| AP sources: Woman accused of sending ricin letter arrested Posted: 20 Sep 2020 04:49 PM PDT  A woman suspected of sending an envelope containing the poison ricin, which was addressed to White House, has been arrested at New York-Canada border, three law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Sunday. The letter had been intercepted earlier this week before it reached the White House. The letter addressed to the White House appeared to have originated in Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have said.
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| AP Explains: What's next with the Supreme Court vacancy? Posted: 20 Sep 2020 03:13 PM PDT  Republican efforts to fill Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat after her death are likely to move swiftly this week, with President Donald Trump possibly nominating a replacement within days and GOP senators hoping to jump-start the confirmation process. Ginsburg's death in late September of an election year puts the Senate in uncharted political terrain. Trump has urged the Republican-run Senate to consider the nomination "without delay" but has not said whether he would push for a confirmation vote before Election Day.
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| World's top companies urge action on nature loss ahead of U.N. talks Posted: 20 Sep 2020 03:06 PM PDT  Some of the world's biggest companies on Monday backed growing calls for governments to do more to reverse the accelerating destruction of the natural world and support broader efforts to fight climate change. More than 560 companies with combined revenues of $4 trillion including Walmart , Citigroup and Microsoft signed up to a statement calling for action over the next decade. The call comes as the United Nations prepares to host a biodiversity summit later this month, aiming to build momentum towards forging a new global pact to ward off threats to nature exemplified by recent fires in the Amazon and California.
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| Environmental crisis will 'dwarf' pandemic's damage, warns Prince Charles Posted: 20 Sep 2020 03:06 PM PDT  The Prince of Wales will on Monday warn of the looming environmental crisis which will "dwarf" the damage wrought by coronavirus, as he says the world risks missing the opportunity to "reset". The Prince, who will deliver the opening speech at Climate Week 2020, is to say the global pandemic is a "wake-up call we cannot ignore". In a message recorded at his Scottish home of Birkhall and delivered online, he warns "swift and immediate action" must now take place, with the Covid-19 pandemic providing a "window of opportunity" to change the world for the better. He will join leaders and environmental campaigners for Climate Week, which takes place annually alongside the United Nations General Assembly. The Prince recently launched a "Great Reset" project at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum, calling on business and political leaders to ensure that global economies are rebuilt with the balance of nature at their centre. In a key note speech to be delivered virtually at 3pm on Monday, the Prince will say: "Without swift and immediate action, at an unprecedented pace and scale, we will miss the window of opportunity to 'reset' for ... a more sustainable and inclusive future. "In other words, the global pandemic is a wake-up call we cannot ignore. "[The environmental] crisis has been with us for far too many years - decried, denigrated and denied. "It is now rapidly becoming a comprehensive catastrophe that will dwarf the impact of the coronavirus pandemic." The Prince, 71, who tested positive for coronavirus in March, has previously urged members of the Commonwealth to come together to tackle climate change. In June, he spoke at a virtual meeting of the 54 UN Commonwealth Ambassadors about The Great Reset, telling them: "In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, we have an unparalleled opportunity to reimagine our future. "This opportunity is an historic and precious one. As we begin to move from crisis to recovery, we have the chance to determine and shape the world we want, not just for ourselves but for the generations which follow." The Prince's concern for the environment has been echoed by other members of the Royal Family. Next month, the Duke of Cambridge will join 50 "leading thinkers and doers" to speak in a session at TEDx Countdown, to discuss climate change, regeneration and protecting nature. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Duke launched the Earthshot Prize, a multimillion-pound award to find positive solutions to the "world's greatest problems by 2030". Last month, a study led by the University of Leeds suggested the global lockdown will have a "negligible" impact on rising temperatures but a green recovery could avert dangerous climate change. While lockdowns caused a fall in transport use and greenhouse gases and pollutants caused by vehicles and industrial activities, it found, the impact is only short-lived. Analysis showed that even if some measures last until the end of 2021, global temperatures will only be 0.01C lower than expected by 2030 without further action.
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| No U.N. support for reimposing Iran sanctions, secretary-general says Posted: 20 Sep 2020 02:52 PM PDT |
| Born to prevent war, UN at 75 faces deeply polarized world Posted: 20 Sep 2020 01:30 PM PDT  Born out of World War II's devastation to save succeeding generations from the scourge of conflict, the United Nations officially marks its 75th anniversary Monday at an inflection point in history, navigating a polarized world as it faces a pandemic, regional conflicts, a shrinking economy and growing inequality. Criticized for spewing out billions of words and achieving scant results on its primary mission of ensuring global peace, the U.N. nonetheless remains the one place that its 193 member nations can meet to talk. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, looking back on the U.N.'s history in an AP interview in June, said its biggest accomplishment so far is the long period during which the most powerful nations didn't go to war and nuclear conflict was avoided.
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| Thousands protest Netanyahu; many ignore Israeli virus rules Posted: 20 Sep 2020 12:58 PM PDT  Thousands of Israelis resumed their weekly protest Sunday outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's official residence in central Jerusalem, despite a new nationwide lockdown order aimed at curbing a raging coronavirus outbreak. An exception allowing people to hold public demonstrations was included in the three-week lockdown imposed last Friday. Thousands of Israelis have participated in the protests throughout the summer, calling on Netanyahu to resign while he is on trial for corruption charges and accusing him of bungling the country's coronavirus crisis.
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| Ginsburg's impact on women spanned age groups, backgrounds Posted: 20 Sep 2020 11:29 AM PDT  Sure, there were the RBG bobbleheads, the Halloween getups, the lace collars, the workout videos. First as a litigator who fought tenaciously for the courts to recognize equal rights for women, one case at a time, and later as the second woman to sit on the hallowed bench of the Supreme Court, Ginsburg left a legacy of achievement in gender equality that had women of varied ages and backgrounds grasping for words this weekend to describe what she meant to them. "She was my teacher in so many ways," said Gloria Steinem, the nation's most visible feminist leader, in an interview.
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| Reports claim Bahrain stopped militants planning attacks Posted: 20 Sep 2020 10:50 AM PDT |
| Family, work and opera filled Ginsburg's final summer Posted: 20 Sep 2020 10:41 AM PDT  Mary Hartnett, one of her two authorized biographers, visited Ginsburg in mid-August at her longtime home in the Watergate apartment complex next to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. "She was trying very hard to treat this, and essentially her body just gave out," Hartnett said. Hartnett, who wore a mask and tested negative for the coronavirus before visiting, said the justice was continuing to do court work.
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| Biden to focus on health care in Supreme Court debate Posted: 20 Sep 2020 10:26 AM PDT  Joe Biden on Sunday used the sudden Supreme Court vacancy to reinforce his argument that the upcoming election should be a referendum on President Donald Trump's handling of health care and the coronavirus. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg jolted the presidential campaign just six weeks before the election and as several states are already voting. Trump has seized on the opportunity to nominate a new justice to motivate his most loyal voters.
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| UN chief: No UN support for reimposing Iran sanctions now Posted: 20 Sep 2020 10:25 AM PDT  Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the United Nations will not support reimposing sanctions on Iran as the United States is demanding until he gets a green light from the Security Council. The U.N. chief said in a letter to the council president obtained Sunday by The Associated Press that "there would appear to be uncertainty" on whether or not U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo triggered the "snapback" mechanism in the Security Council resolution that enshrined the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers.
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| California wildfire likely to grow from wind, low humidity Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:34 AM PDT  The destruction wrought by a wind-driven wildfire in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles approached 156 square miles (404 square kilometers) Sunday, burning structures, homes and a nature center in a famed Southern California wildlife sanctuary in foothill desert communities. The blaze, known as the Bobcat Fire, is expected to grow through Sunday and Monday as critical fire weather conditions continued due to gusty wind and low humidity. Firefighters were, however, able to defend Mount Wilson this weekend, which overlooks greater Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains and has a historic observatory founded more than a century ago and numerous broadcast antennas serving Southern California.
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| Labour may not vote for Boris Johnson's Brexit deal, Keir Starmer hints Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:22 AM PDT  Sir Keir Starmer has warned Boris Johnson the Labour Party will not necessarily vote for his Brexit deal when he brings it back to Parliament. Deal talks have stalled in recent weeks over the key issues of state aid and fishing rights, but negotiations must be concluded before the end of the transition period, after which Britain will automatically leave without a deal. Sir Keir, who supported Remain in the 2016, has urged the Prime Minister he must secure a deal with the EU as promised during last year's election campaign. But speaking on Sky News, the Labour leader refused to commit to voting for the deal if it ever comes back from Brussels for a parliamentary vote. His party will only vote for a deal that is "in the best interests of the country," he said, signalling that Mr Johnson may have a battle in the House of Commons even if his team can successfully negotiate a deal with Michel Barnier.
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| Douglas statue comes down, but Lincoln had racist views, too Posted: 20 Sep 2020 08:52 AM PDT |
| Sen. Graham's challenge: Fill a court seat and save his own Posted: 20 Sep 2020 08:40 AM PDT  Few members of the Republican Party have taken a political journey as long as Lindsey Graham's, from ridiculing Donald Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" to becoming one of the president's fiercest defenders in Congress, as well as a regular golf partner. Graham has long been known to have flexible politics, and that has served him well in South Carolina for decades. "The rules have changed as far as I'm concerned," Graham said Saturday.
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| Verdict against young artists in Sudan stirs controversy Posted: 20 Sep 2020 08:37 AM PDT |
| Wildfires and hurricanes disrupt final weeks of 2020 census Posted: 20 Sep 2020 08:31 AM PDT  Already burdened by the coronavirus pandemic and a tightened deadline, the Census Bureau must now contend with several natural disasters as wildfires and hurricanes disrupt the final weeks of the nation's once-a-decade headcount. The fires on the West Coast forced tens of thousands of people to flee homes in California and Oregon before they could be counted, and tens of thousands of others were uncounted in Louisiana communities hit hard last month by Hurricane Laura. Nearly a quarter million more households were uncounted in areas affected this week by Hurricane Sally.
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| One Year After The First Climate Strike, Here’s What Greta Thunberg Has Accomplished Posted: 20 Sep 2020 08:00 AM PDT  Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish climate activist is back to school after taking a year off to continue campaigning to stop global warming. On this day one year ago, Thunderg led the largest global climate strike in history, as more than 4 million people across 161 different countries went on strike to demand climate action. Students, trade unionists, workers, and labor organizers were among the many who joined the massive walkout, with a message to their governments that together they would not be stopped. Thunberg's activism started gaining international attention during the 2018 summer when she launched a weekly climate direct action called "Fridays for Future" or "School Strike for Climate." Every Friday, Thunberg encouraged students everywhere to skip school and demand their governments take action to save our planet. And the striking has continued for the past year. So, what has Thunberg been up to the past year? Although the 17-year-old has taken a backseat in the news in recent months due to the chaos of the presidential election, ongoing uprisings for racial justice, the pandemic, and aliens, Thunberg has been very busy. In the last year, she has taken her environmental activism around the globe, to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.During her trip to New York, the young activist delivered a now-famous, passionate speech that put world leaders to shame. "I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean," Thunberg said. "Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words." In Davos, Thunberg took on U.S. President Donald Trump in a speech to audience members urging world leaders to take steps to fix a problem they created. After all, 100 companies alone are responsible for 71% of global emissions and more than 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from the oil and gas industry. "You say children shouldn't worry. You say, 'Just leave this to us. We will fix this. We promise we won't let you down. 'Don't be so pessimistic,'" she said, directing her ire at Trump, who during an earlier address suggested climate activists should not be pessimistic about the future of our planet.Much like the rest of the world, Thunberg has had to adapt to changes in her everyday life due to the global public health crisis we face. As a result, she took her weekly climate strikes to the internet, and organized a digital strike every Friday. Thunberg invited participants to post of photo of themselves striking with their protest signs and the hashtag ClimateStrikeOnline. In some of her free time, the 17-year-old said she also started "doing some school" after her gap year travels were interrupted. "It doesn't really count, but just because I love studying so much," said Thunberg. Even in the middle of the pandemic, as we all took steps to social distance and stay home whenever possible, Thunberg continues to raise awareness about social issues and hold world leaders accountable. In June when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized stay-at-home measures and shutting down non-essential businesses, Thunberg launched a crowdfunding campaign with Fridays for Future to purchase medical supplies and make telemedicine services accessible to people living in the Amazon rainforest. But it seems that one year later, the teen continues to organize and boost weekly digital climate strikes, and has moved to start striking in-person again. In August, the climate activist took her socially distanced strike back to the Swedish Parliament, and continued to amplify calls for action. Thunberg along with thousands of journalists, activists, scientists, and professors signed an open letter demanding the European Union and global leaders make a number of changes to slow global warming, including halting investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, enacting climate policies that protect workers, and making ecocide an international crime, among others. > School strike week 106. Back outside the Swedish Parliament! > We will not go away until you FaceTheClimateEmergency . > If you strike, remember to keep social distance and follow COVID-19 restrictions.climatestrike fridaysforfuture schoolstrike4climate flattenthecurve pic.twitter.com/SVMNzw1OBP> > — Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) August 28, 2020Despite her warnings last year that school strikes have not achieved enough and her admission that it's just not sustainable, Thunberg remains a force for change and inspiration to youth organizers the world over. Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?Greta Thunberg's CNN Debut Causes Twitter BacklashGreta Thunberg's New TV Show Follows Her JourneyGreta Thunberg Gets Nobel Prize Nomination Again
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| NVZN Token - Exchange offering on BITXMI Posted: 20 Sep 2020 07:46 AM PDT  NVZN Token NVZN TokenHouston, USA, Sept. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- INVIZION - one of the first blockchain and crypto related projects discussed at the United Nations Global Compact on the 22nd of September, is excited to announce the next major step in their vision of making the world a cleaner, greener and better place. The project will be opening doors to investors through their digital asset listing on BITXMI Exchange.A big aspect of Environmental change relies on waste management. And to successfully achieve this change would need community support and involvement. Hence, Incentivizing the blockchain community into investing in the green energy space has been an important aspect for the team at Invizion. NVZN's aims to achieve this by providing crypto enthusiasts with a token that has an immense real-life use case: revolutionizing the way in which our society at large deals with waste. The current method of waste tracking is not only outdated: it's dangerous. Since the semi-manual tracking of waste is faulty and vulnerable to human mistakes and ill-will, waste often ends up in landfills. From there, toxic chemicals find their way into drinking water, and ultimately, into our bodies. The problem is real and it affects us all. INVIZION makes the waste tracking process fair and transparent by replacing the human element with smart contracts. When waste is produced, it is given a certificate of origin with the use of NVZN Tokens, and from there, the entire lifecycle of a batch of waste can be easily and efficiently tracked on the blockchain. The extent in which applying blockchain technology can improve waste tracking is immense: all suppliers, orders, invoices, shipments, quality checks and so on, everything can be easily recorded with smart contracts. The blockchain that chronicles waste's lifecycle can be independently audited, but cannot be forged or tampered with in any way. A sophisticated project like Invizion, requires a respectable exchange to partner with. Hence, the team at Invizion decided to list NVZN Tokens on BITXMI exchange, where cryptocurrency and environmental enthusiasts can participate in the solutions to make our planet a better place. Bitxmi was founded in 2018 and is one of the most secure global digital asset exchanges for users to trade on. The platform consists of cold storage wallets, multiple servers, and high levels of security through KYC, Sanctions checks, AML, Tracking chargebacks, and so on. NVZN Token is not a mere collectible: it's a digital asset with an important real-life use case. NVZN holders will be empowered to actively take part in delivering a groundbreaking waste tracking technology to the world and follow progress in real time. INVIZION will not only keep users up to date through their website and social media, but also supply live video feed from operation sites. Holders of the NVZN tokens will be able to follow the entire process from start to the end, and see for themselves how industrial waste is being processed into green energy in a revolutionary process that produces no harmful byproducts.Media Details – Company Name - NVZN token Website URL - https://nvzntoken.com/ Email - Marketing@nvzntoken.com Attachment * NVZN Token
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| Uganda Makerere University fire: 'Ivory Tower' gutted Posted: 20 Sep 2020 07:41 AM PDT  An overnight blaze leaves a distinctive building at one of Africa's oldest universities a shell.
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| Iran 'to have nuclear weapon by end of year,' as more sanctions drawn up by US Posted: 20 Sep 2020 07:30 AM PDT  Donald Trump will hit more than a dozen figures linked to Iran's nuclear programme with sanctions on Monday, a senior US official has announced, as he claimed the regime was working with North Korea to produce a long-range missile. The unnamed official told Reuters news agency that Iran may have enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by the end of the year and that Tehran has resumed long-range missile cooperation with nuclear-armed North Korea. He did not provide detailed evidence regarding either assertion. The new sanctions fit into US President Donald Trump's effort to limit Iran's regional influence and come a week after US-brokered deals for the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to normalize ties with Israel, pacts that may coalesce a wider coalition against Iran while appealing to pro-Israel US voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election. The new sanctions also put European allies, China and Russia on notice that while their inclination may be to ignore the US drive to maintain the U.N. sanctions on Iran, companies based in their nations would feel the bite for violating them. A major part of the new US push is an executive order targeting those who buy or sell Iran conventional arms that was previously reported by Reuters and will also be unveiled by the Trump administration on Monday, the official said. The Trump administration suspects Iran of seeking nuclear weapons - something Tehran denies - and Monday's punitive steps are the latest in a series seeking to stymie Iran's atomic program, which US ally Israel views as an existential threat. "Iran is clearly doing everything it can to keep in existence a virtual turnkey capability to get back into the weaponization business at a moment's notice should it choose to do so," the US official told Reuters. The official argued Iran wants a nuclear weapons capability and the means to deliver it despite the 2015 deal that sought to prevent this by restraining Iran's atomic program in return for access to the world market.
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| Des Moines says no to governor's demand for classroom return Posted: 20 Sep 2020 07:28 AM PDT  Students in Iowa's largest school system are facing the possibility that this most unusual school year could stretch into next summer, and the district could be hit with crippling bills because of a dispute with the governor over the safety of returning to classrooms during the coronavirus pandemic. Des Moines school officials have repeatedly refused to abide by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds' order requiring the state's 327 school districts to hold at least half their classes in-person rather than online. For Des Moines, it's a question of trying to keep its more than 33,000 students and 5,000 staffers from contracting the disease.
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| 10 things you need to know today: September 20, 2020 Posted: 20 Sep 2020 07:25 AM PDT |
| Amazon land grabbers assail ecotourism paradise in Brazil Posted: 20 Sep 2020 07:01 AM PDT  Brazil's Alter do Chao, a sleepy village that blends rainforest and beaches, bet on tourism and scored big. Problems rife throughout the Amazon region — land grabbing, illegal deforestation and unsanctioned construction — are plaguing this ecotourism hot spot. One month later, President Jair Bolsonaro, who has pledged to promote development of the Amazon, was inaugurated.
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| Coronavirus: WHO sets rules for testing African herbal remedies Posted: 20 Sep 2020 06:31 AM PDT  Sound science "will be the sole basis" for safe and effective therapies to be adopted, the WHO says.
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| Efforts afoot to save South's disappearing grasslands Posted: 20 Sep 2020 06:08 AM PDT  Once sunlight hit the ground, the seeds and rootstock of native grasses and wildflowers that had lain dormant for decades began to spring to life. The area was originally part of vast patchwork of Southern grasslands that today hang on only in tiny remnants, many times in rights-of-way next to roads or under power lines. In Tennessee, where the pine trees were cleared, wildlife officials now maintain about 4,000 acres of grassland in the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area with controlled low-temperature burns.
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| Georgia's Fulton County works to avoid another vote debacle Posted: 20 Sep 2020 05:31 AM PDT  Twice delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, Georgia's primary election earlier this year was marred by dysfunction: Hourslong wait times at polling places. Absentee ballots that never arrived. The problems were most acute in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta and is a Democratic stronghold in a traditionally red state.
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| GOP hopeful Supreme Court battle will help shift election Posted: 20 Sep 2020 05:29 AM PDT  Four years ago, the allure of conservative Supreme Court appointments helped persuade skeptical Republicans to support Donald Trump for president. Two years ago, a contentious clash over Trump's choice of Brett Kavanaugh for the court was credited with bolstering GOP gains in the Senate in an otherwise bad midterm election.
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| Iran's Rouhani says U.S. faces defeat in bid to reimpose U.N. sanctions Posted: 20 Sep 2020 05:21 AM PDT |
| US sends armoured vehicles to Syria as UN urges Turkey to probe militia's human rights abuses Posted: 20 Sep 2020 05:16 AM PDT  The US military has sent half a dozen armored vehicles on a 90-day mission to reinforce its troops in eastern Syria, less than a month after four US soldiers were injured during an altercation with Russian troops in the area. The military said fewer than 100 soldiers would accompany the vehicles. There are currently less than 1,000 US troops in Syria, a number that has remained approximately the same since the end of the US military offensive that deprived the Islamic State [IS] of most of the territory in Syria. Russia has deployed military forces to Syria in support of the Syrian regime, while US troops conduct joint patrols and operations with the Syrian Democratic Forces, a militia it backed in 2015 to fight against IS. The US and Russia have previously clashed with each other in Syria, such as a 2017 incident that led to the deaths of around 300 Russian military contractors. "The United States does not seek conflict with any other nation in Syria, but will defend Coalition forces if necessary," said Captain Bill Urban, a spokesman for the US military's Central Command. Also on Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights urged Turkey to investigate war crimes committed by groups it backs in northern Syria. Turkey began launching major military operations in 2016 in order to remove Syrian Kurdish militia groups, including the US-supported SDF, from areas they controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border.
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| Lindsey Graham Is Trump’s Most Important Friend Posted: 20 Sep 2020 05:00 AM PDT  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Lindsey Graham may be the most misunderstood figure in Donald Trump's Washington. For the Resistance, the Republican senator from South Carolina is the lickspittle who abandoned his principles for access to a dangerous populist. For the populists, Graham is an interloper, worming his way into the president's inner circle and persuading him to keep fighting the endless wars Trump campaigned against.Neither version, however, quite captures the role that Graham plays in Trump's chaotic presidency. He is neither a Svengali nor a suck-up. Rather, he is an honest friend, willing to do something few others in Trump's inner circle will do: Tell him when he is wrong.That is the Graham that emerges from Bob Woodward's new book, "Rage." In scene after scene, Graham is depicted as the Trump confidante urging him to step back from the ledge.Take Trump's response to former FBI director Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. As Mueller's final report makes clear, Trump tried many times to have him fired, but his staff never complied. Graham also pleaded with the president to back off.Woodward reports that also Graham confronted Trump at the beginning of the Russia investigation, telling the president that there was only "one thing that would turn me against you, and that is if you actually worked with the Russians." Trump insisted that he didn't. "I believe you," Graham said. Graham then told Trump the truth: Mueller is the only person who can clear you.It appears that Graham's counsel was effective. Trump didn't fire Mueller. And although his final report found examples of attempted obstruction of his investigation and contacts between his campaign and Russia, Mueller also stated that he found no evidence of a conspiracy between the president's campaign and the Russian interference operation.Graham's approach with Trump stands in sharp relief with the president's first director of national intelligence, former Indiana Senator Dan Coats. Coats pushed back against Trump on specific policy issues such as his effort to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria. But Woodward does not report that Coats ever confronted Trump directly about whether he colluded with Moscow.Woodward does report that Coats and his staff perused the most classified intelligence on Trump's possible ties to Russia and found no proof of collusion. Nonetheless, Woodward says, "Coats's doubts continued, never fully dissipating." Coats has not gone on the record to either dispute or affirm this account. When Trump asked him in 2019, before Mueller released his report, to state publicly that he found no proof of collusion, Coats demurred, stressing that the FBI still had an ongoing criminal investigation.Graham today leads the Senate's investigation into the FBI's probe of Trump and Russia. The president's opponents dismiss Graham's efforts as an attempt to curry favor with Trump. They shouldn't. When Mueller was named special prosecutor in 2017, Graham introduced legislation to prevent the president from firing him. He counseled the president to allow Mueller to finish his work. When Trump pressed him in 2019 to issue a subpoena of former president, Barack Obama, Graham publicly said it was a bad idea, leading Trump to temporarily break contact. Just as Graham is not the sycophant the left paints him to be, he also defies the warmonger caricature forwarded by populists such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News.Woodward reveals that Graham repeatedly counseled Trump against the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Graham warned him that Iran would retaliate and that Trump could find himself launching an attack inside Iranian territory, risking a major war. Trump responded, "He deserves it," noting intelligence reporting that Soleimani was planning major attacks.Graham also emerged as an honest friend this summer following the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Privately, Graham worried that Trump's response to the protests and riots that followed Floyd's killing was in the style of the infamous segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama.In a series of phone calls in June, Woodward reports, Graham bluntly told the president that if the election were held today, he would lose. He urged the president instead to take a three-pronged approach to his campaign: Issue an executive order on police reform; propose a massive infrastructure bill, and support legislation to protect some 700,000 undocumented young adults who had been brought to the country as children. Trump didn't take Graham's advice. That is often the way it goes with Trump. As the tell-all books published in 2020 document, the president believes that he is his own best counsel. Nonetheless, it's worth asking: Would the republic be in better shape if Graham had chosen to appease Trump's resistance, and said publicly the kinds of things he told him in private?I am not sure it would. Trump won the 2016 election. If he were removed from office through a flawed and abusive FBI investigation, millions of Americans would have viewed their votes as nullified. Graham, who campaigned bitterly against Trump during the primaries, understood this too.Had Graham followed the lead of his late friend, John McCain, maybe there would have been one more Republican vote for Trump's impeachment. But it would not have been enough to remove him from office. Instead, Graham made a choice: He is trying to work with the president we have to persuade him to be the president we need.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Analysis: US to hit 200K dead; Trump sees no need for regret Posted: 20 Sep 2020 04:57 AM PDT  As the coronavirus pandemic began bearing down on the United States in March, President Donald Trump set out his expectations. If the U.S. could keep the death toll between 100,000 to 200,000 people, Trump said, it would indicate that his administration had "done a very good job."
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| Iran's rial hits record low as tension spikes with the U.S. Posted: 20 Sep 2020 04:11 AM PDT  The Iranian rial fell to a record low against the U.S. dollar on the unofficial market on Sunday, a day after the U.S. President Donald Trump's administration declared all United Nations sanctions on Tehran had been restored. The dollar was offered for as much as 273,000 rials, up from 267,800 rials on Saturday, according to foreign exchange site Bonbast.com, which tracks the unofficial market. Iran has dismissed the U.S. move as "void and illegal" and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council on Saturday he cannot take any action on the U.S. declaration because "there would appear to be uncertainty" on the issue.
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| Iran's rial hits record low as tension spikes with the U.S. Posted: 20 Sep 2020 04:07 AM PDT |
| China is our greatest foreign policy issue. But neither Trump nor Biden have it right. Posted: 20 Sep 2020 03:01 AM PDT |
| Iran dismisses US efforts for UN sanctions as currency drops Posted: 20 Sep 2020 02:10 AM PDT  Iran's president dismissed U.S. efforts to restore all U.N. sanctions on the country as mounting economic pressure from Washington pushed the local currency down to its lowest level ever on Sunday. The rial has lost more than 30% of its value to the dollar since June as sweeping U.S. sanctions on Iran continue to crush its ability to sell oil globally. Iran's currency was at 32,000 rials to the dollar at the time of Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which was signed by the Obama administration but which the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of.
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| Trump Makes America More Like Russia Every Day Posted: 20 Sep 2020 02:02 AM PDT  Russian spies have undermined America for nearly a century. Their goals during and after the cold war were the same: Subvert the United States, sabotage its power, poison the body politic. They used the weapons of political warfare: deception, disinformation, espionage.Their American agents held positions of power and authority. They infiltrated the Justice Department, the State Department, and all of America's national-security agencies. Turncoats at the FBI and the CIA gave the Russians keys to the kingdom of American intelligence. Their treason went undetected for many years. A Nazi-hunting congressman, Samuel Dickstein of New York, became a Kremlin spy in 1937. His work stayed secret for six decades.Four years ago, the KGB veteran Vladimir Putin pulled off the greatest coup of political warfare since the Trojan Horse: He helped put Donald Trump in the White House. Ever since, Trump has been a priceless asset for the Russians, a point man for their war on American democracy. It's no secret that Trump echoes Russia's political propaganda, stands with Putin against American spies and soldiers, and undermines the pillars of American national security. No secret that he tried to erase the evidence of Russia's attacks on the last presidential election. Now he's trying to drown out warnings that they'll attack the next one.The mystery is why.I'm not saying Putin pays him. No one has a grainy photo of Trump pocketing Kremlin gold. But there are many kinds of secret agents in the annals of political warfare. Some were compromised by money troubles or blackmailed over sex. Some served their cause without comprehending Russia's goals—they were poleznyye duraki, useful idiots. Some were in thrall to Russia's authoritarian ideology. And most served Russia without ever being recruited. They volunteered.Trump's Fury at Intel Briefing Shows Putin's Bet Keeps Paying OffTrump serves Putin in a very specific way. He's an agent of influence.That's someone in a position of authority who's under the sway of a hostile government. Someone who can use their power to influence public opinion or make political decisions that benefit whoever manipulates them. That's how American intelligence defines it. The Russians, who first perfected the concept, see it a little differently. To them, an agent of influence doesn't have to be controlled, recruited, or paid. They just have to be useful.Leon Panetta, who ran the CIA and the Pentagon under President Obama, has no doubt about it. He told me that, by any definition, "Trump, for all intents and purposes, acts as an agent of influence of Russia."I've interviewed veteran American spies, spymasters, and spy-catchers all summer for a podcast called Whirlwind, based on my new book, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare: 1945-2020. Almost all concur with Panetta. But they have other theories as well. There's the useful idiot scenario. Or maybe it's money: the Russians might have kompromat—compromising information—about Trump's finances. And some think it might be worse than that.All agreed with Fiona Hill, who served under Trump as the National Security Council's director for Russia, that Moscow sized him up as a mark long ago.Putin's KGB experience made him an expert at "manipulating people, blackmailing people, extorting people," she told the impeachment inquiry last year. "That's exactly what a case officer does. They get a weakness, and they blackmail their assets." She concluded: "I firmly believe he was also targeting President Trump."Trump had almost all the traits Russian intelligence officers love to exploit: his transactional sex life, his greed, his corruption, his ego. He first visited Moscow in 1987, a vainglorious businessman seeking to build a luxury hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government. Then he started dropping hints about running for president, and he took out full-page ads in The New York Times and the Washington Post arguing for dismantling America's strategic alliances in Asia and the Middle East. Soon shady Russians were sidling up to him at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. And a generation later, he was still running for president—and still trying to build that hotel in Moscow, though he denied it."I have no doubt that Donald Trump was a target" from his days as a businessman, said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow. He sees Trump's increasingly authoritarian ideology as a key factor in his adherence to Putin. "The most disturbing thing I've learned about Donald Trump is the level to which he identifies with Putin," he told me. "I'm saying this as a CIA officer who's trained to look for this as the most important element of a sure-fire recruitment case—where you can get someone who's on your ideological side. And Donald Trump exhibits a shocking degree of ideological solidarity with Vladimir Putin, doesn't he?"Is the president of the United States really a Russian asset—witting or unwitting? The CIA veteran John Sipher, who served in Moscow and ran spy operations against the Russians for more than 20 years, said that Trump "is certainly being used and manipulated, and is witting and willing to a certain extent. The question is whether the Russian success is because Trump is simply so easy to read and manipulate—or is he complicit over some fear of kompromat? Is he an asset, in the English language sense of the term, to the Russians? Yes, he is. He's essentially following their playbook. He is essentially mouthing their talking points. Somehow people are getting Russian talking points in front of him. And he's doing them."We don't know how much Trump's casinos and his real estate empire and his resurrection from bankruptcy depended on KGB capitalists or Kremlin-connected oligarchs—or whether his financial connections with Russians gave them kompromat to use against him. We won't know until criminal investigators take a deep look at his finances. And one day soon, they likely will."I do believe that there is probably kompromat that the Russians were able to collect on Trump," Steve Hall, who also served as a CIA station chief in Moscow, told me. "But really, in my mind, I think that probably the most important thing that Vladimir Putin has figured out, and he has over Trump, is that Trump so much values himself as a powerful self-made man." He continued: "The ability of Vladimir Putin to call Trump up on the phone—in one of these many phone calls that we don't end up hearing much about—or perhaps private meetings where nobody else is there," and saying, "'Hey, Donald, let's not forget why it is that you're where you are.'""He had significant help and a lot of it came from the Kremlin," Hall said. "That would really be a useful piece of compromising information over Donald Trump."Trump, of course, has insisted that his business empire has "nothing to do with Russia." He's said a thousand times that the idea that he has a nefarious connection with Russians is "a hoax." We might know more about his ties to Russia if the FBI had ever conducted a serious counterintelligence investigation of the matter. But Trump's Justice Department seems to have killed the case, fearing the repercussions of a mole hunt at the White House.The CIA veteran Mowatt-Larssen spent years tracking down the CIA and FBI traitors who served the KGB in the '80s and '90s. He put on counterintelligence hat when I asked him, "Given the flattery, the praise, the political support that Putin has lavished on Donald Trump—and given Trump's desire to be an autocrat in the style of Putin—when it comes to the president of the United States serving the interests of the Kremlin, Putin doesn't have to recruit Trump. Trump recruited himself. Right?"He thought long and hard about this. "That's true," he said. "But then I have to ask the obvious question: Is that all it is? Is it only that Putin is such a master manipulator and that Trump is so vain that he loves it? Or is there a deeper explanation for this inexplicable behavior? Because I cannot, I could never have imagined that an American president could essentially, whether it's witting or unwitting, betray American interests so thoroughly to the Russians as has occurred in the last four years."Trump hammers away at America's alliances. He smiles upon dictators and autocrats. When great throngs of people in Hong Kong and Prague and Minsk take to the streets demanding their right to liberty, the silence of the White House is deafening.No less than Putin, Trump conducts political warfare against the American government. He attacks the rule of law, the freedom of the press, and the legitimacy of elections. He spews propaganda and hatred into political discourse. He denounces his political foes as criminals and threatens them with prison.In Trump's vision of America, all power resides in the president: Congress can't control him, courts can't judge him, and laws can't constrain him. His insistence that his official acts are infallible requires Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. He works to erase the criminal record of the Kremlin's political warfare, and to promote conspiracy theories absolving Russia of its attacks on the last election and the next, thus "abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow's interests, not America's," in the words of the former CIA chief John Brennan.He undermines the architecture of American national security. He shuts his eyes to the CIA's reporting when it clashes with his invincible ignorance, and he scorns his Pentagon chiefs on matters of life and death. He defames distinguished American ambassadors as "human scum," trashes FBI agents as subversive traitors, and vilifies CIA officers as Nazis. He has now purged the national intelligence directorate, installed dishonest partisans, and cut off the flow of intelligence reporting to Congress and the American people, a smoke screen obscuring the threat of Russian attacks intended to help him win re-election.The president, no less than Putin's political warriors, infects the American body politic with falsehoods, inflaming anger, poisoning discourse. Trump's billion-dollar reelection operation uses digital disinformation strategies adopted from the Russians. His response to the coronavirus is a torrent of lying and denying, evoking the Soviet reaction to Chernobyl. With the Kremlin backing Trump as the chaos candidate, there is no foretelling the lengths he will go to stay in power, how he will react if and when the people put an end to his presidency, whether he will surrender the White House peacefully if defeated, or rule as a despot if he prevails.Almost 40 years ago, as the cold war raged, Ronald Reagan held his first news conference as president. He said that the Russians played by different rules than Americans: "They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat," he said. "We operate on a different set of standards." But if those standards ever held true, they don't anymore.The tragedy is that Trump will lie, and he will cheat, to stay in power.And in that way, he has made America more like Russia.The terrible question at the heart of the matter remains: What is the influence that Putin has on Trump? And that mystery never has been fully investigated. Not by the FBI. Not by the CIA. Not by Robert Mueller. Not by Congress. I asked Mowatt-Larssen what he would do if he were in charge of American intelligence and the FBI came to him and said, "We have a national security nightmare on our hands. We are afraid that the president of the United States is, in some unknowable way, in the sway of Vladimir Putin."He said he would tell the CIA and the FBI to create a small team of mole-hunters to see "if there is any merit to the possibility that the president is a Russian spy." He continued: "I'd give them carte blanche to look at anything they need to do, over as long as they needed to do it, in total secrecy. So no one would be even aware of the existence of the unit."I asked, "And you do this knowing that that investigation could last for years and for decades?""You have to," he said. "And the reason you have to is that's what history suggests we may have to be prepared for."Adapted from THE FOLLY AND THE GLORY: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020 by Tim Weiner. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2020 by Tim Weiner. All rights reserved.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Did Russian Spies Use Diplomatic Cover to Run a Global Cocaine-Smuggling Operation? Posted: 20 Sep 2020 01:56 AM PDT  > This is a joint investigation by The Daily Beast and the Dossier Center.Six men await trial in Moscow and Buenos Aires, charged with operating one of the craziest, most ambitious narco-trafficking rings in history. Russia's embassy in Argentina was the storage depot and Russian government transport was intended to move a cartel-sized consignment of virtually uncut cocaine from South America to Moscow. It was a transnational crime that astounded and confused the world, not least because authorities allege it was carried out by a small but resourceful cabal including one dirty embassy employee, one corrupt cop, and one charismatic chameleon who used some of the most secure Russian state real estate to store and smuggle $60 million worth of drugs. According to the official narrative, they did it all right under the noses of innocent diplomats and intelligence officers—and they would have gotten away with it without the plucky joint police work of Russian and Argentinian law enforcement. But what if that neat conclusion, which will soon be presented in court, is intentionally incomplete, a whitewash designed to protect more senior officials in the Russian government?The Daily Beast, in collaboration with the London-based Dossier Center, has obtained the documents from both the Russian and Argentinian investigations of the notorious 2018 cocaine bust, including hundreds of hours of telephone wiretap recordings, reams of witness and suspect interrogation transcripts, and nearly 10,000 pages of police and intelligence case files. These files were leaked to the Dossier Center from two separate sources, including one in Argentina connected with that country's investigation who believes these forensic materials cast doubt on the alleged involvement in the affair of two indicted Argentines. The other source is close to the Russian investigation. All told, both sets of files show gaping holes, contradictions, discrepancies and implausible conclusions, which often border on the ludicrous. At best, these documents suggest a staggering level of incompetence, with credible leads not followed up and government officials credibly implicated in the course of the joint investigation not investigated or prosecuted. At worst, they paint a darker picture of a coordinated, hemisphere-spanning coverup designed to protect those government officials and possibly other unnamed co-conspirators higher up in the food chain in Russia.One U.S. federal drug enforcement agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity thinks that all indications point to the latter. "According to our information, some members of the Russian embassy in Argentina... were aware of drug-related activities and were associated with the drug mafia. At some point there was a leak. The Argentinian authorities found out about the cocaine and contacted the embassy, after which the Russian side decided it was safer to 'find' the drugs. The scandal was resolved at a diplomatic level and no real investigation was conducted by Argentina."But that's not the public line of the Argentinian government. On Feb. 22, 2018, Patricia Bullrich, Argentina's national security minister, lit up Twitter. She posted to her official account videos of the seizure of almost 400 kilograms of cocaine from the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires. "The investigation lasted more than a year, both in Argentina and Russia, and together we detained 6 members of this group that planned to transport a cargo worth more than 50 million euro," one of Bullrich's tweets read.The extraordinary location and sheer volume of the narcotics uncovered made this an explosive international story. It became an even bigger news event when Bullrich announced that Ivan Bliznyuk, the liaison officer at the Institute of Public Security, Buenos Aires's police academy, had been arrested in connection with the same drug case. Yet the evidence for his participation in the drug-running syndicate rests almost entirely on the word of a Russian embassy security official, who, by his own admission, adopted a see-no-evil approach for several months to the presence of 12 strange suitcases stored on embassy grounds.Bliznyuk and a fellow Argentine, the U.S. drug enforcement agent said, "were detained in order to deflect suspicion from the embassy and [Russian] Foreign Ministry officials who used diplomatic channels for smuggling and were the drugs' real beneficiaries." An officer in Argentina's Federal Intelligence Agency agrees that there were other embassy staff members involved, and adds that they likely had connections to Russian intelligence owing to the tradecraft and planning involved in the abortive scheme.At the center of this complex web of alleged criminality sits the main defendant in the case, Andrei Kovalchuk. He claims he is the victim of a vast conspiracy and ran afoul of the very intelligence organs he had faithfully served for years—the organs of two countries, in fact, Russia and Germany. "My misfortunes began," he wrote from a prison cell in Berlin where he awaited extradition to Moscow, "after the operation to join the Crimea to Russia in 2014, in which I took part, for which I was awarded a medal for this operation, which is located here, in Berlin." Kovalchuk's lawyer insists his client has helped nab terrorists, mobsters, and gun-runners from Lower Saxony to Düsseldorf. He denies all of the charges.At once a cipher and a changeling, Kovalchuk is full of fantastical tales about himself and his various clients, cronies and accomplices but this much can be solidly established: He maintained lasting relationships with a series of security officials in various countries, as well as employees of the Russian Foreign Ministry. He had an excellent working knowledge of the layout and protocols of Russian missions, not to mention the protocol for wrapping and diplomatic parcels. And he allegedly seconded a host of Russian government vehicles and aircraft to move not just drugs but jewelry, clothes, and pharmaceuticals across national borders. Based on the Argentine and Russian indictments, we are invited to believe that all of this was arranged privately by Kovalchuk with a little cash and a lot of cognac, cigars, and candies courtesy of a burly and hirsute business associate, a camera-friendly Russian exile in Germany who's taken to calling himself a "baron."An international man of mystery requires manifold identities. Over a remarkable 20-year career, Kovalchuk has passed himself off not only as a spook, but also a diplomat, a Gazprom representative, a shrink, a philanthropist, and a man of leisure. Yet in spite of all his extraordinary Moscow connections, this Ukrainian-born grifter was never even a legal Russian citizen; all of his passports, the case files show, were invalid. Thus the main perpetrator sitting in pretrial detention in Moscow is technically stateless. Did Kovalchuk spy for the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, or was it the GRU, its military service? Both deny he was one of theirs. "Kovalchuk is a man of intelligence, perhaps retired, but still serving the Russian government," a source in Argentina's Federal Intelligence Agency told us. This Russian Spy Agency Is in the Middle of EverythingThat would certainly explain why the functionaries in the Russian Foreign Ministry clearly implicated in the case files as Kovalchuk's blackmarket handmaids were never investigated or suspended or fired from their jobs. In fact, they all seem to have been untroubled by this scandal, all, that is, save the one who committed "suicide" outside his Moscow apartment three weeks after the cocaine was discovered at the embassy in Buenos Aires. Kovalchuk is also being tried in closed Russian court, a dispensation normally reserved for minors, sex offenders or those for whom publicized due process risks compromising matters of national security.Both the Russian and Argentinian governments have failed to account for how Kovalchuk, a man of limited financial resources, acquired eight-figures worth of high-purity marching powder or to determine its ultimate beneficiaries. At times, the investigators simply failed to follow up on obvious leads, such as investigating the possible involvement of the Sinaloa drug cartel as the manufacturers of the cocaine or following up on a Dutch phone number said to belong to the intended buyer or recipient of it.Still another curiosity of this affair is why Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of the National Security Council, the former director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and one of the most powerful strongmen in Vladimir Putin's inner sanctum, flew to and from Argentina, allegedly on the same Russian government plane used in the sting operation that snared Kovalchuk. And why did the Kremlin then deny that his aircraft (and possibly also Patrushev himself) had been involved in this drug-trafficking story?Whoever Andrei Kovalchuk is, or was, before his name appeared in bold multilingual print, his alleged coke-smuggling plan required a network of well-placed fixers and mules. He found his first alleged courier in an embassy. The First Mule?In 2012, Ali Abyanov, the head of the administrative and economics department at the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires, said he received a call from someone who introduced himself as Andrei Kovalchuk, a security officer at the Russian embassy in Berlin. According to the case files, Kovalchuk told his ostensible colleague that he'd be traveling to Argentina in the middle of the year and would very much like to meet. Abyanov later told Russian investigators that he didn't know why this person had called him or why he wanted to meet him but he consented anyway. Kovalchuk must have made an excellent first impression because Abyanov agreed to drive him back to Buenos Aires International Airport by diplomatic car. Once they arrived at the airport Kovalchuk removed his luggage from the vehicle—all but one suitcase weighing between 25 and 30 kilograms. The heft, he told Abyanov, owed to the gustatory contents: wine, coffee grounds, and cookies. According to Abyanov's interrogation, Kovalchuk then gave the property manager $1,000 and asked if he wouldn't mind mailing the suitcase to Russia on Kovalchuk's behalf at a later date. Abyanov said he took his new acquaintance's word at face value and never opened the parcel. Around the end of year, Kovalchuk allegedly called Abyanov and told him it was time to send his package: a Russian cargo plane scheduled to fly to Moscow out of Montevideo, Uruguay, was leaving at the end of 2012 and his stuff should be on it. Montevideo is about a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Buenos Aires in good traffic, but Abyanov couriered the suitcase, then submitted it as cargo on the departing flight. The Argentinian ConnectionThe following year, 2013, Kovalchuk visited Argentina three times, now with an entirely different occupation. No longer a former security officer attached to the embassy in Berlin, he was now an employee of Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company. On one of these three trips, Kovalchuk met Nikolai Shelepov, the first secretary of the Russian embassy in Argentina, whose job is that of assistant head of security for the ambassador, a job often filled by an intelligence officer. They went to a cafe and Kovalchuk said he'd come to town to check on the "feasibility of Gazprom acquiring a historic building in the center of Buenos Aires," according to Shelepov, who said Kovalchuk also boasted of his many contacts in the Russian Foreign Ministry.Shelepov was also sufficiently impressed with his vouched-for compatriot. He decided to introduce Kovalchuk to Ivan Bliznyuk, the liaison officer of the Institute of Public Safety, the point of contact for international relations at the Buenos Aires police academy. Bliznyuk is an Argentine of Russian heritage; he had three children but lived on a modest state wage and he "dreamed of finding a job with Gazprom," according to Shelepov. As part of our investigation, we wrote to Bliznyuk about his role, and he confirmed that Kovalchuk had passed himself off as a Gazprom employee who needed a keyed-in local to help buy "a building in Buenos Aires for their headquarters... That's why Shelepov invited me for a beer at a bar and introduced us to each other there."According to the case files, Kovalchuk returned to Argentina in 2014, Abyanov told investigators, and handed off two more suitcases to his mule. He again told Abyanov they were filled with wine, coffee and cookies, only this time he had a special set of shipping instructions, as Abyanov recalled: "to pack the suitcases specially with paper, string and wax seal. Usually, this is how diplomatic mail is packed, which is not subject to inspection." Kovalchuk is alleged to have paid $1,000 per suitcase. Abyanov might not have been the snooping type but nor was he under any illusions as to why he was so handsomely compensated, $1,000 goes a long way in Argentina. He sent them from Montevideo to Moscow aboard a Russian military transport plane. In his testimony to Russian investigators, Abyanov contradicted himself as to what he suspected he was transporting for Kovalchuk. First, in 2017, he said, he believed the packages contained "prohibited" items but in a separate interrogation, in 2019, he said he never suspected Kovalchuk was anything but above-board owing to his familiarity with "everyone at the embassy" and his frequent attendance at embassy receptions. The Policeman's BallAt the invitation of the Russian Interior Ministry, a delegation of police officers from Buenos Aires, including Bliznyuk, traveled to Moscow. After the official ceremonies concluded, the guests decided to take a trip to St. Petersburg, and Bliznyuk was tasked with organizing the excursion. He asked Shelepov back at the embassy about how best to conduct a guided tour for the Spanish-speaking delegation of police officers , who are known as gendarmes in Argentina, through Russia's cultural capital. Shelepov thought of Kovalchuk, the well-connected Gazprom rep, who was only too happy to help. He linked Bliznyuk up with one of his old friends and business associates from Germany, Baron Konstantin von Bossner. Konstanin Loskutnikov, as he was born, is a bearded bear of a man with more than a passing resemblance to Robbie Coltrane's ex-KGB mafioso Valentin Zukovsky in the James Bond films. He owns a Berlin-based company, Bossner, which hawks chocolate, hand-rolled Nicaraguan and Dominican cigars, ostrich and python purses, crocodile shoes, Georgian wine, and its own signature brand of cognac, Bossner X.O. All of these products, the company website notes, are "designed to cause joy and positive emotions." Bossner is as devoted to God as he is to bespoke leather accessories; he founded the Russian Orthodox Benefactors Club, a German-registered charity, in 2010, and was awarded the Order of Honor in Germany earlier this year for his philanthropic work. According to the investigative files, the Baron made sure Bliznyuk showed the Argentinian cops a good time. They were feted with Bossner staples—cognac, chocolate and cigars— and taken on a boating trip along the rivers and canals of Russia's most European city. Kovalchuk at times portrayed himself as a representative of the Bossner company, someone who came into these many "samples" of booze and cigars, which he'd share with grateful officials and influencers from many nations. A letter from Bossner's Russian Orthodox Benefactors Club, signed by Bossner, shows that Kovalchuk was an official representative of the Berlin-based charity. According to the wiretap transcripts, Kovalchuk even asked Bossner's wife if she'd become his son's godmother, an honor she accepted. Bossner, however, maintained throughout his Interior Ministry interrogations that he had no substantive relationship with Kovalchuk, whom he portrayed as a huckster and schnorrer, eager to lap up those free "samples" of the exile's finest luxury goods as an advance on investments which never came. "Several years ago [Kovalchuk] was brought to my office by a high-ranking employee of Gazprom in Germany and introduced as a colonel, the head of the special services, who deals with consulates in Europe, Asia, Latin America and other rubbish," Bossner told Germany's OstWest TV in 2018. "Mr. Kovalchuk, like many others, tried our products, smoked our cigars, drank our cognac, then, over the years… asking for one sample, [then] another sample, [he told us] he will try to find a client, that he flies around to the whole world that he will try to organize the sale of our products, and naturally wants to make money on this. We are always open to any kind of cooperation, so it often comes from us samples of cigarettes and cognac, but not a single deal, not a single contract was concluded." A New Hiding Place, a New FriendKovalchuk flew back to Argentina three times in 2015, according to travel records. On his third trip, adhering to a now-established tradition, he gave Abyanov two suitcases and $2,000. Abyanov said he hid these away in a car garage attached to the embassy school where the diplomats sent their kids, awaiting Kovalchuk's notice of when and how they should leave the country. In February 2016, a delegation of Russian policemen flew to Argentina as part of a kind of exchange program following the highly successful Argentinian delegation from the year before. Kovalchuk was in town and attended a reception in honor of the visiting officers at the Russian embassy. Abyanov said he introduced him to Oleg Vorobiev, the new first secretary and embassy security chief, who had replaced Shelepov. No longer a Gazprom rep, Kovalchuk was presented as a security official attached to the Russian Foreign Ministry.Kovalchuk relayed greetings to Vorobiev from his predecessor Shelepov, now back in Moscow. Vorobiev and Kovalchuk struck up a friendship and started to communicate. In March 2016, Kovalchuk told the security chief he'd been appointed the Berlin representative of Rossotrudnichestvo, the Russian Foreign Ministry's cultural outreach arm, according to Vorobiev. (Vorobiev later told investigators that he never asked for nor saw a business card from Kovalchuk, even as the latter's occupation morphed throughout their relationship.) An Impossible ScoreKovalchuk returned to Argentina several more times in the spring and summer of 2016, always stopping by the embassy, and, checking in to see Abyanov and Vorobiev, according to their statements to investigators. According to the Russian case files, including Abyanov's statement to investigators, sometime in the middle of 2016, Kovalchuk gave 10 suitcases, all supposedly filled with wine and semiprecious gems, to Abyanov, who moved them to the same garage in the embassy school where he'd stowed the previous two. He asked another embassy employee to pack these suitcases as diplomatic mail. Abyanov then moved all 12 suitcases from the garage to a little-used utility room in the school. It was a seemingly ideal hiding spot, among broken tables, chairs, old computers and other junk.Each of the 12 suitcases, as would later be discovered, were filled with 30 briquettes of nearly undiluted cocaine, with each briquette containing a little over a kilogram. The value of 389 kilograms, the possible total weight in Kovalchuk's alleged consignment, is around $60 million. Drug enforcement experts from multiple countries said that such a sizable score cannot have been purchased from local drug dealers. Kolvachuk, they said, would have needed a longstanding and trusted relationship with high-level narco traffickers to acquire and move that kind of volume. Neither the Argentinian nor Russian investigators tried to uncover the supply chain or find out how Kovalchuk, an alleged Russian spy, who had no significant sources of wealth, ended up with drugs worth tens of millions of dollars. Three types of cartel stamps—a star within a star, a horseshoe and the initials "LG"—were found on the briquettes. The first two are typically associated with the Sinaloa Cartel. Nothing in the Argentinian or Russian documents we have pored through indicates that this piece of evidence was investigated. The Second Mule?On July 19, 2016, Abyanov's embassy contract expired. A new property manager, Igor Rogov, took his place.Sometime during the month-long handover period, Abyanov says he told his successor about the presence of 12 boxes in the utility room, adding that he didn't know what they contained but that they all belonged to Kovalchuk. Rogov didn't know who Kovalchuk was and asked Abyanov about him. "Abyanov answered me that Kovalchuk is a person 'from the center,' that is, from the Russian Foreign Ministry," Rogov told Russian investigators. "Abyanov spoke very well of Kovalchuk and said that Kovalchuk had visited Argentina many times and knew many people, including the embassy staff."Several months went by. Then, in a Skype chat, Rogov said Abyanov asked him to send the suitcases to Moscow by special military plane, which was due to arrive at the Montevideo airport in early December 2016. Rogov needed help for the job. "I unsuccessfully turned to one or another embassy employee," he told investigators, "eventually reaching the military attaché and even the Ambassador Viktor Koronelli."Koronelli had been ambassador since 2011, a year before Kovalchuk first made contact with Ali Abyanov. And yet, in spite of Kovalchuk's frequent appearances at the embassy, Koronelli told investigators that he'd only met him once, in March 2016. It was at the request of Abyanov, who'd introduced Kovalchuk as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Benefactors Club, an employee, in other words, of Bossner's charity. Kovalchuk took that occasion to name-drop several mutual friends and acquaintances, according to Ambassador Koronelli's statement to investigators. Koronelli added that he never bothered to check on his interlocutor's bona fides."It's incredibly easy to check on someone's credentials from an embassy," said Jan Neumann, a former FSB officer from Directorate K, the same financial crimes unit tasked with investigating the Kovalchuk case. Neumann defected to the United States in 2008 and became a CIA and FBI informant. "You put a call into Moscow. If the person you're checking on claims to have been posted to another Russian mission, Moscow then calls that mission to verify he's legit. All of this takes minutes. And it's simply not possible that the head of security in the embassy in Argentina didn't check on Kovalchuk. It's a necessary protocol."Koronelli's term as ambassador to Argentina ended in June 2018, about four months after the cocaine scandal was publicized. Koronelli is now Russia's ambassador to Mexico; he declined to comment on this story.According to the transcript of an Argentinian wiretap of Bliznyuk, Koronelli quarreled with Kovalchuk, a fact Koronelli did not recount to Russian investigators after saying he'd only met Kovalchuk once, casually, at the embassy. This conversation, dated Oct. 11, 2017, has never before been made public and undercuts Koronelli's claim of a one-off encounter with the alleged primary drug smuggler. It also complicates the two Argentinian defendants' role as alleged accomplices, as it suggests that Kovalchuk hadn't paid Bliznyuk or Alexander Chikalo as part of the scheme.> Bliznyuk: Sanya [Alexander], we from Andriukha [Kovalchuk], neither I nor you, have not received a penny in all this time.> > Chikalo: Not once, nothing.> > Bliznyuk: Especially since the suitcases are at the embassy. First, the embassy issues... well, he [Kovalchuk] had a fight with Koronelli.> > Bliznyuk: Yes, the new ambassador will arrive soon. A New Exit StrategyFor some reason, Kovalchuk allegedly changed his cocaine exfiltration scheme, and sped up the timeline. Instead of letting Rogov dispatch the suitcases by special military plane in December, Kovalchuk flew back to Argentina on Nov. 25 to retrieve the items himself. When he arrived, he spent a day roaming the city but stayed clear of the embassy, usually one of his first ports of call. It's not known what he got up to that day, nor with whom, but the 24-hour interregnum cost him dearly.On Nov. 25, the day Kovalchuk touched down at Buenos Aires International Airport, Rogov finally told Vorobiev about the suitcases, according to Rogov's testimony to Russian investigators. Vorobiev, he said, decided to check on their contents. He found the briquettes. "Vorobiev ripped the packaging off one of them, and we saw a compressed white powder inside," Rogov said in his interrogation. "We realized that it could be drugs."Vorobiev then notified Ambassador Koronelli, according to the Russian case files. Koronelli phoned the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow. The 9th Division of the K-Directorate of the Economic Security Service of FSB and the 14th Division of the Main Drug Control Directorate of the Interior Ministry opened an investigation. Except the Russian government hasn't kept the story of how it unfolded straight.Most of the files from the Russian Prosecutor General's Office indicate that the suitcases of cocaine were officially "found"—meaning through a purposive search for them, not an accidental discovery—on the evening of Dec. 8, 2016, when, at the direction of the Foreign Ministry, embassy staff reopened them. The staff did so, according to these files, in the presence of FSB representatives who had flown to Buenos Aires from Moscow after Koronelli alerted the Foreign Ministry. And yet, in one FSB document the suitcases are recorded as having been "found" on Dec. 4 and opened the next day. That document makes no mention of FSB representatives from Moscow being present for this earlier unveiling. A similar discrepancy concerns the total weight of the evidence. Depending on which document you're looking at, the 12 suitcases contain amounts of cocaine ranging from 357 to 389 kilograms, a shortfall of 32 kilograms, or $5 million worth of cocaine. (The true weight may never be known: In August 2018, the Argentinians burnt all the cocaine in accordance with what they say were the protocols of evidence destruction.) "Under the Federal Rules for Evidence, the date discrepancy and the weight discrepancy would potentially jeopardize any criminal prosecution of those responsible," the U.S. drug enforcement agent said. "The evidence is not exact and the drug amount and weight need to be verified and weighed by a laboratory and a clear chain of custody must be intact. The Argentinian-Russian case reeks of evidence mishandling... of the investigation and prosecution." The SwitcherooOn the evening of Dec. 13, Koronelli had a meeting with Patricia Bullrich, the Argentinian security minister, formally briefing her about the presence of hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the Russian embassy. At the same meeting, according to the case files, Vorobiev suggested to his Argentine counterparts that one of the smugglers was likely Ivan Bliznyuk, the point-man at the Argentinian police academy.On Dec. 14, a special operation was launched by the Argentinian gendarmerie to catch the domestic side of this narco-trafficking ring. The 12 suitcases were removed from the embassy and loaded onto a pickup truck and driven to a police facility. They recorded the procedure. There, the cases were opened, and the drugs were weighed. The officers then swapped the cocaine for a mixture of sand and flour, repackaged in bags rather than briquettes, and resealed everything as it had been. The suitcases were then returned to the embassy, where the gendarmes installed three cameras on the school premises. GPS systems were allegedly placed inside suitcases.Argentinian law enforcement opened their own criminal investigation and tapped Bliznyuk's phones as well as those of Chikalo, a close friend and sometime neighbor in Buenos Aires. These wiretaps soon established that both men were in constant communication with Andrei Kovalchuk. So Russian authorities subsequently tapped Kovalchuk's phones. The Smuggler's DilemmaThe alleged main actor in what was now a seemingly compromised smuggling ring is accused of spending the next year or so attempting different exfiltration schemes. One, for instance, involved bringing Russian cadets to Argentina on a trip bankrolled by the fun-loving Bossner, the idea being that the cadets would fly home with undeclared cargo, easily explained away as souvenirs or somesuch. For various reasons, all of Kovalchuk's alleged gambits fizzled. Then, on Oct. 11, 2017, he notified Vorobiev and Rogov he was coming back to Buenos Aires himself, unaware they were now part of a government plot to catch him.The FSB and Interior Ministry investigators weren't quite ready to close the net. Instead, they ordered Rogov to leave town on a business trip to the coastal city of Mar del Plata, leaving Kovalchuk without his only keymaster for the embassy school utility room. We know what happened when Kovalchuk arrived in Buenos Aires because we have the wiretaps of Bliznyuk and Chikalo discussing it on Oct. 11. Kovachulk, Bliznyuk said on the phone, had asked him to move suitcases he'd left at the embassy in exchange for $10,000. Bliznyuk told Chikalo that Kovalchuk had said the cases contained "sea lion skins" from Uruguay that could be sold at high prices in Russia and Germany. Judging from their conversation, Bliznyuk and Chikalo clearly thought Kovalchuk was untrustworthy and suspect; Bliznyuk told his friend he'd have no part in Kovalchuk's nutty scheme. We also know what Bliznyuk did next, based on another wiretap: he immediately called Vorobiev on Oct. 12, a day after his conversation with Chikalo, to tell the embassy security chief about Kovalchuk's solicitation and the presence of suspicious parcels on embassy grounds, which Bliznyuk said probably contained "forbidden elements." Vorobiev was now part of the sting operation to catch Kovalchuk and so he played dumb, casting doubt on the story. But on that same call Vorobiev asked Bliznyuk if the latter intended to help Kovalchuk, to which Bliznyuk answered, "Can't do it and that's all. Why would I mess with this?" The Latvian DeceptionAs Kovalchuk allegedly saw it, he was running out of time and willing or available intermediaries to get his drugs out of Argentina. Investigators claim that Kovalchuk first turned to a familiar pretext: the largesse of Baron Konstanin von Bossner when it came to spoiling friendly foreigners. According to this stratagem, an embassy car would drive to the airport to collect Bossner's cognac and chocolate intended for the Argentinian policemen from the St. Petersburg delegation. The "gifts" would be flown to Buenos Aires from Berlin, where Bossner's office was, on a private jet. For the return flight, Kovalchuk's "sea lion skins" and the supposed paraphernalia of diplomats—in reality, the drugs—would allegedly be loaded onboard. Except the jet wasn't flying directly to Berlin. First it would land in Riga, Latvia, where Kovalchuk allegedly said he had cronies who'd move the goods past customs without any problem. Flying on to Berlin would then mean facing no inspection hurdle owing to the European Union's Schengen area of unrestricted travel across borders. One of Kovalchuk's business partners in Moscow, Ishtimir Khudjamov, said he was asked to help with the operation. On Oct. 14, 2017, Khudjamov flew to Berlin and picked up a box of cognac and sweets from Bossner's office. To justify the stopover in Riga on the way back, Khudjamov said he picked up something else: three Latvian nationals who weren't told of their real role as decoys in a drug-running operation. Instead, Khudjamov told the Latvians to pose as a technical crew attached to Zvezda, the Russian Defense Ministry's TV station. All they knew was that they'd be delivering the gifts to Argentina, then transporting things on the way home. (Khudjamov now pleads innocence and ignorance to being a narcotrafficker at all; he told Russian investigators that Kovalchuk had claimed the return cargo was a rare and expensive brand of coffee beans.)The problem was Rogov was still away on his concocted "business trip" when the Bossner presents were due to arrive. And, as the property manager was still the only one who could access the utility room in the embassy school, investigators allege Kovalchuk couldn't retrieve his drugs on time. On Oct. 18, the jet left Buenos Aires, light of the cognac and chocolate, but also any coke.Although it was a bust, the plan demonstrated Kovalchuk's well-honed tradecraft. The TrapLess than a month later, on Nov. 8, Kovalchuk called Rogov and Vorobiev and told them he'd be back in Argentina in two days. This time Rogov wasn't told to feign a work excursion. With Vorobiev's permission, he met Kovalchuk and told him the suitcases could be shipped aboard a Russian government aircraft the following month. Around the same time, Kovalchuk spoke to Khudjamov, according to Argentinian wiretaps. They discussed "200 kilograms" without specifying the substance (although we can probably guess) which were somewhere in Uruguay. Kovalchuk said he wanted that consignment flown out of Buenos Aires on the Russian plane.He was finally in luck, or so it may have seemed. On Nov. 13, his suitcases found themselves entered onto the manifest. His luggage was supposed to be transferred by RA-96023, a newish Ilyushin-96 long-haul airliner operated by Russia's Special Flight Detachment, the property, no less, of Russia's Presidential Administration used most frequently by Nikolai Patrushev. Patrushev is one of the most influential members of the Kremlin inner circle and a decision-maker when it comes to Russian foreign policy. He succeeded Vladimir Putin as director of the FSB when Putin was appointed prime minister of Boris Yeltsin's government in 1999. Patrushev is now Secretary of the National Security Council and RA-96023 is so associated with his overseas jaunts that it's colloquially known in Russia as "Patrushev's plane."On Feb. 27, 2018 Yelena Krylova, the spokesperson for Russia's Presidential Affairs Directorate, denied that the aircraft was involved in the "cocaine case." "Journalists made conclusions based on inaccurate information—in this case, photographs that can be easily falsified thanks to modern technology," Krylova said. Her denial, however, contradicts what's in the Argentinian case file, according to which the FSB informed Buenos Aires as early as Nov. 17, 2017 that Patrushev's plane was to be used for the special operation. The plane number 96023 is clearly visible not only in the photographs publicly released by the Argentinian gendarmerie but also in the video, uploaded on their official YouTube channel on Feb. 23, 2018. The Argentinian files also confirm that RA-96023 was indeed used "during the visit" of Patrushev to Argentina, suggesting that's how the Russian official got there and back. Yet someone in the Russian government doesn't want this fact to be publicly acknowledged. Shortly after Russian media reports surfaced about Patrushev's plane possibly being used in a covert drug bust, the website with the relevant flight data, russianplanes.net, went offline. Moreover, the creator of that website removed the russianplanes.net group from VKontakte, a popular social media network, as well as his personal VKontakte page and a sister portal, russianships.net, dedicated to tracking seafaring vessels. "I just took it all and deleted it, maybe something didn't work out right there," the website operator, identified as "Kiba," said in an interview with independent Russian outlet Mediazona. "I'm a little tense now, so I went and removed it, I don't want to set anyone up." Patrushev's plane was scheduled to arrive from Moscow on Dec. 4, delivering Patrushev for one of those jaunts, a visit to Argentina. It was scheduled to return to Moscow with the national security secretary on board on Dec. 6. This is the conveyance Kovalchuk allegedly thought wise to transport almost 400 kilos of high-grade cocaine across multiple time zones.On Nov. 15, Kovalchuk and Khudjamov left Argentina. Shortly before departing, Kovalchuk spoke to Rogov and made a few final touches to his plan. He allegedly asked him to remove from the suitcases the name of the Russian diplomat they ostensibly belonged to: Alexander Nezimov, the deputy director of the consular department of the Foreign Ministry. Kovalchuk allegedly instructed Rogov to simply write Kovalchuk's Russian telephone number on the cases and use the abbreviation "CD," likely standing for "Corps Diplomatique," which is carried by all diplomatic licenses overseas.On Dec. 4, Vorobiev drove the suitcases filled with sand and flour to Buenos Aires International Airport and loaded them onto Patrushev's Ilyushin. There is every indication, based on both the public record and the Argentinian case files, that Patrushev was on board the plane when it departed Argentina for Russia, making the former FSB director and one of Putin's most trusted national security advisers a party to the sting operation. "A Close Partnership"On the morning of Dec. 7, Patrushev's plane touched down in Moscow. So did the suitcases allegedly belonging to Kovalchuk, which were sent directly to an FSB storage facility. The next day the FSB called Kovalchuk's telephone number, scrawled on the cargo. He picked up; the FSB officer on the other end introduced himself as a courier from the Foreign Ministry and asked about the pickup. Kovalchuk said his associate Vladimir Kalmykov would come to collect the parcels. On Dec. 9, Argentinian gendarmes arrived in Russia to assume their role in the special operation to snatch the smugglers.On Dec. 12, Kalmykov and Khudjamov arrived at a Foreign Ministry facility to take custody of the suitcases. They were immediately arrested by the FSB. According to documents from the Prosecutor General's Office, the intended recipient of the suitcases could be in Belgium or the Netherlands. Yet no attempt was made to look for them. Moreover, a Dutch mobile phone number allegedly affiliated with the ultimate beneficiary of the cargo was never investigated. On the evening that Kalmykov and Khudjamov were nabbed, Ali Abyanov, the former property manager of the embassy in Buenos Aires, was also arrested at his apartment in Moscow. Kovalchuk wasn't, however, as he was abroad.According to a source in his company at the time, he remained remarkably calm. When his friends advised him to flee to a country with no extradition treaty with Russia, he insisted he had nothing to worry about. On Dec. 19, Moscow declared Kovalchuk a wanted man at home and internationally. Interpol issued a "red notice" for his arrest. Despite the arrests of Kalmykov, Abyanov, and Khudjamov in Russia, the Argentine suspects remained at large for several months. Ivan Bliznyuk even took a vacation with his wife to Italy before he and Alexander Chikalo were arrested in late February 2018. Bliznyuk, in fact, was taken into custody at the airport as he returned home. A day later, Bullrich, the national security minister, issued the statement about the discovery of cocaine in the Russian embassy. Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry, followed suit the next day, announcing an 18 month-long joint operation to disrupt a narcotrafficking syndicate. "As the investigation discovered," Zakharova's statement read, "the cargo belonged to a former maintenance worker who had by that time completed his fixed term employment contract," referring solely to Abyanov. "This experience serves as further evidence of the close partnership that has developed between our countries in different areas, including law enforcement." On March 1, Kovalchuk was arrested in Germany. A month later Berlin received a request about his extradition to Russia. Several days after filing that request, however, Russia's Federal Migration Service found that Kovalchuk was not, in fact, a citizen of the country. All three of his Russian passports had been issued illegally, a wrinkle which didn't interfere with his extradition proceedings. On July 27, Kovalchuk was flown to Moscow from Germany and was immediately remanded to the Matrosskaya Tishina detention center.The Argentines burnt all the cocaine the following month. According to Bliznuyk's lawyer, they did so without a court order and in a civilian crematorium when a gendarmerie crematorium would have typically been used for such purposes. As of this writing the Argentinian prosecution has yet to provide Bliznyuk's counsel with evidence of a proper court order for the evidence destruction.Actions in Buenos Aires should also have repercussions in Moscow. According to the Russian Criminal Procedural Code, evidence must be stored until a court order to destroy it is in force. Thus, the cases against Kovalchuk, Abyanov, Kalmykov and Khudjamov is set to be heard without the main evidence against them in existence.Germany, too, has questions to answer as to how and why it sent one of these defendants to Russia. Kovalchuk is a "stateless person," according to Sergey Safonov, a senior prosecutor of the criminal and judicial department of the Moscow prosecutor's office. And yet, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office consistently referred to him as a citizen of the Russian Federation in several requests made for his extradition. Alexander Hamburg, one of his lawyers in Germany, said Kovalchuk was extradited through an accelerated procedural mechanism that robbed him of the necessary time to file an appeal. The Talented Mr. KovalchukThe criminal case against Andrei Kovalchuk gives him no nationality; it simply states he was born in Hertz. It does, however, note that on his various passport applications, Kovalchuk filled in Form No. 1P as having no definite place of residence and no form of employment—yet he was still granted three different Russian passports. Hertz is in the Chernivtsi region of Ukraine; Kovalchuk was born there in 1968. In 1986 he was drafted into the army in Kaliningrad; two years later he graduated from the 75th paratrooper school in Kirov, and then served for a year as a technician at the aviation school in Barnaul. He was officially discharged from the Soviet military in March 1989 for unknown reasons.His whereabouts and his activities disappeared into a black hole for about 10 years until he turned up in Germany in the late '90s. Kovalchuk registered for a correspondence course in psychology at St. Petersburg State University. He stopped his higher education after only a few classes, according to the university's psychology department chief, who said there was a rumor circulating at the time that Kovalchuk might have been arrested.According to the testimony of his friend Vadim Zhmurov, Kovalchuk next claimed to work as a security officer at the Russian embassy in Berlin in 2000. Witnesses interrogated by the Interior Ministry say that in the mid-2000s Kovalchuk lived in Amsterdam with his sister Irina Kuzmenko and her daughter Anastasia. There he met his first wife, Nadezhda Sorokina. In 2006, the entire family relocated to Germany, where Kovalchuk and Sorokina rented an apartment in the building used by Rossotrudnichestvo, the Russian Foreign Ministry science and cultural arm.At some point in his Berlin period, Kovalchuk is accused of beginning to move goods through diplomatic channels. Irina, his sister, owned Irgotrade GmbH, a cargo transportation company registered in Berlin, which Kovalchuk allegedly used to embark on his smuggling career. On several occasions, his ventures were foiled. In August 2011, employees of Irgotrade tried to ferry 3.7 tons of goods, including 216 kilograms of silver, medicine, jewelry, and clothing, from Latvia to Russia. All of the freight, the company claimed, belonged to Sergei Sedykh, an employee of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Sedykh's signature was even on the declarations presented to Latvian border guards, who confiscated the contraband and impounded the vehicle. In Russia, two criminal investigations were opened. A customs official was arrested and the jewelry company listed as one of the intended buyers of the cargo was ordered to pay a fine of about $47,000.Sedykh denied all responsibility. He said he hadn't given anyone a power of attorney to move items on his behalf, nor had he filled out a declaration and signed any documents. He couldn't say how the driver of the car had got a copy of his diplomatic passport. He didn't have to: Sedykh was neither investigated nor fired from his job at the Foreign Ministry. He's not alone in this respect; officials caught helping Kovalchuk with his illicit schemes have often mysteriously been given the all-clear by the Russian authorities. Friends in High PlacesA trio of high-ranking officials in the Consular Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow—Alexander Dudka, Lev Pausin and Alexander Nezimov—all facilitated Kovalchuk's alleged contraband business, according to their own testimonies contained in the Russian case files. All of them—individually or collectively—accorded Kovalchuk privileged information about the movement of special government transports; issued him passes to roam around sensitive ministry facilities; introduced him to others who would act as fixers; and provided him with other material assistance in what they must have at least suspected was a blackmarket business. To Dudka, the chief adviser of the Consular Department, Kovalchuk was a self-declared technical officer for Rossotrudnichestvo in Berlin, the Foreign Ministry's cultural outreach agency. He told Russian investigators that he met Kovalchuk in Berlin in 2011 while on a "business trip." Then, in December 2017, shortly before the dozen suitcases of flour and sand arrived in Moscow, Dudka said Kovalchuk asked him to find a diplomatic vehicle to transport "12 boxes" from Russia to Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Dudka subsequently gave Kovalchuk the relevant schedules of Foreign Ministry vehicles driving along those routes. How a Soviet Triple Agent Recruited New Spies in the WestDespite his admission that he allowed Kovalchuk to requisition government vehicles for alleged international smuggling, Dudka is still employed at the Russian Foreign Ministry.Kovalchuk named Alexander Nezimov, the deputy director of the Consular Department, as one of his "bosses," without specifying what he meant by that term. "Goodbye, no comments," Nezimov said when reached for comment on this story.The other alleged boss, Peter Polshikov, was the chief adviser of the Latin American Department of the Foreign Ministry. He was found dead in Moscow in December 2016, three weeks after the discovery of the cocaine in the embassy. Polshikov had been shot in the head; an automatic pistol was found next to his corpse, outside his apartment. Authorities ruled it a suicide. Polshikov's neighbors recalled that before his death he had been acting strangely and had stopped communicating with his friends. The 'Spy' Who Loved ManyKovalchuk serially and convincingly posed as an intelligence officer, the Russian case file states, either attached to the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, or the GRU, its military intelligence service. But the official Russian report concluded he was really neither. "In the light of these events, relevant inquiries were made to those institutions and agencies, the responses of which indicated that Kovalchuk is not an employee of the Russian Foreign Ministry, is not an employee of any law enforcement agency of Russia, and is not a representative in foreign institutions of Russia. Kovalchuk used his cunning and ingenuity for his personal, selfish purposes, in most cases achieving the results he needed."Several of his contacts still maintain he was a spy. Sergey Borshchev at the Nakhimov Naval School of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the school that sent the Russian cadets to Argentina, thought Kovalchuk was an officer of the SVR. "According to Kovalchuk," Borshchev told investigators, "he often came [to Russia] to work in the Russian Foreign Ministry, to meet with top officials of the Ministry, as well as to the SVR. Also, I had no doubts about his service, since he would often bring gifts from the SVR: calendars, key rings and other gifts with the symbols of the SVR." Russian army officer Mikhail Kazantsev met Kovalchuk in 2011 when Kovalchuk's nephew was serving in Kazantsev's unit, 3641. Kazantsev told investigators that, in 2015, Kovalchuk offered him an opportunity to transport "goods other than food" from Germany to Russia using diplomatic channels. Kazantsev, too, believed Kovalchuk was a Russian intelligence officer and even claimed to have seen his SVR ID: "I believed Kovalchuk, as he spoke very convincingly, and when we met, he once showed me an ID card of an officer of the SVR, where his photograph was, and the rank of colonel was indicated. I would like to clarify that I perceived this document as genuine and not a fake."There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Kovalchuk may have been entangled in some way with Russia's vast national security apparatus. In his pretrial sessions in Moscow, media and relatives of all the defendants were removed from the courtroom to maintain secrecy. According to the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure, a closed trial is permitted if the case concerns minors, sexual inviolability or state secrets, or if an open hearing may threaten the safety of the participants in the process. Regarding the "cocaine case," as it's commonly known in Moscow, there was no hint of the first two preconditions; only the last two could have plausibly served as grounds to keep the press and families out of the courtroom. Out of the Embassy, Into the ShadowsJan Neumann, the FSB defector, said he sees one of two likely scenarios for what really happened, based on plot holes and elisions in the Argentinian and Russian investigations. "The first scenario: Russian intelligence was tracking a narcotrafficking network from South America to Russia and the whole sting operation was compromised, possibly through leaks. So they hastily covered everything up with this elaborate show involving Patrushev's plane. "The second scenario: Russian intelligence was using one of its agents and his narco-trafficking network in South America to finance its own clandestine operations. It's not uncommon for the Russian services to engage in questionable behavior to keep a 'black budget' going for something highly classified and sensitive."Inside the KGB's Super Power DivisionIf scenario two is closer to the reality, we may never know what that "something" is or was intended to be. In any event, the shadow cast over this remarkable crime saga far exceeds any light that's been shone on it by two separate governments. As we've seen, wiretaps show that Ivan Bliznyuk and Alexander Chikalo talked freely with each other about how they hadn't received any money from Kovalchuk in all the time they knew him; they described him as a chancer and liar who tried to convince them that his 12 suitcases contained sea lion skins, not drugs. If Bliznyuk and Chikalo were his witting accomplices, as Argentine prosecutors argue, then why would Kovalchuk have lied to them about the material he was trying to export? And why did Bliznyuk, who declined Kovalchuk's alleged offer of $10,000 to help move the suitcases, quickly alert Vorobiev, the embassy security official, to their presence on embassy grounds? It was Blizynuk, the evidence in the wiretaps shows, who blew the whistle on a drug-smuggling operation he declined to be a part of. Yet he and Chikalo nevertheless await trial on narco-trafficking charges.We still don't know who, exactly, Andrei Kovalchuk is or who he worked for. Is he the Slavic George Jung, a charismatic and unlikely cocaine smuggler who managed to suborn diplomats and cops with smooth talk, mutable covers, and modest bribes? Was he an asset or officer of one of Russia's spy agencies? A con man? A patsy? Or he is that postmodern commonplace in Vladimir Putin's "mafia state": a forbidding combination of all of the above?Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| AP PHOTOS: Elderly protesters defy Belarus' strongman Posted: 19 Sep 2020 11:49 PM PDT  Thousands of protesters who have flooded Belarusian cities for six weeks of demonstrations to demand an end to the 26-year rule of the country's authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko include people of all ages, professions and social groups. While younger people make up the bulk of the protests pushing for Lukashenko's resignation after the Aug. 9 vote that the opposition sees as rigged, many retirees also have joined the daily demonstrations. The 73-year-old former geologist has become one of the most recognizable faces of Belarus protests, fearlessly waving a huge red-and-white opposition flag in front of riot police.
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| Tropical Storm Beta churns slowly toward Texas and Louisiana Posted: 19 Sep 2020 11:25 PM PDT  Tropical Storm Beta trudged toward the coasts of Texas and Louisiana on Sunday, threatening to bring more rain, wind and stress to a part of the country that has already been drenched and battered during this year's unusually busy hurricane season. While Beta could bring up to 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rain to some areas of Texas and Louisiana over the next several days, it was no longer expected to reach hurricane intensity, the National Weather Service said Sunday.
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| Desert communities told to evacuate as winds stoke flames Posted: 19 Sep 2020 10:29 PM PDT  Strong winds stoked a wildfire burning for nearly two weeks in mountains northeast of Los Angeles, prompting authorities to issue new evacuation orders for desert communities that lost some homes a day earlier. Meanwhile, officials were investigating the death of a firefighter on the lines of another Southern California wildfire that erupted earlier this month from a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device used by a couple to reveal their baby's gender. The death occurred Thursday in San Bernardino National Forest as crews battled the El Dorado Fire about 75 miles (120 kilometers) east of Los Angeles, the U.S. Forest Service said in a statement.
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| Arizona Senate race could impact confirmation of new justice Posted: 19 Sep 2020 10:09 PM PDT  If Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly wins a seat in the U.S. Senate, he could take office as early as Nov. 30, shrinking the GOP's Senate majority at a crucial moment and complicating the path to confirmation for President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Kelly has maintained a consistent polling lead over Republican Sen. Martha McSally, who was appointed to the seat held by John McCain, who died in 2018.
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| Biden to GOP senators: Don't jam through Ginsburg nominee Posted: 19 Sep 2020 09:33 PM PDT  Joe Biden on Sunday slammed President Donald Trump and leading Senate Republicans for trying to jam through a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and urged more senators to stand with a pair of GOP colleagues who oppose the election-season rush. The extraordinary televised plea from the Democratic presidential candidate to Republican senators reflected the ferocious maneuvering that has followed Ginsburg's death at 87 on Friday. Trump has said he intends within days to name a woman to succeed the liberal icon, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was moving toward the first hearings this week.
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| A rapper, an elevator and an elephant: stories Ginsburg told Posted: 19 Sep 2020 09:29 PM PDT  In recent years Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was surprised to find herself so popular that "everyone wants to take a picture with me." Ginsburg was invited to speak so often that inevitably she was asked the same questions and delivered the same punch lines, always, it seemed, to a delighted new audience. Ginsburg came to be known as "The Notorious RBG," a play on the name of the rapper "The Notorious B.I.G." Ginsburg liked to note they had one important thing in common.
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| U.N. chief says no action on U.N. Iran sanctions due to 'uncertainty' Posted: 19 Sep 2020 08:11 PM PDT |
| S.Korea police arrests defector trying to cross back to N.Korea Posted: 19 Sep 2020 07:58 PM PDT |
| US has restored UN sanctions on Iran, says Pompeo Posted: 19 Sep 2020 07:41 PM PDT  The Trump administration declared on Saturday that all UN sanctions against Iran have been restored, a move most of the rest of the world rejects as illegal and sets the stage for an ugly showdown at the world body ahead of its annual General Assembly. The administration said that its triggering of the "snapback" mechanism in the UN Security Council resolution that enshrined the 2015 Iran nuclear deal had taken effect at 8pm Eastern Time. That is 30 days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notified the council that Iran was in "significant non-performance" with its obligations under the accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). "The United States took this decisive action because, in addition to Iran's failure to perform its JCPOA commitments, the Security Council failed to extend the UN arms embargo on Iran, which had been in place for 13 years," Mr Pompeo said in a statement released at precisely 8pm. "In accordance with our rights ... we initiated the snapback process to restore virtually all previously terminated UN sanctions, including the arms embargo," he said. "The world will be safer as a result." The White House plans to issue an executive order on Monday spelling out how the US will enforce the restored sanctions, and the State and Treasury departments are expected to outline how foreign individuals and businesses will be penalised for violations.
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