguntas, respondeu o seguinte: “Tenho plena confiança nas forças de segurança do Distrito Federal”.

Seja como for, apurar qual a influência de Jorge Oliveira, braço direito de Jair Bolsonaro, sobre os oficiais que foram colegas dele e comandavam a tropa nos atos de domingo não será a única missão do interventor Cappelli. André de Sousa Costa e Anderson Vilela, os dois coronéis da quarta turma que passaram pela Secom de Bolsonaro, retornaram à PM e podem ser reintegrados à tropa. (Carlos Renato Machado Paim, que passou pelo Ministério da Justiça, já foi para a reserva.)

Mas debelar a influência de Jair Bolsonaro na Polícia Militar do DF é uma tarefa que dificilmente será realizada em curto prazo.

Colaborou: Guilherme Mazieiro

The post PM do Distrito Federal é comandada por colegas de turma de homem de confiança de Bolsonaro appeared first on The Intercept .

“The battle between good and evil has come now.”
— Senior staff member in the U.S. Senate

In the Cormac McCarthy novel “Blood Meridian,” a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. “We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” he tells his men. As they ride, White notices dust clouds on the horizon. Through his spyglass, he sees a massive herd of cattle, mules, and horses being driven toward the company by what he takes for a band of stock thieves. They seem to pay his men no mind as the herd rumbles past. Then, suddenly, hundreds of mounted Comanche lancers and archers appear:

A legion of horribles … wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners … one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.

I first read those lines 14 years ago, in a hostel bunk bed amid the wanderings of my early 20s. I was in Naples, where my great-grandfather had boarded a ship to America, and though faces on the streets looked eerily familiar, I felt only a tenuous connection to the city. The novel’s lines about a distant frontier, in contrast, instantly resonated, though I struggled to understand why. There was shocking clarity in the violence: The attackers butcher the Americans, “passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads.” The description of their garish attire, with its funhouse mockery of the would-be conquerors, left me with a lingering sense of vulnerability.

These lines resurfaced in my mind after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an event whose meaning I’ve found myself continuing to interrogate as we approach its two-year anniversary. At the start of 2021, I was married, with one small child and another on the way, and living in a brick-house suburb of Washington, D.C. I’d covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, then returned, in 2017, to report on the sort of militant-minded Americans who ended up storming Congress. I had traveled to pre-election meetings with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role that day, and I’d been at a previous “Stop the Steal” rally, in November 2020, watching pot-bellied Proud Boys march around like Catholic school kids in matching polo shirts. On the morning of January 6, however, I stayed home. I was sick of it all: the crowds, the Covid risk, the threats of violence. I’d seen my share of real war at the margins of the U.S. sphere of influence and couldn’t stand another day of listening to comfortable Americans talk about inflicting such violence at home. It wasn’t just them, though. It was also me. In the interludes between my trips around the country, contemplating America’s breakdown from the desk in my sunroom, I’d found I no longer understood what my role was supposed to be.

Then the riot commenced. The Capitol was breached. I thought, if this is something that will overturn the republic — if it’s a real revolution — then my path is clear again, and there will be time to get to the Capitol tonight, tomorrow, and probably for days.

I was right and wrong. The riot was over in a matter of hours. Congress reconvened to certify the election result that night. But I thought the attack had struck a deeper, psychological blow whose impact was hard to see clearly. I felt it in the reactions from friends and neighbors, in the hysteria in the news, and in my own unease. The answer seemed to lurk behind the nature of the freakout. Turning back to the passage from “Blood Meridian,” I reconsidered what was so unnerving about it and wondered if the rioters, perhaps without realizing it, had tapped into the same anxiety the scene had animated in me years earlier. It conjures a fear about the edge of empire that has always lurked in the American mind, in which the frontier is the place where the violence and suffering the nation has inflicted as the terms of its expansion and sustainment bend back on us, and we encounter our demons. There’s an air of reckoning as the legion descends on Captain White’s company. The first weapons they brandish against the Americans are “shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass.”

“They came dressed for chaos,” read the New York Times the day after the Capitol was attacked, “in red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Donald Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and Captain America; another as Abraham Lincoln. They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear.” Other writers noted the “seditionist frontiersmen” and “revolutionary cosplayers” and “Confederate revivalists.” The ghosts were rising up from across the American centuries. Solemn-eyed Christians with their wooden cross. The gallows with its noose. Militants dressed like our modern Forever War soldiers. Some of them, indeed, had been those soldiers, and here they were in their battle attire. A writer for The Atlantic described spending time among a group of protesters that included two men in camouflage and Kevlar vests, along with a woman in a full-body cat suit. He was confronted by a sense of mystery. The event, he wrote, was “not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics.” No — the meaning lay in the subliminal. What these people were describing were their nightmares about the edge of empire, come to life, and massing in the heart of Washington, D.C.

The legion advanced holding up a mirror, and I looked at my reflection. It clarified the unease that had been troubling me at my desk. If that side had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol, then my side might be manning the imperial gates.

Five days after January 6, a writer who uses the pen name John Mosby, after a famous Confederate guerrilla, posted an essay about the attack online. It began with a question he said a friend had asked him that day: “Ever see a government starting to totally lose control and just flail ineffectually?”

Mosby describes himself as a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, though he is guarded about specifics. His friend’s question was rhetorical: Part of the job of a Green Beret is to operate in the chaos of broken countries. One thing that serving in or otherwise witnessing recent U.S. wars can also show you, though, is America’s own weakness, laid bare in the yawning gap between what it promised in those wars and what it was able to achieve. For more than a decade on “Mountain Guerrilla,” Mosby’s blog and now Patreon page, and in survivalist and tactical guides that people in militant and prepper circles discuss with reverence, he has laid out an apocalyptic understanding of the world centered on the idea of America’s decline and eventual collapse.

Two aspects of Mosby’s post are striking in relation to January 6. The first is his starting point: America is an empire. Prominent U.S. thinkers once wrestled with this idea, with Mark Twain and others making the Anti-Imperialist League a political force during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. These days, the concept often seems relegated to the Noam Chomsky -citing hard left or pockets of the far right, but a shift in perspective can sharpen the picture. “To an outsider, the fact that America is an empire is the most obvious fact of all,” the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who spent 25 years in the U.S., wrote during the Vietnam era. America emerged from a revolt against an imperialist power, giving its citizens an aversion to “the mere suggestion that they may themselves be an empire,” Fairlie noted. “Call it, then, by another name … but the fact will remain.”

The modern blend of America’s economic might, military alliances, and borderless campaigns of surveillance, drone attacks, and commando raids makes its version of empire look different from those that preceded it — and from the blunter attempts at power grabs in Cuba and the Philippines that mobilized Twain and his allies. Mosby, however, also subscribes to the idea that the country itself is a patchwork of far-flung places tied together by conquest. The distance from London to Rome, he notes , is less than from Denver or Austin to the White House. So the U.S. decline Mosby sees is imperial decline, both at home and abroad. He derides the idea that America’s technological advances and the comforts of its globalized economy will help it escape the fate of every empire that came before it. In fact, he believes that the excesses of contemporary U.S. capitalism will only speed that fate along. He titled his post about January 6 “The Hubris of Technophilia.”

Secondly, in Mosby’s view, Donald Trump existed outside the true power structure of this crumbling empire even when he controlled the presidency. The real authority lay somewhere else. This was the authority that revealed its weakness on January 6. It wasn’t the breach of the poorly guarded U.S. Capitol that told him this. (“I could give two shits about that, and in fact, was surprised that we didn’t see smoke billowing out the windows.”) He saw it in the agitation of the politicians and talking heads and the panicked talk about insurrection in the news. It was in the frenzy of a kicked beehive.

What you’re watching, right now, is the mechanisms of imperial power — the government, the legacy media, and the oligarchs, of social media and big business — lashing out ineffectually, in the throes of panic, because the collapse of the imperial hegemony just became readily apparent to even the willfully blind … They’re NOT in control, and at their core, they know it. They’re not in control in Afghanistan. They’re not in control in Iraq. They’re not in control in Syria. … Hell, they’re not even really in control in Washington, DC.

If you ask me, Trump embodies the worst of U.S. empire and is exactly the fallout that critics of its runaway capitalism, militarism, and nationalism have predicted. He campaigned on stealing oil and indiscriminately bombing ISIS territory, and on demonizing Muslims, who for 20 years have been the state-sponsored enemy, as well as by fearmongering over migrants at the southern border. It wasn’t just talk: Trump ramped up drone attacks and embraced secret wars and loosened airstrike rules designed to limit civilian casualties . Large corporations and defense contractors raked in profits during his presidency. I recognize in the January 6 movement the same alliance between a supposedly anti-establishment grassroots and the super-rich that I remember from the tea party. My goal, however, is to look in the mirror, and Mosby’s writing shows how the Democratic side of the political divide can also be portrayed as aligned with the centers of entrenched power. After January 6, many liberals looked to Big Tech for more censorship and to financial institutions for help blocking funding streams. They embraced the government agencies that had managed the war on terror and pushed them for domestic remedies , such as the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived disinformation board and a new law to give the FBI more tools and funding to counter domestic extremism. Maybe some of this was justified, given the stakes, but one goal in psychological operations is to get your opponent to act like the enemy you want to fight.

Mosby’s prescriptions seem somewhat apolitical: He sees America’s collapse as unavoidable and advocates a retreat into austere survivalism. There are plenty of people on the right, however, who are keen to harness the January 6 crowd’s momentum to enact radical change. This includes an expanding constellation of anti-democratic thought that can draw on similar notions of empire and the modern right’s place outside its hierarchies. Thinkers in this space have posited that liberal authority is so ingrained that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy; this was the concept behind the former private equity executive Michael Anton’s 2016 case for Trump in his widely circulated essay “ The Flight 93 Election ,” which gave conservatives an ultimatum: “Charge the cockpit or you die.” Anton became a National Security Council official in the Trump administration and is now at the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank. Curtis Yarvin, a writer often cited as a favorite of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, has also deployed the declining empire frame. He has called for an “American Caesar” to rescue the country from its liberal masters. “Certainly, our choice in the early 21st century — if we have a choice — is one of two fates: the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire,” he wrote . “Don’t let anyone hate on you for preferring the former — or being willing to learn from it.”

Let’s consider a different moment when protesters massed in the heart of Washington, D.C, the crowd stretching out by the tens of thousands. There are militants in helmets among them, along with the frumps and strivers of the middle classes in jeans. And then there are the freaks. They have come decked out in various costumes, including furs and animal skins. These are the legions of the anti-war left, assembled for their October 1967 march on the Pentagon.

In “The Armies of the Night,” his book about the march, Norman Mailer described the spectacle. “They came walking up in all sizes,” he wrote, “perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin.” He counted hundreds of hippies in Union blue and Confederate gray marching beside samurais, shepherds, Roman senators, “Martians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor.”

With this absurdist show of force, Mailer hoped the left had found the momentum to challenge not only the war in Vietnam but also what he called “the authority” behind the version of America that he called “technology land,” where the horrors of napalm, Agent Orange , and nuclear bombs were tied in some intrinsic way to all the stifling domestic corruptions.

Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority. … this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority … were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy.

The movement’s power, the book suggests, was born of a refusal to accept, at home, what America manifested overseas, and a determination not to lose sight of the immediacy of burned forests and dead civilians. It challenged the authority by refusing to play on its terms. This was the energy behind the idea of such a horde preparing to march, with no coherent plan, against the annihilating structure of the Pentagon, a building that encompasses 6.5 million square feet of office space and 7,500 windows. “[T]he aesthetic at last was in the politics,” Mailer wrote, rejoicing that “politics had again become mysterious.”

In the end, the marchers streamed across the Arlington Bridge and descended on the Pentagon, where some managed to break in and run amok for a while. Hundreds were arrested. The world seemed to spin on. Mailer felt, however, that a psychological blow had been dealt — because the event, he wrote, was one “that the authority could not comprehend.”

One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks.

The protesters, it seems to me, were trying to reach into the subliminal reserve of guilt and fear that Americans keep buried, and in doing so, they took on the role of McCarthy’s legion of horribles. One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks. The system was run and staffed by squares, policed by squares, and supported by squares, the unquestioning drones of empire. There was power in the ability to interrupt the programming, to jolt them with a sense of dislocation. It’s an ethos captured in miniature in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when he recounts standing in the men’s room of a popular nightspot and spilling LSD powder onto his flannel sleeve. A stranger walks in and begins to suck the powder from Thompson’s arm: “A very gross tableau,” he writes, that makes him wonder if a “young stockbroker type” might walk in and see them. “Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it’ll ruin his life — forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”

During the protest at the Pentagon, the hippies held an exorcism, trying to levitate the building and drive out the demons within it. The new generation of the left, Mailer wrote, “believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution.” Now it’s the new right reaching for magic — black magic, maybe, but magic nonetheless. They believe in international conspiracies of pedophiles , in Satan worshippers, and Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. These are terrible, dangerous fantasies, yes, but they also contrast with a left whose anti-establishment impulses often seem to go corporate, like rock and roll and weed, and executives with hired shamans preaching psychedelic healing. One side believes in apocalypse and ivermectin horse paste, and God, and bleach . The other believes in grown-up generals and congressional committees, rules and norms, and the FBI.

I recently was reading one of the books to which liberals flocked in the Trump era — actually, even more on-brand, I was listening to the audio version while buying groceries in the middle of a weekday. It was “How Fascism Works,” by Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale. Stanley details contemporary problems that can be understood as aspects of fascist politics: male chauvinism, unreality, the demonization of minorities, the glorification of an imagined race or ethno-centric history, attempts to divide people into “us” and “them.” He also expands the discussion to other traits of U.S. conservatism: being against abortion, for example, or paternalistically regressive. He writes that a 2016 tweet by Mitt Romney — in which Romney called Trump’s sexist comments on the “Access Hollywood” tapes “vile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters” — evokes the Hutu power ideology behind the Rwanda genocide, suggesting that Romney’s description of women “exclusively in traditionally subordinate roles” supports the paradigm of “the patriarchal family in fascist politics.” Academics who advocate for so-called “great books” programs centered on the works of white Europeans, he warns elsewhere, citing a “Mein Kampf” passage on the supposed dominance of Aryan cultural heritage, are at risk of finding themselves in the company of Hitler.

I breezed along with my shopping, until I thought I felt Stanley reach for me. Other key features of fascism, he writes, using Rush Limbaugh as a foil, are the undermining of “expertise” and attempts to create a climate in which “experts have been delegitimized.” Wait a minute, I thought, pulling out my earbuds. Which experts does he mean? (And is Stanley one of them?) Aside from calls to defend science and academia from right-wing onslaughts, he leaves the category mostly undefined. Limbaugh’s attacks on all sources of information that ran counter to his own hyperpartisan propaganda were transparent enough, and easy to disdain; this has also become part of the Trumpian playbook. At the same time, however, many among the sprawling class of elites and experts in America have used Trump’s specter to shield themselves from challenges to their authority that may well be justified. Whoever has been guiding the country through the three-plus decades of my lifetime, at least, hasn’t been doing a good job of it, and we clearly have more than just conservatives to blame. This is apparent in any statistical indicator that tracks the worsening of, say, climate change or economic inequality over time, the persistent discrimination faced by Black Americans, or their continued killing by our militarized police . However inadvertently, broad defenses of elites and experts support the status quo, while nurturing an increasingly dangerous American reverence for authority. Now more than ever, it seems, we should be leaning into the opposing tradition of vibrant skepticism as we seek to discern and constantly reevaluate which purported expertise is worthwhile and which we’d be better off dismissing.

The book dissects how problems from racism and inequality to inhumane treatment of immigrants have seeded the potential destruction of American democracy. It makes only passing mention, however, of an example of elite failure that’s essential to the discussion: the disaster of U.S. foreign policy. Nothing has bred hyper-nationalism like the post-9/11 wars, or inflamed a reactionary sense of cultural superiority, or fed the worship of violence and power, or eroded the rule of law, or indoctrinated people in a constant, searching fear of new threats and enemies , or encouraged them to turn, for relief, to industry, technology, and the security state. The wars and their knock-on effects, including surveillance and civilian casualties that continue to this day, have been supported by both political parties and sustained by a top-down culture of unreality based on encouraging people to look away. An edifice of official secrecy, staffed by experts and elites, has been built upon layers of classification, obfuscation, and denial that hide information we’d rather not see anyway, helping us avoid a full view of our own reflections.

Hannah Arendt, born in pre-war Germany, is widely considered one of the foremost scholars of that country’s descent into Hitlerism. She devoted a third of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which analyzed the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi and Soviet regimes, to imperialism. Tyranny deployed abroad, she noted, “could only destroy the political body of the nation-state,” and while imperialism alone didn’t spawn Hitler’s rise, it was essential to creating the right conditions. Arendt immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and tracked the overseas adventurism that has defined the era of American dominance. In her 1971 essay on the release of the Pentagon Papers, “ Lying in Politics ,” she observed that the Vietnam War was the province not only of flag-waving nationalists but also of seemingly well-intentioned experts and bureaucrats, the so-called problem solvers who’d helped to support the war and lent it a sheen of respectability. “Self-deception is the danger par excellence ,” she wrote. The experts ended up living in the same unreality they foisted on the public. For all their acumen, they became gears in a machine that was grinding forward unthinkingly: “One sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision-makers’ had been let loose in Southeast Asia.”

These decision-makers were taking direction from Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who served as defense secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Some detractors saw the “problem solvers” and their technocratic counterparts across government as dangerous progressives. Some of the technocrats’ critics on the left, however, believed that, rather than truly changing the power structure, they were trying to alter it just enough to be comfortable in it — and that this applied more broadly to the Kennedy-Johnson coalition. In “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer wrote of his unease at a pre-march party at the home of an academic who was both against the war and, as Mailer saw it, one of the empire’s unwitting supporters.

If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame … [on] the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.

The enemies on the right were more obvious; here Mailer was concerned with the trickier battle within liberalism. He saw that you can’t start a revolution, which is what pulling down the edifices of empire would be, if the people on your side are so ingrained in the power structure that they can’t even see it.

In June, I traveled to a town called Eureka, just shy of the Canadian border in the pines of northwest Montana, and stopped at a cluster of storage units off the main road. At the entrance to one of them, Dakota Adams, 25, the eldest child of Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader , took out a ring of keys and opened the padlock to the roll-up door. Inside, amid belongings piled halfway to the ceiling, were remnants of the many years his father had spent preparing for the revolution: rifle cases, old ammunition boxes, helmets, recruiting flyers, smoke grenades. Adams waded through the pile, dug around for a bit, and lifted up a camouflage vest heavy with bulletproof plates. “Ah,” he said. “My childhood body armor.”

Adams had been brought up in the militant movement, immersed in meetings and trainings hidden away in the surrounding pines. Then, recently, he’d broken from it and from his father as well, following a long process that he called “deprogramming,” during which he also changed his surname. All around were obscure and dusty books that had belonged to his father: “The Coming Battle,” by M. W. Walbert; “Firearms for Survival,” by Duncan Long; “Rawles on Retreats and Relocation,” by James Wesley Rawles; “Tracking Humans,” by David Diaz; “Boston’s Gun Bible,” by the pseudonymous Boston T. Party. Though Adams couldn’t find it, he was sure that “The Reluctant Partisan,” one of John Mosby’s books, was also buried somewhere in the clutter. The militant movement believes that it takes only a small vanguard to start the revolution, Adams told me, but its preparations for political violence have also been married to efforts to bring as many people as possible to its side. I found another type of book among the piles: “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” and “How to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide.” The Oath Keepers, in the end, were just one of many pieces that came together on January 6, but Rhodes had been tapping for years into the momentum that fueled it. He’d recognized that “a meandering energy” is on the loose in America, Adams said. “People want structure and they want to feel a part of things.”

“The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

Maybe there’s no choice, at the moment, but to defend the system we have in hopes of staving off a much darker fate. That’s what Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest federation of labor unions, told me. He has been credited with helping to organize the liberal defense against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote, sounding the alarm for months ahead of time and then, when the coup attempt was on, playing a coordinating role in the response. That response involved mobilizing the grassroots left and institutional liberals alike — and yes, the retired security officials, tech and business executives, bureaucrats, experts, and elites who are part of the wealthy, educated demographic that increasingly votes Democratic. The larger effort to stop Trump from overturning the vote brought establishment Republicans and big corporations into the fold as well, Podhorzer noted; the AFL-CIO even released a joint letter with the Chamber of Commerce to support the election result. History has shown, he told me, that right-wing authoritarianism can only be defeated when all of civil society — including corporations and the center-right — is aligned against it: “The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

This is probably true. It might even be heroic, in its own way. It also means manning the imperial gates. Our demons from the frontier are here, running rampant, and there’s no one left to turn to but the people who loosed them in the first place — to get in line with the squares. Nothing shows that a system has been victorious like the inability of even its opponents to imagine an alternative. I suffer from this fate. Even my critiques of U.S. empire, I often think, exist so comfortably within its confines as to make me just another part of it. It reminds me of a term I heard in countries I covered overseas: controlled opposition.

This was the dilemma that had been plaguing me over those long months of suburban comfort as January 6 approached. And it’s why, watching the chaos unfold at the Capitol, I felt, amid the dread, a hint of clarity, as if perhaps a fog were about to lift. If the coup happened, I’d be able to charge at last against the authority like the revolutionary I’d imagined I might be back when I was bouncing through hostels with a backpack full of books. The thought provided some comfort, but returning to the passage from McCarthy, I arrived at another set of questions. What if the battle between good and evil had already been settled in America? And if the latter had won, what would be the use in guarding the gates?

The protagonist in “Blood Meridian” is a nameless, wandering youth called “the kid,” who is traveling with Captain White’s company when it’s wiped out by the Comanches and survives by lying among the dead. Moving onward through the frontier’s netherworld, he falls in with a man who makes Captain White’s brand of violence seem quaint. The Judge is a towering figure, nearly seven feet tall, and apparently civilized; “this man of learning,” as he’s described, is well traveled and erudite, with an expansive knowledge of languages, history, science, and law. He also unleashes a machine-like violence capable of wiping out entire settlements of men, women, and children as they sleep. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” the Judge says. “War endures.”

Eventually, belatedly, the kid revolts against him. “You’re the one that’s crazy,” he says weakly. The book ends in a violent hug, with the kid trapped in the Judge’s arms, smothered “against his immense and terrible flesh.” When I first read this in Naples, it left me confused. Now, though, I can feel the familiar embrace of patrimony.

The post How Jan. 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of U.S. Power appeared first on The Intercept .

P aul Blount started small. When he set up a semiconductor chip company in his basement in 2006, he was the only employee. He had spent a decade at the chip behemoth Hittite Microwave Corporation, and he saw room in the market for a boutique design outfit.

About a decade later, a man named Haoyang Yu did almost exactly the same thing, setting up his own lean chip company, Tricon, in Lexington, Massachusetts, just 30 miles from Blount’s home. A tipster, whom Blount would later acknowledge was linked to his company, went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, writing that their new competitor “smells a bit fishy.”

The tipster said it was suspicious that no one in their orbit had heard of Yu. “None of us here know this person or this company and there is 100% no way that they could come up with this product line in 6 months,” wrote the tipster. Both Yu and Blount marketed tiny, mass-produced chips called monolithic microwave integrated circuits, or MMICS, which can be used in everything from cellphones to military radar systems. Some MMICs are under export controls, which means that they can only be sent to certain end users and destinations with a license from the Commerce Department. Without evidence, the tipster hinted that Tricon might be violating export control regulations. “They are most likely reselling someone else’s part and what makes me nervous is that at least one is 3A001.b.2.d part,” the tipster wrote, referring to an export control classification number covering certain MMIC chips.

Yu, who also goes by Jack, was in fact no stranger to the industry. He had moved to Amherst in 2002 to study engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After graduation he stayed in New England, eventually settling in Lexington with his wife and two young children. He worked at Hittite after Blount left, staying on after the company was acquired by Analog Devices in 2014. The year Yu started Tricon, he left Analog to work as a software engineer at a company that counts MMIC makers among its clients. At one point, he had even visited Blount’s company, Custom MMIC, to demonstrate software to a group that included Blount.

Nonetheless, the tip to the FBI set off a cascade of events that would upturn Yu’s world. Investigators came to see him as a national security threat, zeroing in on what they imagined were unsavory links to China, where Yu, now a U.S. citizen, was born. They mounted a secret camera on a pole outside his house and enlisted the local trash company to set aside his family’s garbage after collecting it so agents could covertly rifle through it. In May, after spending five nights in jail, three months with a clunky ankle bracelet tracking his movements, and over two and a half years in legal limbo, he stood trial for a slew of felonies, including export control violations, immigration fraud, and wire fraud. Prosecutors also accused Yu’s wife, Yanzhi Chen, of wire fraud after she refused to cooperate.

Then, just as quickly as it had come together, the case against the couple seemed to unravel. The U.S. government largely failed to convince a Boston jury, which in June acquitted Yu on 18 of 19 counts. Shortly after the trial, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins dropped all charges against Chen, saying in a statement that the decision was a result of a “ continuing assessment of the evidence .”

Court documents reveal a series of missteps, including a confounding export control classification and a failed sting operation. The lone charge of which Yu was ultimately convicted, possessing stolen trade secrets, had no connection to China.

“There were so many mistakes,” Chen told The Intercept recently. “We have had three very dark years.”

What prosecutors did have was evidence that Yu had transferred prototype chip design files onto his Google Drive while working at Analog Devices, naming two of the files Pikachu and Dragonair after Pokémon characters. Analog later abandoned the prototypes, some of which Yu had worked with while at the company, and in all but one case, the jury was unconvinced that the designs constituted trade secrets.

Yu’s lawyers contend that such a case would have normally been dealt with through a low-stakes civil lawsuit filed by Analog Devices. That didn’t happen, they argue, because of Yu’s ethnicity. “Yes, he had some files on his computer that should have been deleted,” said Yu’s attorney William Fick of Fick & Mark in his closing statement at trial. But for the U.S. government, “[i]f you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat.”

Federal prosecutors, working closely with the FBI and large corporations, have brought dozens of cases over the last decade involving alleged technology theft by China. In 2018, amid rising tensions with Beijing, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave the crackdown a name : the China Initiative. The initiative was scrapped earlier this year, following concerns from the American Civil Liberties Union and Asian American advocacy groups that it entailed racial profiling, but the biases that contributed to the program’s downfall endure, activists say. “The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat,” said Aryani Ong, co-founder of Asian American Federal Employees for Nondiscrimination. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in January that the bureau has over 2,000 open investigations involving China and technology. And perhaps no technology is more pivotal to geopolitical strategy than semiconductor chips, which are essential components of electronic devices and important to breakthroughs in computing.

“MMICs have cutting-edge military applications ranging from electronic warfare to signals intelligence to military communications,” said Emily de La Bruyère, a co-founder of Horizon Advisory, a consulting firm focused on China. “China and the U.S. are locked in a battle — not just for advanced semiconductor technology, but also for influence over the global semiconductor value chain.” In just the past few months, President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS Act , which is aimed at strengthening domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing, and the Commerce Department unveiled unprecedented new restrictions on the sale of semiconductor technology to entities within China. Last week, Reuters reported that the Chinese government was readying an infusion of 1 trillion yuan ($143 billion) into its semiconductor industry.

Convictions in China Initiative and related cases have led to years of prison time. But many cases have fallen apart because prosecutors made inappropriate leaps, activists say.

“We are deeply concerned that the Yu case is yet another continuation of biased targeting policies and practices,” said Jeremy Wu, founder of APA Justice Task Force, a group formed in the wake of several botched prosecutions of Chinese American scientists. “His case exemplifies another tragic ordeal.”

For Yu and Chen, the ordeal is not yet over. For his sole conviction, Yu now faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. His lawyers are trying to get the charge thrown out ahead of sentencing, arguing that prosecutors inflated a workplace dispute into a national security threat and that the entire investigation was tainted by bias. A judge will soon rule on whether the government is selectively enforcing the law by targeting Yu for his ethnicity, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Yu, his lawyers, and a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing legal proceedings. When asked about the case by phone, Blount declined to comment and quickly hung up.

“We Make Business”

Chen and Yu met online in the early aughts, when they were students pursuing graduate degrees in different parts of the United States. He was from the north of China, and she was from the south. He struck her as whip-smart and diligent, and after dating long-distance for a year, they married and settled in New England. They had two kids, and Chen stayed home to raise them while Yu worked as an engineer.

In 2013, they moved to Lexington for its excellent public schools, buying a house on a quiet street near the town’s Great Meadow. They grew to love the historic Boston suburb, which two and a half centuries after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War is now a wealthy bedroom community with a large Asian American population. Chen volunteered at her kids’ school and for local groups, and at her urging, Yu ran unsuccessfully for a seat on Lexington’s Town Meeting.

Initially, Chen told The Intercept, Yu’s goals for Tricon were modest. Yu registered the company in Chen’s name — a structure sometimes used to protect assets — and listed a box at a nearby UPS Store as the company’s mailing address. Business was slow. Chen advised him to focus on recouping his investment, not turning a profit. Since Yu was happiest when he was busy, she said she recommended the Town Meeting candidacy partly as a distraction.

“I never expected it to bring so much trouble,” she said of Tricon.

The investigation into Yu began in earnest a month after the complaint linked to Blount, when the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency received a second tip about Tricon. A DCSA agent compiled an internal report, which was later entered into the court record, describing the second tipster as a government contractor with a security clearance. The contractor speculated that Yu “could be using” the contractor’s “products pictures and datasheets to market for HIS own company.” The agent labeled the report as involving foreign intelligence, China, and a “person reasonably believed to be an officer or employee of, or otherwise acting on behalf of, a foreign power” — presumably, Yu.

MMIC is often pronounced “mimic,” and copying competitors’ products is common in the chip industry, as are allegations of theft. Shortly before the tipster went to the FBI, Yu’s previous employer Analog Devices had accused three former employees of taking proprietary material upon leaving the company. That case took the form of a lawsuit against the former employees’ new workplace , Macom, and the matter was handled in civil court, with Analog paying its own legal fees. It quickly ended in a settlement.

But Yu’s case was different. Because the U.S. government alleged that it involved a potential national security threat, four federal intelligence agencies conducted the sprawling 18-month investigation. And while Analog Devices provided information, federal prosecutors ultimately decided which charges to press, and U.S. taxpayers covered the ballooning investigative and legal costs.

Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy.

Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy. In addition to putting Yu under surveillance, they followed Chen around town as she drove their kids to and from sports practices and obtained a search warrant to comb through Yu’s email accounts.

From the start, the U.S. government’s investigation didn’t go quite as planned. Early on, an undercover agent with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations force wrote to Yu, posing as representative of a potential buyer named “XY Atallah” from Jordan. The agent asked about a chip with specifications close to those that fall under export controls. “If good price, we can make business,” he wrote. The agent repeated the stereotypical phrase in a follow-up email the next day: “We make business.”

Yu suggested lower-frequency chips that could be legally exported to Jordan without a license. When the undercover agent posing as Atallah declined, insisting on the higher-frequency chip and saying he could pay upfront, Yu walked away from the deal. Agents also found emails that Yu had exchanged with a potential buyer in Spain. After the buyer asked about controlled chips, Yu noted that he did not have an export license for the products and asked if the buyer had a licensed representative in the United States — a legal way of moving the product overseas, provided that Spain was the final destination. That deal didn’t go through, either.

Nor did the investigation uncover solid evidence of crimes involving China. In March 2019, an HSI agent alleged in an internal report that Yu had stolen designs and technical data from his former employer to produce his own MMIC chips and sell them to entities in China in violation of export control regulations. The agent also contended that Yu had consulted for a Chinese company, claiming that the payment was evidence of “additional export violations to China.” Eventually, though, the government dropped both allegations.

The HSI agent also claimed that Tricon had illegally exported one chip without seeking an export license. But a semiconductor industry expert hired by Yu’s lawyers would later show that the relevant export control classification had only been issued at the request of an investigator after Yu came under scrutiny.

Companies that suspect their technology or designs have been taken generally “want to set an example for their own employees,” said Matthew Brazil, a former export controls official and resident fellow at the Jamestown Foundation focused on Chinese intelligence operations, after reviewing some of the court documents in Yu’s case. “That’s often a corporate response. But it’s not clear where the espionage component was in this case.” (Yu was never charged with espionage, but the U.S. government has in the past charged export control violations in cases alleged to involve spying or technology transfer.)

“It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”

One reason that investigators pressed the national security angle may have to do with timing. In November 2018, less than a year after Yu came under investigation, Sessions announced the China Initiative. Yu’s name does not appear on a list of sample initiative cases released by the Justice Department and last updated in November 2021, but the effort was clearly important for Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Boston at the time. He was one of a handful of federal prosecutors on the initiative’s steering committee. Lelling, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on this and several other issues.

“If your name is tied to it, then you want to see it succeed,” said Robert Fisher, an attorney with Nixon Peabody in Boston who successfully defended a China Initiative case brought by Lelling’s office. The priority placed on China-related cases led to an uptick in flimsy charges around the country, Fisher said. “It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”

“You Lied to Us”

Early one morning in June 2019, shortly before Yu’s family was scheduled to fly back to China to see relatives, Chen returned home from dropping off their children at school to find cars lining the street. Their house was swarming with agents and local police, around 20 officers in all.

Agents from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security approached and asked her to get inside their vehicle, she said. In the car, according to a transcript of the interview, they drilled her about Tricon.

Chen told the agents that her husband was an uptight engineer, always doing everything by the book. Although the business was in her name, she said that he only let her do basic tasks for the company, not because he had anything to hide but because he wanted them done perfectly. “He’s a control freak,” she said, adding that she had helped him mail chips to sites in Europe and the United States but that he insisted on packing all the materials himself. She said that she didn’t really understand MMIC technology.

“Yeah, neither do I,” one of the agents admitted.

Later in the interview, the other agent accused her of lying. “I don’t want to see you get in trouble for anything, you know, that you lied to us about,” he said.

“I was so confused,” Chen told The Intercept. While she didn’t understand the technology he worked with, she did know that her husband’s business was little more than a side project.

Meanwhile, inside their house, agents were rummaging through the family’s belongings as another pair of investigators from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security questioned Yu. When he asked whether he needed a lawyer, they brushed off the question. Over the course of the interview, Yu mentioned an attorney five more times. But instead of stopping so that he could contact one, the agents kept questioning him.

When Yu declined to answer a query, musing that his remarks could be misinterpreted, one agent launched into a heated speech. “I appreciate that you want to try to protect yourself, but Haoyang, we’re past that. The question now is, are you willing to do the right thing?” The agent offered a sample confession: “Like, ‘Yes, I did it. I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t have done it. I had financial problems and I was trying to do the best thing I could for my family and this is the way that I saw to get out of that. It was a terrible choice.’ Like — whatever.”

But Yu stayed quiet.

Inside the agents’ vehicle, Chen said she watched, stunned, as he was led away in handcuffs. “I didn’t know why they took my husband away,” she said. “It is a really weird feeling.”

After the street cleared out, she walked into her house and surveyed the aftermath. The agents had taken their computers, cellphones, and papers printed with Chinese characters that had no connection to Yu’s business, she said, including notes on potential travel destinations and the addresses of her college classmates. In the kitchen, a chipmunk scurried across the floor. The back door had been left open during the raid, and the animal had found its way inside. She shooed it out and sat down to cry. Then she forced herself to get up and put the house in order before her kids arrived home from school.

Later that day, Lelling’s office issued a press release describing Yu as “a Chinese born naturalized US citizen.” “Theft of trade secrets from American companies is a pervasive economic and national security threat,” Lelling was quoted as saying. The press release continued: “Yu is charged with a massive theft of proprietary trade secret information.”

Singled Out?

As the couple’s cases moved toward trial, Yu’s defense team hired a semiconductor expert, Manfred Schindler, a consultant who had worked with several leading chip companies. Schindler wrote in an affidavit that small outfits like Tricon were common in the MMIC industry, and that companies commonly reverse engineer one another’s chips. “[M]ultiple manufacturers commonly sell individual items with very similar or even identical designs and performance characteristics,” he wrote. (Schindler declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement with Yu’s lawyers.)

More explosively, Schindler took issue with the export control category that the U.S. government said governed one of Tricon’s chips. At the time, three of the charges against Yu hinged on that classification. The designation was unusual, Schindler wrote, because chips with similar specifications — including the one that prosecutors alleged Yu had copied — typically do not trigger export controls. He determined that the U.S. government had introduced the designation at the request of an agent investigating Yu and had never publicized the rule. The rule seemed to have been tailor-made for Yu.

Another setback came in January of this year, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts dropped charges in a controversial China Initiative case against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen (no relation to Yanzhi Chen). He had been charged with wire fraud and accused of omitting affiliations with Chinese institutions on Department of Energy grant applications that he submitted electronically. Prosecutors abandoned the charges after determining that some of the alleged affiliations did not exist and that Chen had no obligation to declare the others. Gang Chen’s defenders alleged that he was the victim of blatant racism and bias; 170 MIT faculty members signed a statement in his defense. The Justice Department scrapped the China Initiative the following month.

Rollins had inherited both the Gang Chen and Yu cases from Lelling. Yu’s lawyers hoped to get charges thrown out in his case as well.

Instead, Rollins’s office went ahead with the prosecution. But by the time Yu stood trial, the allegations against him had changed. Prosecutors dropped the export control violation charges connected to the chip that Schindler had flagged after the Commerce Department reclassified it as not requiring a license. In a superseding indictment, they charged Yu with new export control violations, for sending two chip designs to a foundry, or chip factory, in Taiwan.

Yu’s Tricon was what’s known as “fabless,” meaning the company didn’t fabricate the chips in-house. Instead, Yu designed chips which were then manufactured in foundries. In recent years, Commerce Department officials have grown more aggressive about how they interpret regulations with regard to the export of design files, but historically, companies including Analog Devices have at times not sought licenses for similar exports. “[Fabless] suppliers often use off-shore fabs and package houses, yet most US military contractors don’t seem to care about this,” the industry publication Microwaves 101 notes in an explainer on MMIC suppliers . “Go figure!”

Using files found in Yu’s Google Drive and on devices seized from his home, prosecutors alleged that he had stolen the designs for “dozens” of chips from Analog Devices. And, in a sort of legal hall of mirrors, they tacked on charges that depended on other charges sticking. In his interview ahead of becoming a U.S. citizen in February 2017, Yu had asserted that he’d never committed or tried to commit a crime for which he had not been arrested. Prosecutors alleged that this was fraud because he had committed a crime: trade secrets theft, the crime they were charging him with.

“Why Are You Challenging Him?”

The drama began even before the trial started, when a prosecutor tried to ensure that an Asian American man was not chosen for the jury. The judge questioned the prosecutor’s motive. The potential juror, the judge noted, “is Asian; why are you challenging him? I see no reason to challenge him.”

When the prosecutor replied that the objection was based on the man’s profession, the judge asked what that was. Silence ensued. “You don’t even know what the profession is,” the judge admonished the prosecutor. (Court documents, which give only the man’s first name and last initial, reveal that he worked as a nurse and paraprofessional for a public school system.) The government ended up withdrawing the objection, and the man remained on the jury.

As the trial got underway, prosecutors returned again and again to the Pokémon characters. “[N]o one names things after Pokémon characters at work when they intend to be found out,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Beck. They accused Yu of adopting a fake name because, in his work with Tricon, he used the English name Jack. They emphasized his use of multiple email addresses, claiming that it was a signature of criminals violating export controls. They suggested it was odd that Yu had registered Tricon in his wife’s name rather than his own and used the address of a UPS store for the business rather than his home. And they called as a witness an employee of Win Semiconductors, the Taiwanese firm that had manufactured Yu’s chips, who testified that the designs Tricon had sent the firm appeared unoriginal.

Then, halfway through the trial, Blount, Yu’s Boston-area competitor, took the stand. In 2020, he had sold Custom MMIC for a reported $96 million . He later started a new company, Kapabl Engineering. When cross-examined by the defense, Blount admitted that he had met Yu before, though he said he did not remember the encounter. He conceded that Kapabl Engineering was, like Tricon, registered in his wife’s name. Just as Tricon had a bare-bones website, Kapabl Engineering had a site that Blount conceded was “rudimentary.” And much as Tricon had sent designs to Taiwan to be manufactured without obtaining an export license, Custom MMIC had sent designs to France without a license until 2019, the year Yu was arrested.

“Custom never got an export license to send the GDS to France?” asked Fick, Yu’s attorney, referring to a chip design file.

“We did not, no,” Blount answered.

“And is that because you were intentionally violating the law?” Fick asked.

“No,” Blount said.

Blount also admitted that he was connected to the tip to the FBI. “We brought this matter to the FBI back in 2017,” he said.

The jury deliberated for five hours. After they largely cleared Yu of the charges, Rollins’s office boasted in a press release about the single charge that had stuck, calling it “the first-ever conviction following a criminal trial of this kind in the District of Massachusetts.” Few observers saw it as a win for the government, though. The trade publication Law360 recently listed the trial among a string of losses by the U.S. attorney’s office.

“The verdict revealed this case for what it truly is: a trumped-up civil dispute between a multibillion-dollar, global technology company and its former employee concerning alleged trade secrets,” wrote Yu’s attorneys in a recent filing. “The government’s relentless pursuit of Mr. Yu was driven, at least in part, by its baseless and offensive assumption that he was a Chinese spy, secretly loyal to China and, thus, a danger to the national security of the United States.”

If Yu had been white, his attorneys contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time.

Yu’s attorneys now argue that the law has been selectively enforced, and that the U.S. government gave too much weight to information provided by Blount and Analog Devices. If Yu had been white, they contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time — as had happened when Analog Devices accused the three former employees of taking proprietary material to Macom. That lawsuit, in fact, involved data for several of the exact same Analog Devices products at issue in Yu’s case, with the difference that the Macom engineers were accused of stealing much more data than Yu, and that, according to Yu’s attorneys, one of them actually confessed to taking trade secrets.

Proving that Yu was singled out will be a challenge. Traditionally, the burden of proof for a selective enforcement motion rests on the defense, and no lawyer has successfully argued it in a China Initiative or related case. But in November, Judge William G. Young reversed an earlier decision on the topic, ordering the U.S. government to turn over to the defense additional evidence connected to Yu’s prosecution.

In one filing, Yu’s lawyers cited comments Lelling made to Science in 2020 , in which they say he acknowledged that prosecutors were seeking out ethnic Chinese defendants. “[U]nfortunately, a lot of our targets are going to be Han Chinese,” Lelling said at the time. “If it were the French government targeting U.S. technology, we’d be looking for Frenchmen.’”

In an email to The Intercept, Lelling took issue with that interpretation. “No one was targeting people based on ethnicity — we were looking for conduct,” he wrote.

Chen’s hopes now center on the judge dismissing the case. But she is clear-eyed about Yu’s chances. “The success rate is very low,” she said, adding, “I don’t know why the government has invested so much on us. We are just normal people.”

Meanwhile, in August, Analog Devices finally filed a civil lawsuit against Yu. By the time it winds through the courts, he may be in federal prison.

The post A Competitor Put the FBI on Haoyang Yu’s Trail. The Investigation Didn’t Go as Planned. appeared first on The Intercept .

T he crisis started with an email: It was September 2016 and Pietro Gallo, a former police officer from Rome, was writing the Italian foreign intelligence service. He was in his cabin aboard the VOS Hestia, a 200-foot rescue ship, on the tail end of a mission patrolling international waters off the coast of Libya. Two colleagues, Floriana Ballestra and Lucio Montanino, also ex-cops, huddled nearby. The three worked as security guards for the international charity Save the Children, which ran the VOS Hestia, and they were writing to report a crime.

Gallo had found a generic email address for the intelligence service after a few minutes of Google searching. The three explained that they had witnessed suspicious activities by humanitarian NGOs working near the Libyan coast. They had tried contacting police in the Sicilian port of Trapani, but they believed the police weren’t acting because the whole affair was too big. “In the Mediterranean, the shit is boiling,” Gallo later told Montanino.

Nearly 200,000 people arrived in Italy by sea that year after fleeing Libya aboard inflatable rubber dinghies or repurposed wooden fishing boats. More often than not, they were rescued by European coast guard vessels or humanitarian organizations long before reaching Italian waters. Gallo looked at a map of the Mediterranean Sea. The ships seemed to pick people up so close to the African coast and then bring them all the way to Europe. The towering Vos Hestia was one of over a dozen humanitarian assets patrolling the area. He wondered: Who was behind the organizations sending ships to sea? How could they have so much money? Gallo had his doubts, but he knew one thing: Something sketchy was going on, and it was his duty to find out what.

“In the Mediterranean, the shit is boiling.”

Gallo later said that he wanted to be “like a journalist” and expose what was happening in the Central Mediterranean. Wiretapped conversations show that he was also hoping to recover his police job — he had previously been expelled for misconduct — or even get a position as an undercover agent. Speaking to Montanino, he fantasized about a private meeting with the head of Italy’s national police, the Polizia di Stato, which answers to the Ministry of the Interior. “I want to tell them, ‘Look, since I don’t think this stuff at sea with these immigrants will be over anytime soon,’” Gallo told his colleague, “‘we can sign a contract with the ministry — you place us, I don’t know, on a Red Cross ship, and we’ll be your spies.’”

Gallo, Ballestra, and Montanino never got a response to their email. But it eventually made its way into Italy’s halls of power at a moment of growing resentment over the role of rescue NGOs. Anti-immigration politicians were circulating theories about the supposed “pull factor” the organizations represented, and Gallo’s message offered up a target. The evidence resulting from his self-conceived undercover operations wound up on the desks of politicians in Rome and Brussels. It reached the Warsaw headquarters of Frontex, the European Union’s border and coast guard agency. And, importantly, it ended up in the hands of anti-mafia prosecutors charged with coordinating migration-related investigations throughout Italy.

The resulting inquiry would involve scores of wiretaps, rescue ships bugged with secret microphones, and an undercover police officer placed on board the VOS Hestia, all part of a sprawling investigation into the work of humanitarian organizations. According to wiretapped conversations, Gallo believed that NGOs working to save lives at sea were funded by “globalist elites” and in cahoots with Libyan smugglers.

Gallo’s email singled out one organization as particularly suspect: Jugend Rettet, a small German nonprofit that operated a rescue ship known as the Iuventa. Now, four members of Jugend Rettet are on trial in Sicily for aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Prosecutors allege that they coordinated directly with smugglers to arrange the delivery of migrants to Italy. If convicted, they stand to serve up to 20 years in prison each and would be the first humanitarian rescuers in Europe ever convicted of a crime for their work. Seventeen other aid workers and professional mariners are facing the same and other charges related to their rescue efforts. Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, are charged as organizations, as is the company that owned the ships they leased.

A collection of 30,000 pages of court documents obtained by The Intercept sheds light on the magnitude of this case, the largest of its kind in European history. The full court file spans over four years of investigations and includes transcripts of wiretaps, clandestine recordings, and police interrogations; material scraped from seized electronic devices; and reports written by an undercover officer.

The documents show how Italian anti-mafia prosecutors went to great lengths to dig up dirt on humanitarian rescue organizations and their crews. Authorities listened in on the legally protected conversations of journalists and lawyers and hired a company to remotely hack at least two mobile phones using powerful surveillance software. The court documents also show how officials from Italy’s Interior Ministry used these investigations as a tool for leverage over humanitarian organizations.

All this while police were working to prove what is, in effect, a conspiracy theory: that humanitarian NGOs in the Central Mediterranean are profiting off migration by colluding with smugglers in Libya.

Man Overboard

Pietro Gallo is stocky and bald and speaks with the resigned tone of someone who has told his story many times. For a moment, Gallo had the ear of high-level figures on the Italian far right, fielding calls from Matteo Salvini, an anti-immigration hard-liner who went on to become interior minister. But, Gallo says, Salvini and the rest only used him to push their own agendas.

“Of course I feel used,” he said with a shrug. We spoke to Gallo in the back patio of a hotel at Rome’s airport. “So many people have been professionally rewarded over this story: in the government, in the police. Many were punished, but many were rewarded.”

Gallo never set out to work on humanitarian ships. But he was fired from the police department in Rome after being accused of planting fake drugs in the car of a romantic rival. (Gallo said he is still challenging the dismissal.) Then in 2016, he got a call from IMI Security Service, a private security company owned by a man named Cristian Ricci. A search-and-rescue organization was hiring security staff for its vessel, Gallo was told. Weeks earlier, in international waters off the coast of Libya, unidentified armed men had fired at and boarded a rescue ship chartered by MSF, and Save the Children feared that similar incidents could happen again.

Gallo said he started noticing problems soon after going aboard the VOS Hestia. At first, he remembers, there was a divide between the crew — mostly activists and professional mariners — and his team of former police officers working security. The rescues were hectic. Dinghies were often surrounded: by European military vessels, the Libyan coast guard, and sometimes Libyan fishermen hoping to steal the dinghies’ engines or return boats back to the coast for a fee. European authorities consider these “engine fishers,” as they’re known by humanitarian workers, to be part of the Libyan smuggling apparatus.

Rescuers document their work at sea with helmet-mounted cameras and photographers aboard ships. Italian police use these images to identify the people piloting dinghies, who are routinely arrested on smuggling charges and sometimes given decadeslong prison sentences. According to internal police documents, prosecutors were aware as early as 2015 that most dinghy drivers were migrants with no link to Libyan smugglers, but they continued their campaign of arrests anyway.

Some of the images from rescues carried out by the VOS Hestia were never handed over to the authorities. This infuriated Gallo. The photos and videos were “systematically hidden,” he later told investigators, and then used “for promotional purposes.”

Weeks after the three ex-cops sent their email, tension was brewing aboard the VOS Hestia. According to police reports, on October 12, 2016, there was a physical fight on board between Ballestra and Montanino. Montanino hit Ballestra with a plastic plate during an argument over work shifts. Afterward, Ballestra went to the police in Trapani to report her colleague. Gallo and Ballestra both maintain that the fight wasn’t staged, but they acknowledge using it as a pretext to talk to law enforcement. “With the excuse of Lucio, she went to the police,” Gallo said of Ballestra, “to tell them what really happened on board.”

Gallo vividly remembers the meeting with police. Ballestra called him from the station, saying that the officers wanted to hear more about the suspicious activities they had witnessed. When Gallo arrived, the director of the Trapani investigative unit asked more questions about humanitarian organizations than about the fight. Finally, Gallo thought, someone was listening. The two security guards complained that Save the Children had imposed a code of silence, prohibiting crew members from talking to law enforcement. Gallo said that looking at the radar of the VOS Hestia, he noticed that the Iuventa sailed particularly close to the Libyan coast. He gave the police a copy of his email to the intelligence service. They would later share it with a Trapani prosecutor working with Italy’s anti-mafia directorate, the national body that in turn collaborates with Europol, Frontex, and Operation Sophia, an EU naval mission in the Central Mediterranean.

Gallo said he suggested that police send an undercover agent aboard the VOS Hestia via a contract with his employer, IMI Security Services. “‘You have Ricci hire him and send him up there, and he sees what’s really going on,’” Gallo remembers saying. “And then later that’s what happened.”

Easter Mayday

The Iuventa was the first and only humanitarian rescue ship in the Central Mediterranean to ever call a mayday for itself. It was April 2017, seven months after Gallo and the others sent their email. The Iuventa was 24 nautical miles off the coast of Libya, in the stretch of international waters where most Mediterranean shipwrecks take place. It was Easter, and there were no Italian coast guard ships in the area.

And that weekend, people were fleeing Libya by the thousands.

Earlier that year, the EU had decided to pull back its coast guard rescue patrols to at least half a day’s sail from the search-and-rescue zone. Making the journey more dangerous would deter future departures, the logic went. Coast guard officers also began a campaign of destroying migrants’ boats after rescues to prevent smugglers from using them again. In February, Italy had signed an agreement with the fledgling United Nations-backed Libyan government to equip and train a new Libyan coast guard to contain departures.

In response, Libyan smugglers began pushing more people to sea at once. They were given shoddier boats with more people on board and barely enough fuel to make it out of Libyan territorial waters. According to a 2017 report from Operation Sophia, that summer was characterized by “mass launches with a large number of vessels in convoy.” The withdrawal of coast guard patrols left humanitarian vessels scrambling to fill the void.

The Iuventa is a small ship compared to other NGO rescue assets. It is just under 100 feet long and painted bright blue. Because of its size, it couldn’t accommodate a large number of rescued people on board. More often the Iuventa crew carried out rescues and then transferred people to larger humanitarian ships, like the VOS Hestia, or ships from the Italian coast guard. The Iuventa crew was also younger, more political, and more willing to disobey authorities in the name of humanitarian rescue. They operated closer to the Libyan border than other organizations, eliciting a mix of admiration and suspicion. In one wiretapped conversation, an employee of MSF described the Iuventa as a “rebel boat.”

In one wiretapped conversation, an employee of MSF described the Iuventa as a “rebel boat.”

While Gallo harbored doubts about the Iuventa, he was impressed by the crew’s willingness to carry out risky rescues, even in Libyan waters when necessary. “They were brave, fearless professionals,” he remembered. “They didn’t give a damn.”

At sea that Easter weekend, the Iuventa crew realized they had a problem: Their ship was surrounded by rubber boats in distress, and they didn’t have space to take everyone on board. The crew inflated their life rafts and tied them together, then secured that structure to the ship to create more space. It was a quick solution that worked while the sea was calm, but the weather was about to change.

Stefano Spinelli remembers this weekend well. Spinelli was head of a medical NGO called Rainbow for Africa, which placed doctors aboard the Iuventa to provide medical care to rescued migrants. As one of the few Italians working with a largely German NGO, he was responsible for liaising with the Italian coast guard.

Eating dinner in his hometown of Pisa, Spinelli got a frantic phone call from Jugend Rettet’s headquarters in Berlin. They explained that a storm was coming, and the lifeboats had begun to capsize. The crew of the Iuventa had decided to take everybody — 300 people — aboard the ship.

“The captain told me that the Iuventa was unable to navigate anymore, that we were forced to send out a mayday,” Spinelli remembered. “If a [search-and-rescue] asset sends out a mayday, it’s a big deal.”

Fortunately, Spinelli said, Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center, run by the coast guard in Rome, was able to divert a commercial tanker to block the waves. The center tried to send coast guard ships to rescue the Iuventa, but each time they did, those ships, too, found migrants along the way and had to initiate rescue. The Iuventa was eventually rescued by the VOS Hestia and another humanitarian vessel.

For Spinelli, the mayday episode was a point of inflection. “If you are unable to safely perform a rescue, you have no reason to be there,” he said. “We started thinking, are we doing the right operation, or are we unable because we are too small?” He decided that his organization would part ways with Jugend Rettet and sent an email to top Italian coast guard officers distancing himself from the Iuventa.

In a hearing held by the defense committee of the Italian Senate the following month, a Trapani prosecutor revealed that certain individuals from Mediterranean rescue organizations were under investigation but gave no specifics. Behind closed doors, the crew of the Iuventa began to suspect that legal problems could be looming.

According to the minutes of a May 2017 meeting among multiple humanitarian organizations, some voiced concern about the “isolation of smaller NGOs at sea and lack of funds to explore legal options.” Jugend Rettet said they felt the coast guard center wanted them out of the search-and-rescue zone following the mayday incident.

With Italy’s general election approaching in early 2018, migration and the role of rescue NGOs were becoming hot-button campaign issues. Gallo and Ballestra saw an opportunity: Together, they reached out to major party leaders offering up their insider information. Salvini, head of the far-right Lega party, responded. He first called Gallo personally and later arranged a channel for him to file reports. Salvini was campaigning on a hard anti-immigration platform; in one interview , he claimed that there were weapons and drugs on some humanitarian vessels, citing sources aboard the ships.

The ex-cops’ speculation about illicit activity in the Mediterranean was not only informing national politics — their report to the police in Trapani had since ballooned into an investigation coordinated by a special operations division of the national police. When they found out that the division had assumed control, Gallo and Ballestra congratulated each other. “We did a good job,” Gallo said in a wiretapped conversation. Ballestra agreed: “We deserve a prize.”

Still, the investigation was just beginning. Soon, police would be listening to Spinelli’s phone calls and reading his emails as he criticized the Iuventa crew, and they would have an undercover officer aboard the VOS Hestia.

Fishing Expedition

Sicilian police and prosecutors wiretapped the phones of at least 40 individuals as part of their investigation, including employees of Jugend Rettet, MSF, and Save the Children, as well as security contractors aboard the VOS Hestia, most of whom were never officially under investigation or suspected of having committed any crime. An MSF office in Sicily was bugged, and hidden microphones were placed aboard three ships: the VOS Hestia, the VOS Prudence of MSF, and the Iuventa. Police also wiretapped human rights lawyers and journalists working on migration issues — conversations with clients and sources that, according to attorneys representing Jugend Rettet and MSF, are supposed to be protected from police scrutiny under Italian law. Lawyers for the two NGOs said they plan to contest the legal basis for this surveillance.

According to the court documents, police in Trapani also hired a company in Milan, RCS Lab, to remotely hack the mobile phones of two MSF employees, using phishing techniques to install software capable of extracting data from their devices and monitoring them in real time via their phones’ microphones. RCS, which offers hacking and surveillance services to clients across the globe, has drawn scrutiny from a European parliamentary committee created in the wake of revelations about the Pegasus spyware sold by the Israeli company NSO Group.

Prosecutors wiretapped Gallo himself for at least seven months without his knowledge. As they sought to expand their surveillance, court documents show, Gallo’s at times paranoid conversations with colleagues about the true motives of NGO workers were frequently cited as evidence. In one call, Gallo suggested that “powerful international figures” were financing migration from Libya. In another, Montanino told Gallo that the VOS Hestia rescued boats that were faring just fine in “perfect sailing conditions.” Throughout the investigation, conversations like these were used to justify ongoing surveillance of an increasing number of people.

“Investigators abused their power to figure out what I was working on.”

One of these people was Moussa Zerai, a priest and human rights activist from Eritrea. Police listened in as he spoke to his lawyer, an Italian senator, journalists, and, he told press when the wiretapping news first broke , multiple Vatican diplomats. Zerai came under investigation after Gallo mentioned his name to the police: His phone number circulated among Eritrean refugees, who often called him when in distress at sea. Zerai said he referred these cases to the Italian coast guard as required by international maritime law. In the wiretaps, many of Zerai’s calls were marked as “very important,” but neither Zerai nor anyone he was wiretapped speaking to was ever charged with a crime.

“They not only listened to my conversations with friends and family, but also my confidential calls with sources,” said Nancy Porsia, one of the journalists wiretapped by police. “Free journalism is essential for democracy; it is very serious that they had access to my conversations with sources.” Porsia is one of Europe’s leading experts on migration and was the first journalist to report that Libyan coast guard officials supported by Italy and the EU were themselves involved in human trafficking.

Police wiretapped Porsia’s conversations over the course of six months, according to the court files, requesting multiple extensions of the 15-day legal limit in order to gather information on her sources. “Investigators abused their power to figure out what I was working on,” Porsia said.

Serena Romano, a criminal lawyer in Palermo, Sicily, was wiretapped while speaking about the defense strategy of one of her clients. “When I found out that conversations of mine covered by attorney-client privilege were in the court records,” Romano said, “I felt sick.”

“These laws are a shield that allow us not to bend to the dysfunctions of the police and judicial systems,” she added. “If these protections are lacking, the legal defense system no longer works.”

For decades, anti-mafia prosecutors relied on sprawling surveillance and long-term wiretaps to build cases against organized crime families operating in Italy. As the number of these large-scale Mafia investigations waned, prosecutors looked to what they saw as a new kind of mafia: Libyan smuggling rings facilitating migration. In 2013, they developed an interpretation of Italy’s anti-smuggling laws that allowed them to expand their jurisdiction into international waters and aggressively prosecute the people who pilot migrant boats.

These prosecutions relied not only on photos from rescues, but also witness statements obtained before migrants had access to lawyers or NGO staff. As humanitarian organizations began taking on a larger share of rescues at sea, the prosecutions stalled. In closed-door meetings, anti-mafia prosecutors explored ways to get the organizations out of the way: by charging them with smuggling, forcing them to bring police onboard their ships, or both.

The undercover police officer boarded the VOS Hestia in Malta in May 2017. He was presented to the crew as a firefighter employed by IMI Security, using the fake name Luca Bracco. Observing Bracco from the bridge, Vito Romano, the first officer on the VOS Hestia, was puzzled by his behavior.

“I asked him about his work as a fireman and he just went blank,” Romano remembered. “Then, when he thought people weren’t looking, he pulled out a little camera and took plenty of pictures.”

Bracco delivered this evidence to his superiors in the national police later that month in the town of Corigliano Calabro, where the coast guard directed the VOS Hestia to disembark hundreds of people who had just been rescued. Police arrested three alleged boat drivers as a result, but Bracco wasn’t able to show any collusion between smugglers and the NGOs. He did, however, photograph the Libyan coast guard — funded by Italy and the EU — escorting migrant boats into international waters and then recovering engines and fuel to bring back to land.

“I asked him about his work as a fireman and he just went blank.”

Meanwhile, Gallo continued passing information to Salvini. He also sent a second report to the intelligence service detailing contacts between the VOS Hestia crew and engine fishers at sea. Most of the evidence collected by both Gallo and Bracco related to these interactions, and the relationship between humanitarian rescue crews and engine fishers is at the center of accusations in the case.

Gallo maintained that he didn’t know a police officer was on board, but Romano remembers Gallo being rude and dismissive toward Bracco. “Gallo isolated him on board,” the first officer said. “He really didn’t like him. We didn’t understand … but then we found out that Gallo was a mole, and Bracco was also a mole.” According to court documents, Romano was also wiretapped for more than six months but never charged with any crime.

It wasn’t until April 2021 that the Italian media outlets RAI and Domani, along with The Guardian, revealed that prosecutors had wiretapped lawyers and journalists as part of this investigation. The news prompted international condemnation from human rights and press freedom organizations. Italian press organizations said the transcripts of wiretapped calls could be used to target sources, intimidate journalists, and open both up to potential violence. In response, Italian Justice Minister Marta Cartabia ordered a review of the Trapani prosecutor’s office. According to a ministry spokesperson, the results will not be made public, but last July, Cartabia told Parliament that the review had found “no violations of procedural regulations on the subject of wiretapping.”

Reached by The Intercept, the Trapani prosecutor’s office pointed to Cartabia’s statement, declining to comment further on an ongoing court case. The Interior Ministry did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, and a spokesperson for the national police said they were not authorized to comment on the case.

A spokesperson for RCS Lab said the company offers its services to police “in full compliance with current regulations, with great ethics and professionalism.”

Under Pressure

Spinelli says he first suspected a criminal investigation after the Easter mayday. His organization had already parted ways with the Iuventa when he received a call from the Italian coast guard, inviting him to the rescue center in Rome. “They invited me in a strange way, saying, ‘We have to discuss something, but it’s better to talk in person,’” Spinelli said. Then he knew something was up. “There I received a proper questioning for five or six hours.”

Spinelli told his version of events from his house in the hills outside Pisa. Tall and lanky, with curly hair, glasses, and a pointed stare, he said he remembered the coast guard interview like it was yesterday. The interviewer probed him for information about a connection between the Iuventa crew and Libyan smugglers.

It became clear, Spinelli said, that “we are looking at an operation similar to an anti-Mafia operation in terms of magnitude,” involving the national police; the Guardia di Finanza, which specializes in financial crimes; and anti-mafia prosecutors in Sicily. “These were not separate actions from provincial actors,” he said. “This was planned and directed from a central level.”

“I was scared. Every one of us was scared of the prospect of being charged,” Spinelli said. “I felt the treason of my country. It completely changed my view of the Italian judicial system.”

Documents in the case file show that the investigations into NGOs were indeed orchestrated from a central level, at the Interior Ministry. In December 2016, not long after prosecutors in Trapani opened their investigation, a new interior minister, Marco Minniti, was appointed. Up to that point, Minniti had overseen Italy’s intelligence service, and according to close colleagues, he was obsessed with migration and the role of rescue NGOs.

“I felt the treason of my country. It completely changed my view of the Italian judicial system.”

On the day Minniti was sworn in, the head of his ministry’s immigration office sent a 27-page report to the special operations division of the national police. The report made a number of claims about humanitarian organizations in the Central Mediterranean that soon became mainstream in Italy: that saving lives at sea contributed to increased migration; that NGOs let traffickers recover dinghies after rescues; and that crews “indoctrinated” migrants into not cooperating with law enforcement.

The report concluded that “NGO ships have become a sort of ‘platform’ waiting on the limit of territorial water for rubber boats coming from Libya.” Police forwarded copies to the prosecutor’s office in Trapani and the central office of the anti-mafia directorate, which, according to a note attached to the report, then issued a directive to its local branches to investigate.

In July 2017, Minniti presented his solution to the NGO problem at a summit of EU interior ministers in Estonia. It was a code of conduct, an 11-point document that, among other things, required humanitarian organizations to bring police officers aboard their vessels and “transmit all information of investigative interest” to Italian authorities.

The code of conduct generated intense debate. Some organizations chose to sign the document, while others sought to negotiate their own versions. A handful of organizations refused to sign flat-out, arguing that the requirements would interfere with rescue work and lead to more fatalities at sea. In an interview with CNN, Òscar Camps, the founder of the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms, said he thought Italian authorities were bullying them into signing the code.

The transcripts of wiretapped phone calls support Camps’s claim. At a meeting with MSF, according to a wiretapped call made by one of the people present, an Interior Ministry representative said that if the organization signed the code, prosecutors would take that into consideration regarding potential criminal investigations. The caller, an MSF employee, described this as a “veiled threat” from the ministry. Still, MSF did not sign.

Minniti denied any personal involvement in pressuring NGOs, saying that his head of cabinet was in charge of relationships with the organizations. He argued that there was a consensus in Italy that humanitarian organizations should be regulated. “The minister of interior refused to intervene with a law. He just adopted a code of conduct,” Minniti said, speaking about himself in the third person from the Rome offices of Leonardo, the Italian defense company where he now works. “From the far right to the far left, everyone unanimously asked the government to intervene on the handling of migrants.”

On August 1, 2017, Jugend Rettet announced that after three days of negotiations with the Italian government, the organization had decided to not sign the code of conduct. They said that the document was “in direct conflict with the humanitarian principles on which our work is based” and would force them to break international maritime law.

“We don’t want to break off talks,” the organization stated . “Only together can solutions be found.”

“When they seized the Iuventa, I said, I have to get off this ship. Otherwise they’ll throw me overboard.”

The following day, police impounded the Iuventa and leaked to the press a 148-page document mostly made up of wiretapped conversations by Gallo and Spinelli. “They are looking for conflict,” Spinelli was recorded saying, complaining to colleagues about the attitude of the Iuventa crew toward Italy’s coast guard rescue center. He called the crew’s lack of respect for the authority of the state “unacceptable.”

Spinelli said these private conversations were taken out of context to serve prosecutors’ interests. He was floored when he found out about the seizure, the wiretaps, and that the contents of his phone calls had been sent to journalists throughout Italy. “I was in my room and turned on the television,” Spinelli recalled. “On one channel, they were speaking about me. On another, they were speaking about me. On the third, they were speaking about me.”

Gallo was still aboard the VOS Hestia when the news broke. He was indignant that no one had told him what was coming. All his colleagues now knew that he had been informing on them.

“When they seized the Iuventa, I said, I have to get off this ship,” Gallo remembered. “Otherwise they’ll throw me overboard.”

Months later, police searched Gallo’s house and seized his electronic devices. Speaking to us outside the hotel in Rome, Gallo looked more incredulous than angry. He couldn’t believe that after all the information he had passed to authorities, after being wiretapped despite his willingness to collaborate, police would forcibly enter his house.

“I said, ‘Is this a joke? I was passing you information up until yesterday,’” Gallo recalled. “Everything you’ve built, you’ve built thanks to us.”

“A Few Idiots”

The Iuventa was pulling into port in Lampedusa, a small island off the coast of Sicily, when its crew received a message from the coast guard that the ship was being seized due to a criminal investigation.

The news made headlines worldwide, and the Italian press feasted on the leaked wiretap transcripts. Newspapers quoted prosecutors’ claims that people rescued by the Iuventa weren’t actually at risk of drowning. They said that the crew had “arranged deliveries” of migrants with smugglers. Authorities confiscated mobile phones, laptops, and hard drives from the ship, according to court documents. Data police extracted from these devices included the text of internal chats and emails, photos and videos of rescues, and the browsing history of the crew.

In an email described in the case file as offering insight into “the attempts by some NGOs to establish contacts with Libyan traffickers,” Kathrin Schmidt — Jugend Rettet’s former head of mission, who is currently charged with smuggling — received a message from the crew member of another NGO, with a proposal to distribute flyers explaining the NGOs’ work to engine fishers during rescues. The idea, according to the email, was that the information would get back to coastal communities in Libya and eventually to the traffickers themselves. But the proposed flyers were related to migrant safety, not collusion: requests that they not put so many people on the boats, that they provide flashlights, and that they cease pushing boats to sea in bad weather.

Prosecutors paid special attention to photos of outboard motors lined up in port, scraped from laptops that were taken in the seizure. They hypothesized that the Iuventa assisted Libyan fishers in recovering motors from migrant boats to sell back on land. Another photo included in the file shows a sticker inside a toilet aboard the Iuventa that reads “With Best Regards to the MRCC,” referring to the coast guard rescue center. In the seizure order, prosecutors noted that these and other actions by the Iuventa crew represented “antagonistic” attitudes and “a desire to break Italian law.”

The court announced charges in March 2021, four and half years after Gallo and Ballestra first spoke to the police in Trapani. Twenty-one people were charged in total. The trial began last May but has been repeatedly delayed for procedural reasons. The next hearing will be on January 13.

Italy’s newly elected far-right government, led by Giorgia Meloni, has taken an active interest in the trial. On December 19, the office of the prime minister requested to join the litigation as a civil party, meaning that the government is now directly seeking financial damages from the defendants. Salvini, who succeeded Minniti as interior minister and is now Meloni’s main coalition partner, was recently appointed transportation minister, putting him in charge of Italian ports and the coast guard.

The Iuventa crew declined to speak about the specifics of the case. Their lawyers maintain that the charges are unfounded and say they will contest the legality of the sweeping surveillance operation. “The crew has never communicated or cooperated with either Libyan smuggling networks or militias,” said Francesca Cancellaro, one of the lawyers for the Iuventa.

Lawyers for MSF and Save the Children declined to discuss the specifics of the case. Vroon, the company that owned the ships they leased, said, “We deeply regret that our crew and the company is being exposed to criminal charges whilst performing their human duty to people in distress.”

Since the Iuventa case began, Italian prosecutors have carried out over a dozen other legal proceedings against humanitarian rescue organizations working in the Central Mediterranean. Three cases have been dismissed, and the rest are ongoing.

All the while, tens of thousands of people continue to flee Libya each year. In the past five years, the EU has drastically reduced sea rescue patrols and is providing surveillance support to the Libyan coast guard to intercept migrant boats and bring them back to the country they just fled. Over 30,000 people were intercepted at sea and returned to Libya in 2021. Just under 70,000 people made it to Europe via this route. At least 1,500 people drowned trying.

Pietro Gallo said he doesn’t regret what he started, but things didn’t turn out as he’d hoped. “The goal wasn’t to have the crews of Iuventa and [MSF] arrested. We just wanted to show what was going on in the Mediterranean,” Gallo told us. “Our aim was not to campaign for Salvini, it was only to find a solution to this problem.”

He still believes rescue NGOs should be more transparent about their funding. “Behind all these poor people, there’s a lot of money going around.”

In a wiretap from August 2017, Gallo seemed more interested in what was in it for him. Authorities had been listening to his calls for months to see if he was telling the truth, he told his brother. Now they had to admit him back into the police. “I’ve been good, haven’t I?”

“Well, you stopped all the migrants,” his brother replied. “Now they don’t come anymore.”

“The European Union didn’t manage, the Italian government didn’t manage,” Gallo answered, “then a few idiots came and stopped everything.”

Additional research: Alessio Perrone

The post Hacked Phones, Undercover Cops, and the Conspiracy Theory at the Center of Italy’s Crackdown on Humanitarian Rescue appeared first on The Intercept .