Head south on state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on the front door is barely legible. But atop that humble three-acre lot lies a leading solution to the global plastic pollution crisis — well, according to the plastic industry.

The facility is home to the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week operations of Braven Environmental, a company that says it can recycle nearly 90 percent of plastic waste through a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis. Traditional recycling is able to process only about 8.7 percent of America’s plastic waste; pyrolysis uses high temperatures and low-oxygen conditions to break down the remaining plastics, like films and Styrofoam, ideally turning them into feedstock oil for new plastic production.

The American Chemistry Council, the country’s leading petrochemical industry trade group, claims that chemical recycling will create a “circular economy” for the bulk of the world’s plastic, diverting it from oceans and landfills. Plastic giants have gone so far as to dub the process “advanced recycling,” but environmentalists say this is a misnomer because the majority of the plastic processed at such facilities is not recycled at all. In fact, researchers have found that the process uses more energy and has a worse overall environmental impact than virgin plastic production. Numerous companies have tried and failed to prove that chemical recycling is commercially viable.

Despite these challenges, lawmakers nationwide are now embracing the technology, thanks to a massive lobbying push from the ACC and other petrochemical groups. As of September, 24 states have passed industry-backed bills that reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing. The change effectively deregulates the process, since manufacturing facilities tend to face less stringent guidelines than waste incinerators.

As one of only seven commercial facilities currently operating in the United States, Braven Environmental is at the vanguard of the growing chemical recycling boom. An Intercept investigation, however, found numerous issues at its Zebulon facility.

A review of meeting minutes, permit applications, and compliance documents reveals that Braven misled the public about the risks of its pyrolysis operation and has potentially endangered human health and the environment through “significant noncompliance” with hazardous waste management regulations. While the ACC has touted Braven as a sustainable success story, documents also show that much of the company’s pyrolysis oil was not converted into useful plastic or fuel — it was disposed of as highly toxic waste.

“Chemical recycling is really a greenwashing technique for burning up a bunch of petrochemicals in a new way, and it’s releasing tons of air pollutants into the environment,” said Alexis Luckey, executive director of Toxic Free NC, in an interview. “What we’re talking about is incinerating carcinogens and neurotoxicants in a community.”

“Hazardous Items, We Have None”

On April 8, 2019, the Zebulon Board of Commissioners held a joint public hearing with the town planning board to gather community feedback on several proposed construction projects. One of the developments on the docket was from a company called Golden Renewable Energy, based in Yonkers, New York. 

Golden Renewable — which changed its name to Braven Environmental in the North Carolina business registry in 2021 — was requesting a special use permit to “locate a refinery and the storage of flammable liquids” on a parcel of land zoned for heavy industry.

According to minutes from the hearing, Meade Bradshaw, former assistant planning director for Zebulon, explained that Braven must show the proposed development “will not materially endanger the public health, safety, or welfare” in order to be granted a special use permit. In response, Ross Sloane, Braven’s business development director, made a series of promises to this effect, painting the company as a safe, family-run operation.

“We’ve never had an incidence in an operation that’s been operating up in New York now for seven years,” Sloane said. “My entire family operates the machine, so I don’t want to lose sleep.”

While Sloane pointed to Braven’s operations in Yonkers as evidence of the company’s safety record, The Intercept’s review of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation records found no indication that the company’s facility in Yonkers has ever been legally permitted to conduct plastic pyrolysis activities.

An air quality permit completed on February 22, 2013, states that the facility’s function was the conversion of vegetable oil to biofuels — a far cry from advanced thermal decomposition of plastic waste. In July 2014, inspectors from the DEC visited the facility and observed plastic waste being accepted and processed without authorization. The company agreed to resolve the violations, pay civil fines, and apply for a modified permit to accept recycled plastics, but the permit was never completed. DEC staff inspected the site again in 2021 and confirmed that Golden Renewable had moved its processing equipment out of state. DEC public records did not contain any additional permit information, and the Yonkers operation is Braven’s only other facility.

Public hearing meeting minutes also show Sloane told the town that Braven does not handle any hazardous materials. “Any kind of material trash, landfill items, hazardous items, we have none,” he said. “We do not contain any kind of hazardous materials. We have nothing that goes into a drain. … It’s all biodegradable.”

This turned out to be false. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database, Braven’s Zebulon facility generated and shipped 9.6 tons of hazardous ignitable waste and benzene in 2021 alone. In March of that year, Braven registered with the EPA as a large quantity generator: a facility that generates at least 1,000 kilograms per month of hazardous waste.

One list of warnings in a Braven air permit application reads like a toxicologist’s worst nightmare: The pyrolysis oil may cause cancer and genetic defects, as well as damage to organs, fertility, and unborn children. Other hazards included being “extremely flammable” and “very toxic to aquatic life” with “long lasting effects.”

Stephanie Hall, a parent of students at a nearby K-12 charter school, voiced concerns about air emissions during the hearing in Zebulon. She pointed out that the Braven lot would be adjacent to a community college and a public housing community, as well as only 780 feet from the charter school.

Sloane offered reassurance that Braven would “have no smells or emissions that are emitted to the air.” But when a planning board member asked for more information, he backtracked.

“It’s not a zero-emission process,” he clarified. “We do have an emission of CO2. It’s the exact same CO2 that comes through in your gas logs at your home.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Michael Moreno, Braven’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, wrote, “Braven strives to operate its Zebulon facility safely, responsibly and in compliance with its permits and regulatory requirements. Any discrepancies found are proactively resolved with the agencies involved.”

Braven’s special use permit application notes that the facility will have an exhaust stack but still characterizes the operation as a “closed loop process where all by products are fully contained without being discharged into the atmosphere.” An emissions test report prepared for Braven in March 2020 contradicts this claim, revealing that, in addition to CO2, the company’s plastic pyrolysis emits air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. The report also found that Braven would emit an estimated 5.14 tons of volatile organic compounds per year. It did not specify which VOCs were present, though known human carcinogens like benzene and styrene are commonly found in emissions from petrochemical operations. On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

Certain industrial facilities must annually report their chemical emissions for inclusion in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Since pyrolysis facilities are classified by the EPA as waste incinerators, they’re required to meet Clean Air Act guidelines but are excluded from TRI reporting requirements. This makes it difficult to assess the full health risks that Braven and other plastic pyrolysis units could pose to surrounding communities. In April, more than 300 environmental and public health organizations filed a petition with the EPA for the inclusion of waste incinerators in the database.

Ilona Jaspers, director of the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, has studied emissions generated from the burning of plastic waste. She called the TRI’s lack of pyrolysis and waste incineration data “a giant loophole.”

“I am all for finding good ways to make plastics into something usable, but the danger of generating air toxics in the process is considerable,” she said. “When we looked at the list of chemicals generated in the emissions of the plastics, a lot of it is not good. It’s kind of terrifying what gets generated when you burn plastics.”

In addition to air pollutants, residents raised the risk of potential water contamination. Hall, a professional engineer with a background in water resources, noted during the public meeting in Zebulon that the building slated to house Braven’s operations was built in 1994, so the lot would not have established stormwater control measures to treat any potential runoff. “You may want to include some sort of sand filter or proprietary stormwater device to help with any incidental spills,” she suggested, since the lot lies near a Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain.

“When that industrial park was developed, there were no regulations for stormwater control,” Bradshaw, the former assistant planning director, told The Intercept. “Because they’re just occupying an existing building … from a site standpoint, it did not need to meet current regulations. But the commissioners, as part of the special use permit, could’ve made that a condition if they wanted to.”

At a subsequent session, the planning board unanimously recommended denial of the permit, based on “lack of evidence and testimony” showing Braven would not endanger public health and safety. But the planning board’s decision was “just a recommendation,” Bradshaw noted, and did not dictate the final decision. The Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to approve the special use permit on May 6, 2019, under the sole condition that masonry screening be conducted around the fuel tanks.

Braven was up and running by March 2020. Four months in, one major company had already bet big on the nascent operation’s long-term success: To further its “corporate responsibility” goals, Sonoco agreed to deliver its waste plastics to Braven for the next 20 years.

Significant Noncomplier

As part of an unannounced hazardous waste compliance inspection, an environmental specialist from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, visited Braven’s Zebulon facility on September 26, 2022. The details of the resulting compliance report paint an alarming picture of a business operating in stark contrast to the health and safety promises made to Zebulon residents three years prior.

Inspectors cited Braven for numerous regulatory violations, including accumulating more than 400 containers of hazardous waste without a permit over the course of two years, as well as failing to “manage waste material in a manner to prevent it from discharging to the ground and storm drain system.”

The report details one incident in April 2022, when Braven sent 31,080 gallons of hazardous waste to a rented warehouse facility about one mile down the road. The transfer was conducted by a local trucking company, not a licensed hazardous waste transporter, and the warehouse was not permitted to receive such waste. The containers, which contained toxic chemicals like toluene and ethylbenzene, were then disposed of by a waste management service, though the transportation manifests for the disposal contained numerous inaccuracies.

The report also states that Braven generates light, medium, and heavy cut oils through plastic pyrolysis but has been unable to find a buyer for the heavy cut oils. As a result, the oil accumulated in a tank until it was eventually discarded as hazardous waste — twice. “The facility has been unable to demonstrate that it has been or can be legitimately used or recycled,” inspectors wrote.

“It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

“There’s very little actual monitoring data from these facilities that are doing plastic pyrolysis,” Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. “It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

Even Braven’s purportedly recyclable products pose substantial risks. In June 2021, Braven announced a “long-term agreement” to supply pyrolysis-derived oils to Chevron Phillips Chemical. The press release did not state outright what the oil will be used as feedstock for, stating only that it will help Chevron “achieve its circularity goals.” However, ProPublica reported in February that one Chevron refinery in Mississippi is turning pyrolysis oil into jet fuel; according to EPA documents, air pollution from the fuel production process could subject nearby residents to a colossal 1 in 4 cancer risk.

The Intercept confirmed that some of the pyrolysis oil at this Chevron facility is indeed supplied by Braven: The chemical name and unique registry number listed in an EPA record obtained by ProPublica matches the details of Braven’s pyrolysis oils found in a North Carolina air quality permit exemption application. Additionally, in July 2022, the EPA published notice in the Federal Register of several new pyrolysis oils manufactured by Braven, including the same one on the EPA record.

Some residents within one mile of Braven were already at an increased risk for environmental carcinogens before the business moved in: One nearby census tract has worse particulate matter and ozone exposure, hazardous waste proximity, and air toxics cancer risk than over 90 percent of the country.

During the town hearing, Sloane had emphasized Braven’s “proactive” safety features; the special use permit application promised “daily inspections.” The compliance investigation, however, noted numerous deficiencies in emergency preparedness, including the absence of a fire extinguisher in the main room where containers of flammable waste were accumulating, some of which were left open and unlabeled.

According to the report, Braven staff admitted that personnel had not conducted weekly inspections, and they were unable to provide documentation that an engineer’s certification had been completed for a hazardous waste tank. Neither safety data sheets for the pyrolysis oils nor an emergency contingency plan had been completed with all required information, and the plan had not been distributed to local emergency authorities.

Additionally, inspectors observed during the visit that oil-contaminated stormwater was being pumped from a containment pit into a storage tote, but the connecting hose was leaking and “dark staining was evident” on the paved area between the pit and the storm drain.

Christopher Serrati, Braven’s manager of operations, told inspectors at the time that the concrete surrounding the storm drain had been “power washed in the past to remove staining.” The report noted an absorbent sock had been placed around the storm drain, and dark staining was present on soil adjacent to the property’s stormwater outfall, indicating hazardous waste may have been discharged to the ground.

Following an assessment period, the North Carolina DEQ cited Braven as a “significant noncomplier” and issued the company an “initial imminent and substantial endangerment order” on April 28, 2023. Braven has not received any state or federal penalties.

“This is an ongoing state lead enforcement matter, and EPA is currently not involved. EPA cannot further comment regarding the facility’s compliance or enforcement activities,” wrote an EPA spokesperson.

As part of a spill remediation plan, the DEQ required that Braven test both stormwater and soil from the contamination sites. Four of the contaminated stormwater samples tested positive for high concentrations of benzene, according to a report submitted to the agency in January. The report notes, however, that Braven believes the high benzene levels can be attributed to oils that were left in the sampling totes.

Top/Left: Braven Environmental received a special use permit to store flammable liquids on Industrial Drive in Zebulon, N.C. Bottom/Right: Birds sit atop a water tower in downtown Zebulon, N.C. Photos: Schuyler Mitchell/The Intercept

“In the past, all waste including dike water was shipped as hazardous waste and therefore, our crew did not realize the new operations and they inadvertently used the old empty oil totes for dike stormwater storage,” wrote Braven. The report states that going forward, “Braven will use only clean totes to store dike stormwater, if any, to avoid any potential hazardous waste conditions for the stormwater totes.” Braven has also installed an oil/water separator for stormwater discharge.

However, Braven’s claim that contaminated stormwater had previously been disposed of as hazardous waste appears to contradict notes in the initial compliance investigation. “Records dated April 2022 documenting shipment of rainwater … were provided after the inspection and document the material was previously disposed of as non-hazardous,” inspectors wrote.

Singla, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the storm drain discharge a “big concern.”

“We know that when there’s spills or leaks from industrial facilities, benzene can contaminate surface water, groundwater especially,” Singla said. “If there’s any built environment over that groundwater, the benzene can migrate up through the soil into indoor spaces and then contaminate the air, and people can be exposed that way.”

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Another report submitted by Braven in June notes “site-specific groundwater investigations have not been conducted,” though a contractor completed a reconnaissance survey of potential “wells, springs, surface-water intakes, and sources of potable water” within 1,500 feet of the facility and did not observe any apparent water supply wells. The contractor said it also contacted the county for more information on potential water sources in the area but did not receive a response.

In late August, a new remedial action oversight report was posted to the DEQ’s public records database. A state chemist’s review of Braven’s soil samples found “evidence of elevated hexavalent chromium and arsenic” in the site’s underlying soil. The state’s report attributes these findings to “a release of waste,” since the results were above the levels found in background samples. Both arsenic and chromium are considered occupational carcinogens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The state offered Braven two remediation options: complete additional sampling and remove the contaminated soil, or close the impacted areas as a landfill. According to Melody Foote, a public information officer from the DEQ’s Division of Waste Management, Braven completed the additional sampling in late September. The DEQ is waiting for the sampling results and findings report, which is expected in three to four weeks.

Zebulon Commissioner Shannon Baxter called the noncompliance report “extremely disturbing” and noted that the public hearing testimony given in 2019 “appears to be in conflict with how Braven is actually operating.” Baxter was previously a member of the planning board and recommended denial of Braven’s permit in 2019. She noted that her views should not be interpreted as representative of the entire Board of Commissioners.

“I had my concerns as a member of the Planning Board, which is why we voted to recommend denial of the Special Use Permit,” Baxter wrote in a message to The Intercept. “Now, as a Commissioner, I am troubled about how these violations will affect the safety of our Community, especially the students attending school down the road from the Braven facility.”

Aggressive Expansion

A troubled record hasn’t deterred the petrochemical industry from throwing its weight behind Braven in recent months. The company has announced three major executive hires since April, including a chief operating officer, development director, and president and CEO. Heath DePriest, the new COO, previously served in leadership positions at Phillips 66, a petroleum company. A press release notes that CEO and President Jim Simon held roles at the refinery subsidiary of Koch Industries.

In June, Braven announced a new “strategic framework agreement” with another Koch Industries subsidiary, Koch Project Solutions, to “support Braven’s aggressive expansion plans.” The press release cited a new project to be built in the Gulf Coast region, which will allegedly produce 50 million gallons of pyrolysis oil per year.

Braven’s past expansion plans, however, have not materialized. In 2020, the company was the subject of a number of splashy headlines for its plans to invest $32 million in Cumberland County, Virginia, a rural region west of Richmond. Promising the creation of more than 80 new jobs, the project marked the first economic development opportunity for the county since 2009. Braven was slated to break ground in late 2021, but the year quietly came and went, until a sole public update arrived via an article in a Cumberland County newspaper: “Braven No Longer Coming.” The article, published in January 2022, did not explain why Braven had pulled out, and the company declined to comment at the time.

Braven has also been the subject of several legal actions. In 2015, sisters Joan Prentice Andrews and Jane Prentice Goff filed a lawsuit against Golden Renewable in New York, which also named four executives, including co-founders Moreno and Nicholas Canosa, as defendants. The suit claims that the sisters had collectively invested a total of $650,000 in Golden Renewable’s “bio-energy business” after Canosa had given the false impression that the company was “imminently signing a contract” to sell its biofuels to the Pentagon. The suit’s charges included wire fraud, mail fraud, and violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The case was settled out of court and voluntarily dismissed less than one month after the defendants were summoned.

The following year, a New York court ruled that Golden Renewable owed a different plaintiff over $10,000 in a civil debt lawsuit. The company was also released from a New York state tax warrant in 2018 after paying an outstanding balance of $16,522. In January 2020, Moreno was released from another New York tax warrant along with his wife, totaling over $300,000. After stepping down as Braven’s CEO in April, Canosa remains on the company’s board of managers. Moreno currently still serves as Braven’s chief commercial officer.

In April, Braven announced it had completed a financing round led by institutional investors Fortistar, Arosa Capital, and Avenue Capital, where Moreno also serves as senior managing director. While Fortistar and Arosa have investments in the energy sector, Avenue backs businesses in financial distress — or as it calls them, “good companies with bad balance sheets.”

But any bad balance sheets that Braven might have are unlikely to dissuade the numerous major petrochemical companies now banking on chemical recycling. Last year marked the ACC’s highest lobbying spend on record, up to nearly $20 million. That same year, the group shelled out more than $265,000 for Facebook and Twitter ads focused on promoting chemical recycling. One ACC ad effort included the sponsorship of a promotional video specifically for Braven, which features Canosa and Moreno alongside the ACC’s associate director of plastics sustainability.

Dow, Shell, and Chevron have all invested in developing their own plastic pyrolysis technology, while Exxon Mobil launched one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America earlier this year, the first of 13 facilities it says it will launch by the end of 2026. Worldwide, the advanced recycling market is projected to grow by 3,233 percent in less than a decade, from $270 million in 2022 to more than $9 billion by 2031.

As chemical recycling spreads, we know from existing studies that the facilities are most likely to harm communities that are already vulnerable and marginalized.

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both.”

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both,” said Singla, who authored a report for the Natural Resources Defense Council on the environmental justice impact of chemical recycling.

Meanwhile, North Carolina could soon become the 25th state to take up the reclassification of chemical recycling. In April, three Republican state Senators introduced Senate Bill 725, which would amend the state’s waste management laws to explicitly note “solid waste management does not include advanced recycling.”

Braven, the only advanced recycling facility in North Carolina, was already exempt from obtaining a solid waste permit, according to Foote, the public information officer. Foote told The Intercept that since Braven processes “recovered material” — defined in state laws as “material that has known recycling potential, can be feasibly recycled, and has been diverted or removed from the solid waste stream” — it is not regulated as “solid waste.”

There has been one recent development that could slow chemical recycling down. In June, the EPA unveiled new proposed rules under the Toxic Substances Control Act that would establish reporting requirements for 18 substances derived from plastic pyrolysis. The agency would require companies to submit their chemical feedstocks for review so the agency can screen them for “impurities,” including PFAS, dioxins, heavy metals, bisphenols, and flame retardants.

The public comment period ended on August 19. The EPA is currently reviewing responses and is targeting early next year for follow-up action, according to a spokesperson.

The ACC, American Petroleum Institute, and Dow were among those who submitted comments urging the EPA to withdraw the proposed new rules.

“The ACC would welcome the opportunity to meet with EPA leadership to clarify misconceptions about advanced recycling,” the ACC wrote, “and invite Agency officials to an advanced recycling facility for a first-hand sense of their operations.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers from the ACC’s Plastics Division, wrote in a statement, “Progress towards a circular economy can only be achieved with smart, cohesive approaches that avoid inconsistent and conflicting approaches by regulators. … ACC remains committed to working with EPA as a constructive stakeholder in the development of effective, practical, and responsible policies.”

Braven already appears to be pulling from the ACC’s playbook in its efforts to curry favor with state lawmakers. Democrat Deborah Ross, who represents the North Carolina congressional district that includes Zebulon, made a trip to Braven’s facility on August 25.

“I enjoyed meeting and learning from Braven’s innovative leaders and employees this morning in Zebulon,” Ross is quoted as saying in a Braven press release. “I look forward to applying the insights and information I gained during my visit to the important discussions in Congress about advanced recycling technologies.”

The Intercept emailed the compliance report to Ross’s office and asked whether Braven had mentioned the inspection and ongoing remediation efforts before, during, or after the representative’s visit.

“Congresswoman Ross does her best to accommodate invitations she receives from constituents and visits dozens of businesses in her district every year — these tours and constituent meetings should never be interpreted as expressing support for any particular company’s policy positions or business practices,” wrote a spokesperson. “She was not aware of this investigation before touring Braven, nor was it discussed during or after her visit. As a vocal supporter of environmental protections, she takes these allegations seriously and strongly supports NC DEQ’s work to hold companies in our state accountable for harmful waste or activities that threaten our people and our environment.”

The post They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste appeared first on The Intercept.

This article includes descriptions of sexual violence.

BUCHA, UKRAINE — The first Russian soldiers arrived several days after Bucha had fallen, looking for any men left behind. Anna, a widow, lived alone with her mother and teenage daughter.

“We have no men,” Anna told the soldiers, speaking in Russian. She warned her mother not to speak, worried that the soldiers would pick up on her distinct Western Ukrainian speech and mark her as a banderivka, a pejorative Russians often use to refer to Ukrainian nationalists or people they think of as such.

Anna showed the Russians her father’s death certificate, which noted that he had been born in Russia’s far east. “It’s what saved us,” she later told me.

She tried to appear welcoming, heeding a neighbor’s advice. “It’s going to be worse if you don’t let them in,” the elderly woman had warned. 

At first, the fact that they were three women alone did not feel uniquely threatening to Anna. Some of her neighbors were hiding male relatives in the basement — a far more dangerous proposition. In the early days of the occupation, Anna and her daughter, Maria, ventured into town, where they collected humanitarian aid from the local hospital and scavenged for melted ice cream in abandoned stores. They saw the mutilated bodies of men on the streets.

Anna’s friendliness seemed to appease the first group of soldiers — the “orcs,” as she and many Ukrainians routinely call Russian troops. After searching the home, they gave Anna and her daughter white armbands to wear, a signal that they had been “filtrated” and posed no threat to the occupiers. 

It wasn’t until the second group of soldiers barged into Anna’s yard when she realized that women, alone in the occupied ghost city, faced a different sort of risk. Their leader, a tall man in his early 20s, struck her temple with the back of his weapon and demanded oral sex. He also threatened to rape Maria, who was 13 at the time. Anna acquiesced to his threats to protect her daughter, she says, setting off a chain of events that would lead her own government to investigate her for collaboration with the Russian occupiers even as it eventually came to recognize her as a victim of wartime sexual violence.

I met Anna and Maria this summer at their home in Bucha: the city that first became synonymous with the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They spoke for hours, talking excitedly over one another, repeating a story they had told many times but rarely, it seemed, to a willing listener. (Anna and Maria are pseudonyms; I am withholding their full names to protect their privacy.) Well into the conflict’s second year, as Ukrainian forces seek to liberate territories that remain under Russian occupation, their story is emblematic of the fissures tearing through Ukrainian society. On the one hand, Anna’s ongoing ordeal is a product of enduring stigma around sexual violence. On the other, it reflects deep-seated social divisions that have plagued Ukraine for years and have only escalated amid the current conflict.

As survivors in each liberated town revealed fresh evidence of Russian atrocities, Ukrainians clamored for justice and nursed a growing vindictiveness against those perceived to have helped the occupiers. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set the tone, signing a sweeping and unforgiving law targeting collaborators just days after last year’s invasion.

In Bucha, neighbors summarily judged Anna’s wartime choices and shunned her as a traitor. But her interactions with Russian soldiers also posed a set of challenges for law enforcement officials, who have pledged that no crime stemming from the conflict will go unpunished. Local and international prosecutors have opened hundreds of investigations targeting Russian soldiers over wartime atrocities, including sexual violence. At the same time, local authorities have investigated thousands of Ukrainian citizens for collaboration.

At once a victim and a suspected collaborator, Anna was caught between overlapping quests for justice, facing neighbors — and a law enforcement apparatus — unable to reconcile those contradictions.

“People don’t understand exactly what collaboration is, and so they think that any contact with the enemy is collaboration.”

“At the beginning no one believed that the Russians were capable of such things. People believed that those under occupation were not exactly collaborators but were quite friendly with the Russians,” said Kateryna Ilikchiieva, Anna’s attorney, referring to the sexual assault her client described. “People don’t understand exactly what collaboration is, and so they think that any contact with the enemy is collaboration.”

The legislation passed last year further entrenched that belief. The law does not specifically prohibit relationships with Russians, but it does bar Ukrainians from sharing information that could have “serious consequences” with enemies of the state. In practice, any contact with Russians is fodder for speculation. “People understand even sex with Russian soldiers as collaboration,” said Alena Lunova, advocacy director at the Ukrainian human rights group ZMINA.

In Anna’s case, the suspicion alone prompted relentless questioning by multiple law enforcement agencies and the dismissal, for months, of her reports that she was abused. She is probably not alone; human rights advocates warn that some victims of Russian sexual violence are not speaking out because they fear being labeled and possibly investigated as collaborators.

In that sense, Anna’s story is a cautionary tale.

Anna walks in her backyard in Bucha, Ukraine, on July 6, 2023. During the occupation, Russian soldiers regularly came to her home and sexually abused her.

Pasha Giraffe

Long before Russian troops invaded Bucha in February 2022, Anna’s all-female household generated rumors. Neighbors had gossiped for years about her supposed drinking and promiscuity. They even whispered about Maria, who stopped going to school after the pandemic. The two lived with Anna’s 74-year-old mother in a disheveled house surrounded by a large, overgrown yard — on the margins of both the city and society, not caring much about what people said about them. Anna, with her blue hair and extravagant jewelry, looks at once much older than her 41 years and also like a sister to Maria, who dyes her hair bright red and wears artsy makeup.

While most of Bucha’s residents fled as the Russians advanced, Anna and her family stayed put. Her mother, who is largely bedridden, didn’t want to leave her home. Besides, they had little money and nowhere to go. They followed news of the incursion on TV until the power went out and the sky filled with smoke.

When the first group of soldiers came knocking, Maria noticed many of them seemed barely older than she was. She tried hard to seem friendly, thinking it safer.

The terror began in mid-March, when the leader of the second group of soldiers, called Pasha Giraffe by his compatriots due to his towering height, told Anna that some man would eventually have his way with Maria, so why not now. It had taken them three months to get to Ukraine, another soldier said; they missed women and “needed relaxation.” Anna insisted that Maria was a child and pleaded with the soldiers; she told them she knew they were good men. She agreed to sleep with them so they would not touch Maria. “I took everything on myself,” she told me.

After that, different groups of soldiers started coming by the house several times a day. They would announce themselves by firing shots in the air and hang around a pit fire in the yard, bragging about the people they had killed. Sometimes they would tell jokes and ask Anna and Maria to sing with them. Other times they were more menacing; Pasha Giraffe would cock his weapon when talking as if to remind them that he was in charge. Some of the soldiers were convinced that Anna and her daughter were spies for the Ukrainian army: They once burned Maria’s L.O.L. dolls — plastic figurines that are popular around the globe — because they believed that a laser light in the toys was a recording device. The soldiers were unpredictable and “twisted,” Anna and Maria said. They were always drunk, and most came to the house for sex.

Anna didn’t want her mother to know what was happening, so she never took them inside. Instead, one by one, they filed into a garage in the back of the yard, “like they were waiting in line for the bathroom,” Anna said. There were sometimes up to 10 men a day, she recalled, maybe 30 to 50 different soldiers in a two-week period.

Meanwhile, the other soldiers lingered in the yard with Maria. They put their arms around her waist, sometimes touched her legs, but never more, she said. She credits her mother, but also what she described as her wits. “I learned how to be around them,” she said. “We were playing nice, trying not to be rude. We played their game, said Zelenskyy is a jerk, Putin is great, telling them they were liberators.”

Anna believes most of the soldiers must be dead by now, but she said she would kill Pasha Giraffe herself if she could. She got to know some others by their nicknames as well: There was Sergeant, Shamil, Puppy, and Monarch, who broke down toward the end of the occupation and apologized to Anna. He didn’t know why they came to Bucha, he said, nor why they did what they did.

Her familiarity with the soldiers would come in handy, months later, when Anna was summoned to identify perpetrators of war crimes.

Maria sits in her backyard, where Russian soldiers would often linger during their occupation of Bucha, Ukraine.

Return to Bucha

Throughout the monthlong occupation of Bucha, Russian soldiers killed at least 501 people, according to a newly erected memorial that officials warn is incomplete. When the city was liberated in early April 2022 and residents returned, they found dozens of Ukrainian bodies in mass graves. There was a mound of partially burnt corpses in a shallow patch in Anna’s neighborhood. Others were scattered in the streets, some with their hands tied behind their backs, bearing signs of torture.

Not far from Anna’s home, on the leafy outskirts of the city, three brothers were found slain, at least one of whom had worked as a police officer. There was also a woman who taught the Ukrainian language, whom neighbors believe was targeted along with her husband and son for refusing to speak Russian to the occupiers. Some people who had fled found their homes looted and burnt; other homes were untouched.

Ira, a neighbor who lives down the street from Anna and asked me to use only her first name, was among those who returned. On April 4, the first day returning residents were allowed into the city, she walked through her yard, cradling her cat, as the executed bodies of her husband and two other male relatives lay on the ground nearby.

Ira remembers seeing Anna and Maria that day. Like other residents, she had heard rumors that the two were among those looting abandoned houses. Blurry photos and videos had circulated on social media, some taken surreptitiously through slits in neighbors’ fences. In one, Anna is pushing a wheelbarrow carrying a large piano. In another, she stands next to a resident whom neighbors also accused of looting; after the invasion, he killed himself because of the shame, Ira said. In yet another photo, Anna appears to be smiling.

The smile is what bothers Ira most. The day she returned to Bucha, she photographed Maria and Anna: the daughter flashing a wide grin, the mother a more subdued one. Ira said they had greeted her from down the street waving a victory sign. “We were so happy to see living souls,” Maria told me.

But to Ira and others, the fact that they were still alive, seemingly in good spirits, and that their house was mostly intact, were indisputable signs of their treason. “They are smiling at the same time that there are bodies in my yard,” she said. “Does a victim act like that?”

Rumors about Anna grew worse as more residents trickled back into the city. On social media, people referred to her as a “whore”; some asked for her address and threatened to kill her. Some neighbors said that she had been “in charge” of the looting, an offense they put on par with the actions of Russian soldiers. They also reported her to the police.

The looting is not all that neighbors blame Anna for. Some municipal workers who had stayed during the occupation and were beaten by soldiers accused her of riding in an armored vehicle with the Russians and guiding the soldiers to them. Neighbors speculated that two elderly residents, whose bodies were found piled among others not far from Anna’s home, were targeted by the Russians after yelling at her for looting. Some neighbors wondered how the soldiers had been able to identify the police officers, former members of the military, and community leaders they executed. “Someone told them,” said Ira. “Maybe it was Anna.”

As I spoke with Ira, an elderly woman stopped to listen, interjecting that the white armband the soldiers gave Anna was a sign “she was in their camp.” Another neighbor, who only gave her name as Svitlana, noted with scorn that Anna had taken to wearing earrings with a Ukrainian flag after the city was liberated. “She started working on her new image after the occupation,” said Svitlana. When residents hurled insults at her, she added, Anna told them that the Russians would be back. Her father was Russian, Svitlana stressed. “It’s in her DNA.”

Then there was the sex with soldiers. Her neighbors accused her of enjoying it. They told me about rumors that she drank with the soldiers, danced with them, and even fired their weapons.

Anna doesn’t deny taking the piano, which she said she found in the street and took into her home, with the help of some neighbors, after the Russians left the city. Many residents who remained in Bucha looted, she added, thinking that those who fled wouldn’t return. But she said she never gave the soldiers information about her neighbors, nor did she fire their weapons. She laughed when I told her what the neighbor said about her riding in an armored vehicle. And she says she spoke openly to her neighbors of having slept with soldiers, telling them she had done it to protect her daughter.

Ira doesn’t believe her. She noted that several other women in Bucha who were raped by soldiers had been killed afterward, while another woman who emerged from a cellar after the invasion looked barely alive and was unable to speak of the abuses she had survived. “That’s an example of how a person goes through violence, not smiling,” Ira said. Anna, she insisted, “either is a very good actress, or has a mental problem, but it’s not sexual violence.”

Anna next to the garage where she was sexually abused by Russian soldiers, in Bucha, Ukraine, on July 6, 2023.

Our Orcs

As Anna’s neighbors whispered, Ukrainian authorities began to investigate her. 

For several weeks, a steady stream of law enforcement officials came to her house. Throughout the visits, Anna took every chance to report the soldier’s abuses, repeatedly asking for a lie detector test to prove she was telling the truth. Nobody believed her, she said, because she wasn’t beautiful and because her clothes were dirty. “If you survived the occupation, you were a collaborator,” she said. “People who were not in the occupation just do not understand what happened here and what it was like.”

Ukrainian soldiers were the first to stop by, looking for weapons the Russians might have left behind. After that, most of the officials who came didn’t explain what they were looking for, and Anna didn’t always know what agency they were with. Photos Maria took on her phone show that several worked for the Department of Strategic Investigations, a special unit of Ukraine’s national police.

“If you survived the occupation, you were a collaborator.”

Someone from the local prosecutor’s office came too. Anna is not sure how the office learned of her ordeal but said the prosecutor, Roman Pshyk, was the only one who appeared to take her account of the sexual violence seriously. Pshyk accompanied her to a gynecological exam shortly after the city was liberated, where she was horrified to see many elderly women. In the waiting room, she thanked herself for having protected her mother in addition to Maria.

Pshyk, who has since left the office, told The Intercept that Anna’s case was one of more than 100 investigations into Russian crimes the prosecutor launched after Bucha’s liberation. “Any report of sexual harassment prompts a criminal prosecution investigation,” he said. “We can’t only take the position of the victim. We need evidence.” He added that his office had not yet heard the rumors about Anna and focused only on her testimony. He said the office later referred the case to national police and to Ukraine’s intelligence services, the SBU, though Anna didn’t hear from them until several months later.

When the local police came to her house, they found cans of spray paint in the garage and claimed that it was used by Russians to mark the homes of allies. Other officers searched every room in the house, rummaging through drawers and asking for receipts to prove that items weren’t stolen. Svitlana, the neighbor, told me that police shared photos of items they discovered at Anna’s home with other residents, in an effort to identify stolen property. The police did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Some of the officers were rough. In June last year, they demanded all the phones in the house, with no explanation. When Maria yelled at them and tried to film them, they snatched her phone and shoved and handcuffed her. Vitaliy Pelehatiy, a senior investigator with the Department of Strategic Investigations who was in charge that day, told The Intercept that officers were searching for stolen property and confiscated the phones as part of the investigation.

“They behaved like orcs,” said Anna. “Our orcs.”

A Slow Reckoning

Sexual violence goes substantially underreported virtually everywhere, but in conflict zones, the stigmatization of victims can be exacerbated. As Ukrainian forces seized back control of occupied territories last year, reports began to emerge of widespread sexual violence by Russian troops. The true toll may never be known, particularly in large swaths of the country that remain under occupation. Even in liberated areas, advocates caution that fear and persistent taboos about sexual violence make the scale of the abuses virtually impossible to assess. Often, they say, law enforcement agencies’ own biases and failures only compound the problem.

“Because it is a shame to talk about sexual violence, our society charges these people as if they’re not a victim but more of a perpetrator,” said Gyunduz Mamedov, a deputy to Ukraine’s previous prosecutor general and a rare, outspoken critic of the collaboration law. The suspicion with which sexual violence victims are routinely treated, he said, amounts to “a double victimization.”

Seven months into the war, in September 2022, Ukraine’s prosecutor general opened an office within the war crimes division to investigate and prosecute conflict-related sexual violence, or CRSV. It was a formal recognition of systemic abuses — and the fact that an array of Ukrainian agencies has failed to adequately support survivors.

It was around this time that Anna’s interactions with the authorities took a turn. “After that, they started to work on the sexual violence case more sensitively, or to work on it at all,” said Ilikchiieva, her attorney, a volunteer who was connected to Anna by a legal nonprofit earlier this year.

Late last summer, two SBU officers came to Anna’s house and handed her a document recognizing her status as a victim. In the months that followed, they asked more questions about her contacts with soldiers, and last November they finally gave her the polygraph she had been demanding for months.

In a two-hour interview with the SBU officers, she told me, they asked her a wide range of questions: Was she raped? By how many people? What about the looting? Did she work with Russia’s security services or kill anyone? It felt just as much an investigation into war crimes by the Russians as a probe into Anna herself. The officers warned her she would go to jail if she lied, and she answered all their questions. Afterward they drove her home, and a few days later an officer called to say she had passed the test.

The officers’ questions were the closest Ukrainian officials came to acknowledging that they suspected Anna of collaboration. The SBU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Anna’s lawyer said she was never notified of a formal investigation, though Anna’s various interactions with law enforcement authorities pointed in that direction. Despite the lack of formal charges against her to this day, Anna’s neighbors in Bucha have no doubt about her guilt. 

Iryna Didenko, the prosecutor in charge of conflict-related sexual violence at the office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine, acknowledged in an interview that “huge mistakes” were made in the first months after the invasion and that law enforcement officials were unprepared to deal with victims. Investigators often didn’t keep information confidential, she noted, at times sharing it widely within the community. When she came in, she took over cases involving sexual violence from other agencies and overhauled the investigative interview process. Now, there must be a woman on every team, and investigators have been instructed to speak to witnesses and victims more empathetically. Didenko launched pilot programs in Kherson and Kharkiv, territories that Ukrainian forces liberated last year, where multiagency teams were trained by international experts on best practices when dealing with conflict-related sexual violence.

Changing the culture of law enforcement, Didenko said, will take time. She also said there is a need for greater public education about sexual violence. She cited a USAID-led survey, published in May, in which most respondents noted that survivors of sexual violence “constantly face biased attitudes from Ukrainian society,” discouraging them from seeking help. “People will sometimes say a victim of rape may not have been against it,” she said. “But we are seeing changes; there is stronger support for victims.”

Didenko declined to comment on Anna’s case specifically, citing confidentiality, but Anna said Didenko visited her earlier this year and was shocked to learn about how investigators had treated her. A week later, the phones Anna had been trying to get back from police for nearly nine months were returned to her. 

By the end of last year, Didenko’s office had opened more than 220 sexual violence investigations; the office ultimately filed charges against Russian soldiers in 62 cases. Didenko acknowledged that there are likely many more incidents that are not on her office’s radar because of the stigma associated with sexual violence and fear, in some liberated areas, that the Russians might return. Earlier this summer, Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin introduced a new plan to strengthen protections for victims of wartime sexual violence. Russia often uses such violence, he wrote, “as a form of torture, a way to humiliate and break resistance.”

Bodies of civilians lie on Yablunska Street in Bucha, Ukraine, after the Russian army retreated from the city on April 2, 2022.

Splitting Society

The first calls for legislation to punish Ukrainian collaborators came on the heels of the 2014 Donbas conflict, during which Ukrainian separatists, backed by Russian troops, seized large swaths of land in the country’s east, in a precursor to the current war. Russia went on to unilaterally annex those lands following last year’s full-scale invasion. 

Vitaliy Ovcharenko, a prominent blogger-turned-soldier from the Donbas’s Donetsk region, helped draft a law in 2017 that would have imposed civil penalties on officials and administrators who had supported the separatist effort, including banning them from holding public office. In towns that remained under Ukrainian control, he told me, residents who had aided pro-Russian forces, at times leading to the abuse or death of their neighbors, roamed freely. It wasn’t uncommon for people who had been tortured to run into their torturers at local shops. “There was a crisis of justice in Ukrainian cities, and no one cared, no one was taking responsibility, and no one knew how to bring these collaborators to justice,” Ovcharenko said.

Ovcharenko’s proposal stalled after being introduced in Parliament in 2018. He and other local activists believed there was no appetite among Ukraine’s political leadership for criminalizing collaboration. He said that human rights advocates in Kyiv, some 500 miles away, accused him of being a traumatized veteran out for vengeance and warned that the proposed law had a violent, “vigilante” connotation to it. “They said, ‘We don’t need this confrontation in society.’ I told them, ‘If you left Kyiv and got to the ground, you would see that there are already confrontations,’” he said. “When society feels that there is no regulation from the government, it starts mass regulation by the people — and that ends with broken tires, broken windows, Molotov cocktails, and violence.”

Several parties, including Zelenskyy’s, introduced similar proposals in later years, but they never came up for a vote, partly because of Ukrainian legislators’ concerns that they would enflame social divisions. It was also unclear how collaboration would overlap with existing laws, including on treason.

Until last year: After the invasion, legislators voted Zelenskyy’s version into law so hastily that the legal advisers who evaluated the bill noted that they had done so under time pressure and “in extraordinary circumstances.” The result, many critics charge, was a “bad law” whose overly vague contours effectively criminalize a much broader range of behavior than originally intended. In some parts of the country, it could potentially apply to tens of thousands of people.

The law prohibits participation in political, legal, and law enforcement activities under the occupying authorities and the transfer of resources to them, as well as acts that lead to the “death of people or other serious consequences.” It bans Russian propaganda in educational institutions and the “public denial by a citizen of Ukraine of the armed aggression against Ukraine.” Penalties range from bans on holding government jobs to confiscation of property and prison sentences of up to 15 years.

The legislation leaves little room for the complexities of war and people’s need to survive it.

While its proponents argue that it serves as a deterrent, the legislation leaves little room for the complexities of war and people’s need to survive it. The law applies to Ukrainians providing Russian forces with information about military or civilian targets — as was the case with the agent who helped direct a Russian missile attack on a crowded café earlier this summer that killed 13 people. But it has also been used against local officials who remained in their posts under the new authorities, teachers showing up for work in occupied areas, and private citizens selling hogs or other goods to Russians or expressing opinions, including via social media, that are seen as supportive of the invasion.

So far, prosecutors have investigated more than 6,000 cases of alleged collaboration, according to Ukrainian government records. While many were tried in absentia, scores of people have been convicted already.

Some civil society groups and officials have called on the government to amend the law and apply it more selectively. Iryna Vereshchuk, the Ukrainian minister responsible for reintegration, warned against branding “everybody” who remained in occupied territory a collaborator. “Many people look to the future with fear because they don’t know if they fall under those categories,” she said last year. Tamila Tasheva, the government’s permanent representative for occupied Crimea, also called for a separate approach for Ukrainians who have lived under occupation for years.

But lawmakers have so far refused to budge, with few politicians willing to be seen as soft on those who are considered traitors in the popular imagination.

“The government is pretty understanding of what’s going on. It’s not a secret for those who are working with the issue, but the problem is that you need to explain to society why we need to change this law,” said ZMINA’s Lunova. “They can split society with this issue of collaboration.”

The phenomenon is hardly unique to Ukraine. “Every war has its collaborators, and every war has an often brutal response to those collaborators,” said Shane Darcy, deputy director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, who has researched the issue globally. Still, models for how to address it are scarce. Even international humanitarian law — the body of law that rules conduct in armed conflict — has a “blind spot” when it comes to collaboration, Darcy added.

International law posits that life should continue as normally as possible under occupation and requires occupying authorities to continue providing administrative services to civilians, allowing them to recruit former public servants to keep running them so long as it is not by coercion. “Of course, in a situation of occupation, it’s very hard to draw a fine line between what’s coercive and what’s not,” said Darcy. At the same time, international law also allows states to punish collaborators, provided they do so humanely. “Ukraine — to their credit — seem to be subjecting everyone to a legal process,” he added. “They’re not stringing collaborators from lampposts.”

Ukraine’s justice system is grappling with how to handle some 80,000 alleged crimes by Russian forces. Critics of the collaboration law argue that, at best, it’s impractical because it places more strain on a system that’s already overburdened. “We understand the situation, but you can focus on those whose crimes are really critical, against state security, whose actions really have heavy consequences,” said Lunova. “You shouldn’t prosecute those who put a like on Facebook.”

“They are pitting people against each other.”

Nadia Volkova, a human rights attorney and director of the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group, who helped draft a never-implemented transitional justice plan after the 2014 conflict, argued that the mass prosecution of low-level collaborators risks causing long-term harm. Already, last year’s invasion deepened divisions that had long split Ukraine. “They are manipulating these differences that have always existed in Ukraine, because it was never a unified nation in a way,” she said. “They are pitting people against each other. One might think that they want to show everybody that if you’re not going to be supporting Ukraine, this is what is going to happen to you, you’re going to be held responsible. But if they want to unify the nation, it’s not really the way to go.”

Neighbors and Traitors

As Ukrainian forces wrestle territory back from Russian control, accusations of collaboration have become ubiquitous across the country. Old conflicts are sometimes recast in light of the ongoing conflict. Victims turn on victims.

“Sometimes it’s real cases, with real records, real evidence,” Leonid Merzlyi, the chief judge in Irpin city court, whose jurisdiction includes Bucha, told me when I visited his courtroom. “In other cases, it is neighbors’ fights.”

Though collaboration cases are usually investigated by national authorities and heard before higher courts, Merzlyi was well aware of their nuances. “If someone didn’t leave an occupied area, we need to know, why? And if someone had Russian soldiers visiting their house, why?” he said. “We need to analyze every case. It’s very crucial for Ukrainian society.”

While some Ukrainians in occupied areas “were supporting the enemy before, and it was clear,” he continued, others may have been “protecting their children, and they were forced by this natural feeling of protection, and it’s hard to judge in that case.”

Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha for 24 years, noted that there were fewer allegations of collaboration there as compared to other areas that were occupied for longer periods of time, but he acknowledged that long-standing hostilities between neighbors were exacerbated by the conflict. “Often, people on the same street or even in the same family are ready to eat each other,” he said. “We are a civilized society and we do not prove things by conjecture: There should be evidence — whether of collaboration or of rape — not rumors.”

When we met, Fedoruk said that he wasn’t familiar with Anna’s case and couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations. The next day, however, a team of municipal workers came to inspect Anna’s rooftop. It had been damaged by shelling, and she had been asking the city to repair it for months. (They still haven’t fixed it, she recently told me.)

Anna and Maria’s war crimes case is currently in the pretrial phase, Ilikchiieva told me. As part of the prosecutor general’s investigation, the two have traveled to Kyiv in recent months to identify soldiers in hundreds of photos authorities pulled from Russian social media. During one visit, Pelehatiy, the senior police investigator who had repeatedly visited Anna at home and who had been in charge when police handcuffed Maria, stood on a side of the room, watching skeptically. Pelehatiy told The Intercept he had heard about Anna’s reports of sexual violence by soldiers, but that she had never told him directly about them. “He does not believe her,” Ilikchiieva said.

He’s not the only one. According to Ira, she and other neighbors have spoken with officers who agree that Anna is a liar, playing the part of the victim. “Everyone can see it,” she said, “but they can’t do anything with it.”

For Anna, it makes little difference whether she will ever face criminal charges for looting or collaboration. Either way, she is now an outcast in Bucha.

Last winter, someone vandalized her fence. On Christmas Eve, while she and Maria were out, two young men from the neighborhood smashed their windows with baseball bats, stole a TV, and beat her mother, she said. After she reported the attack to police, one of the men returned to fix the fence and brought a different TV; he told Anna that he had not touched her mother. In January, the same men attacked Maria as she walked home, threatening her with a knife. Again, Anna reported the incident to police. She said they did nothing.

Anna has come to resent her neighbors and the Ukrainian officials who failed her just as much as she hates the Russian soldiers who abused her. “The worst part,” she said, “was not the orcs.”

The post A Ukrainian Woman Protected Her Daughter From Russian Soldiers — and Was Accused of Collaborating With the Enemy appeared first on The Intercept.

Like many who knew Sanchez, Beattie couldn’t believe he’d committed such a horrible crime. She’d never known him to be violent — not like Glen, who could be terrifying. One Valentine’s Day, she said, Glen put a gun to his head at his home in Norman, Oklahoma, only to swing it around and put a bullet in the wall. Other times she saw Glen put a gun to Sanchez’s head. Although she said he never hit her — she threatened to stab him the one time he tried — Glen inflicted “mental abuse.” He was especially sadistic during sex, raping her repeatedly.

Still, it wasn’t until many years after Sanchez was sentenced to death that Glen started dropping hints that there was more to the story of his son’s case. On Friday nights, they would drink in a shed behind Beattie’s house, where Glen had put a warning sign: “WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MAN CAVE STAYS IN THE MAN CAVE.” It was there that Glen brought up Busken.

“He’d just all of a sudden start talking about her,” Beattie said. He said ugly things, calling her “the ballerina girl” or “that Busken bitch.” Perhaps most chilling, “He’d always say, ‘I should’ve done a better job at it.’” When Beattie asked Glen if he was saying what it sounded like, he deflected. She didn’t press him. But she came to call those nights “his confession time.”

Beattie always knew Glen had secrets. In the decades he came in and out of her life, he showed up when he needed a place to crash and refused to answer questions. He parked his black Trans Am behind her house so it wasn’t visible from the street. “Probably because he was running from something,” she said.

But in the spring of 2022, Glen was dying of cancer and spending his time on the couch in her home. Oklahoma was on the verge of setting a slew of execution dates, and Sanchez was likely to be among the men scheduled to die. One day Glen brought up the murder again. “He just made it sound like he was there,” Beattie said. He said his son didn’t know how to tie the knots that had bound Busken’s wrists. And he repeated something he often said: that he never could have survived prison like Sanchez. “‘He’s a bigger man than I am,” Glen said.

On April 24, 2022, Beattie was in her bedroom talking on the phone. The 10 o’clock news had just come on when she heard a gunshot. She ran outside to find Glen dead on her front porch. Beattie was still processing his suicide months later. “You sit here and wonder: Did you really want to die because you don’t want the truth out there? Are you making your son pay for what you did?”

Beattie told her story on an icy morning in late January, at her home outside Oklahoma City. Her adult son Charles played “Assassin’s Creed” in the living room. Charles had negative memories of Glen from childhood. “Whenever I knew that he was coming back, I had bad dreams,” he recalled.

Beattie first shared her account with Sanchez’s death row spiritual adviser, who persuaded Sanchez’s attorneys to look into it. Although the lawyers, Mark Barrett and Randall Coyne, had sought funds to hire an investigator before filing Sanchez’s federal habeas petition in 2011, their motion was denied. In an unusual arrangement, they agreed to use money raised by the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. Last December, a private investigator named David Ballard came to Beattie’s home and took a statement. He also collected personal items belonging to Glen, including a cowboy hat and a toothbrush. They planned to test the items for DNA.

In February, Barrett and Coyne filed a state post-conviction petition with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. It included an affidavit from Beattie recounting Glen’s “confessions” and explaining why she had never come forward before. “I was too scared of Glen while he was alive to even consider revealing what he admitted to doing,” it read. The attorneys asked for a hearing on the new evidence.

Three weeks later, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a response. The office had obtained a blood sample from Glen through the medical examiner’s office, which was analyzed by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The DNA “does not match” the profile from the case, the bureau said. The results confirmed “what the state and the courts have already known for many years now,” Drummond wrote. Sanchez — and Sanchez alone — was responsible for murdering Busken.

Now 44, Sanchez is scheduled to die at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester on September 21. He has insisted on his innocence for almost 20 years. His pleas have been dismissed by prosecutors, the courts, and, according to Sanchez, his own attorneys, who have never been able to overcome the incriminating DNA. Earlier this year, Sanchez asked a federal judge to replace Barrett and Coyne with an attorney introduced to him by his spiritual adviser, Jeff Hood. After his motion was denied, Sanchez waived his clemency hearing. A month later, Barrett and Coyne withdrew from the case.

The state of Oklahoma maintains that its evidence against Sanchez was overwhelming. Prosecutors say he abducted Busken from her Norman apartment complex early on the morning of December 20, 1996. He forced her into her car and drove to Lake Stanley Draper, where he raped her and shot her in the back of the head. The case hinged on two critical pieces of evidence: DNA taken from sperm found on Busken’s underwear as well as a leotard left at the scene.

Sanchez has long contended that the DNA evidence must have been planted or manipulated. He blames his court-appointed lawyers for failing to defend him at his 2006 trial and accuses Barrett and Coyne of abandoning him. The allegations have been amplified by Hood and Death Penalty Action, which launched a Free Anthony Sanchez campaign earlier this year. The activists insist that Glen Sanchez, not his son, killed Busken. Over the summer they placed billboards from Norman to McAlester urging people to watch a short film they produced called “Evidence Unraveled.”

In a state where 10 people have been exonerated from death row, the risk of executing someone for a crime they did not commit is real. “It is undeniable that innocent people have been sentenced to death in Oklahoma,” a bipartisan commission on capital punishment found in 2017. Poor lawyering, a lack of funding for capital defense, and overzealous prosecutors have contributed to wrongful convictions in the state. Particularly disturbing is the sordid history of misconduct within the Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab, where a forensic chemist named Joyce Gilchrist was fired for manipulating evidence — including in death penalty cases. Although Gilchrist was not the analyst in Anthony Sanchez’s case, she was a supervisor during the time that evidence from the case was examined and stored.

There are good reasons to question the forensic evidence behind any criminal case from that era. Yet some of the activists’ claims do not withstand scrutiny. “Evidence Unraveled” downplays and mischaracterizes the DNA. Ballard, the private investigator, now a vocal advocate for Sanchez, insists that the evidence was contaminated based on the fact that the DNA profiles for Busken and Sanchez, who were unrelated, shared alleles: the pairs of genes that appear on a specific location on a chromosome. Veteran DNA scientist Laura Schile, the forensic analyst who blew the whistle on Gilchrist’s misconduct more than 20 years ago, rejects this as egregiously misinformed. Ballard is not a DNA expert, she points out. “It takes a lot of years to understand DNA. And people share alleles with other people.”

Schile is one of dozens of people I interviewed while probing Sanchez’s case. A monthslong investigation and review of the available record — including trial and hearing transcripts, appellate briefs, and portions of the case file — left me with more questions than answers. But it also revealed significant problems that are all too familiar in Oklahoma death penalty cases. Sanchez, who is part Mexican and Choctaw, was convicted by an all-white jury, a fact his attorneys did not challenge at trial. No witnesses were called on Sanchez’s behalf at the guilt phase. And despite several mitigating factors that could have moved jurors to spare his life — Sanchez had just turned 18 at the time of the crime and grew up amid violence, abuse, and addiction — his trial team did little to develop such evidence.

“DNA is an investigative tool. It is not an investigation in and of itself.”

In Oklahoma, these problems have been eclipsed by the debate over Sanchez’s innocence and controversy over the Free Anthony Sanchez campaign. Local abolitionists have publicly disavowed Hood and Death Penalty Action for their incendiary rhetoric against the attorney general and lawyers appointed to represent people on death row. Barrett and Coyne have denied that they abandoned Sanchez. They accuse Hood of turning their former client against them and persuading him to forgo clemency. Sanchez has maintained that the decisions were his alone. He accuses his former attorneys of sabotaging his case by refusing to turn over his case files — a collection of more than 50 boxes. Last week, a federal judge reversed a previous order denying Sanchez the files but refused to stay the execution to give Sanchez’s new attorney time to review them.

With his execution imminent, unanswered questions still linger over Sanchez’s case. Among them is what role, if any, his father had in the crime. Sanchez’s trial lawyers either declined to be interviewed or could not be reached for comment. But documents in the case file show that his defense team suspected Glen was the real murderer — even if the DNA suggested Sanchez sexually assaulted Busken.

Indeed, even if the DNA implicates Sanchez, it is not at all clear what actually happened on the day Busken was killed. The rest of the state’s case was assembled from flimsy circumstantial evidence that did little to connect Sanchez to the murder. “Nothing else adds up besides the DNA,” Barrett told me. “I can’t believe that for so long the prosecution convinced the courts there was some meaningful corroborating evidence.”

“DNA is an investigative tool,” Schile said. “It is not an investigation in and of itself.” Even in a cold case, it is incumbent on prosecutors to close evidentiary holes that surround it. To forensic DNA expert Tiffany Roy, a death penalty case that relies solely on DNA is a red flag. “If it’s just the DNA, and that’s all you have, then it isn’t enough,” she said. If you can’t go back and put the DNA in context to ensure it is proof of the alleged crime, then it is certainly not enough to justify an execution. “The chances that you’re going to get it wrong, for me, the risk is just too high.”

Juli Busken’s murder was any parent’s nightmare.

Five days before Christmas in 1996, Bud and Mary Jean Busken drove a U-Haul from Benton, Arkansas, to Norman to help their daughter pack up her apartment. Busken had studied ballet at the University of Oklahoma, most recently performing in “Swan Lake.” She finished a semester early and was accepted to the University of Arkansas for a graduate degree in elementary education. Busken planned to go home for the holidays, then return to Norman so she could walk across the graduation stage with her friends.

Busken lived in an apartment complex on East Lindsey Street, just east of campus. As her parents pulled up around 11:30 p.m., they expected to see her red 1991 Eagle Summit parked outside. But it wasn’t there. On the door of her apartment, Busken’s mother found a note that said to contact the University of Oklahoma Police Department.

At the station, the campus police chief told them Busken had been reported missing earlier that day. He also said there had been a body found at Lake Stanley Draper, a large recreation area 15 miles north of Norman. He asked the Buskens for a photo of their daughter, then stepped out of the room. When he returned, he broke the news. The body at the lake was Juli. She had died from a gunshot wound to the head.

News of the murder shocked the college community. Some 300 people attended Busken’s funeral, and a scholarship was swiftly established in her name. Meanwhile, multiple law enforcement agencies began investigating the crime, including both the Oklahoma City and Norman police departments, along with members of the university police, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI.

The overlapping efforts did not ensure all leads were followed. In the days after the murder, multiple tips to police were apparently missed, including calls from eyewitnesses who believed they saw Busken’s car on the morning she disappeared.

The last person to see Busken alive was her friend Megan Schreck, a fellow ballerina who spent the night with her on the eve of her death. Around 10 p.m., Schreck met Busken at a mutual friend’s apartment, where they exchanged Christmas gifts; Busken gave Schreck a pair of angel earrings. Busken planned to drive Schreck to the airport for an early flight the next morning, so the two decided to stay up all night, going out to eat around 2 a.m. They drove separate cars back to Schreck’s apartment, splitting up while Busken went to get gas.

Years after the case went cold, Schreck told a reporter that Busken seemed to take a long time filling up her car — and that she noticed a man’s name on Busken’s cellphone when she finally returned. For years Schreck wondered if this was important. When she was called as a witness at Sanchez’s trial, however, the name on the phone did not come up.

Instead, Schreck testified that Busken showed up with a cappuccino, then took a nap before heading to the airport before 5 a.m. “She drove me to the Delta check-in,” Shreck said. “She dropped me off and that was the last I saw of her.”

When a violent crime took place in Oklahoma County or its surroundings in 1996, the evidence went to the Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab. The lab had attracted good press over the years for its crop of forensic analysts — the “detectives behind the detectives,” as The Oklahoman put it. The year before Busken’s murder, the newspaper ran a flattering story about forensic analyst Joyce Gilchrist and two of her colleagues. “Criminals beware!” it read. “It’s getting harder and harder to go undetected.”

At the time, Gilchrist was in charge of opening the lab’s new DNA section. “We’ll be able to extract DNA from the root of one hair or a very small sample of semen or blood and establish a profile,” she told The Oklahoman. “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a single drop of blood will give us all the information we need.”

At first glance, there was plenty of potential forensic evidence in Busken’s case. Her unlocked car had been found at an apartment complex a block away from hers. There was reddish sand on the floorboard of the driver’s side. The car was messy, filled with papers, CDs, and a bunch of clothes, including pajama bottoms and multiple pairs of underwear. Half a dozen hairs were lifted from the car. Forty-nine latent fingerprints were found on the inside and outside.

At the autopsy, the medical examiner noted that Busken’s blue jeans were undone; her underwear was soiled and “slightly rolled down.” There was bruising on her thighs and labia and a small scrape on her anus. Her hands were bound behind her back “by a black shoestring ligature.” She had been shot at close range; a “significantly distorted” small caliber projectile was recovered from her skull. A ballistics analyst said it came from a .22.

Yet the murder weapon was never recovered. Neither were a number of key items: an opal ring belonging to Busken, as well as a radar detector, small stereo, and cellphone she kept in her car. Although phone records would provide critical clues — dozens of calls were made from the device following her murder — they did not lead to a suspect.

Evidence found at the lake was largely inconclusive. Shoe prints leading to the spot where Busken was found were not documented before the wind filled them with sand overnight, rendering them “useless,” as one evidence technician later testified. A discarded beer bottle and Coke can were examined for prints but yielded none.

Other items were disregarded, like a small purse found in some tall grass. It was red, with a square pattern that looked like a Native American design. “The sun kind of glimmered on it,” the sergeant who spotted it testified. “It was something that didn’t look like just some trash laying there.” The purse contained what appeared to be drug paraphernalia: a plastic-tipped cigar, two brass faucet screen aerators, and a pair of razor blades, along with a small jar of Carmex lip balm.

Authorities decided the purse had nothing to do with the case. But one item found a few feet away would prove vitally important: a crumpled pink dance leotard. It was marked with Busken’s initials, and according to a forensic analyst, it was stained with semen.

Police calls to Lake Stanley Draper were not particularly rare. With 34 miles of shoreline, the lake made an attractive place for illicit activity, from illegal dumping and drug use to more serious crimes. In 1980, at least eight women were reported to have been raped on the north side of the lake by a man dubbed the “Draper Raper.”

Not long after Busken’s murder, there was another attack at the lake. On the night of December 29, 1996, an 18-year-old woman was assaulted by a man in a 7-Eleven parking lot nearby. He forced her inside his car at knifepoint, “struck her in the face,” according to a police report, and drove to Draper Lake. He told her to “cooperate and you won’t get hurt,” ordered her to pull down her pants, and sodomized her.

The man was described as 6 feet tall and 180 pounds, between 31 and 35 years old. He had a medium complexion, medium build, and brown “short, shoulder length” hair. The victim briefly got ahold of the knife, according to the report; after struggling over the weapon, she managed to flee to the nearest building and call the police.

It’s not clear how much police probed a connection between the rape and Busken’s murder. But there are indications they tried to find a link. According to a report obtained by The Intercept, a detective submitted underwear and a vaginal swab from the rape case for DNA testing at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, or OSBI, on the same day that he submitted a cutting from Buskin’s leotard.

An OSBI analyst later reported DNA results in both cases. From Busken’s leotard, a complete male profile was found. From the underwear in the rape case, there were only partial results.

The rape case was never solved. In a phone call, the victim told me no one ever spoke to her following her initial report to police. She did not learn the results of the rape kit or whether it yielded any DNA. “Nobody ever contacted me afterwards to follow up,” she said.

Left/Top: A forensic sketch of the suspect in Juli Busken’s murder based on the eyewitness account of Kay Keller Merryman. Right/Bottom: A forensic sketch of the suspect based on the eyewitness account of David Kill. Credit: Oklahoma City Police Department

The Oklahoma City police released the first in a series of forensic sketches of a possible suspect in late January 1997. All of them came from drivers who had spotted a vehicle resembling Busken’s car — small and red, with Arkansas plates — on the morning of December 20. Residents of Busken’s apartment complex had said they heard a woman’s scream at around 5:30 a.m., followed by a door slamming and a man’s voice. Investigators concluded that Busken had been abducted, driven to the lake, raped, and murdered within two hours.

This time frame was based on the eyewitness account of David Kill, an aircraft mechanic at Tinker Air Force Base, just north of the lake. Kill told police that around 7 or 7:15 a.m., he was driving along the lake’s perimeter when a red car with Arkansas plates suddenly pulled out in front of him. The driver looked over at Kill, who decided to follow him, driving as fast as 80 miles an hour. Although it was still dark and he only saw the man from behind, Kill described him as roughly 23 years old, with collar-length, light brown hair and a medium complexion. There was nobody else in the car.

Kill gave his description to veteran law enforcement officer Harvey Pratt, who was Oklahoma’s only full-time forensic artist. Pratt was renowned for his skills, drawing countless composites in high-profile cases. The resulting sketch was heavily publicized, appearing on “America’s Most Wanted.”

Forensic sketches are highly fallible. They rely on the memory of an eyewitness, as well as the interpretation of a forensic artist with their own unconscious biases. As with any eyewitness account, the most accurate descriptions are likely to come soon after an event; the more time passes, the more memories can be distorted by new information. In Busken’s case, most eyewitnesses did not share their descriptions until months or even years after the murder.

With few apparent leads, however, police relied on the drawings to solicit tips. In March 1997, they released a second forensic sketch that bore little resemblance to the first. It came via a man who said he was driving in Norman around 6:30 a.m. on December 20 when he did a “lane dance” with a red car with Arkansas plates. A white woman with blonde hair was in the passenger seat. According to the police report, the witness sensed that the people in the car “had just finished arguing or fighting and were stewing in it.” The driver was white, in his mid-20s, with brown hair “about one inch long.”

A third man, John Henderson, contacted police in October. He had tried to call 10 months earlier, the day after Busken’s murder. But no one called back. Henderson worked at a water treatment plant on the grounds of Lake Stanley Draper. He said he was driving to work between 11:30 a.m. and noon when he saw a red car with Arkansas plates driving erratically. “The driver acted as if he was looking for some place to pull off the main street and stop,” Henderson said. There was a blonde woman in the passenger’s seat, but he could not see her face; she was hunched over in such a way that he thought she might be performing oral sex on the driver. The man was white with a dark complexion, Henderson said. He wore a military-style haircut and a black baseball cap.

Henderson’s account didn’t fit with the timeline the state later presented at trial. Although Busken’s body was not found until around 1 p.m., prosecutors argued that by 7:30 a.m., she had already been killed and left at the lake. Police spoke to Henderson twice; he led them to the location where he spotted the car. But he was not asked to help produce a forensic sketch. Instead, they asked him to submit blood and saliva samples. “They were never really interested in much of anything I had to say,” Henderson told me. He was not interviewed by Sanchez’s defense attorneys, despite his account casting doubt on the state’s version of events.

The last forensic sketch was not revealed until the fall of 1999. Like Henderson, Kay Keller Merryman had tried to come forward with information in December 1996 but never heard back from police. When they finally got in touch with her, she said she was on her way to work at Tinker Air Force Base early on the morning of the murder when she pulled up at a stop sign next to a red car that she would later see on the news. The car was making a right toward the southern part of the lake. The driver was a man between 25 and 30. He looked unkempt, with hollow cheeks, a “day or two’s worth of beard,” and long, dark hair. He wore a stocking cap and looked angry, Merryman said. A young blonde woman next to him looked scared.

According to the police report, Merryman said it was 6:37 a.m. when she pulled up next to the car. She remembered because she was planning to get to work early, and she had been checking her watch. Lead Detective John Maddox wrote that, according to Merryman’s account, the suspect would have had “just had enough time” to drive from the spot, “rape and execute the victim Busken, then leave the crime scene between 7:00-7:15 and be spotted by the witness David Kill.”

Busken’s case had gone cold by the time Cleveland County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall ran for reelection in 1998. The veteran prosecutor found himself embroiled in an ethics scandal over a memo he’d sent to the homes of his staff. “Every employee should be doing everything they can to see that I get reelected and their job is secure,” Kuykendall had written. Defense attorneys called the memo coercive; Kuykendall’s opponent called for him to resign. The Oklahoma Ethics Commission reprimanded Kuykendall, but by then, he had already been reelected.

In an interview with The Oklahoman, Kuykendall was ready to leave the scandal behind. He discussed his love of beans and cornbread over steak and his habit of keeping raccoons as pets. More importantly, he emphasized his “tremendous success” winning murder cases. “We have gotten seven death penalties, 15 life without paroles, and nine life sentences,” he said of the three counties he represented as district attorney. Kuykendall did not discuss the Busken case. But it was never far from his mind. “This is the case I think about every week,” he later told reporters.

Kuykendall’s tenure as district attorney coincided with the advent of forensic DNA analysis in Oklahoma. The OSBI opened its DNA lab in 1994, the year he was first elected. In 1998, the federal government launched the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which provided a national database of DNA profiles taken from people convicted of crimes.

Some experts sought to make clear that DNA was not a magic bullet. “We are not specifically identifying a person,” OSBI analyst Mary Long told The Oklahoman, explaining that results are expressed in terms of probabilities: the chance that an identical profile would appear in a given population. But such nuances were mostly lost on juries. As an expert witness on the stand, Long told me, it was important not to conflate the presence of DNA with the guilt of the defendant. “Unless you saw him do it, you don’t have any idea who did it,” she said.

From the earliest days of the Busken case, the one thing investigators had was DNA. In 1997, the OSBI used an early form of DNA typing that required a large sample of biological material. The pink leotard contained enough sperm for analysts to obtain a male profile using this method. Later, the OSBI analyzed the garment again using PCR testing, which is still in use today. The resulting male profile included alleles at 13 locations, or loci. If a suspect could be found whose profile corresponded with all 13 loci, it would be considered a match.

On March 20, 2000, Kuykendall held a press conference in Norman. He announced that he was filing charges of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, forcible sodomy, and kidnapping against a “John Doe” in the Busken case. In lieu of a name, there was a series of numbers and letters: the DNA profile found on the leotard.

Kuykendall acknowledged how unusual it was to file charges against an unnamed defendant. But he maintained that the evidence was strong enough for a murder charge, and the DNA would be the crux of the case. He hoped that the profile might produce a random hit in a DNA database.

In the meantime, the profile spurred detectives back into action. The Oklahoma City Police Department undertook a DNA dragnet, requesting blood and saliva samples from men in and around Norman. The sweep raised the concerns of civil libertarians. One criminal defense attorney criticized detectives for violating people’s right to privacy rather than doing a more thorough investigation. “Police are basically saying, ‘If we pop a needle into enough arms, we’re bound to get lucky sooner or later,” he told The Associated Press.

Bo Ireland, now an Oklahoma City pastor, was one of the many men who submitted to testing. He remembers being called to the OU campus to answer questions only to find himself surrounded by 75 to 100 others at the health center, all being asked for blood and saliva. “I was like, ‘Wait, What? … I thought you had to have a warrant for that.’” As he recalls, his reaction sparked the officers’ interest — “like, ‘Do we need to get a warrant?’” Like almost everyone else, Ireland agreed to give a sample.

Maddox, the lead detective, bluntly acknowledged that refusal would be viewed with suspicion. “For them not to cooperate with us,” he told CBS News, “it leaves an open end out there for us to look at.” Busken’s father told the media that he did not understand why someone would not willingly give their DNA. “If you don’t want to give your DNA, you have something to hide,” he said.

In the summer of 2004, Kuykendall finally got what he’d been waiting for. An OSBI letter to the Oklahoma City Police Department reported that an autosearch had been conducted of the CODIS database, seeking a match between a forensic item in the Busken case and a sample from a man named Anthony Sanchez. According to the letter, “a candidate match was obtained.”

Prosecutors in Kuykendall’s office were familiar with Sanchez. In 2001, he had been accused by an ex-girlfriend of rape. She told police that she had come home at 2 a.m. to find Sanchez in her living room, where he tied her up and assaulted her. Sanchez insisted it was a false allegation — and the rape charge was ultimately dropped. Sanchez pleaded guilty to burglary. But there was one detail that leapt out from the police report: The girlfriend said Sanchez had tied her up with shoelaces.

There is “no question that this is our guy,” Kuykendall told The Oklahoman.

Sanchez swore from the start that he was innocent. He said he had no idea how his DNA would have ended up at the scene, but he believed it could have been planted using evidence from the alleged rape. As he tells it, he had never heard Busken’s name until two detectives came to see him at the Lawton Correctional Facility, where he was incarcerated on the burglary charge. After he refused to speak without an attorney, he was escorted back to his cell. It was the prison guards who told him that he was a suspect in Busken’s murder.

Someone in Sanchez’s position had good reason to question forensic evidence that had been handled by the Oklahoma City Police Department lab. Just a few years earlier, the lab had been the center of a national scandal when Gilchrist, the lab’s supervisor, was revealed to have manipulated evidence in criminal cases, sending innocent people to prison. One man had already been exonerated and released after being wrongly imprisoned for rape.

The forensic analyst who blew the whistle on Gilchrist’s misconduct was Laura Schile, a DNA scientist who arrived at the lab in 2000 and took over from Gilchrist. Schile had worked with DNA at a cancer research center, then spent three years at the Texas Department of Public Safety. What she found at the OCPD lab was disturbing. “The evidence was scattered throughout the police department,” she later told the OCPD’s departmental review board. There were boxes in the hallway, in the lab itself, and in the old jail. “It was quite obvious that all of the evidence was being compromised, potentially compromised,” she said.

In the case of Jeffrey Todd Pierce, the man who was exonerated of rape, Schile found a box of evidence that also contained evidence from an unsolved homicide. The items were “loose and unsealed,” she wrote in a memo. “Trace evidence was being potentially mixed and evidence was being contaminated.” Gilchrist, she learned, had packaged the items together because she suspected that Pierce was responsible for both crimes.

“It looks like they killed someone who didn’t do it.”

Especially concerning was Gilchrist’s role in some two dozen death penalty convictions, including the case of Malcolm Rent Johnson. A Black man convicted by an all-white jury, he professed his innocence until his execution in early 2000. Schile later reexamined forensic slides in the case and found that, contrary to Gilchrist’s testimony at Johnson’s trial, they did not contain his sperm after all. Although prosecutors insisted the rest of the evidence against Johnson was strong, the case was full of holes. “It looks like they killed someone who didn’t do it,” a defense attorney who reviewed the evidence told The Associated Press.

Gilchrist was fired in 2001. Schile left the OCPD the same year, after getting the DNA lab up and running. She went to work for the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System as the organization’s first in-house forensic analyst. The office provided state-funded trial and appellate representation throughout Oklahoma. For defense attorneys who wanted to challenge forensic evidence in the wake of the Gilchrist scandal, there was no better resource. Schile knew what to look for; she helped with discovery requests, asking defense lawyers to get everything she would need to review forensic evidence, including chain of custody documents, testing methods, lab notes, and raw data. “I would have had no control whether they got it for me or not — that was often the problem,” she told me.

Court records show that Sanchez’s lawyers fought for almost a year to get the Cleveland County District Attorney’s Office to turn over materials related to the DNA evidence in his case. A private attorney who was initially hired by Sanchez’s family filed a motion for discovery in September 2004, only to leave the case a few weeks later because he was not being paid. Lawyers with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System took over. In August 2005, they wrote that while multiple labs had been involved in “the collection, storage, and/or analysis of evidence in this case,” the lawyers had yet to receive records documenting their work. “Thus far, the information provided has been limited, scant, and obviously incomplete.”

Sanchez had an additional reason to harbor suspicion about the DNA evidence. The earliest filings in the case show that defense attorneys were under the impression that there was only one piece of evidence containing Sanchez’s DNA — and it was so small that further testing would completely consume it. But later they learned that there were multiple items containing DNA. Nobody ever explained the discrepancy, according to Sanchez and his family. To them, the evidence seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The fight over discovery was ultimately resolved at a hearing on the DNA, where Sanchez’s defense team told the judge they had reached an agreement with the state. According to the trial transcript, Schile met with OCPD forensic analyst Melissa Keith, who had tested the leotard and other items in the recently opened DNA lab. They examined the evidence item by item, Keith testified. “I believe we spent the better part of a whole day.” Schile said this would be consistent with her job at the time. Although she has no specific recollection of reviewing the evidence, she confirmed that she received the necessary items from Keith prior to Sanchez’s trial. “I looked at this case,” Schile said. “I can say that I did not see any issues in the DNA testing.”

Sanchez came to mistrust his legal team. He was especially outraged upon learning that one of his attorneys — who later went to work for the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office — was a member of the same church Busken had attended in Norman.

Today, Sanchez has a term for loyalty he sees among the network of people in Norman’s legal community: the “Crimson blanket.” “They all stick together,” he told me. “It’s like a gang. The cops all go to OU, the judges go to OU.” Sanchez had been raised on the east side of town, which he described as “the ghetto side.” Growing up poor in Norman meant being outside of this powerful, insular world.

Sanchez was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1978. His father, Glen, who was part Choctaw, had grown up in a large Mexican family in Lampasas, Texas. His mother, Gloria Faulkner, who was Choctaw and Chickasaw, was raised in Ardmore. Glen and Faulkner separated around the time that Sanchez was born. Both had severe substance abuse problems; Faulkner was addicted to drugs, Sanchez said. “I think I was like 6 or 7 years old when her house got raided the first time,” he told me. He was hiding under some covers when it happened, and the cops mistook him for someone trying to evade arrest. “That was the first time police beat me up.”

Sanchez’s older sister Lujuana remembers trying to protect him from their father as a child. “I tried to get him to run away with me,” she said. “Today it’s called abuse, but Daddy was just trying to make him tough.” At Sanchez’s trial, his grandmother recalled seeing Glen hit Sanchez in the chest when he was just 2 years old. “I said, no, you’ll make his heart fibrillate doing that,” she testified. But Glen responded that it would toughen him up.

“Today it’s called abuse, but Daddy was just trying to make him tough.”

When Sanchez was young, Faulkner suffered a disfiguring burn. Glen told Sanchez that his mother had been cooking meth. But Lujuana said that she had been burned by a man she’d gotten together with after the divorce. “Anthony was told that she was making drugs. And she wasn’t. She was trying to get away from an abusive relationship.” Sanchez remembers visiting Faulkner in the hospital and running away when he saw her. “She looked like Freddy Krueger,” he told me. “That’s how bad she was burned.”

Documents in Sanchez’s appellate file show that, according to family members, Glen tried to turn his son against Faulkner, taking him to live with Glen’s new wife, Cathy Hodge, when Sanchez was about 18 months old. According to Hodge, Glen wanted to save Sanchez from an unsuitable environment. But their own home life soon became violent.

“He was fine whenever he wasn’t drinking,” Hodge said about Glen. On weekends he would get drunk and beat her. During one particularly violent attack, Hodge tried to hide in a closet, but Glen found her; Sanchez yelled at his father to leave Hodge alone. Nonetheless, Hodge remembers Sanchez as a mostly happy kid. She showed me childhood photos of Sanchez wearing orange floaties in a swimming pool, sitting on Santa’s lap, and posing in a school football uniform. “The only time that I’d seen [Glen] really being ugly with Anthony was when he was trying to protect me,” she said.

Another one of Glen’s ex-wives remembers him treating Sanchez as “his golden boy.” But Beattie, Glen’s longtime girlfriend, said he “beat the crap out of Anthony.” As she described it, Glen was confident that Sanchez wouldn’t tell anyone.

According to his friends, Sanchez did not talk about his relationship with his dad. Adam Sheets, who knew Sanchez as a teenager, remembers Glen as a “mean, nasty” man who “talked to Anthony like he was a piece of shit.” Sanchez seemed to fear his father while also seeking his approval.

“I saw Anthony pretty much every day of my whole adolescent life,” said Kristina Bryan, Sanchez’s best friend. “We would just like hang out, smoke weed together. … I mean stupid teenage stuff.” Glen was clearly abusive, she said — he even pointed a gun at her once, which her mother also remembers. Bryan and Sanchez later had a temporary falling out over Sanchez’s drug use. As she recalls, he was doing crank, which “was changing who he was.” During a heart-to-heart, he opened up about physical abuse inflicted by his father. But that was the only time Bryan could remember him talking about it.

Hodge finally left Glen for good when Sanchez was about 15. That’s when Sanchez’s run-ins with police seemed to start. “I don’t know if he just didn’t have a family life,” she said. “I think he was just running the streets.” Before that, she said he was often followed in stores and wrongly suspected of crimes based on his ethnicity. One neighbor accused him of breaking into her house when he was actually in school. “She didn’t like them because they were Hispanic,” Hodge said.

The population of Norman was almost entirely white in the years Sanchez grew up there. As late as 1967, it was a sundown town: Black people were explicitly prohibited from staying out after dark under threat of violence. As Norman became more diverse in the early 1990s, racist backlash followed; The Oklahoman reported a rise in racist graffiti and police harassment of nonwhite residents.

Sanchez remembers facing plenty of racism growing up in Norman. “People would tell me to go back to my country, go back where I was from,” he said. He doesn’t remember it affecting him all that much. Most of his friends in Norman were Native American, he said. It was harder to feel like he didn’t fit neatly in either community. “If you’re not fully bilingual, you’re not Mexican,” he said. “If you don’t speak Choctaw, you’re not Choctaw.”

But facing a murder trial in Norman was a wake-up call. “It was all white people, even in the audience,” he said.

Sanchez’s trial began on January 30, 2006, at the Cleveland County District Court in downtown Norman. Media and spectators filled the gallery, including at least one local celebrity, famed football coach Barry Switzer, who attended almost every day. There was a heavy security presence; Sanchez remained shackled throughout. The Court of Criminal Appeals later found that the shackling was illegal but it would not have changed the outcome.

The jury was all white, which did not seem to faze Sanchez’s lawyers or the presiding judge. In a post-trial questionnaire, the judge acknowledged that there were no Hispanic or Native American people on the jury but said Sanchez’s attorneys had not objected. Asked if jurors had been instructed to “exclude race as an issue,” the judge answered only with a question mark.

Hodge brought a suit for Sanchez to wear but was barred from giving it to him. Along with the rest of his family, she was prevented from watching most of the proceedings. “We went and sat at restaurants or sat outside,” she said. She was distressed to realize that the lawyers did not plan to call anyone at the guilt phase of the trial. Like another person close to Sanchez I interviewed, Hodge said the lead attorney, Silas Lyman, told them that his goal was not to prove Sanchez’s innocence but to keep him off death row. Lyman declined to be interviewed about the case.

Representing the state was Assistant District Attorney Richard Sitzman, a veteran of the office who had been prosecuting homicides since the 1980s. As he described it, he did not want to rely too heavily on the DNA. “There are some people who think that DNA is hocus pocus,” he told me. “So it was very important to me and to the police department to prove this case without the DNA.”

“Evil sits right here in front of you today. And it’s Anthony Castillo Sanchez.”

In his opening, Sitzman emphasized how long it had been since Busken’s was killed. “Nine years, one month, and about 16 days,” he said. “That’s how long I’ve been waiting to tell you this story.” He told the tale of a ballerina with a bright future whose life was violently cut short. But instead of explaining how the crime took place, Sitzman described how DNA had finally identified the killer years later. “I call him ‘the cold hit guy,’” Sitzman said. “And the DNA is going to tell you what it’s told the rest of us, and that is that evil sits right here in front of you today. And it’s Anthony Castillo Sanchez.”

Despite Sitzman’s claims about proving the case without DNA, the additional evidence implicating Sanchez was elusive. One of Busken’s neighbors described hearing the scream at 5:30 a.m. on December 20, followed by a man’s voice saying, “Shut up and get in the car.” The state theorized that Sanchez was breaking into cars when he spotted Busken returning from the airport. But there was nothing placing him at her apartment complex that morning. Merryman, the eyewitness who told police she saw a blonde woman looking scared in the passenger seat of a red car, was not asked to identify Sanchez from the stand. Neither was Kill, the eyewitness who testified that a red car had cut him off later that morning. Of the 49 fingerprints found on the car, none of them matched Sanchez.

An acquaintance of Sanchez’s who allegedly told police he’d once seen Sanchez with a .22 caliber pistol testified that it was actually a .25. “I felt like they were wanting me to say something that didn’t happen,” the man told me, adding that he didn’t believe Sanchez had killed Busken. Sanchez’s former landlord testified that, after police tore apart the walls of Sanchez’s old apartment in search of a .22-caliber projectile, the landlord discovered a slug in the debris. Yet there was nothing directly linking it to Sanchez. His ex-girlfriend, Christin Martin Setzer, testified that Glen, not Sanchez, had shot bullets into the wall. “Glen was drunk, and Anthony made me stay in the bedroom,” she said.

Nor was there much linking Sanchez to the slew of numbers found in Busken’s cellphone records in the days after the murder. Prosecutors called a man whose phone number was on the list, but he testified that he did not know Sanchez or Busken — he couldn’t say why his phone would have been called by the killer. There was one compelling piece of circumstantial evidence pointing at Sanchez, however: an old day planner belonging to Setzer, in which she had listed the phone numbers of friends in their social circle. One of them was Melanie Crain, who had dated Sanchez. The number under her name matched one of the numbers in the phone records.

“I hadn’t spoken with Anthony in years by the point that he would have called that number.”

Crain now goes by Melanie Thompson. She remembers being bewildered when detectives contacted her to say that her number had shown up in the records. But she also said that the number in question was no longer hers in December 1996, which made her doubt that the person who used the phone was trying to reach her. When detectives contacted her again to say that the DNA matched Sanchez, “I was really confused,” she said. “Because I hadn’t spoken with Anthony in years by the point that he would have called that number.”

Of all the pieces of circumstantial evidence presented at trial, Sanchez is perhaps most adamant about debunking one: shoe prints found at the scene that investigators ostensibly linked to a pair of Nike sneakers he owned. For years Sanchez has argued that, according to the state, the prints were left by a man who wore a size 9. “I wear a size 11 1/2 wide and have since I was 12 or 13,” he told me.

There were other reasons why the shoe-print evidence was absurd on its face. OCPD officers testified that sand had blown into the prints on the lakeshore, making them impossible to examine. This was clear from a crime scene photograph entered into evidence, which captured a barely discernible shoe print with a vaguely waffle-patterned sole. Even if the print had been left by the killer, there was no way to determine which specific shoe had created the print — and the state did not call a footprint examiner to try.

Instead, OCPD detectives described how a pair of colleagues had taken the photograph of the print to local stores and compared the sole to athletic shoes in stock. “They believed it to be a Nike Max Air 2,” Maddox, the lead detective, testified.

Investigators contacted the Nike corporation and requested an overlay of the shoe model, which was presented to jurors. The visual insinuated a match between the shoe print and the Nike Air Max 2. Prosecutors then utilized Setzer’s planner to show that Sanchez had purchased a pair of Nikes in the months leading up to the murder. In bubbly handwriting on October 14, 1996, Setzer, who was pregnant at the time, wrote that Sanchez had given her a necklace, a baby bed, and a pair of Nikes. “He got matching shoes but boy style,” the planner read.

The link was tenuous. In an interview with detectives, Setzer was shown a photo of a pair of Nike Air Max shoes. “I can’t say they were identical,” she testified.

Left/Top: The Nike Air Max Tailwind, pictured, which had the same sole as the Air Max 2, was shown to jurors at Anthony Sanchez’s 2006 trial. Right/Bottom: A shoe print believed to belong to the man who killed Juli Busken found on the shore of Lake Stanley Draper on Dec. 20, 1996. Detectives said the print was unusable but claimed to match it to a Nike Air Max 2. Credit: Courtesy of Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office

The strength of the shoe-print evidence became strikingly distorted in the years after the trial. Sitzman remembers the prints at the lake as being “pristine.” Kuykendall, the district attorney, has attributed the match to the Nike corporation itself, claiming in a “Forensics Files” episode that “they were able to identify the specific shoe that they believed made this impression in the sand.”

The star witness for the state was Melissa Keith, the DNA manager for the biology unit of the OCPD lab, who laid out her handling of the leotard. “In 1996, when I originally received this item, I examined it. I marked areas for testing,” she said. When she found sperm on the leotard, she sent it for DNA testing at the OSBI. Later, she did DNA testing on the leotard and other items herself. She got a complete male profile from the leotard and the underwear. Sitzman asked her to go through the profile step by step for the jury. The results were decisive. The profile and the reference sample from Sanchez “were found to be the same at all loci tested.”

“If I find a sample to be consistent with a certain person, I can then take that DNA profile, put it into a program called population statistics, and calculate how, let’s say, rare that profile would be,” Keith testified. The probability of finding another donor with exactly the same DNA profile as Sanchez was 1 in 200 quadrillion Caucasians, 1 in 20 quintillion African Americans, and 1 in 94 quadrillion Southwest Hispanics, she said.

On February 15, 2006, Sanchez was convicted on all counts. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to die.

It wasn’t long after Sanchez was sent to death row that his aunt had an odd interaction with her brother, Glen, who came by her house while she was watching TV. “Out of the clear blue sky he said, ‘I might be a woman beater and a drunk, but I’m not a killer,’” she said. “And I thought, ‘Why would he say that?’”

Another time, he pulled up in his truck while she was smoking a cigarette. She can’t remember exactly when. But he gave her a black beanie-style hat and said something like, “Here, you do something with this.” Although his son’s trial was over, Glen seemed concerned that he might still be targeted as a suspect. “Before I know it, they’ll be trying to pin that on me,” his sister remembered him saying.

“Before I know it, they’ll be trying to pin that on me.”

Glen was not wrong to think he was suspected of being involved. Documents in the case file show that Sanchez’s trial lawyers believed that Glen might have been the real killer. Even if the DNA showed that Sanchez had sexually assaulted Busken, there was no real proof that he was the one who shot her. At least one of the crime scene photos also showed what appeared to be a print from a cowboy boot in the sand; Glen was known to wear cowboy boots.

Unlike the vast majority of men questioned by Oklahoma City police, Glen was not asked to give blood or saliva samples. During an interview in 2004, he was evasive and “difficult,” according to a police report. He couldn’t answer basic details about his son’s life, such as where he’d gone to high school or where he was living around Christmas 1996. When he was told about the DNA evidence implicating Sanchez, Glen got agitated, suggesting this was another false accusation, like the one by his son’s ex-girlfriend — “just because of a woman’s loud mouth, a lie.”

According to Glen, “Anthony wasn’t capable of killing at 17 or 18 years old,” the detective wrote. When he asked Glen if he ever went fishing with his son at Lake Stanley Draper, Glen said, “I think so.” The location he gave caught the detective’s attention. It was on the lake’s south side, “just west of the location where the body of Jewell Busken was located.”

According to Sitzman, Glen was investigated alongside the rest of his son’s friends and acquaintances. “I’m not aware of anything that ever raised him to the level of suspect or even a person of interest,” he said. Despite the trial lawyers’ suspicions, it is unclear how thoroughly the legal team investigated the theory. A defense investigator’s memo shows that Glen was interviewed only once before Sanchez’s trial. “After that, he has refused to talk to anyone on the defense team,” the investigator wrote. “Glen is paranoid, does not trust lawyers, cops, or white people.”

Nevertheless, Sanchez’s appellate lawyers argued that evidence of the murder pointed more directly at Glen than his son. To support the argument, they cited the forensic sketch based on Merryman’s account. In Sanchez’s direct appeal, his lawyers noted that Merryman had described the driver as older than the 21-year-old Busken. “Sanchez had just turned 18 at the time and looked quite young,” the lawyers wrote. The state’s own timeline also suggested that Busken was not raped at the lake. There was too much time between her apparent abduction at 5:30 a.m. and Merryman’s sighting well over an hour later. It was more likely that she had been taken to “some other location,” which opened up the possibility that someone else — possibly Glen — had driven Busken to the lake.

“I wish you could look into my eyes and see what I saw because it’s indelibly etched in my mind.”

If his lawyers’ theory cleared Sanchez of murder, it did not offer much proof against his father. What’s more, although the lawyers argued that the evidence was insufficient to convict Sanchez of first-degree rape, they conceded the “presence of what appears to be his DNA at the crime scene.” In a letter after his direct appeal was rejected, Sanchez assailed his attorney for arguing that his father had killed Busken. “What kind of demented lawyer are you?” he wrote. “I feel that you have done your best to help seal my fate at death.” The attorney replied that he had done his best under the circumstances. “The one fact that could not be overcome in your case was the fact that your semen was present at the crime scene.” He reminded Sanchez that they tested his DNA themselves, and the results were the same. “You wish to ignore this aspect of your case, but wishing it away won’t make it so.”

Sanchez’s advocates have continued to use the sketch based on Merryman’s account. It is prominently displayed by the Free Anthony Sanchez campaign — and it’s easy to see why. The drawing shows a man of possible Indigenous ancestry, who looks quite a bit older than 18. With long black hair, the man in the drawing bears a striking resemblance to Glen.

Yet Merryman remembers being frustrated by the sketch. In a phone call, she told me that the forensic drawing didn’t look much like the man she saw. “I said to the artist, ‘I wish you could look into my eyes and see what I saw because it’s indelibly etched in my mind. I don’t seem to be able to convey it to you,’” she said. Today she believes that the man was Sanchez and the frightened woman was Busken. “I couldn’t understand why she didn’t attempt to notify me or say help or something,” Merryman said. “It weighs on me to this very day.”

In November 2010, Sanchez was appointed a new attorney to challenge his conviction in federal court: veteran post-conviction lawyer Mark Barrett. In many ways, Barrett seemed ideally suited to litigate Sanchez’s innocence claim: He had helped exonerate two different clients from death row, including Ron Williamson, whose story was later immortalized by John Grisham in “The Innocent Man.”

Barrett was joined by Randall Coyne, a University of Oklahoma law professor and seasoned capital defense attorney who had been part of the legal team that defended Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Like Barrett, Coyne had a heavy workload; when he entered his appearance in Sanchez’s case in June 2011, he was facing deadlines for the fourth edition of his reference book, “Capital Punishment and the Judicial Process,” while also editing a professional journal covering death penalty trends.

Sanchez was hopeful about his new attorneys at first. In a letter to Coyne, he wrote that he and Barrett were the first lawyers to listen to what he had to say. “All of my other lawyers always say, ‘There is DNA, you did it, nothing else matters.’” Still, Sanchez admitted that he was leery of Coyne given his affiliation with the university. Sanchez asked him to answer questions, including “Where do you go to church?” In a P.S. Sanchez wrote, “For what it’s worth, I am innocent!”

Barrett remembers getting along well with Sanchez in the beginning. “He clearly was a person that had had a rough life in some ways but still wasn’t all that hardened,” he said. Given his age at the time of the crime, Sanchez was “barely eligible for the death penalty,” he said. Yet the state had gone out of its way to make him into a monster. “He was sentenced on 6/6/06,” Barrett said. “I’m almost certain they did that on purpose.”

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Intercepted

Like any federal habeas lawyer in Oklahoma, Barrett was hamstrung by the work of Sanchez’s previous appellate attorneys, who themselves faced daunting procedural hurdles. In most death penalty states, a direct appeal and state post-conviction proceedings are two distinct phases of a capital case. When a direct appeal is denied, a person on death row has a couple of months to a year before their state post-conviction appeal is due. This is critical because the latter is the first opportunity for an appellate lawyer to investigate and present evidence outside of the trial record. When it comes to arguing that a client received ineffective assistance of counsel, often the most viable path to relief, an investigation is usually the best way to reveal a trial lawyer’s failures.

But in Oklahoma, the direct appeal and state post-conviction proceedings happen simultaneously. What’s more, the Court of Criminal Appeals has held that a claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel must be raised on direct appeal. The practical effect is to prevent appellate lawyers from uncovering evidence that could have been presented at trial. “At the point we come in, if it wasn’t brought up by the lawyers ahead of us, it’s pretty much unusable by us,” Barrett said.

“There has to be another way that this has happened.”

Barrett and Coyne sought to build on the argument that there were alternate suspects. They met with Sanchez’s stepmother, Cathy Hodge, who shared documents that pointed to other potential perpetrators. “There has to be another way that this has happened,” she wrote. “I truly believe that Anthony is innocent.”

Among the documents were two letters from a man named Rocky Dodd, who was on death row when Sanchez arrived in McAlester. The two had known each other in Norman. The letters said that Dodd had spoken with his younger brother Shaun, who had information that Sanchez might be able to use. Around the time of Busken’s murder, Shaun said, two men named Tony and Scott showed up at his mother’s house looking nervous and “in a hurry to get out of town.” They asked Shaun to go to Tennessee with them and he did. There, Tony pawned a number of items, although Shaun did not know what they were. But he suspected the items might have belonged to Busken.

The Tony in question was Tony Reynolds, an acquaintance of Sanchez’s who had been identified by police as a “person of interest” in the Busken case. He had a long rap sheet and lived with his girlfriend in the apartment complex where Busken lived. They moved out shortly after the murder. An OCPD detective testified at trial that Reynolds had answered questions over the phone from Tennessee. Maddox, the lead detective, said they obtained DNA from Reynolds. But rumors persisted long after the trial that Reynolds was involved — and that he had pawned Busken’s opal ring and other belongings after leaving the state.

Dodd said it was possible that Shaun knew more than he’d shared in their phone conversation, which took place over the prison’s monitored line. “Are you wanting to have an investigator talk to Shaun?” Dodd asked Sanchez. “Just let me know and we can get it arranged.”

Barrett and Coyne filed a motion in federal court seeking an investigator. They planned to argue in Sanchez’s federal habeas petition that his trial attorneys had provided ineffective representation by failing to present any proof of his innocence, even though there was evidence pointing to alternate suspects. They also wanted to show that the trial attorneys failed to uncover “substantial mitigating evidence” that could have spared Sanchez a death sentence. Although the trial lawyers called some witnesses during the sentencing stage, they presented a limited view of the abuse and trauma Sanchez experienced as a child.

At the time of Sanchez’s trial, the American Bar Association had developed specific guidelines defining the importance of mitigation. Today, capital cases involve mitigation specialists — people trained to investigate a defendant’s family history to shed light on things like generational trauma, addiction, and violence. But Sanchez’s trial team did not include such a person. Family members mistrusted the lawyers; although a defense investigator interviewed Faulkner, Sanchez’s biological mother, she was “unable to provide the kind of testimony we needed,” according to a subsequent memo. Faulkner then asked to be released from her subpoena and threatened that if she wasn’t, she would “go to the DA and testify for their side.”

Federal District Judge Joe Heaton denied the motion for an investigator. Barrett and Coyne had failed to show why that was necessary, he wrote. Besides, the U.S. Supreme Court had recently decided a case that further restricted the right of petitioners to present new evidence in federal court. In light of this ruling, an investigator would “fail to serve any purpose.”

The lawyers’ resulting petition challenging Sanchez’s conviction was thin, largely reiterating points made by his previous attorneys. There was no new mitigation evidence or evidence pointing to different potential perpetrators. Although the petition mentioned Reynolds by name, it did not explain who he was or why he should have been investigated in the first place.

The following year, Sanchez’s petition was denied.

I first traveled to Oklahoma in January. At that time, Sanchez was set to be executed in April. But Drummond, the attorney general, asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to slow down the state’s frenzied execution schedule. After news broke that Sanchez’s date had been pushed to September, I wrote to get his reaction. He told me I was the first to share the news. He did not hear from his attorneys often.

At the time, Barrett and Coyne were still collaborating with Hood, Sanchez’s spiritual adviser. But after the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the state post-conviction petition containing the affidavit from Beattie, Glen’s longtime girlfriend, the relationships fell apart. Sanchez and his family sided firmly with Hood. If not for his activism, they told me, no one would know about Sanchez’s case.

Much of my time in Norman was spent seeking records in the case. Some were at the Cleveland County Courthouse. Others were stored in dozens of boxes at Barrett’s office. Among the documents I hoped to review were the police reports, which the OCPD would not release, and additional records related to forensic testing. Barrett did not share them. Over time, our conversations gave me the sense that their contents would not necessarily help Sanchez’s case.

One of the questions I wanted to answer was not about Sanchez but about Busken. A woman who briefly worked as a defense investigator for Sanchez’s original trial attorney told me that she had uncovered evidence that Busken was involved in dealing drugs. She had found multiple witnesses who could testify to this. The red purse found at the lake was almost certainly Busken’s, she said.

The woman said she’d given all her materials to the trial lawyers with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System. But they did not use what she found. This didn’t surprise her. Although presenting such evidence could have undermined the state’s case, it also could have backfired. “We go from this innocent ballerina OU student that does no wrong to ‘Oh my god, she’s into drugs,’” she said. It would have looked like they were attacking the victim.

Ryan James, a close friend of Busken’s, was the first to report her missing when she failed to meet him for a lunch date on December 20, 1996. James rejected the notion that Busken was dealing drugs. “She was the furthest thing from anything to do with any kind of drugs or alcohol,” he said. Barrett’s recollection was that Busken “was supposed to be a super clean, strait-laced lady.” He didn’t remember evidence pertaining to drugs, but he conceded that it could have been pursued by the trial lawyers if it offered an alternate theory of the crime. “If it helps the client, you have to use it, but you have to be very careful in how you use it.”

Documents in the case file show that at one point, Sanchez said Busken looked like a drug dealer he knew. When I asked Sanchez about this, he said he had no recollection of it. As for Reynolds, Sanchez said the two did not get along, but he did not know whether he was involved in Busken’s murder. “There’s a lot of people who say that he was bragging about it, but I don’t know,” Sanchez said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Reynolds did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.

In the months I spent investigating the case, I was struck by the number of people who believed Sanchez was innocent. Most of his friends and family members said that he was not capable of murder but his father definitely was. Still, many found it hard to believe that Glen would have allowed his son to be executed for a crime he himself committed. And they balked at some of the wild claims made by the activists, like the open speculation that Glen might have been a serial killer.

I also came to wonder what, exactly, Glen told Beattie before he died. In our conversation, she described more insinuations than confessions. But the more she spoke publicly, the more detailed and vivid her accounts became. With no other direct proof of Glen’s involvement, it was impossible to conclude that he was responsible for the crime. But as in so many cases I’ve written about, it also seemed clear that Sanchez was profoundly shaped by his father in ways that led him to death row.

When I first asked Sanchez how he felt when the attorney general’s office released Glen’s DNA results in February, he said he felt “relieved.” He didn’t want his father implicated in the crime. “Don’t get me wrong, I know my dad had his flaws,” he said. “But if he wasn’t drinking, he was a really actually good guy.” Glen’s alcoholism made him act “like an idiot,” Sanchez said. “He was very violent.” But Sanchez had also been accustomed to it from an early age. “I mean, that’s my dad … that’s what I grew up knowing. I didn’t know no different.”

On September 13, the day before Sanchez was transferred to death watch, he went outside for the last time. He had already given away his belongings — mostly clothes and art supplies he used to send paintings and cards to his family over the years. Now he just had to pack up his cell, including the photos that decorated the wall. “I have a lot of family photos,” he said. “I have my three kids. I have my grandbabies. I have my mom, my dad.”

It was a beautiful day in McAlester, he told me. It had been nice to see other people, even if he could only talk to them inside a cage. The recreation yard looked like a “dog pound,” he said, but he was used to it. He’d been at McAlester for almost his whole adult life. “I know a lot of people in prison,” he said. Some of them were pretty cool. But “if I was to get out today, I would not take none of these people home.”

For a man so close to execution, Sanchez sounded calm, if not particularly hopeful. There had been a hearing in Oklahoma City earlier that day about the boxes of files in Sanchez’s case. Heaton, the same judge who denied him an investigator in 2011, had agreed to allow Sanchez’s new attorney access to the records. But he also denied a request for a stay of execution. There was no way the lawyer would have time to go through the boxes before Sanchez was scheduled to die.

Sanchez was looking forward to a visit from Hodge. She was supposed to bring one of his daughters and a grandchild he’d never met. But he refused to put any family or friends on the witness list for his execution: “I don’t want this being the last vision of me for people that I love.”

We talked about what he might say when it came time for his last words. He said he wanted to acknowledge the Buskens. The worst thing about his decades on death row was that it kept him away from his children, he said. The Buskens had lost their child too. “What happened to their daughter was a tragedy. It should have never happened. And if this is what they need to feel closure, then I hope it helps.” Still, he said, “I didn’t kill Juli Busken.”

Now he mostly seemed to want to shut out the world. For the past few weeks, he’d been watching movies on his tablet. “I can put my earphones in and turn it all the way up and I don’t hear nothing.” He’d watched the “Lord of the Rings” series and “The Fast and the Furious.” And he’d watched “Harry Potter,” but he didn’t like it. “I don’t believe in magic like that.”

The post DNA Evidence Sent Anthony Sanchez to Death Row. But Did It Actually Solve the Crime? appeared first on The Intercept.

It was still dark outside when Umar Khalid sat down to make the farewell video. He had stayed up all night at a close friend’s apartment, where he had just celebrated his 33rd birthday, blowing out candles and cutting a chocolate cake. Now he sat on the couch stiff with tension, dark circles under his eyes, his face tinged a sickly yellow. He had been smoking nonstop for hours and eaten so little that he was feeling unwell. His friend was seated on the ground nearby, his phone ready to record.

“If you’re watching this video,” Khalid said, “it means that I’ve been arrested.”

It was September 2020, on a hot, stuffy morning in Delhi. Seven months earlier, in late February, a wave of sectarian violence had ripped through the Indian capital. Amid mass demonstrations against a restrictive citizenship law that targeted Muslims, a mob goaded by a local leader clashed with Muslims in the area. Over the next four days, violence swept through predominantly Muslim neighborhoods; at least 53 people were killed and 14 mosques gutted.

The timing was noteworthy: U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the day after the riots erupted. While Trump and Modi hugged and lavished each other with praise, Delhi’s northeastern district burned.

As the violence unspooled, Khalid was halfway across the country in the eastern state of Bihar. He was headlining a protest where he told the audience seated cross-legged before him that many Hindu supremacists “have nurtured the dream that Muslims will leave the country, that they will go to Pakistan.”

“They have spread hate to make it happen. They have nothing but hate. But we will respond with love,” he said. “They are trying to provoke us. They are trying to start a riot. They are saying, ‘Shoot them.’ What are we saying? We are saying, ‘There is no better place in the world than India.’”

The secular activist rose to national prominence giving powerful speeches criticizing Modi and his far-right political party for leading a campaign of repression previously unseen in independent India. Khalid has compared Modi to India’s British colonizers, whose centuries-long stranglehold was enabled by policies that pitted religious and ethnic groups against each other, fueling mutual suspicion and resentment. A target of the Modi government since he was a university student, Khalid was now among the leaders of a broad-based movement that had emerged to protest the prime minister’s anti-Muslim policies — and the government was eager to squash its momentum.

Khalid was among the leaders of a broad-based movement that had emerged to protest Modi’s anti-Muslim policies — and the government was eager to squash its momentum.

In March, Amit Malviya, the social media chief of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, tweeted a video of a speech Khalid had given ahead of Trump’s visit in which he urged protesters to fill the streets and tell the U.S. president that Modi was dividing India and mocking Gandhian values of nonviolence. Malviya described Khalid’s audience as “largely Muslim.”

“Was the violence in Delhi planned weeks in advance by the Tukde Tukde gang?” he wrote on Twitter, using a pejorative to refer to the BJP’s political critics. This single tweet was turned from a question into a statement and reported as fact by cable news channels aligned with Modi. It soon became the basis for accusing Khalid of masterminding the riots.

The Covid-19 outbreak and the government’s nationwide lockdown forced an end to the demonstrations, as well as Khalid’s speeches at protest sites. Exhausted, Khalid and his partner of 10 years, Banojyotsna Lahiri, went to visit her family and unwind.

In April, while Indians were ordered to stay in their homes, the Delhi police began arresting student leaders and activists who had participated in the citizenship protests, charging over a dozen high-profile activists with a slew of offenses, including murder, sedition, and, not long after, terrorism. News of the arrests put Khalid on edge. Lahiri recalled, “There was crazy tension in the air.”

In August, Khalid received a phone call from the Delhi police. The summons was couched as a request for help with the police’s investigation into the riots, but Khalid knew his turn had come.

Over the next few weeks, Khalid was called in twice for questioning. He knew the interrogations weren’t intended to establish the facts; they were a sham to make it seem as if the officials were doing their job. He was fully aware of how this would end.

He decided to record the video, telling his close friend to release it at a press conference when the police finally made their move.

“They are silencing me,” Khalid said, staring into the smartphone camera. “They are putting me behind bars. But they also want to imprison you — with lies. They want to frighten you into silence. I’d like to end with an appeal: Don’t be afraid. Raise your voice up against injustice.”

Three days later, on September 13, the police called Khalid to the office of the city’s counterterrorism unit. This time, they didn’t let him leave. Nearly three years on, he remains in jail without a trial date.

The Modi government has made a habit of hounding anyone who criticizes the prime minister’s efforts to transform the world’s largest democracy into a majoritarian police state. Since Modi came to power in 2014, his government has wielded the law to target every kind of critic on every platform, from students expressing opinions on social media to human rights activists investigating atrocities. In March 2023, a court in Gujarat — where Modi was born and had a long political career before becoming prime minister — convicted the leader of India’s main opposition party, Rahul Gandhi, of defaming Modi. The decision led to Gandhi’s disqualification as a member of Parliament and jeopardized his eligibility to contest Modi in national elections next year. Though the Indian Supreme Court has since suspended the conviction, the move was the clearest sign yet that India is now an elected autocracy.

Two decades-old laws have been Modi’s favorites for suppressing dissent and removing his critics from public life: the colonial-era sedition law and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a so-called anti-terror law. Khalid is among the few Indians who have been charged under both.

Between 2014 and 2020, more than 7,000 people were charged with sedition, according to a database published by Indian news site Article 14. The UAPA accounted for more than 8,000 arrests between 2015 and 2020, according to a study by the Indian human rights nonprofit People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

“These laws were already on the books — what we are seeing now is malice,” said journalist Aakar Patel. “This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

“This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

When I visited Delhi late last year, even mere conversations about the state — or “the regime,” as many called the Modi government — were steeped in fear. People wanted to communicate with me through secure messaging apps. When we met, it was at places such as a park at dusk, where they could not be recognized or overheard. A transcriptionist based in India later declined to work on this piece for fear of being implicated in journalism that was critical of the government. The culture of pluralistic debate that inspired economist Amartya Sen to coin the term “the argumentative Indian” has been all but wiped out.

Despite India’s divisive and unstable political environment, Modi remains very popular among voters and is almost certain to win a third term next year. The BJP has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to build a cult of personality around him. His face is everywhere, from front-page newspaper ads to Covid vaccination certificates. A satellite launched into space in 2021 carried a photo of Modi. Despite being only 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Modi towers over the Indian people in giant cardboard cutouts that have popped up all over the country.

The purpose of this symbolism is not lost on Indians. It is a loyalty test. Long after Independence Day last August, gas stations, homes, and even street vendors in Delhi continued to fly the Indian tricolor. One woman told me that as a personal act of resistance, she had decided not to display the flag. Then she heard that gangs of Hindu vigilantes were roving the area, noting down the names and addresses of those who refused to fall in line. She went up to her terrace and raised her flag.

Growing Up Muslim in India

Last fall, two years after Khalid was arrested, I spent time with his family in Delhi. Their elegant apartment was full of books and photographs. A maid worked in the open-plan kitchen while one of Khalid’s younger sisters chatted with a cousin. His father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, brought out a tray filled with snacks and served tea. At first, Khalid’s parents were politely reserved. But when his mother, Sabiha Khanam, a soft-spoken woman who wears a hijab, sat down next to me, she planted her feet firmly on the ground as though determined not to hold back.

“My son had a bright future,” she said. “He could have moved abroad, bought a nice house, a nice car. It was all within his grasp. But he said, ‘I only want to live in India.’” She shook her head. “And he’s the one they call a terrorist?”

Khanam’s parents moved from the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to Delhi when she was a child; she grew up among a large extended family helmed by her father, a sales tax officer with the city government. Ilyas came from an activist family: His paternal grandfather had been a freedom fighter with the Muslim League and after independence joined the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a movement to establish Islamic fundamentalism in India that later moderated its views because they were so unpopular among Indian Muslims. Khanam and Ilyas met as members of Students’ Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, launched in 1977 to offer Muslims moral support and camaraderie in a nation that was often openly antagonistic toward them.

The friction around the acceptance of Muslims as Indian can be traced back to the Partition of 1947 and the division of British India along religious lines: Hindu- and Sikh-majority regions remained inside independent India, while Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims. Though 35 million Muslims chose to stay in India, the Hindu supremacist groups that mushroomed in the run-up to Partition — namely the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideology’s mothership and the world’s largest volunteer paramilitary force, which Modi joined as a child — viewed them as an even greater threat after the subcontinent was split.

Since then, despite being India’s largest minority religious group, the country’s more than 200 million Muslims have been systematically underrepresented and discriminated against in virtually every area of public life, from education to employment to housing. SIMI impressed upon members the need to uplift the community through education and job training; the group came to be known for its cadre of educated Muslims, including Ilyas, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry.

By the time Ilyas became SIMI’s national president in the 1980s, Khanam was in charge of the Delhi women’s wing. “When it was time to marry,” Ilyas told me, “I wanted someone related to the movement. So I married her.” Was it a love marriage? I asked. “No, no,” he replied, looking offended. “Not at all.” Khanam burst out laughing. “Not for me either,” she said.

When their first child was born in 1987, Ilyas and Khanam named him after their favorite religious figures: the second caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab, who is regarded as the father of Islamic jurisprudence, and the seventh-century military commander Khalid ibn al-Walid. Khanam took her son everywhere she went, including to religious gatherings.

To his parents’ disappointment, Khalid showed no interest in Islam. In his late teens, he declared himself an atheist. If Khalid had a religion, it was cricket. His dream was to play for India, like his hero Irfan Pathan. Khalid was an all-rounder with a special gift for fast bowling, and he gained a reputation for trash-talking opponents. Doted on by his family, the eldest child and only boy out of six kids, Khalid grew up self-confident and resilient. But starting in his late teens, he became preoccupied with the abject state of his neighborhood. 

Khalid’s home was in Zakir Nagar, a Muslim area of the capital known for being overcrowded and unsanitary. Dangerous coils of electric wires hung over the streets, and the pungent combination of sewage, livestock, and exhaust fumes lent the area its signature smell. “We [can’t] get pizzas delivered, you don’t get internet, you don’t get home loans,” a teenage Khalid had said about his neighborhood in a student documentary.

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’”

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’” said Anirban Bhattacharya, the friend in whose apartment Khalid recorded his farewell video. Khalid would come to realize that even privileged Muslims would rather raise their families in a ghetto than in a religiously mixed area, where their Hindu neighbors might turn on them.

Khalid’s political consciousness developed as he grew into adulthood. In 2008, when he was 21 and studying history at Delhi University, a police inspector and two young Muslim students who police described as terrorists were killed in a shootout near where Khalid grew up. The Batla House encounter — named for the area where the incident took place — remains controversial. Police have used so-called encounters to mask extrajudicial killings and support official narratives about threats to national security, including in Kashmir, where Indian security forces frequently claim they’re defending themselves in gun fights that kill civilians active in the region’s independence movement.

The police used the Batla House encounter to increase surveillance of Muslims in the area; stop-and-frisk became routine. For Khalid, it was a seminal moment in his understanding of how security agencies violently target Muslims, regardless of whether they commit a crime.

“I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

“I was in the kitchen, and he came over and rested his head on my shoulder,” Khanam told me. “I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

The stereotyping and ostracization of Indian Muslims had increased since September 11. Days after the attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Eager to please a powerful ally, and with its own ax to grind, the Indian government, which was then also run by the BJP, banned SIMI, declaring it a terrorist organization.

Ilyas and Khanam had long left SIMI. In 1985, Ilyas started working for a media company; Khanam launched a boutique selling hijabs and organized literacy classes for adults from disadvantaged backgrounds. But the stigma of having once belonged to SIMI haunted the couple: The anti-terror law the BJP used to crush SIMI was the same one that, years later, it would deploy against Khalid.

Modi’s Reign of Terror

The Indian government’s determination to stamp out terrorism didn’t extend to Hindus, and by the early 2000s, Hindu extremist groups had been linked to numerous deadly attacks on Muslims, including the bombing of a train connecting India to Pakistan, a blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, and another blast at a mosque near Mumbai at the end of Ramadan.

The most notorious episode of Hindu terror in India’s recent history occurred under Modi’s watch in 2002, when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat. After a train full of Hindu pilgrims caught fire, killing 59 people, Modi declared the incident a “terrorist attack” and had the charred bodies put on display at the state capital. According to Human Rights Watch, Hindu mobs immediately responded to the dog whistle with a frenzy of bloodletting that lasted three days and left at least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead as police either stood by or participated in the violence. Despite accusations of complicity from several domestic and international human rights groups, Modi was reelected in a landslide victory later that year and became Gujarat’s longest-serving chief minister.

In 2005, after an investigation by the Indian government concluded that the train fire was an accident, the U.S. State Department denied Modi a visa to speak at Madison Square Garden in New York under a law that prohibits the entry of foreigners who have committed “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The Obama administration lifted the ban after Modi became prime minister.

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As India’s top elected official, Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors. The Modi government has empowered local right-wing officials and Hindu vigilantes to make life for many Indian Muslims not just difficult, but unbearable. Muslims have faced economic boycotts of their businesses and bulldozers destroying their homes after officials arbitrarily deem them illegal constructions. Several states have adopted laws that target Muslims, including criminalizing the slaughter of cows, possession of beef, and interfaith marriage.

Few Hindu vigilantes who have lynched dozens of Muslims have been arrested — even though many of these crimes were committed in public, captured on video, and shared online.

“Towards what end?” said Patel, the journalist. “Exclusion. Apartheid. To say, ‘We don’t want you.’ This is ideological. [Hindu supremacists] genuinely hate these people.”

Even punishments for past wrongdoing can be reversed at the government’s whim when the victims are Muslim. In August 2022, 11 Hindu men convicted of gang-raping their Muslim neighbor during the Gujarat riots walked free after an intervention from the government. Bilkis Bano was five months pregnant at the time of the attack. The men killed her 3-year-old daughter by smashing her head to the ground, as well as 14 other family members, including female relatives who were also sexually assaulted. They had been sentenced to life in prison, but a review committee decided to release them. A BJP politician on the committee told an Indian news outlet that the men were “honest people. … Their behavior in prison and the behavior of their family is very good.”

Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors.

In a statement released by her lawyer, Bano said the decision left her “bereft.” “I trusted the highest courts in our land. I trusted the system, and I was learning slowly to live with my trauma,” she said. “The release of these convicts has taken from me my peace and shaken my faith in justice.”

From the bold-faced discrimination and subjugation of Muslims emerged a vocal opposition to Modi and his Hindu supremacist agenda. In response, the government has used a legal dragnet to sweep up his critics and stifle dissent.

When it was first passed in 1967, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was only applicable to organizations; the Islamic State and Al Qaeda were later banned under the law. When Modi came to power, his government amended the UAPA so individuals could be accused of terrorism and detained for up to six months without formal charges.

“Every country has counterterror laws, but the UAPA does not meet international standards,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “Is Umar Khalid really comparable to the 9/11 terrorists? And if not, the government is undermining the entire principle of a legislation that is meant to protect the public from extremely brutal acts.”

Like Khalid, many Indians who have been charged under the UAPA are public figures who have spoken out against injustice and command widespread respect for their work. Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest with Parkinson’s disease, was among 16 prominent human rights activists arrested on terrorism charges in 2018, accused of engaging in a Maoist plot to assassinate Modi. Swamy had moved to a remote area of eastern India about three decades earlier to live among Indigenous communities under threat from mining corporations, including Adani Group — owned by billionaire coal tycoon and Modi confidante Gautam Adani — that was permitted by the government to expand its mining operations on Indigenous forest land.

In prison, Swamy was deprived of a straw and sipper he needed to drink water. His requests for bail on medical grounds were denied multiple times. When he died of cardiac arrest in 2021, he was still awaiting trial. A U.S.-based digital forensics firm later found that the computers owned by Swamy and at least two other activists had been infiltrated by a hacker who planted evidence that was used to arrest them.

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When courts do grant bail in UAPA cases, it is under conditions that force once outspoken activists to exist as half-citizens. Safoora Zargar, one of the student leaders arrested after the citizenship protests, was granted bail two months later because she was pregnant. However, she was forbidden to leave Delhi without permission from the court and had to call the investigating officer on her case every two weeks. Zargar told me that her lawyers advised her not to speak publicly “just to be on the safe side.” Though she hasn’t given speeches since her release, she still attends protests and is active on social media, a decision she said she makes at “great personal risk.”

Modi’s critics have also been charged under an anti-sedition law introduced during British rule to imprison freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi. According to Article 14’s database, from 2010 to 2021, 149 people were charged with sedition for making “critical and/or derogatory” remarks against Modi; the maximum penalty is life in prison.

Notably, young people are the most vulnerable to sedition charges. From 2015 to 2020, most of the people arrested for violating this law were under the age of 30.

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country,” said Ganguly, “because from these students will emerge a democratic space with a variety of political opinions and a diversity of political thought that will enrich any democratic process.”

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country.”

Last year, in response to nine petitions challenging its constitutionality, the Supreme Court suspended the law, asking the government to stop issuing sedition charges or punishing those already charged while the terms of the law are reassessed. The Law Commission of India, which is under the government’s purview, has argued not only that the sedition law should be reinstated, but also that the punishment should be more severe.

Despite the high-profile nature of many of the arrests, they rarely result in widespread protest, in part because the arrests are often the culmination of a media campaign in which government critics are vilified as anti-Indian. By the time these dissidents are imprisoned, the tide of public opinion may have turned against them.

Indians are so consumed by Modi’s brand of politics that they overlook the lack of jobs for young people and any real hope of a promising future, Harsh Mander, a human rights advocate who himself has been targeted by the government, told me. “They are persuaded by the idea of scapegoats, and they are willing to accept anything — hunger, joblessness, even bodies decimated by Covid floating down the Ganges — because they are preoccupied by something else: hatred.”

Khalid became one of Modi’s targets in 2016, when he and a group of fellow graduate students who had spent most of their adult lives with their noses stuck in books were branded enemies of the state.

“Creating a Witch Hunt”

I met Khalid in May 2016 while reporting on the events that had led to his arrest and those of other student organizers accused of sedition at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Khalid, who had recently been released after nearly a month in jail, invited me to tea at the same outdoor café where, three months earlier, he and other students had held a vigil for a Kashmiri man accused of terrorism and hanged after a botched trial — an annual demonstration that the media blew up overnight into a national news story.

The JNU campus — like cinemas, malls, and other public venues in Delhi — had private security personnel at the entrance. When I arrived, there were also police officers in their trademark khaki uniforms, extra security introduced after the vigil. The air buzzed with the sound of walkie-talkies.

Once through the gates, I was transported from the crowded street full of potholes to broad, spotless vistas, lush greenery, and the unvarnished brick structures that the architect CP Kukreja had left exposed to match the red soil upon which they were built.

It was morning, and the café was full of students. Khalid was sitting at a table talking to a friend. He wore a kurta with jeans and stout sandals, a shawl thrown around his neck and shoulders. Though he appeared gaunt, Khalid was full of energy, his eyes intent, his speech fast. Between his fingers rested a Navy Cut cigarette, his favorite brand, which he bought in packs and smoked one after the other.

Khalid was working on his history Ph.D. at JNU, a liberal arts institution known for fiery intellectuals who have gone on to mold global ways of thinking, becoming political leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and renowned novelists. Here, Khalid was introduced to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leo Tolstoy, and studied Karl Marx, whose vision for a stateless, classless society he came to believe was the best solution for a country as unequal as India. Khalid’s doctoral research focused on an Indigenous community’s struggle to maintain control over their land. He was so sure he wouldn’t leave India that he had never applied for a passport.

To some at JNU, Khalid’s ideas sounded like loony leftism. But his restless optimism, inquiring mind, and activist spirit made him popular and easy to get along with. He loved films and pestered friends to watch them with him, offering a play by play. He was also known as a prankster with what some have fondly described as “a cringeworthy sense of humor.”

To some at JNU, Khalid’s ideas sounded like loony leftism. But his restless optimism, inquiring mind, and activist spirit made him popular and easy to get along with.

“In the milieu in which I’ve grown up, I’ve known people who have been arrested on false charges,” he told me during our meeting, referring to people he’d met through his parents’ activism. “I know of people who have been brutally tortured or forced to sign false confessions or spend years in prison before being acquitted of all charges. I only spent 24 days in jail. That’s nothing compared to some.”

On the evening of February 9, 2016, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and other students marked the 2013 execution of a Kashmiri shopkeeper, Muhammad Afzal Guru. Though he had denied aiding the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament that killed nine people, Afzal Guru was sentenced to death based on what novelist and activist Arundhati Roy described as a “pile of lies and fabricated evidence.” For many, including the JNU students, Afzal Guru’s case represented a confluence of injustices: the use of capital punishment, the unfair treatment of Muslims by India’s criminal justice system, and state repression of Kashmiris. Past events to commemorate him had been held on campus without incident, so the students were taken aback when a TV crew showed up.

Members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad also came out. Since Modi’s election, ABVP and other Hindu supremacist student groups have increasingly acted as proxies for the BJP on college campuses. They rejected the existence of caste-based discrimination and used claims of “Hinduphobia” to deflect criticism. A month before the JNU event, members of ABVP at the University of Hyderabad had targeted a doctoral student who was Dalit, a member of India’s lowest and most disadvantaged caste. Rohith Vemula was subsequently suspended for fighting caste discrimination on campus; after the university upheld the decision, he hanged himself.

At JNU, ABVP had prevented the screenings of two documentaries critical of the BJP. But among most students, the group wasn’t despised so much as dismissed for being on the wrong side of history. Khalid referred to ABVP’s joint secretary as bhai, or brother. Another member of the group was Khalid’s neighbor, and Khalid often stopped by his place to bum a cigarette or a lighter.

At the event commemorating Afzal Guru, ABVP members heckled the organizers. “He who speaks of Afzal will die Afzal’s death,” they shouted.

The students replied with a call-and-response chant borrowed from India’s feminist movement: “What do we want?” “Freedom from hunger! Freedom from casteism!”

The scene was chaotic, but no one was hurt, and by the time the students were back in their rooms, many had already chalked up the evening as just another unpleasant encounter with India’s emboldened right wing.

The next day, however, #shutdownJNU was trending on Twitter. Confident that they had nothing to hide, Khalid and other student organizers responded to media requests for interviews. This proved a costly mistake. That evening, Khalid appeared on Times Now, a cable news channel known for its right-wing bias, as part of a panel discussion about the vigil.

“You are more dangerous to this country than Maoist terrorists,” screamed Arnab Goswami, the channel’s editor-in-chief at the time. “Someone is going to name you as anti-national, and I’m naming you as anti-national tonight.” Khalid, struggling to get a word in over Goswami’s berating, responded with a bewildered smile.

Over the next few hours, other cable channels adopted the same rhetoric, describing the students as pro-Pakistan and secessionist while running clips from the event on a loop. Khalid, with his Muslim name, was singled out. The channels labeled him the event’s “mastermind” — foreshadowing the accusations that would lead to his imprisonment years later — and falsely claimed that he had visited Pakistan. They called him a sympathizer of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization, an accusation the media claimed was based on an Indian government report. The government later denied the report’s existence, but none of the news outlets issued a retraction.

“The regime wants to portray young Muslims as people influenced by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Muslim fundamentalism,” Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist and writer who is a close friend of Khalid’s, told me. “By selecting Umar for persecution, the government sent out a signal to people like him.”

Within days, Modi’s home minister, the cabinet official responsible for national security, tweeted that he had ordered Delhi police to “take strong action against the anti-India elements” at JNU. The rhetoric ignited a public frenzy. Mobs of furious people converged outside the university gates, where they had to be held back by riot police. Fearing they would be lynched, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and other students fled the campus.

The mainstream media’s dependence on state support has enabled the Modi government to put political pressure on journalists, and as a result, most news outlets have yielded their independence. Veteran journalist Ravish Kumar — who coined the term “Godi media,” or lapdog media, to describe pro-Modi news outlets — has direct experience of what happens when news outlets resist falling in line. NDTV, where Kumar worked as managing editor, was subject to repeated raids by the income tax department before Adani, the billionaire businessman, bought the channel last November. On the day the buyout was made public, Kumar resigned.

“I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.”

As the mobs hunting the JNU students spread across the city and beyond, Kumar watched from the window of his apartment. “The atmosphere was terrifying,” he told me. “I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.” The next day, Kumar ran a black screen on his prime-time show, telling viewers, “This darkness is the picture of television today.”

The police issued wanted notices and warned border authorities not to let the students leave the country. On February 23, Khalid and Bhattacharya returned to campus prepared to be arrested. Bhattacharya referred to what happened next as being “pulled into a social experiment.”

The Delhi police charged Khalid, Bhattacharya, and three other students with sedition. Bhattacharya, an upper-caste Hindu, told me that prison authorities were baffled by his presence: “Khalid getting embroiled in these things one can understand, but why are you here, Bhattacharya sahib?”

Prison guards never spared an opportunity to taunt Khalid: “If you have to fight, why don’t you fight for reform in Islam?” He distracted himself in jail by rereading a favorite book that Lahiri, his partner, brought him on a visit, Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

When the two friends were released on bail nearly four weeks later, the JNU administration fined them for holding the vigil. Most of their fellow students, however, welcomed them back as heroes, a response observers declared a “Student Spring.”

On the night of his release, Khalid gave a speech attended by thousands of people at an open-air courtyard christened Freedom Square.

“Friends,” Khalid said when the cheers died down, “I don’t know how to put my feelings into words. Things happened so fast that even now I haven’t been able to make sense of them. I think about them every day and wonder, ‘What happened?’” The crowd roared. Khalid took a beat and switched from English to Hindi, his tone becoming serious.

“But the one thing that’s crystal clear,” he said, “is that if the government, the RSS thought that by profiling some of us, by creating a witch hunt, that they could break us and destroy our movement and unity and courage, well, they were delusional. Today, as I stand before you, I feel even stronger than I did, and this is a huge victory for our fight.” 

“What do we want?” he shouted. “Freedom!” the crowd screamed back.

“It was very clear that students would play a vital role against the authoritarian regime,” Bhattacharya told me. “And it was evident from the way the government moved that they believed the attack on JNU was going to silence students in this country for some time to come.” But for Khalid, this was only the beginning.

As we chatted at the café a few months after his release, Khalid was constantly interrupted by well-wishers. He politely stopped talking to respond to the “hellos” and “how are yous.” I got the feeling that after the initial shock had worn off, Khalid had accepted that his life would be very different — and that he would embrace his new role as an act of citizenship.

“People are listening to us,” he told me. “Our task is to foreground questions that haven’t been highlighted.” His immediate goal, he said, was to bring together students, activists, Indigenous communities, and trade unions in a broad-based “anti-fascist front.” For a moment before the pandemic hit, his vision of popular resistance became a reality. But it cost him his freedom.

“How Much Has the Country Changed?”

Khalid’s powerful campus speeches gained national attention, and soon, he was getting invited to share his message all over the country.

But some were bent on keeping Khalid from the podium. On August 13, 2018, while he and Lahiri were waiting for chai at a tea stall outside Delhi’s Constitution Club where he was scheduled to speak, a tall, beefy man lunged at Khalid and threw him to the ground. Lahiri and some others hurled themselves at the assailant, but he shrugged them off and pointed a gun straight at Khalid. “The man’s face was blank,” Lahiri told me. Suddenly, he ran away, tossing the gun.

When police retrieved the weapon, they discovered six live rounds. “You’re a very lucky man,” an officer told Khalid. “He pulled the trigger, but the gun somehow jammed.” The alleged assailant and an accomplice were later arrested but released on bail. The next year, the assailant was backed by a political party with Hindu supremacist ties to run in a local assembly election, which he lost.

The assassination attempt convinced Khalid that the only place he would be safe was in a Muslim neighborhood. Khalid stopped taking public transport, friends recalled, and he wouldn’t travel alone. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. “Earlier, the threat to his life was hypothetical,” Lahiri said. “Now it was real.”

But Khalid was undeterred from his mission to rally the masses against Modi. During a Facebook Live event with the human rights activist Teesta Setalvad in January 2019, he told viewers that Modi’s regime was based on “jumlebaazi” and “nafrat,” the Hindi words for false promises and hate, respectively, adding: “His government is run on lies.”

He also continued to face hurdles on campus. The JNU administration refused to accept Khalid’s Ph.D. thesis, effectively preventing him from receiving his degree. The Delhi High Court intervened, and after a successful thesis defense in August 2019, Khalid found himself at a loose end. He thought about applying for a postdoctoral research fellowship, but he didn’t exclude the possibility of becoming a politician.

“It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

“Earlier, his ideas were evolving within a university campus,” Bhattacharya told me. “Now the canvas was much larger. It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

Bhattacharya said Khalid wanted to shape how Muslim youth facing second-class citizenship envisioned their futures. “He was frustrated that the community was reduced to saying, ‘Humko bas jeene do’ — ‘Please let us just live,’” he said. “Muslims were being lynched, so of course safety was important, but he was also trying to broaden the idea of citizenship to include other rights. He wanted people to live in full bloom.”

On the second anniversary of Khalid’s imprisonment in September 2022, I went to a public park in central Delhi to meet Lahiri, Khalid’s partner. It was dusk when I arrived; a human-made lake glittered in the dwindling light, and birds of prey surveyed the grounds with sharp-eyed interest. Though Lahiri was only a few minutes late, she was very apologetic. She explained that she lived in Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood about 40 minutes away, near where Khalid grew up. She had remained there so that he would one day have a familiar place to come home to. 

Lahiri, a 39-year-old research scholar focused on minority rights, was born in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, to a biology teacher and a chemist who were members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of India’s long-established left-wing political parties. Lahiri was a student at JNU when she first met Khalid while counseling students harassed by police in the aftermath of the Batla House encounter. When Khalid enrolled at JNU the following year, the two reconnected. He and Lahiri helped co-found a group called United Against Hate after Khalid’s 2016 arrest to address the rising mob violence against Muslims.

“We were, like, very hot-headed radicals and all that,” Lahiri told me with a laugh. “Politics was and continues to be the cornerstone of our relationship.”

Less than a year into Modi’s second term, the government passed a citizenship law that signaled to Indian Muslims that they were no longer welcome in their own country. The Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, would make it nearly impossible for Muslim migrants to become citizens in India. The law was twinned with a planned nationwide campaign to force people already living in India to prove they belonged there.

Mander, the human rights advocate, called the citizenship law the first of its kind in India’s history to target one community. “It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution,” he told me.

“It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution.”

The potential impact of the plan was already playing out in the northeastern state of Assam, which is controlled by the BJP. The state, which shares a border with Muslim-majority Bangladesh, has long been depicted by the right as a hotbed of illegal immigration. As a part of the citizenship drive there, the state’s 33 million residents, many of whom are poor, illiterate, or itinerant, had to produce documents certifying their date and place of birth. The cruelty of this laboratory experiment became clear when 2 million people, including many Muslims, were struck off the citizenship rolls.

Declared “foreigners,” many were sent to detention camps within existing jails. In January 2023, news reports said that detainees would be transferred to India’s first immigration detention center as more such camps sprouted, creating the fearsome specter of a country where Muslims are kept in cages.

Protests started in Assam and quickly spread to the rest of the country. In several cities, the peaceful gatherings, known as the anti-CAA protests, were led by students on Muslim-majority campuses. They recited the preamble to the constitution, which mandates a secular state. They unfurled the national flag and shouted slogans such as “Keep dividing, we will keep multiplying,” and “Asking questions isn’t anarchy; abusing power is.”

Days after the law was passed, police unleashed their arsenal on student protesters at Jamia Millia Islamia, a renowned Muslim university in Delhi. CCTV footage showed police in riot gear storming the glass doors of the library, where students were engrossed in their work, and thrashing them with hefty bamboo sticks. One student was so badly wounded that he lost his left eye. In a hearing calling on the Delhi High Court to investigate the violence, a lawyer representing injured students said the police fired 452 tear gas cannons.

Lahiri told me she could hear the firepower from her and Khalid’s apartment: “I felt like I was in a war zone.”

The Indian government imposed an internet blackout to try to stop the protests. Still, they continued. So many hundreds of people were detained in Delhi that the police sought permission from the city to convert a sports stadium into a temporary prison.

As the protests and police violence raged, about 100 women sat down to block a main road in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh. Their sit-in lasted through the night into the morning and kept going. Every day, more and more people from all over the city joined them. “Hum Dekhenge,” or “We Shall See,” by the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, became their anthem:

Underneath our feet — we the governed.
The ground will echo like a thumping heartbeat
And the sky over the heads of the rulers
Will echo with the sound of thunder.

“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen,” Lahiri told me. “I haven’t seen the Paris Commune, but I’ve seen Shaheen Bagh.”

Shaheen Bagh inspired sit-ins across the country, and Khalid was deluged with speaking invitations. From December 2019 to February 2020, he spoke at almost 70 sites.

“Seventy-two years after independence, Muslims are still being told to prove that we are patriots,” he told a crowd of protesters in Mumbai on December 27. “Even today we’re told, ‘You got Pakistan, what more do you want? You’ve divided the country once, now what do you want?’ To them I’d like to say, ‘We’re not Indians by chance. We’re Indians by choice.’’’

“The fact of us being here is proof of our patriotism. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was not our leader, is not our leader. Mahatma Gandhi is our leader. … Narendra Modi said, ‘I feel happy seeing [Muslims] wave the flag.’ Mr. Modi, the flag has been in our heart, and in our hands, since 1947. It took you people more than 50 years to raise the tricolor at the RSS headquarters. We don’t need a certificate of patriotism from you.”

“He spoke very bravely, very charismatically,” said Mander, who sometimes shared the podium with Khalid. “He was by then a political leader with significant clout.”

The moment of mass resistance was short-lived. On February 23, 2020, Kapil Mishra, a Delhi BJP leader known for his hateful rhetoric, incited his followers to forcibly remove women from their protest sites if the police did not take action.

“Those who clean the toilets of our homes, should we now place them on a pedestal?” he asked at a gathering of BJP supporters. “We will have to teach them a lesson.”

The next day, Mishra’s followers started attacking protesters with guns, swords, spears, and stones. The violence quickly expanded to target any Muslim regardless of their involvement in the demonstrations, as the mob destroyed cars and threw petrol bombs at shops, homes, mosques, and madrasas. Lahiri, who was in Bihar with Khalid at the time, told me her phone exploded with messages from friends in Delhi reporting “horrible violence.”

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The next day, Trump landed in India. While Trump was fêted by Modi in front of 100,000 people in a stadium in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, and lunched with the prime minister on leg of lamb, mushroom curry in saffron gravy, and date halwa, 53 people, mostly Muslims, died, and more than 500 were injured. Many Delhi police officers either stood by or attacked Muslims themselves, in a display reminiscent of the Gujarat riots 18 years earlier. The deputy commissioner of police had stood beside Mishra during his speech and was later seen shaking hands with members of the mob.

When police began investigating the violence, they focused not on the perpetrators — many of whom had been caught on camera or identified by their victims — but on the protesters. Nearly 2,500 people were arrested, including 17 high-profile activists who had galvanized the anti-CAA protests as organizers and speakers. Modi had described the protests as a “conspiracy against the country,” and the activists were charged with conspiracy, as well as sedition and murder.

“Claiming that the violence was a conspiracy by the left and Muslim activists to create an insurrection to force a regime change is fantastical,” said Mander, who was investigated as part of the crackdown but not charged.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” despite ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers. A month after many of the arrests, the charges against Khalid and the 17 other activists were updated to include offenses under UAPA.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” despite ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers.

Khalid was detained on September 13, 2020. In October 2022, the Delhi High Court rejected his appeal for bail, declaring that the charges against him were “prima facie true.” As proof, they pointed to the fact that Khalid was in a WhatsApp group set up by a student activist who had also been charged with conspiracy and was still in prison.

The court’s decision affirmed what human rights defenders have said all along about India’s terror law: that the charge is the punishment.

“There’s no evidence that Umar Khalid was engaged in violence,” Ganguly of Human Rights Watch said. “So on what grounds is UAPA being used against him? Simply because he made statements the government disliked?”

Khalid refused to let his imprisonment take away his voice. In a letter published by The Wire, an Indian news site, Khalid wrote: “On Independence Day, in the evening, I sat outside the prison cell with a few others. We saw kites flying high above our jail compound and reminisced about our childhood 15th August memories. How did we reach here? How much has the country changed?”

He spent most of his time in jail alone because he’d grown weary of trying to convince fellow inmates that what they read about him in the newspapers was not true.

“Now, the sight and sound of people and traffic during my visits to court make me irritable and anxious. Far from the madding crowd, the tranquility of jail is starting to become my usual,” he wrote. “I wonder, am I getting used to captivity?”

A Taste of Freedom

One Friday afternoon in December, Lahiri was startled awake from a vivid nightmare. It was bitterly cold in Delhi, but she was soaked in sweat. Before she could process her dream, she realized she had only three minutes to log into her video call with Khalid. She couldn’t miss it, or he would worry. He would think that now she was in danger.

Lahiri sat up in bed and reached for her phone. When she joined the call, she saw an empty chair, and her face in the small top-right window peering anxiously down at the screen. She felt a pinprick of anxiety. Would the sound work? Would the internet connection be stable? Would he even come? Until Khalid sat down and smiled at her, she could never be sure the call would happen.

After five long minutes, Khalid finally appeared. He affectionately commented on her hair, disheveled from the nap. “Why are you looking like this?” he laughed.

She told him about her dream. In it, the police allowed Khalid to visit JNU to meet his friends, and many students gathered to get a glimpse of him. How happy they were! But then the police, threatened by the growing crowd, chased them away, and suddenly, members of the ABVP, the right-wing student group, emerged from the fog to lynch him.

Khalid burst out laughing. But when he saw that Lahiri wasn’t amused, he reassured her. “It’s just a dream,” he said. “It’s not real.”

“I should be consoling him,” she told me later, “not the other way around. But he does more of the consoling.”

The two saw each other via video once a week. Khalid was also entitled to a mulakat, or in-person meeting, every week at Tihar jail, where he is imprisoned. His family and friends divided the dates to ensure that he always had a visitor.

Bhattacharya told me that visiting his friend in jail evoked a range of emotions from grief to guilt. After being arrested for sedition at JNU, he had stepped back from activism; his case is on hold while the law is under review.

“I come to the office, I have a drink with a friend, go for fieldwork, go to eat out, buy new clothes,” he said. “Of course, there barely passes a day when I don’t think, ‘When will he come home?’ or ‘He would’ve done this,’ or ‘He would’ve loved watching this film,’ or how he is so irritating. But the clock of life hasn’t stopped for me — the way it has for him.”

Tihar is considered one of India’s progressive jails, offering inmates counseling services, yoga classes, and sports facilities. But it is also overcrowded, with more than 13,000 prisoners crammed into a space built for 5,000. When Khalid first arrived, prison staff put him in a cell by himself instead of the army-style barracks typical of Indian prisons. Under the pretense of safety, he was locked up 24 hours a day; after 30 days, Khalid approached the Delhi High Court for relief from “practically a sort of solitary confinement.” The court granted his request, and since then, he has followed the same routine as the other prisoners, who include an Olympian charged with murdering a fellow wrestler.

Sometimes, Khalid can’t help but shake his head at how he ended up here. “Kabhi kabhi, I feel like I have never even hurt a person,” he told Lahiri during another call. “I have never even, you know, injured a person. And here, there are people accused of multiple murders — and we are together, in the same space.” 

With his parents, Khalid is less ruminative and more of a jokester. On a recent call with his mother, he quipped, “The other prisoners tell me, ‘We’re here because we killed someone, but you’re here because you did a Ph.D.’”

When Khanam asked, “And how are you, my son?” Khalid responded, “Very well, you tell me.”

“Very well? Are you on holiday in Switzerland?” Only from Khalid’s lawyer did Khanam learn that her son was strip-searched prior to every court appearance.

Khalid has tried to make the most of the past few years awaiting trial. Under the tutelage of the Olympian, he started lifting weights. He also returned to his first love, cricket, and took up badminton.

Without a phone or social media to distract him, he reads constantly, borrowing books from the prison library and asking friends and family to send more. Lahiri estimated that he’s read nearly 200 books while incarcerated. He recently finished Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Not Just Cricket: A Reporter’s Journey Through Modern India” by sports journalist Pradeep Magazine. He has filled dozens of notebooks with musings on prison life and published five articles, including a review of a graphic novel about Shaheen Bagh and an obituary for the Indian historian Ranajit Guha.

After Lahiri recounted her dream, the conversation quickly moved to lighter topics. They joked about how they had missed two “dates,” a pun on Khalid’s court dates that had recently been canceled. Khalid spoke proudly about how he had quit smoking. He told Lahiri that when he is released, he wants to learn how to swim.

Khalid spoke proudly about how he had quit smoking. He told Lahiri that when he is released, he wants to learn how to swim.

The jail imposed a strict 15-minute time limit for video calls, but Khalid often begged for more. Two minutes, please, he asked the police officer in charge. But ultimately, it was time to go.

“Chalo ab jaana hoga,” he told Lahiri — Now I really have to go. “Bye,” he said, “I love you.”

“Bye, I love you,” Lahiri replied. He disappeared. The screen was now filled with just her face.

This past winter, a Delhi district court granted Khalid a week’s bail to attend his sister’s wedding. The family had planned three celebrations: a haldi, mehendi, and nikah. The court set strict conditions: Khalid could only leave his parents’ house for the nikah, the Islamic marriage ceremony. He couldn’t talk to the media or the public. Still, Lahiri recalled wistfully, “It was wonderful.”

All his closest friends came to see him, often staying past midnight. “He’s a chatterbox, so most of the time, we were listening,” Bhattacharya told me.

For the first 48 hours, Khalid didn’t sleep. He met his twin nieces, who were born while he was in prison. He ate pizza. He rested his head on his mother’s lap and closed his eyes as she gently stroked his hair. “Ammi, I’ll only eat non-vegetarian food,” he warned her, tired of the prison menu of rice and dal.

Sometimes he went up to the roof of his parents’ apartment building to look over the city. When would he walk the streets again as a free man?

On the day of the nikah, Khalid wore a bespoke black sherwani, a traditional knee-length jacket, over white trousers. Lahiri and his friends stood protectively around him — he was under as much scrutiny from guests as the bride herself. He was overwhelmed, Lahiri told me. Although he enjoyed the festivities, it was impossible to forget that he was on borrowed time.

“This will be over soon,” he said again and again.

An entourage of family and friends accompanied Khalid back to Tihar. When they arrived at 5 p.m., sympathetic staff told them that since the prison gates didn’t close until 6, they could hang around for another hour. The group drank chai from a street vendor, but no one spoke much. Khalid wore black trousers and a warm sweater and carried a small duffle bag with items he was allowed to take in: fresh clothes, a second pair of reading glasses. When it was time to go, he raised his fist, a wide smile on his face.

Back inside, Khalid fell into a deep depression. “If you taste freedom for seven days, the ‘unfreedom’ becomes stark,” Lahiri told me. A few weeks later, he was back to what had become his normal routine. 

Khalid periodically appears before a judge for a bail hearing over whether he must remain incarcerated, with the next one scheduled for August 9. Eventually, a trial date will be set, said Ganguly of Human Rights Watch, adding that the charges against Khalid are unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

“There’s no evidence that he’s engaged in anything that could be considered a violent act against the state,” she told me. “He’s never wielded a weapon. In fact, he’s been targeted and attacked. At some point, a judge will overturn the charges, but by then, he would have spent many years in jail.”

While they wait and hope that day comes sooner, Khalid and Lahiri will keep competing to make each other laugh. The joy they are still capable of feeling, Lahiri told me, is their resistance.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to him. How can we when the whole thing is a farce?” she said. “But it can’t go on for eternity. It will come to an end, and until it does, we must be happy. Because if we are not, they win. So we’ve decided to be happy just as things are. And no one can take that away from us.”

Correction: August 7, 2023
A previous version of this article stated that the Delhi High Court rejected Umar Khalid’s appeal for bail in October 2020. This happened in October 2022.

The post Umar Khalid Challenged Modi’s Anti-Muslim Agenda. India Accused Him of Terrorism and Locked Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

As Nixon rambled and ranted — calling for more strikes by bombers and helicopter gunships — Kissinger’s replies were short and clipped: “Right.” “Exactly.” “Absolutely, right.” We know this because, while Nixon was fuming about “assholes” who said there was a “crisis in Cambodia,” the conversation was being recorded. It wasn’t the secret White House taping system that finally laid Nixon low as part of the scandal that came to be known as Watergate, but Kissinger’s own clandestine eavesdropping system. Later, it was up to Kissinger’s secretary Judy Johnson to transcribe that night’s exchange and add in the single, double, triple, and even quadruple exclamation points to capture the spirit of the call and accurately punctuate the president’s words.

Johnson was new on the job when she heard the December 9, 1970, exchange. She was just one of many Kissinger secretaries and aides who, during his years working for the White House, either listened in on an extension and transcribed conversations in shorthand or typed up the transcripts later from Kissinger’s own Dictabelt recording system that, according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1976 book “The Final Days,” was hooked up to a telephone “housed in the credenza behind his secretary’s desk and … automatically activated when the telephone receiver was picked up.”

The transcripts offer a window into policymaking in the Nixon White House, Kissinger’s key role, and how so many Cambodians came to be killed by American military aircraft. Johnson was somewhat reluctant to talk about them and expressed surprise that they were publicly available.

Decades later, the heated December 1970 exchange didn’t stick out in Johnson’s mind, she told The Intercept. None of their conversations did. It was a long time ago and, she said, “there was a lot of stuff going on” at the White House. Johnson didn’t know whether Nixon was aware of Kissinger’s eavesdropping activities or why her boss recorded all his calls. Ask him yourself, she said. When I tried to interview him, Kissinger stormed off and his staff ignored follow-up requests for more than a decade. Johnson also cautioned that it was very hard to get an accurate sense of a conversation from the transcripts alone. There were nuances, she said, that were missing.

“Those conversations were strenuously edited,” said Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who resigned in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and had listened to many conversations between Nixon and his national security adviser. The men and women who took down the text didn’t completely eliminate the spirit of the conversations, but if you were listening to calls in their raw, original form, it was more disconcerting. “It was worse because the words were slurred and you knew you had a drunk at the other end,” he said of Nixon.

Did Johnson suspect that Nixon had been drinking when he called to direct policy and give orders? “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” she said. Any evidence is apparently gone forever. In a 1999 letter to Foreign Affairs, Kissinger claimed that the tapes of phone calls made in his office were destroyed after being transcribed. No notes or other materials involved in the transcription survived either, according to a 2004 report by the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff of the U.S. National Archives.

Johnson joined Kissinger’s staff in late 1970, before moving on to the White House press office in 1971 where she stayed until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. After a brief stint in the administration of President Gerald Ford, she moved to California and worked as a researcher for Nixon, who was then writing his memoirs. She might have been starry-eyed when she first arrived at the White House, she told me, but listening in on high-level phone conversations quickly disabused her of the notion that these were “super people.” She termed Nixon’s coarse talk “typical male language.”

Johnson took down Kissinger’s conversations using shorthand, she told me, repeatedly emphasizing how difficult it was to transcribe conversations like these perfectly. A “shit” or a “damn” might go missing, but there was no deliberate censorship and nothing was sanitized, she said. Morris recalled it differently. While Nixon’s remarks might be prettied up, he told me, it was Kissinger’s own acid-tongued ripostes that subordinates were supposed to excise to protect their boss. Privately, Kissinger called Nixon a madman, said he had a “meatball mind,” and referred to him as “our drunken friend.” 

“I just had a call from our friend,” Kissinger told his aide Alexander Haig moments after getting off the phone with Nixon on that December night, according to Johnson’s transcript. The president “wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia,” Kissinger told Haig. “He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” In a notation, Johnson indicated that while it was difficult to hear him, it sounded as if Haig started laughing.

When I mentioned these orders and asked about Nixon’s drinking, Johnson emphasized that there were buffers in place. Policy changes, she told me, weren’t as simple as a presidential order given by phone. Many discussions would occur before instructions were carried out. But Kissinger’s immediate and blunt relay of Nixon’s command suggests otherwise. The raw number of U.S. attacks in Cambodia does too. While they had no explanation for it at the time, The Associated Press found that compared with November 1970, the number of sorties by U.S. gunships and bombers in Cambodia had tripled by the end of December to nearly 1,700.

Was the reason for it — and the Cambodian deaths that resulted — a drunken president’s order, passed along swiftly and unquestioningly by Henry Kissinger? Nixon and Haig have been dead for many years, and Johnson passed away earlier this month. That leaves only Kissinger to answer the question — and to answer for the deaths.

The post Transcripts of Kissinger’s Calls Reveal His Culpability appeared first on The Intercept.

A previously unrevealed military investigation — declassified in the 1980s but buried deep in the files of Vietnam War-era inspector general’s documents in the nation’s archives — shows that after U.S. soldiers were caught looting Snuol in May 1970, the Army launched a pro forma investigation, worked to minimize the story, and even tried to blame the press corps for sacking the town. The Army, however, never questioned its own reporter on the scene: a journalist working for the venerable U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes. In an interview with The Intercept, he laughed at the notion that journalists had looted Snuol.

The Snuol revelations are part of an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents assembled by The Intercept as part of a reflection on the life and crimes of Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday. 

Kissinger, the architect of America’s 1969 to 1973 bombing of Cambodia and a proponent of the 1970 invasion, acknowledged that 50,000 Cambodian civilians were killed during his tenure crafting America’s war policy. Experts have conservatively estimated the actual total may be three times higher.

The Sack of Snuol

On April 28, 1970, Nixon issued an order that was opposed by his secretary of state and secretary of defense but endorsed by Kissinger: The U.S. military would invade Cambodia. Two days later, in a televised address to the nation, Nixon announced the assault and offered a history lesson loaded with lies. Since 1954, when an international agreement formally ended a U.S.-backed French war to maintain their colonies in Indochina, he said, U.S. policy had been “to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people.” His statement belied the covert cross-border missions and secret bombings being carried out — and hidden from the American public and Congress — on his orders throughout the previous year. “In cooperation with the armed forces of South Vietnam, attacks are being launched this week to clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border,” he continued. “This is not an invasion of Cambodia. … Our purpose is not to occupy the areas. Once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw.” 

U.S. troops and armored vehicles streamed across the border but encountered few enemy soldiers and saw little pitched combat. Kissinger had “no doubt about the operation’s success” and publicly described it as a victory, but the CIA later determined that the capability of enemy forces in Cambodia had not been “substantially reduced,” while the National Security Agency deemed the invasion an “unmitigated disaster.”

Four Kissinger staffers resigned over their boss’s role in planning the invasion, arguing that it would achieve none of its objectives and lead to “blood in the streets” at home. They were right. As predicted, the “incursion” sparked widespread campus unrest across America, including at Kent State University, where members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during a protest a few days later. 

A week after the killings at Kent State, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rushed Nixon and Kissinger a report on the private phone conversations of Morton Halperin, a Kissinger protégé and national security aide whose home phone Kissinger had ordered tapped. According to an FBI transcript, Halperin predicted that the “most certain consequence” of the invasion would be “that a large number of Cambodian civilians would be killed and labeled Viet Cong.” He, too, was right. 

As U.S. troops plowed through the countryside, the 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment was tasked with taking the town of Snuol. According to Army documents, Brig. Gen. Robert M. Shoemaker ordered that minor resistance should not necessitate the town’s destruction. “Try to avoid shooting into crowds of civilians,” his subordinate Lt. Col. Grail Brookshire, the commander of the 2nd Squadron, 11th Cavalry Regiment, told his men on the outskirts of the town, according to an account from New York Times reporter James Sterba, who was there to cover the battle. “In other words, if you’re taking light fire and there are civilians in the area, try to return the fire without losing all the fuckin’ civilians.” In a recent conversation with The Intercept, Brookshire emphasized that when his forces encountered a mixed group of North Vietnamese troops and “Cambodian refugees,” he would not allow his men to open fire on them. 

When they encountered enemy resistance as they entered Snuol, Brookshire nonetheless ordered his tanks to turn their guns on the town and called in bombers and helicopter gunships, leveling buildings to dislodge North Vietnamese forces. The next day, Brookshire’s men moved fully into Snuol. 

While it was a major battle in the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, the invasion of Snuol wasn’t significant in terms of the wider war in Indochina. Taking the town did not cost a single American life and left only five U.S. troops wounded. Leon Daniel, a former Marine and Korean War veteran who covered the operation for United Press International, rode into Snuol on one of the Army’s tanks. “The only dead I saw were obviously Cambodian civilians, but the U.S. Army claimed later it had killed 88 Communist troops in the area,” he wrote. “I doubt it.” All told, he saw four dead: a little girl and people he assumed were her family. They had all been killed by napalm. He also watched U.S. soldiers

helping themselves to what little was left in an area of shops that had been destroyed. The first items taken were beer and soft drinks because it was very hot. Other GIs took suitcases, mirrors and shoes. I saw a motorscooter strapped to one tank. … Other soldiers broke locks off a few sheds that were still standing. One shed was set on fire after it was looted of several cases of batteries.

Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett described soldiers smashing open the doors of shops to steal watches, clocks, and other items before setting the stores ablaze. “I saw one soldier run from a burning Chinese noodle shop with his arms full of Cambodian brandy … and two others wheeled out motorcycles and tied them to the turrets of their vehicles,” he recalled in his 1994 memoir “Live From the Battlefield.” “After about an hour of looting and merrymaking an officer came by and yelled, ‘Get your hands off that stuff, we’re moving on.’ The soldiers laughed and mounted their vehicles.”

Looting or Lies?

While Arnett’s dispatch from Snuol was published in its entirety around the world, the versions carried by American news organizations were missing a critical piece of reportage: any mention of the looting. The AP had decided, in the wake of the killings at Kent State, to censor the story. “Let’s play it cool,” Ben Bassett, the late, longtime foreign news editor of The Associated Press wrote in a cable to the AP bureau in Saigon, explaining that “in present context [mention of the looting] can be inflammatory.”

With the AP’s Saigon staff up in arms, Arnett fired off a message to the home office. “I was professionally insulted by New York’s decision to kill all my story and picture references to the Snuol looting on grounds that it was inflammatory and not news,” he wrote, recounting the cable in his memoir. “To ignore the sordid aspects of America’s invasion of Cambodia would surely be a dereliction of a reporter’s duty and I find it impossible now to continue to compromise my reporting to suit American political interests.” Arnett, who had previously won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war in Vietnam, then leaked the story of AP’s censorship to Kevin Buckley of Newsweek, who had also reported from Snuol.

With the press and Congress demanding answers, the Army launched a cursory investigation into “the extent of damage… and the veracity of news accounts” about U.S. troops’ role in the looting, according to the formerly classified Army records.

“My soldiers haven’t been looting,” Brookshire had told a TV crew. But footage showed otherwise. A soldier was filmed handing bottles to a colleague on a tank who said, “If you find any more sodas, get ’em.” Another was seen pilfering a radio. Still another was caught rooting through a shed.

“I don’t know what kind of Scotch it was because the label was in Cambodian,” one of Brookshire’s men told Gloria Emerson of the Times, “but it wasn’t bad at all.” As civilians drifted back into Snuol, they found a sea of debris: shattered glass, burned bicycles, twisted metal, and busted bricks, amid huge craters that had swallowed up homes and shops. “We want no shooting or killings by anyone here, and look what has befallen us,” one resident told Emerson. “We just want to earn our living.”

Blaming the Messengers

In June 1970, the Army concluded its investigation into the sack of Snuol. About half the structures in Snuol were “destroyed or damaged” by U.S. bombs, napalm, tank rounds, and small arms fire, according to an inspector general’s report. The Army also discovered more dead Cambodians than reporters had seen, noting that troops found 11 bodies “presumed to be civilians.”

“Reports of looting and pillage are confirmed by statements in the file,” a follow-up report by an Army staff judge advocate noted. That report corroborated accounts of soldiers stealing a “motorbike, cases of soft drinks, sunglasses and razor blades,” while disputing reports that GIs pilfered Cambodian currency, beer, and other items. 

The staff judge advocate’s report stated that there was “no evidence of a general rampage through undestroyed shops” and raised an alternate theory about the looting: Any theft “was done by civilian reporters in their wandering about the village.”

The Times’s Sterba never made it into Snuol, and Newsweek’s Buckley said that he left before the looting occurred. Gloria Emerson and Leon Daniel died in 2004 and 2006, respectively. However, The Intercept spoke with one reporter on the scene who should have been first on the Army’s witness list.

While the Army’s investigation failed to mention it, the military’s own newspaper, Stars and Stripes, had a reporter in Snuol. Army Specialist Jack Fuller — who went on to win a Pulitzer in 1986 and serve as editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of the Tribune Publishing before his death in 2016 — rode into Snuol atop one of Brookshire’s tanks. He watched as 11th Cavalry troops began stealing radios, soft drinks, and alcohol.

“I knew it was a story,” he told The Intercept in a 2010 interview, speaking of his article, which included an account of GIs pillaging the town. “Looting of any dimension by American soldiers was a story for Stars and Stripes, in my view.”

Fuller laughed out loud when I read him the staff judge advocate’s conjecture about the civilian press looting the town. “I certainly saw no correspondents grabbing anything,” he said, noting that, unlike soldiers, members of the media had easy access to alcohol and no need to steal it. 

Fuller recalled running into Arnett after the flap with AP. “He said: ‘For god’s sake, AP kills my story and Stars and Stripes runs yours. Stripes has more courage than AP,’” Fuller told me, noting that he had mentioned the looting deep in his story, while Arnett reported it more prominently in his article. 

Arnett did not respond to email inquiries to be interviewed for this story.

The Butcher of Snuol

In June 1970, an Army spokesperson announced that the looting in Snuol was limited to “several, perhaps five or six, cases of soda pop, which were consumed.” A motorcycle that was taken had been returned to its owner, the Army said, and a tractor would be returned once its owner was located. 

No mention was made of the theory that the press had pillaged Snuol.

The two-month Cambodian incursion left 344 American soldiers and 818 South Vietnamese troops dead. There were, however, “no reliable or comprehensive” statistics for Cambodian civilian casualties, although the Pentagon estimated that the operation rendered 130,000 Cambodians homeless. The invasion proved only a minor inconvenience for North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. By the end of June 1970, most U.S. troops had left the country, and the North Vietnamese soldiers had moved back into the region around Snuol. By late October, America’s South Vietnamese allies were fighting their way back into the town.

Grail Brookshire did, however, get something out of the incursion. His troops’ looting of Snuol became a joke — and Brookshire gave himself a grisly, though tongue-in-cheek, nickname. 

In a conversation this month, Brookshire defended his troops and told The Intercept that they “got a bum rap” from reporters. He expressed a low regard for the press, then and now, and a belief that they are “part of the deep state.”

In 1972, having recently returned from four years’ reporting in Southeast Asia, Buckley gave a talk at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, during which a man in the back asked numerous well-informed questions. “He and others swarmed me when the event was over — and I asked him his name and where he had been,” Buckley told The Intercept.

“Grail Brookshire,” the man responded.

“You mean —” Buckley began, but before he could finish the sentence, the man interrupted. 

“That’s me, Grail Brookshire, the Butcher of Snuol,” he told Buckley. (When we spoke recently, Brookshire didn’t recall the particulars of this exchange from 51 years ago, but said it sounded like the type of “smart-ass remark” he would make.)

“You guys said my troops systematically looted the place,” Brookshire told Buckley. “My god, my men couldn’t do anything systematically.”

The post U.S. Blamed the Press for Military Looting in Cambodia appeared first on The Intercept.

Her first husband was killed after Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge plunged Cambodia into a nightmare campaign of overwork, hunger, and murder that killed around 2 million people from 1975 to 1979. Four other family members died too — some of starvation, others by execution.

“No one ever even had time to laugh. Life was so sad and hopeless,” she told The Intercept. It was enough suffering for a lifetime, but it couldn’t erase the memory of the night in August 1973 when her town became a charnel house. 

Ny was sleeping at home when the bombs started dropping on Neak Luong, 30 tons all at once. She had felt the ground tremble from nearby bombings in the past, but this strike by a massive B-52 Stratofortress aircraft hit the town squarely. “Not only did my house shake, but the earth shook,” she told The Intercept. “Those bombs were from the B-52s.” Many in the downtown market area where she worked during the day were killed or wounded. “Three of my relatives — an uncle and two nephews — were killed by the B-52 bombing,” she said.

The strike on Neak Luong may have killed more Cambodians than any bombing of the American war, but it was only a small part of a devastating yearslong air campaign in that country. As Elizabeth Becker, who covered the conflict as a correspondent for the Washington Post, notes in her book “When the War Was Over,” the United States dropped more than 257,000 tons of explosives on the Cambodian countryside in 1973, about half the total dropped on Japan during all of World War II.

“They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence.”

“The biggest mistakes were in 1973,” she told The Intercept. “They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence. During those months ‘precision bombing’ was an oxymoron.” Neak Luong, she concurred, was the worst American “mistake.”

State Department documents, declassified in 2005 but largely ignored, show that the death toll at Neak Luong may have been far worse than was publicly reported at the time, and that the real toll was purposefully withheld by the U.S. government.

In his 2003 book “Ending the Vietnam War,” Henry Kissinger wrote that “more than a hundred civilians were killed” in the town. But U.S. records of “solatium” payments — money given to survivors as an expression of regret — indicate that more than 270 Cambodians were killed and hundreds more were wounded in Neak Luong. State Department documents also show that the U.S. paid only about half the sum promised to survivors.

The Price of a Life

The death warrant for Neak Luong was signed when U.S. officials decided that American lives mattered more than Cambodian ones. Until 1967, U.S. forces in South Vietnam used ground beacons that emitted high frequency radio waves to direct airstrikes. But the U.S. stopped using the beacons after a radar navigator on a B-52 bomber failed to flip an offset switch, causing a bomb load to drop directly on a helicopter carrying a beacon instead of a nearby site designated for attack. The chopper was blown out of the sky, and the U.S. military switched to a more reliable radar system until the January 1973 ceasefire formally ended the U.S. war in Vietnam.

At that point, the more sophisticated radar equipment went home, and the less reliable ground beacons came into use in Cambodia, where the U.S. air war raged with growing intensity. 

In April 1973, according to a formerly classified U.S. military history, American officials expressed concern that “radar beacons were located on the American Embassy in Phnom Penh” and raised “the possibility that weapons could be released in the direct mode,” striking the U.S. mission by accident. Within days, that beacon was removed. But while Americans at the embassy were safe, Cambodians in places like Neak Luong, where a beacon had been placed on a pole in the center of town, remained at risk. “It should have been put a mile or so away in the boondocks,” a senior U.S. Air Force officer told the New York Times in 1973.

On August 7, 1973, a secret cable shot from the beacon-less U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh to the secretaries of State and Defense and other top American officials in Washington. At approximately 4:35 a.m. in Cambodia, according to Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Enders’s message, Neak Luong was “accidentally bombed by a yet undetermined [U.S. Air Force] aircraft.” 

Ny said that her cousin, who served with the U.S.-allied Cambodian army and spoke English, got on the radio shortly after the bombing and asked an American what had happened. He was told that the bombs were dropped in error, she said.

It later became clear that a navigator had again failed to flip the offset bombing switch.

“No Great Disaster”

Col. David Opfer, the U.S. Embassy’s air attaché, quickly flew to the town to survey the situation, he told The Intercept. “I remember that some of the injured people were very happy to see somebody arrive, and I sent some of the most seriously wounded people back to the hospital in Phnom Penh in my helicopter,” he said. (Opfer died in 2018.)

Opfer told the foreign press corps in Phnom Penh that the bombing was “no great disaster.” 

“The destruction was minimal,” he announced at a press briefing, even though Enders, in the secret cable, had already informed U.S. officials that damage was “considerable.”

In a November 2010 interview, Opfer reiterated that he didn’t consider the damage to Neak Luong significant, and that it was limited to a small area. “It was a mistake,” he explained. “It happens in war.”

Sydney Schanberg, who reported for the New York Times in Cambodia, recalled Opfer’s briefing. “He said the casualties weren’t severe,” Schanberg, who died in 2016, told The Intercept. “He said there were 50 dead and some injured.” Opfer admitted that he didn’t actually know the number. “Even then I wasn’t sure how many,” he told The Intercept.

Schanberg, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia, was skeptical of the pronouncement and set out to see for himself. He was thrown off a Cambodian military flight to Neak Luong, but Schanberg’s fixer Dith Pran got them to the town by boat, and they interviewed survivors until local officials detained the journalists for taking photographs of “military secrets.” The U.S. Embassy, meanwhile, tried to wrest control of the story by arranging for a group of five Western reporters to take a quick look around with little opportunity to speak to townspeople. 

Schanberg and Pran, who spent a day and night under house arrest, watched their press colleagues through the window of the building where they were confined. “They didn’t see enough to write a detailed story and they hadn’t talked to anybody,” said Schanberg, noting that the pool reporters were only on the ground for about 20 minutes.

Ny Sarim told The Intercept that soldiers from the U.S.-allied Cambodian military also kept residents from making their way downtown, but that even from a distance, the damage was unmistakable. When she finally got through the cordon, she saw massive craters and twisted metal. “It was a total wreck,” Schanberg told me. “Everything had been hit.”

Schanberg’s August 9, 1973, front-page Times story on Neak Luong emphasized Opfer’s minimization of the damage; a second article and an editorial soon after detailed U.S. efforts to thwart Schanberg from covering the story.

In a confidential cable back to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Emory Swank mentioned “the New York Times correspondent’s accusation that the air attaché office attempted to block journalists’ access to Neak Luong” and defended the officer. “Colonel Opfer has done well in trying circumstances,” he stated, while casting the foreign press corps as “demanding and hostile.” Opfer told The Intercept that the Cambodian military had detained Schanberg and Pran. “They always get things mixed up and don’t tell it as it really is,” he said of the press. 

Schanberg took a different view. Opfer, he said, “was absolutely unskilled with the press. I felt bad for the man, in a way, because he was telling us what he had been told to tell us. A lot of the senior officers felt that we didn’t give anybody a fair break — but the Cambodians weren’t getting much of a break, were they?” 

A Grand Bargain

Officially, 137 Cambodians were killed in the Neak Luong bombing and 268 were wounded, according to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. Months later, Enders, in a confidential, December 1973 cable that went to Kissinger and then-Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, confided that the U.S. had actually paid out solatium for 273 dead, 385 seriously wounded, 48 who suffered “mutilation,” and 46 victims of slight injuries. All told, that figure — 752 people hurt or killed — was 86 percent higher than the official number.

Enders stated that the U.S. had not sought to verify the numbers, but that the tally had been certified by the Cambodian regime. The final number of wounded and dead, he noted, “is higher than the official count given by [the Cambodian government] to the press and therefore should not be released.”

In the December 1973 cable, Enders admitted that the U.S. had never established a policy for “the payment of medical expenses for persons injured by U.S. errors,” and that the bombing of Neak Luong was “the only such incident which has occurred in Cambodia.” But just a day after the Neak Luong bombing, a State Department cable referenced a “second accidental bombing” at Chum Roeung village that killed four to eight people and injured up to 33. The Pentagon blamed the “error” on a F-111 bomber’s “faulty bomb-release racks.” By then, the U.S. had dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs throughout the countryside and killed, according to experts, as many as 150,000 Cambodians. 

Two weeks after the bombing of Neak Luong, Swank, the U.S. ambassador, publicly signed an agreement on compensation with the Cambodian government. “We desire to compensate, insofar as possible, the survivors of the tragedy,” he said in a brief speech, adding that the U.S. would pay $26,000 to rebuild the damaged hospital in Neak Luong and provide $71,000 in equipment. 

The next of kin of those killed, according to press reports following his speech, would receive about $400 each. Considering that in many cases, the primary breadwinner had been lost for life, the sum was low: the equivalent of about four years of earnings for a rural Cambodian at the time. The financial penalty meted out to the B-52 navigator whose failure to flip the offset switch killed and wounded hundreds in Neak Luong was low too. He was fined $700 for the error. By comparison, a one-plane sortie, like that which bombed Neak Luong, cost about $48,000 at the time. A B-52 bomber cost about $8 million.

In another confidential cable sent in December 1973, Thomas Enders made a final accounting of solatium payments to those who had lost a relative in Neak Luong. They had actually not received the $400 per dead civilian that they had been promised. In the end, the U.S. valued the dead of Neak Luong at just $218 apiece. 

The post Notorious 1973 Attack Killed Many More Than Previously Known appeared first on The Intercept.

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of attacks that have never before been publicized and that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger’s tenure in the White House. When questioned about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents — assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S. National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. The documents also provided a rudimentary road map for on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia that yielded evidence of scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been reported to the outside world.

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

The incidents detailed in the files and the testimony of survivors include accounts of both deliberate attacks inside Cambodia and accidental or careless strikes by U.S. forces operating on the border with South Vietnam. These latter attacks were infrequently reported through military channels, covered only sparingly by the press at the time, and have mostly been lost to history. Together, they increase an already sizable number of Cambodian deaths for which Kissinger bears responsibility and raise questions among experts about whether long-dormant efforts to hold him accountable for war crimes might be renewed.

The Army files and interviews with Cambodian survivors, American military personnel, Kissinger confidants, and experts demonstrate that impunity extended from the White House to American soldiers in the field. The records show that U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments.

Together, the interviews and documents demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives: failing to detect or protect civilians; to conduct post-strike assessments; to investigate civilian harm allegations; to prevent such damage from recurring; and to punish or otherwise hold U.S. personnel accountable for injuries and deaths. These policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia but also set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.

“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands

All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In 1973, during his Senate confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, Kissinger was asked if he approved of deliberately keeping attacks on Cambodia secret, to which he responded with a wall of words justifying the assaults. “I just wanted to make clear that it was not a bombing of Cambodia, but it was a bombing of North Vietnamese in Cambodia,” he insisted. The evidence from U.S. military records and eyewitness testimony directly contradicts that claim. So did Kissinger himself.

In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)

At a 2010 State Department conference on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia from 1946 through the close of the Vietnam War, I asked Kissinger how he would amend his testimony before the Senate, given his own contention that tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians died from his escalation of the war.

“Why should I amend my testimony?” he replied. “I don’t quite understand the question, except that I didn’t tell the truth.”

“Anything That Flies on Anything That Moves”

One night in December 1970, Nixon called his national security adviser in a rage about Cambodia. “I want the helicopter ships. I want everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them,” he barked at Kissinger, according to a transcript. “I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters. … I want it done! Get them off their ass. … I want them to hit everything.”

Five minutes later, Kissinger was on the phone with Gen. Alexander Haig, his military aide, relaying the command for a relentless assault on Cambodia. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?”

Two years earlier, Nixon had won the White House promising to end America’s war in Vietnam, but instead expanded the conflict into neighboring Cambodia. Fearing public backlash and believing that Congress would never approve an attack on a neutral country, Kissinger and Haig began planning — a month after Nixon took office — an operation that was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even top Pentagon officials via a conspiracy of cover stories, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged airstrikes in Cambodia as occurring in South Vietnam. Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.

Kissinger, who went on to serve as secretary of state in the Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In the decades that followed, he has continued to counsel U.S. presidents, most recently Donald Trump; served on numerous corporate and government advisory boards; and authored a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he came to the United States in 1938, amid a flood of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he continued on to an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954. He subsequently joined the Harvard faculty, working in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs until 1969. While teaching at Harvard, he served as a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before his senior roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations. A believer in Realpolitik, Kissinger heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.

Through a combination of relentless ambition, media savvy, and the ability to muddy the truth and slip free of scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and government functionary into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. While dozens of his White House colleagues were engulfed in the swirling Watergate scandal, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger emerged unscathed, all the while providing fodder for the tabloids and spouting lines like “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership cannot be exonerated for committing genocide on the Cambodian people, said Kiernan, the Yale scholar, but neither can Nixon nor Kissinger escape responsibility for their role in the slaughter that precipitated it. The duo so destabilized the tiny country that Pol Pot’s nascent revolutionary movement took over Cambodia in 1975 and unleashed horrors, from massacres to mass starvation, that would kill around 2 million people.

Kaing Guek Eav (known as “Duch”) who ran the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s, made the same observation. “Mister Richard Nixon and Kissinger,” he told a United Nations-backed tribunal, “allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities.” After he was overthrown in a military coup and his country was plunged into genocide, Cambodia’s deposed monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leveled similar blame. “There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia,” he said in the 1970s. “Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.”

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, and Chile to East Timor, Laos, and Uruguay. But Hitchens reserved special opprobrium for Kissinger’s role in Cambodia. “The bombing campaign,” he wrote, “began as it was to go on — with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect.”

Others went beyond theoretical indictments. As a teenager, Australian-born human rights activist Peter Tatchell felt greatly affected by the U.S. war — and war crimes — in Indochina. Decades later, believing that there was a strong case to be made, he took action. “It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go,” he told The Intercept by email.

“It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go.”

In 2002, with Slobodan Miloševic, the former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on trial for war crimes, Tatchell applied for an arrest warrant at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957, an act of Parliament that incorporated some components of the laws of war as defined by the 1949 Geneva Conventions into British law. He alleged that while Kissinger “was National Security Advisor to the U.S. President 1969-75 and U.S. Secretary of State 1973-77 he commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” Judge Nicholas Evans denied the application, stating that he was not “presently” able to draft a “suitably precise charge” based on the evidence Tatchell submitted.

When the arrest warrant was denied, Tatchell tried to engage international humanitarian organizations to help or take over the case, he told The Intercept, but they “did not see it as a priority.” He tried unsuccessfully to contact potential American witnesses and engage U.S. human rights groups.

But Tatchell maintains that Kissinger should still have his day in court. “I believe that age should never be a barrier to justice. Those who commit or authorise war crimes should be held to account, regardless of their age,” he wrote, “providing they have the mental capacity for a fair trial, which I understand is the case with Kissinger.”

Five Decades of Impunity

Kissinger and his acolytes frequently cast blame for the American war in Cambodia on the North Vietnamese troops and South Vietnamese guerrillas who used the country as a base and logistics hub, while giving short shrift to U.S. involvement there. “What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards,” wrote former Kissinger aide Peter Rodman. But three years earlier — long before most Americans knew their country was at war in Southeast Asia — U.S. “bombs hit a Cambodian village by accident … killing several civilians,” according to an Air Force history. And the “accidents” never stopped. Between 1962 and 1969, the Cambodian government tallied 1,864 border violations; 6,149 violations of its air space by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces; and nearly 1,000 civilian casualties.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

In 2010, I traveled to Cambodia to investigate decades-old U.S. war crimes. I searched the borderlands, looking for villages mentioned in U.S. military documents, carrying binders filled with photos of Cobras, Loaches, and other aircraft, asking villagers to point out the military hardware that killed their loved ones and neighbors. My interviewees were uniformly shocked that an American knew about attacks on their village and had traveled across the globe to speak with them.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict, the war was a shock and a horror.

For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have documented systemic killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity extending from the drone pilots who slay innocent people to the architects of America’s 21st-century wars in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan — which revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people — finally forced the Defense Department to unveil a comprehensive plan for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian casualties. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks a concrete mechanism for addressing past civilian harm.

The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.

I share some responsibility for the delay in publishing these accounts. For 13 years — while I was reporting on drone strike victims in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and civil wars from Libya to South Sudan — survivors’ accounts from Cambodian villages like An Lung Kreas, Bos Phlung, Bos Mon (upper), Doun Rath, Doun Rath 2, Mroan, Por, Sati, Ta Sous, Tropeang Phlong, Ta Hang, and Udom were lodged in my notebooks. Other projects and imperatives, coupled with the vagaries of the news industry that doesn’t always view past atrocities as “news,” kept them there.

When I conducted my interviews, in 2010, the life expectancy in Cambodia was about 66 years. Many of the people I spoke with — their ages in this article pegged to the date we spoke — are likely dead. Few in these rural villages had cellphones 13 years ago, so I have no way to reach them. But their accounts remain vibrant and the horrors they recounted have not diminished. Nor has their pain necessarily passed on with them from this world. We know from Holocaust survivors, for example, that trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on — along with the architect of that country’s agony.

Memories of Atrocity

Crossing a bridge over the Mekong River, I sped into the Cambodian countryside, along highways where SUVs passed tiny carts pulled by tiny ponies, motorbikes loaded with sheaves of bamboo or brightly colored textiles or baskets of squealing pigs, and ancient flatbed trucks piled high with rough-hewn, ochre bricks. I rolled through market towns of open-air butcher shops and wooden stalls selling cases of motor oil or motorcycle helmets or child-sized bags of rice or cases of Angkor Beer. I raced past thick, unruly forests and rubber plantations and rice fields where you could spot lines of water buffalo loping, single file, along the paddy dikes. Finally, I turned off the pavement onto a path of rutted, red dirt, looking for villages unknown even to the local police. At the end of one of these dusty, pitted trails, I found a hamlet straddling the border with Vietnam.

The air in Doun Rath was dry and musty during the day and punctuated, in the late afternoon, by the comforting smell of cooking fires that wafted up to wooden homes built on stilts to maximize air circulation on sweltering days like these.

I came looking for members of a ravaged generation who had survived both the American war and the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed. One of them, Phok Horm, spry and 84 years old at the time of our meeting, with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, told me: “Bombing was very common in this area. Sometimes, it happened every day. Sometimes there were dive bombers. Sometimes, the aircraft with the legs of a lobster would fly over and shoot at everything.”

Vietnamese guerrillas operated in the nearby forest, Phok and fellow village elders recalled. They came to Doun Rath to buy supplies from residents already living hard lives, growing rice and selling it across the border in Vietnam, before the war flooded the hamlet with refugees from other bomb-ravaged Cambodian villages. But the guerrillas generally weren’t present during the attacks. “Many people here were shot,” said Chneang Sous, who was in his 20s during the conflict. “Most of them were Cambodian.”

When the shooting started, villagers would scatter, running for the uncertain protection of paddy dikes and, as the war dragged on, subterranean bunkers that families dug beside their homes. Min Keun, a teenager in 1969, remembered the regular intrusion of “lobster legs” in the skies over the village. “People would panic. They would run. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they would be killed,” she recalled. “There was so much suffering.” Min and others remembered helicopters firing on fleeing villagers. Water buffalo and cattle were repeatedly machine-gunned. At night, the helicopters’ bright search beams lit up the darkness as they hunted for enemy forces. Bombs might fall at any time.

Around 1969, Phok’s husband was caught in the open during a “bombardment” and hit in the neck with shrapnel. He hung on for seven days before succumbing to his wounds. Chneang recalled an instance when an American Huey gunship popped up from behind a tree line, forcing villagers to bolt for safety. The helicopter raked the area with machine gunfire, killing his aunt and uncle. Nouv Mom told me that his younger sister was gravely wounded in a 1972 bombing. Vietnamese guerrillas arrived after the attack and took her away for medical treatment, but his family never saw her again. All told, survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks.

In nearby Doun Rath 2, former village chief Kang Vorn said residents led a simple life before the war, growing rice, beans, and sesame seeds. They began to see Vietnamese guerrillas around 1965, but the bombing didn’t begin until about 1969. Vet Shea, a one-eyed woman, recalled that the attacks intensified as time went on. “Sometimes we were bombed every day. Once, it was three or four times in one day,” she said. She herself survived a helicopter attack targeting farmers working in the nearby fields. “I ran flat out when I saw it,” Vet told me. “One person was wounded. A few others died.”

Thirteen elders of Doun Rath 2 did their best to recall the names of the dead. “Nul, Pik, Num, Seung,” said Sok Yun, an 85-year-old who relied on a weathered walking stick, as she ticked off the names of four villagers killed when their bomb shelter collapsed under a direct hit from an airstrike. Vet said her aunt was slain in another attack. Tep Sarum was just a teenager when a bomb hit his aunt’s house, killing her. Mom Huy, 80 years old at the time of our interview, said deaths and injuries from the bombs were common, while Kang, the former chief, estimated that at least 30 villagers were wounded by airstrikes but survived.

Just how many people in and around Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 were killed by Nixon and Kissinger’s war was already lost to history when I visited. The U.S. documentary record is quite sparse, but it does exist. On the night of August 9 and the morning of August 10, 1969, according to an Army inspector general’s report, a U.S. “Nighthawk” helicopter team — consisting of one Huey, equipped with a spotlight and high-powered M-60 machine guns, and a Cobra gunship outfitted with a powerful Gatling gun, rockets, and a grenade launcher — was operating in a so-called free fire zone near the South Vietnamese border with Cambodia.

The previously unreported investigation reveals that while only some members of the helicopter crews mentioned sporadic ground fire that night, they all agreed that lights were seen in “living structures.” Helicopter crew members claimed that radar operators told them they were over South Vietnam, but the radar operators said otherwise. One of them, Rogden Palmer, speaking to investigators about the Huey commander, said:

[H]e told his Tiger bird (the cobra accompanying him) that he thought he saw a light. At this time I advised him that he was close to the Cambodian border, and he rogered my transmission. Night Hawk and Tiger started circling … about the same time I advised him that he appeared to be over the border. I don’t remember if he rogered my transmission, but I beleive [sic] he did. At one time I told him he was over the border.

Apparently undaunted, the Huey focused its searchlight on the houses and the Cobra gunship commenced a firing run, blasting three of what the Pentagon documents referred to as “hooches” — shorthand for civilian dwellings — with machine gunfire and rockets filled with “flechettes,” tiny nails designed to tear through human flesh.

The U.S. investigation determined that the helicopters “did engage a target in the vicinity of the Cambodian border which could have been the village of Doun Rath.” The survivors in Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 didn’t recall this particular incident, emphasizing that attacks were so common for so long that they blended together. The report concluded that the “aircraft commander exercised poor judgement [sic] in engaging a target under these circumstances.” The inspector general, however, recommended that “no disciplinary action be taken,” and until I arrived decades later no one, apparently, had tried to investigate what actually happened in Doun Rath.

Fifty years on, most U.S. attacks in Cambodia are unknown to the wider world and may never be known. Even those confirmed by the U.S. military were ignored and forgotten: cast into history’s dustbin without additional reviews or follow-up investigations.

On January 6, 1970, for example, five helicopters breached Cambodian airspace and fired on the village of Prastah, killing two civilians and severely wounding an 11-year-old girl, according to an Army inspector general’s summary report. That perfunctory review found that helicopter gunships from the 25th Infantry Division had fired on enemy forces, who allegedly withdrew into Cambodia. The inquiry determined that the “gunships continued to engage and rounds did impact in Cambodia.” As to the question of civilian casualties and property damage resulting from the attack, the report stated only that “it was possible that civilian personnel … could have been struck by fire from the gunships and some crops could have been destroyed.” There is no indication that anything was done to compensate the survivors.

In the early evening of May 3, 1970, a helicopter circled the Cambodian village of Sre Kandal several times, scaring villagers and forcing them to flee, according to a formerly classified Army report. The file states that witnesses said a “helicopter of unknown type circled their village several times. They became frightened and started to run, at which time the helicopter allegedly fired.” According to Cambodians who the U.S. military encountered just after the attacks, three people suffered burns when a home was set ablaze in the attack and one person was wounded by shrapnel. One of the burn victims, his name likely engraved in the hearts of his Cambodian relatives but otherwise lost to history, later died.

“Everything Was Completely Destroyed”

Less than a month after Kissinger and Haig began planning the secret bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. launched Operation MENU, a callously titled collection of B-52 raids codenamed BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK, DINNER, DESSERT, and SUPPER that were carried out from March 18, 1969, to May 26, 1970. The attacks were kept secret through multiple layers of deception; Kissinger approved each one of the 3,875 sorties.

Survivors say that living through a B-52 bombing is unimaginably terrifying, bordering on the apocalyptic. Even within the confines of a deep, well-built bomb shelter, the concussive force from a nearby strike might burst eardrums. For those more exposed, the earth-shaking strikes could be extraordinarily lethal.

One morning, at the end of a busted dirt and gravel road near the Vietnamese border, I found Vuth Than, 78 years old at the time, with a shorn head of bristly gray hair and a mouth stained red with juice from betel nut, a natural stimulant popular in Southeast Asia.

Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,” Vuth Than told me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It was so terrible. Everything was completely destroyed.”

Exposed by North Vietnam’s Hanoi Radio and confirmed by the New York Times in May 1969, the secret bombing of Cambodia was officially denied and unknown to the public and the relevant congressional committees at the time. Congress and the American people were kept so deep in the dark that on April 30, 1970, as he announced the first publicly avowed U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia to strike at suspected enemy base areas, Nixon could baldly lie, telling the country: “For five years neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.”

It was only in 1973, during the Watergate scandal, that the secret bombing allegations came to the fore, prompting the first effort to impeach Nixon on the grounds that he had waged a secret war in a neutral nation in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Eventually, that article of impeachment was voted down in the name of political expediency. In the face of the other charges, however, Nixon resigned from office.

“That was in essentially unpopulated areas and I don’t believe it had any significant casualties,” Kissinger told me at the 2010 State Department conference, titled “The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975,” when I questioned him about the bombing. It was effectively the same reply he offered British journalist David Frost during a 1979 NBC News interview in which Frost charged that Kissinger’s Cambodia policy set in motion a series of events that would “destroy the country.” Kissinger stormed out of the studio after the taping and Frost quit the project, alleging interference by NBC, which was then also employing Kissinger as a consultant and commentator. NBC later released a transcript of the interview but allowed Kissinger to amend his comments through an attached letter to NBC News President William Small.

“We did not start to destroy a country from anybody’s point of view when we were bombing seven isolated North Vietnamese base areas within some five miles of the Vietnamese border, from which attacks were being launched into South Vietnam,” Kissinger told Frost. In typical fashion of seizing on discrepancies and muddying debates, he accurately denied Frost’s contention that Base Area 704 was bombed — a mistake stemming from a typographic error in a Pentagon document — during the secret B-52 attacks, noting that “base area 740” was actually attacked. He said recommendations of targets were accompanied by a statement “that civilian casualties were expected to be minimal.”

There were in fact 1,136 civilians living in Base Area 740, according to the Pentagon; a formerly top secret Air Force report, declassified decades after the Frost interview, noted that only 250 enemy forces were present there. An Army document I discovered in the National Archives also notes that the military was aware that civilians “were wounded/killed by B-52 strikes in Base area 740” between May 16 and 20, 1970, around the time of the SUPPER attacks. According to the confidential case file, those slain and injured were “Montagnards,” members of an ethnic minority whose “hamlets were not accurately reflected on commonly used maps.”

“I Was the Only Survivor of My Whole Family”

In 2010, the village was officially known as Ta Sous, but to its inhabitants it was still known by its name during the American war: Tralok Bek. “Every house had a bunker during the war. But during the day, if you were out tending to the cows, your life might depend on a termite hill and whether you could hide behind it,” Meas Lorn explained. “Planes dropped bombs. Helicopters strafed. Many people died,” said Meak Satom, a gray-haired man with a gold tooth. A B-52 strike in 1969 killed about 10 people, including a young friend, he recalled.

While I interviewed locals about the many attacks that occurred there during the war, Sdeung Sokheung said little. But when I brought out a binder filled with photographs of many different types of American aircraft, she zeroed in on an F-4 Phantom. Pointing at it, she said that as a girl, she had witnessed the bombing of Ta Hang village, about eight kilometers away, by that type of plane.

After finishing our interviews in Tralok Bek, I traveled winding dirt roads, past stunted bushes and the occasional thin, tan-colored cow, until we reached an area of dry, rock-hard rice paddies and towering palms. A few minutes later, in a rustic wooden home, I found 64-year-old Chan Yath, a woman with a substantial head of dark hair and teeth stained from chewing betel nut. I asked if there had been a bomb strike in the area during the war. She said yes; a family had been nearly wiped out. The lone survivor, she explained, was her cousin, An Seun. A younger woman was dispatched to find An and, 20 minutes or so later, we saw her — a tiny, aging mother of 10 — ambling along a narrow paddy dike path leading to the rear of Chan’s home. “During the time of a full moon,” said An, referring to a Buddhist holy day, she was off visiting her grandfather’s house. “At around 10 a.m., an airplane dropped a bomb on my home. My parents and four siblings were all killed,” she told me with wet eyes and a catch in her throat. “I was the only survivor of my whole family.”

During these same years, the U.S. was also conducting clandestine, cross-border ground operations inside Cambodia. In the two years before Nixon and Kissinger took over the war, U.S. commandos conducted 99 and 287 missions, respectively. In 1969, the number jumped to 454. Between January 1970 and April 1972, when the program was finally shut down, commandos carried out at least 1,045 covert missions inside Cambodia. There may, however, have been others, ostensibly launched by Kissinger, that were never disclosed.

From January to May 1973, between stints as deputy assistant to the president for national security and White House chief of staff, Al Haig served as the vice chief of staff of the Army. Retired Army Brig. Gen. John Johns told me that during this time, he was in Haig’s office at the Pentagon when an important call came in. “I was briefing him on something, and the red phone rang, which I knew was the White House,” Johns recalled. “I got up to leave. He motioned me to sit down. I sat there and heard him tell them how to cover up our intrusions into Cambodia.”

Johns — who had never before revealed the story to a reporter — was relatively sure that Haig was referring to past covert actions, yet did not know if the operations were made public or who was on the other end of the phone line. But Kissinger was responsible for many of the cross-border missions, according to Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council. “A lot of the time, he was authorizing the ongoing covert excursions into Cambodia,” he told me. “We were running a lot of covert ops there.”

“How Could the People Escape?”

After two days of driving local roads asking for directions, I turned off a highway onto a red dirt track that cut through lush farmland and finally spilled into a border village of simple wooden homes amid a sea of variegated greenery. During the war, these houses had looked much the same, said village chief Sheang Heng, a wiry man with calloused hands and bare feet wearing a loose dress shirt that had once been white. The only real change was that corrugated metal had replaced most of the old thatch and tile roofs.

In 1970, when Sheang was 17 years old, this village was on the front line of America’s Cambodian incursion. Halfway around the world, at Kent State University, members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during a May 4, 1970, protest against this new stage in the war. While that massacre received worldwide attention, a larger one in Sheang’s village three days earlier went unnoticed.

On May 1, 1970, helicopters circled the Cambodian village of “Moroan” (an American’s phonetic spelling of the name) before opening fire, killing 12 villagers and wounding five, according to a formerly classified U.S. document that, until now, has never been publicly disclosed. After the assault, another helicopter landed and carried off the injured; the survivors fled their village to another named “Kantuot,” located in a neighboring district.

There is no village in Cambodia named “Moroan,” but the hamlet near the Vietnamese border where I located Sheang was, he said, called Mroan. As in the other Cambodian border villages I visited, focusing on a lone attack cited in U.S. military documents left residents baffled, given that they had endured many airstrikes over many years. Still, when asked about the date, Sheang gestured toward what is now the far edge of the village. “Many died in that area at that time,” he recalled. “Afterward, the people left this village for another named Kantuot.”

Sheang and Lim South, who was 14 years old in 1970, said that many types of aircraft battered Mroan, from helicopter gunships to massive B-52 bombers. As Sheang — who lost his mother, father, a grandfather, a nephew, and a niece, among other relatives, to airstrikes — told me about the relentless attacks, his eyes reddened and went vacant. “The explosions tossed the earth into the air. The ‘fire rocket’ burned the houses. Who could survive? People ran, but they were cut down. They were killed immediately. They just died,” he said, trailing off as he moved to a far corner of the room and slumped to his knees.

Each survivor told a similar story. Lim’s sister and three brothers were killed in bombing raids. Thlen Hun, who was in her 20s in the early 1970s, said her older brother was killed in an airstrike. South Chreung — shirtless in dress pants with a vibrant orange krama, the traditional Cambodian scarf, around his neck — told me that he had lost a younger brother in a different attack.

Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.

Sheang and Thlen said that about half the families in Mroan — some 250 people — were wiped out by U.S. attacks. They led me to the edge of the village, a riot of foliage in every shade of green that sloped into a depression, one of several remaining nearby bomb craters. “About 20 people were killed here,” said Sheang gesturing toward the crater. “It used to be deeper, but the land has filled it in.” Thlen — slim, with graying hair, her brown eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint — shook her head and walked to the crater’s edge. “It was disastrous. Just look at the size,” she said, adding that this hole was just one of many that once dotted the landscape. “How could the people escape? Where could they escape to?”

The Stolen Suzuki and the Girl Left to Die

The results of Nixon’s December 1970 telephone tirade and Kissinger’s order to set “anything that flies on anything that moves” were immediately palpable. During that month, sorties by U.S. helicopters and bombers tripled in number. Soon after, in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.

How many similar killings occurred will never be known. Cover-ups were common, investigations were rarely undertaken, and crimes generally evaporated with the fog of war. But there were ample opportunities for mayhem and massacre. In the two years before Nixon took office, there were officially 426 helicopter gunship sorties in Cambodia, according to a Defense Department report. Between January 1970 and April 1972, there were at least 2,116. In January 1971, Congress enacted the Cooper-Church amendment, which prohibited U.S. troops, including advisers, from operating on the ground in Cambodia, but America’s war continued unabated. Evidence soon emerged that the U.S. was violating Cooper-Church, but the White House lied about it to Congress and the public. “As long as we didn’t set our foot on that ground, we basically weren’t there, even though we did missions there every day,” Gary Grawey, an Army helicopter crew chief who flew daily missions in Cambodia during the spring of 1971, including the May mission that killed the young girl, told me.

“They attacked that village,” Grawey said, noting that both the South Vietnamese and American troops shot up the hamlet. “They were shootin’ and they didn’t even know who they were shootin’ at,” he recalled, adding that the victims were “women and children,” just “regular villagers.”

It started at half past noon on May 18, 1971, according to an Army investigation file and previously unreported summary documents produced by a Pentagon task force in 1972, when three U.S. helicopters — a “hunter-killer team” conducting a reconnaissance mission — skimmed the treetops inside Cambodia. The team came upon a village where they spotted motorcycles and bicycles that, according to crew members’ testimony, were suspected of being part of an enemy supply convoy. Hovering above, the Americans tried to motion for people on the ground to open packs on the vehicles. When the villagers instead began moving away, the highest-flying helicopter fired two incendiary rockets, a numbingly common tactic to draw out enemy personnel who might be hiding nearby. While the crew of one of the helicopters reported taking isolated ground fire, no Americans were killed or wounded, nor were any enemy personnel or weapons ever found.

According to a confidential report discovered in the U.S. National Archives and published here for the first time, the high-flying helicopter then “rocketed and strafed the buildings and surrounding area with approximately 15 to 18 rounds of high explosive rockets and machine gun fire.”

Capt. Clifford Knight, pilot of the “low bird,” said that his gunner shot an apparently unarmed man, clad in civilian clothes, who was “trying to run away.” The gunner, John Nicholes, admitted it, noting that the killing took place after the initial rocket barrage.

Capt. David Schweitzer, the “high bird” commander, testified to rocketing and strafing the area and calling for the insertion of South Vietnamese, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, troops to search for suspected enemy forces. According to a summary of the testimony of Grawey, the helicopter crew chief who ferried an elite ARVN Ranger team and an American captain, Arnold Brooks, to the village:

CPT Brooks and the ARVN Rangers acted “hog wild” when they deplaned, shooting up the area although they received no return fire. … [H]e did observe 5 to 10 Cambodian personnel that appeared to be wounded, but that he did not know if they were wounded from air or ground fire.

Decades later, Grawey reconfirmed details of the incident in an interview, noting that, as the ARVN deployed from the helicopter, he told Brooks that “he was not to get off my bird.” But Brooks, whom Grawey described as “gung ho,” pulled rank and ignored him. Brooks — who he said was carrying a non-regulation “machinegun” — started shooting indiscriminately.

Davin McLaughlin, the commander of a replacement “low bird” that was called in when the first helicopter ran short on fuel, similarly noted that the South Vietnamese met no resistance and, according to the documents, “grabbed what they could.” A summary of the testimony of his gunner, Len Shattuck, in the investigation file adds:

The ARVN Rangers appeared melodramatic when they were inserted and in his opinion fired excessively in the area. … He stated that there were approximately 15 wounded personnel in the area and that he observed 2 males 50-60 years of age, and one female 8-10 years of age, that appeared to be dead.

In a 2010 interview, Shattuck told me that he didn’t fire a shot that day and stressed that he only saw one section of the village. What he saw there, however, stayed with him. “We came into a smoking village,” he said. “I witnessed dead bodies. I witnessed some wounded people that appeared to be civilians. … We didn’t evac[uate] anybody.” Shattuck remembered the little girl as even younger than indicated by his testimony, just 3 to 5 years old, and that she was covered with blood. “She was pretty badly shot up,” he recalled.

As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents. Brooks acknowledged his service in Cambodia during a telephone conversation and asked for a formal interview request by email. He did not respond to that request or subsequent ones.

Agness, according to an Army investigator’s summary, said that he received “a radio request to evacuate a wounded girl [but] denied on instructions of CPT Brooks since he was fully loaded with the ARVN Ranger team, a motorcycle and he was low on fuel.” The stolen Suzuki was presented as a gift to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Carl Putnam, who was later seen tooling around base on it, according to the investigation documents. The Army concluded that the wounded girl, left behind for the sake of the Suzuki, died.

Furious, Gary Grawey resolved to report Arnold Brooks. “I was really pissed at the time,” he told me. “I said I would report him, which I did.” A previously unreported final status report on the “Brooks Incident,” contained in the files of the Pentagon war crimes task force, concluded that allegations of excessive bombardment, pillage, and a violation of the rules of engagement had been “substantiated.” While no enemy weapons or war materiel were found in the village, according to the report, civilian casualties “were estimated at eight dead, including two children, 15 wounded and three or four structures destroyed. There is no evidence that the wounded were provided medical treatment by either U.S. or ARVN forces.”

Putnam and a direct subordinate were issued letters of reprimand — a low-grade punishment — for their “actions and/or inactions” in the case. (Putnam died in 1976.) While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.

Backing the Genocidaires

When Henry Kissinger hatched his plans for the secret bombing of Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge numbered around 5,000. But as a 1973 CIA cable explained, the Khmer Rouge’s recruitment efforts relied heavily on the U.S. bombing:

They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda. … The [Khmer Rouge] cadre tell the people … the only way to stop “the massive destruction of the country” is to remove [U.S.-backed junta leader] Lon Nol and return Prince Sihanouk to power. The proselyting cadres tell the people that the quickest way to accomplish this is to strengthen [Khmer Rouge] forces so they will be able to defeat Lon Nol and stop the bombing.

The U.S. dropped more than 257,000 tons of munitions on Cambodia in 1973, almost the same amount as during the previous four years combined. A report by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that “the intense American bombing in 1973 increased the cumulative number of refugees to nearly half of the country’s population.”

Those attacks galvanized Pol Pot’s forces, allowing the Khmer Rouge to grow into the 200,000-person force that took over the country and killed about 20 percent of the population. Once the regime was in power, the political winds had shifted and Kissinger, behind closed doors, told Thailand’s foreign minister: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” He then clarified his statement: The Thai official should not repeat the “murderous thugs” line to the Khmer Rouge, only that the U.S. wanted a warmer relationship.

In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.

That same year, Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”

In 2001 and again in 2018, the late chef and cultural critic Anthony Bourdain offered sentiments shared by many, but rarely put so eloquently:

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic.

In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he ducked investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and quickly leaving Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths in Cambodia or anywhere else.

“Play With It. Have a Good Time.”

“To spare you is no profit; to destroy you, no loss” was the cold credo of the Khmer Rouge. But it could just as easily have been Kissinger’s. In 2010, I followed up with Kissinger, pressing him on the contradiction in his claims about only bombing “North Vietnamese in Cambodia” but somehow killing 50,000 Cambodians, by his count, in the process. “We weren’t running around the country bombing Cambodians,” he told me.

The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates otherwise, and I told him so.

“Oh, come on!” Kissinger exclaimed, protesting that I was merely trying to catch him in a lie. When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

Cambodians in villages like Tralok Bek, Doun Rath, and Mroan didn’t have the luxury of such an easy escape.

The post Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

“A shooting, and Mr. Welch is down,” the driver yelled.

Estes grabbed his coat and ran outside, ignoring his girlfriend’s pleas to stay.

At Welch’s house in the Greek capital, Estes saw the station chief lying on his back on the sidewalk, his wife, Kika, kneeling beside him. Blood covered Welch’s face, and Estes could see immediately that he was dead. “I didn’t need to feel for a pulse,” he said in an interview. A police car arrived, and Estes asked the officer to call an ambulance. When no ambulance arrived, they hauled the body into Welch’s car and Estes and Welch’s driver followed the police officer, siren blaring and lights flashing, through the streets of Athens to the nearest hospital. A medical team was waiting; they quickly placed Welch on a gurney and took him to an examining room. There, a doctor placed a stethoscope on Welch’s chest and confirmed to Estes that he was dead.

Welch was 46 years old. A career CIA officer, he had been the CIA’s Athens station chief for six months.

At the hospital, Welch’s driver finally caught his breath and told Estes what had happened. He had driven Welch and his wife home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, then stopped in front of the walled compound that enclosed Welch’s house to open the front gates. As Welch and his wife got out, three armed men in a black car pulled up behind them, burst out of the car, and confronted Welch.

“Put your hands up!” one of the men told Welch in Greek.

“What?” Welch asked in English.

One of the gunmen leveled his .45 caliber handgun and fired three times. An autopsy later showed that the first shot hit Welch in the chest, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The three men got back in their car and sped away. That’s when Welch’s driver rushed to get Estes.

The hospital lobby soon filled with journalists, who had most likely heard about the shooting by monitoring the city’s police radio. Estes realized that many of them already seemed to know that Welch had been the CIA’s station chief. Steven Roberts, a New York Times reporter in Athens who covered Welch’s murder, wrote the next day that he had been talking with Welch at the ambassador’s Christmas party an hour before the shooting.

A spokesperson from the U.S. Embassy arrived, and Estes slipped away from the crowd of reporters. The police found the gunmen’s car, which had been stolen, abandoned several blocks from Welch’s home.

Back at the CIA station, Estes sent cables to CIA headquarters and talked on a secure phone with a top agency official. “When I finished briefing him, he said, ‘I could only hear about half of what you said.’” Estes recalled. “‘Send me a cable repeating what you said immediately. We’ve got to go to the president.’”

Before the Church Committee was created in January 1975, there had been no real congressional oversight of the CIA. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees did not yet exist, and the Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.

Sen. Frank Church, the liberal Democrat from Idaho who chaired the committee, had come to believe that the future of American democracy was threatened by the rise of a permanent and largely unaccountable national security state, and he sensed that at the heart of that secret government was a lawless intelligence community. Church was convinced it had to be reined in to save the nation.

The Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.

To a great degree, he succeeded. By disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power and spearheading wide-ranging reforms, Church and his Committee created rules of the road for the intelligence community that largely remain in place today. More than anyone else in American history, Church is responsible for bringing the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the government’s intelligence apparatus under the rule of law.

But first, Church and his committee had to withstand a brutal counterattack launched by a Republican White House and the CIA, both of which wanted to blunt Church’s reform efforts. The White House and CIA quickly realized that the Welch killing, which occurred just as the Church Committee was finishing its investigations and preparing its final report and recommendations for reform, could be used as a political weapon. President Gerald Ford’s White House and the agency falsely sought to blame the Church Committee for Welch’s murder, claiming, without any evidence, that its investigations had somehow exposed Welch’s identity and left him vulnerable to assassination.

There was absolutely no truth to the claims, but the disinformation campaign was effective. The Ford administration’s use of the Welch murder to discredit the Church Committee was a model of propaganda and disinformation; an internal CIA history later praised the “skillful steps” that the agency and the White House “took to exploit the Welch murder to U.S. intelligence benefit.”

The Welch case has long since served as a classic example of how to exploit and weaponize intelligence for political purposes. The George W. Bush administration’s efforts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11; the Republican obsession with the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and their use of it to discredit then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Donald Trump’s efforts to portray himself as the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy can all be traced back to the way U.S. leaders exploited Welch’s 1975 killing.

The White House and CIA were aided in their propaganda campaign by the fact that Estes did not go public at the time with his account of what really happened in Athens. Now, nearly 50 years later, Estes has finally broken his silence. In interviews for our new book, “The Last Honest Man,” he talked in detail about the murder and its causes with a journalist for the first time, supplying new evidence that Welch’s assassination stemmed from the toxic politics of Athens — not Washington.

Greek hostility toward the United States spread. On August 19, 1974, a pro-Greek mob attacked the U.S. embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, and both U.S. Ambassador Rodger Davies and a local embassy employee were killed. After a ceasefire, Cyprus was divided into Greek and Turkish zones; the disastrous outcome of the coup in Cyprus later led to the collapse of the military junta in Athens. But anger in Greece toward the United States continued unabated.

The relationship between the CIA and Greece’s Central Intelligence Service, known as the KYP, was also poisoned. Soon, someone had leaked the names of Welch and a few other officers in the CIA’s Athens station to the Greek press.

In November 1975, Welch’s name and home address were published in English language and Greek language newspapers in Athens. The information “was obviously leaked by hostile KYP officers,” Estes said in the interview, “because the only names leaked were those in liaison contact with KYP.” (CIA overseas stations often included officers who were in liaison contact with the intelligence service of the local country — their identities as CIA officers thus declared to the service so they could meet with them and trade intelligence — and others who were not identified so they could spy without the knowledge of the local government.)

Welch was not hard to find; he lived in a luxurious villa that had been the official residence of the CIA station chief for decades. After his name and home address were published in the press, Estes talked to him about whether he should move. But Welch and Estes concluded that the threat was minimal. “We both agreed that political assassination was not part of the fabric of Greek history or culture,” Estes recalled.

It was a fatal miscalculation. Welch’s murder was carried out by a new, extremely violent Greek leftist guerrilla organization called 17 November. While right-wing Greek nationalists hated the United States for betraying Greece over Cyprus, left-wing Greeks blamed the United States for helping to install the military junta in Athens in 1967. The 17 November group was named for an anti-junta protest by students that was brutally broken up on November 17, 1973. Welch was 17 November’s first target. (The group continued to conduct terrorist attacks in Greece, including the murders of other American officials, until it was finally crushed in 2002.)

Estes reported the truth back to CIA headquarters: that Welch had been murdered by Greek terrorists after being publicly exposed by the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. His story was buried in the service of a more helpful political narrative.

After Welch’s murder, emotions were running high in the CIA station in Athens. On the night of the assassination, Estes had to restrain another CIA officer after he grabbed a pistol and threatened to seek revenge by killing the KGB’s Athens Rezident, Welch’s Soviet counterpart.

Welch’s murder hit Estes hard as well. He and Welch had come up through the ranks of the agency together, and by 1975, they were close friends who met to play chess every Sunday. Welch and Estes had previously served together in Cyprus, and they understood the island’s status as a battlefield in the long-running conflict between Turkey and Greece. While serving in Cyprus, Estes said, Welch had recruited the personal secretary of Cypriot President Makarios III to spy for the CIA.

Estes was eager to solve his friend’s murder, without waiting for the Greek police. At the time, he didn’t know about the new leftist 17 November organization since Welch’s killing was its first operation. Instead, Estes focused his investigation on a right-wing terrorist group.

He and other CIA officers in Athens grilled their local sources and found that a gunman associated with a Greek-Cypriot right-wing paramilitary group known as EOKA had left Athens on a flight to Nicosia, Cyprus, the day after Welch’s killing. The gunman was known to have killed people in Cyprus with a .45 handgun — the same kind of weapon used to kill Welch.

When he worked in Cyprus years earlier, Estes had recruited an EOKA hitman to work for the CIA. “When I left Cyprus, he told me that whenever the CIA wanted something done that it didn’t want to do itself, call me,” recalled Estes. “So, after Welch was killed, I sent a case officer to Nicosia to meet him and tell him that Ron Estes sent him.”

The CIA officer asked the Cypriot agent if he knew the EOKA killer who had flown from Athens to Cyprus the day after Welch’s murder. The hitman said he did. The CIA officer told the hitman to go meet the man and ask him if he’d killed Welch.

The hitman reported that, when he confronted the EOKA killer, the other man was so scared that he offered to plead his innocence to the CIA himself. An American case officer then met with the man in Laranca, Cyprus, where he passed a CIA-administered polygraph.

Estes’s conviction that Welch had been exposed by the KYP and murdered by Greek terrorists, and the fact that CIA officers were conducting their own murder investigation on the ground in Cyprus, were not made public in Washington at the time. That information would only have gotten in the way of the campaign to exploit Welch’s murder to discredit the Church Committee.

By late 1975, Ford and the CIA were both worried about their public standing. The Church Committee’s disclosures of intelligence abuses had weakened the CIA, and the White House was concerned about the political impact of the committee’s disclosures on Ford, the first commander-in-chief who had never been elected either president or vice president. Ford had been the obscure House minority leader in 1973 when he was chosen as vice president under the 25th Amendment by then-President Richard Nixon and Congress. Ford replaced Spiro Agnew, who had been forced to resign amid a corruption scandal; he became president when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in August 1974. Ford was headed into a tough presidential election campaign in 1976, and he wasn’t even assured of winning the Republican nomination. He faced a formidable challenge on the right from former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, and so Ford was eager to prove his conservative bona fides.

Now, with Welch’s assassination, the White House and CIA quickly realized they had been handed a political gift — a martyred hero whose death they could lay at the feet of liberal Democrat Church.

Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.

It didn’t matter that Welch’s murder had nothing to do with the Church Committee. It didn’t matter that Estes had told CIA headquarters that the Greek intelligence service had leaked Welch’s name and address to the Greek press as revenge for U.S. policy in Cyprus. Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.

The day after Welch’s murder, Welch’s father, who had been living in Athens with his son, asked Estes to see if Welch could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Welch had never served in the military, so burial at Arlington would require a special exemption.

Estes says he cabled CIA headquarters about the request, and Ford quickly gave his approval. That led to a grand political moment, stage-managed by the White House.

A U.S. Air Force plane flew Welch’s body from Athens to Washington. Welch’s son, a Marine lieutenant wearing his dress blues, accompanied his father’s body on the flight. The plane delayed its landing, circling Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington for 45 minutes so its arrival could be broadcast live during the morning network television news programs.

Daniel Schorr, a CBS News correspondent who covered the event, wrote in his personal journal, which was published in Rolling Stone in 1976, that “the public relations people explain that the big cargo plane, already overhead, will stay in a holding pattern and land at 7 a.m. so that it will be available for live televising on network morning news programs. We do in fact carry it live on the CBS Morning News.”

Welch’s January 6, 1976, funeral service at Arlington was attended by Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and CIA director William Colby. No president had ever before attended the funeral of a slain CIA officer.

After the funeral service, Ford stood beside Welch’s widow while Welch’s coffin was placed on a horse-drawn caisson. “We watch, and film … the same caisson that carried the body of President Kennedy, the folded flag given to the widow by Colby,” wrote Schorr in his journal.

“It is the CIA’s first public national hero,” Schorr wrote. “I have a sense that Welch, dead, has one more service to render the CIA. He will be turned into a symbol in the gathering counter-offensive against disclosure.”

While Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended Welch’s funeral, the FBI was investigating a death threat against Church in retaliation for Welch’s murder, sent by a group calling itself Veterans Against Communist Sympathizers.

Another prominent Washington official also attended Welch’s funeral: George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just been nominated to succeed Colby as CIA director. Ford had chosen Bush after firing Colby, who Ford believed had cooperated too readily with the Church Committee’s inquiries. The opening battle between the White House, the CIA, and Church would be fought over Bush’s confirmation in the Senate.

Church saw Bush’s nomination as an effort by Ford to put a partisan hack at the CIA, someone who would do the bidding of the White House just as Congress was seeking to curb the agency’s abuses. Church viewed Bush’s nomination as a direct attack on the Church Committee.

The chance to be CIA director came at a critical moment in Bush’s career. Until then, he had a poor record in elected politics. He won a House seat from Texas and served two terms but then lost a campaign for the Senate in 1970. After that, Bush started to rise in the Republican ranks through a series of appointed positions. He served as chair of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, a job that forced him to make repeated public excuses for Nixon but earned him credit for party loyalty. He also served as United Nations ambassador under Nixon and as head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China under Ford.

Ford was considering Bush to be his running mate in 1976; the job as CIA director seemed like a stepping stone. But first, Bush had to get past Frank Church.

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Even as he was still working on his committee’s investigations and reports, Church went all out to block Bush’s confirmation. On December 16, 1975, Church testified as a witness against Bush during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bush’s confirmation was “ill-advised,” Church told the committee, because of his partisan political background and because he had refused to rule out running as vice president in 1976. Church complained that the White House was using the CIA as a “grooming room” for Bush “before he is brought on stage next year as a vice presidential running mate.”

But Welch’s murder quickly changed the political calculus of the confirmation fight in favor of Bush — and against Church.

The White House and CIA followed a subtle but effective strategy to use the Welch murder to help get Bush confirmed, while also poisoning the political climate for Church and his Committee. Immediately after Welch’s murder, the CIA sought to blame the Fifth Estate, a left-wing group based in Washington that published Counter Spy, a small left-wing magazine that had previously printed long lists of CIA officials’ names, including Welch’s when he served in Peru. Agency officials also blamed Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who had just published “Inside the Company,” a controversial book that had listed the names of hundreds of CIA officers and agents.

Many observers saw the CIA’s efforts to blame Counter Spy and Agee as a way to shift the blame for Welch’s murder from Greek terrorists to the CIA’s American critics. And if the public inferred that those American critics also included Church and his committee, so be it.

Conservative pundits quickly made the link explicit. In early January 1976, right-wing columnist Smith Hempstone wrote that the blame for Welch’s murder should be shared by “the congressional committees that for nearly a year have been holding the CIA up to ridicule and verbal abuse.” Around the same time, an anonymous, pro-CIA newsletter, the Pink Sheet, called Welch’s murder “a tragic reminder of a very basic truth: There are individuals and organizations in this country whose activities are aiding the enemies of the U.S. Are we to be impotent against such fifth columnists in our midst? Please write to your congressman and senators and ask what they propose to do about this increasingly dangerous problem. Instead of harming our internal security agencies, Senator Frank Church and his colleagues should be investigating outfits like the Fifth Estate.” The Pink Sheet’s diatribe was included in CIA files and publicly released by the CIA among other documents declassified in 2004. It is not clear whether the newsletter was published by someone affiliated with the CIA.

Meanwhile, former CIA officers began to make themselves available to the press to attack Church. One of them, Mike Ackerman, told reporters that the Church Committee shared the blame for Welch’s death, adding that the committee should have conducted its investigations without publicly disclosing agency operations.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis saw through the unfolding White House-CIA strategy.

“Understandably, the Welch case has brought to a boil the resentment felt by CIA veterans at critics of the agency,” Lewis wrote. “But it is another matter entirely to use the murder of Richard Welch as a political device, as President Ford and his national security assistants are evidently trying to do now.”

Colby’s “denunciation [of Fifth Estate] plainly had a larger purpose: to make the case that the CIA needs more secrecy in general than it has been getting lately,” Lewis wrote. “President Ford and his colleagues, judging by their recent comments, hope to prevent any thoroughgoing reform of the CIA. They will use the Welch case to that end, in particular to resist limits on covert action and to reduce congressional scrutiny.”

The Washington Star’s Norman Kempster agreed, noting that “only a few hours after the CIA’s Athens station chief was gunned down in front of his home, the agency began a subtle campaign intended to persuade Americans that his death was the indirect result of congressional investigations and the direct result of an article in an obscure magazine. The nation’s press, by and large, swallowed the bait.”

The campaign by the White House and the CIA to exploit Welch’s murder ensured Bush’s confirmation as CIA director. On January 27, 1976, Bush sailed through the Senate on a vote of 64-27. Ford made only one concession to the Senate before the vote: He announced that Bush would not be his running mate in 1976.

Four years later, Bush was elected vice president on the ticket with Reagan.

The false narrative that Welch had been murdered because of reckless disclosures in Washington remained powerful for years afterward, ultimately leading to legislation that made it illegal to publish the names of covert CIA officers, a law that has since often been abused by the government to crack down on whistleblowers and dissent.

After Welch’s murder, public support for the Church Committee waned. Church was stunned by the sudden reversal of the political climate and angered that Bush continued to push the false story around Welch’s killing even after he became CIA director.

During one closed hearing of the Church Committee soon after Bush had been confirmed, “Bush blurted out, ‘You were responsible for Welch’s assassination,’” recalled Fritz Schwarz, the Church Committee’s chief counsel. “It pissed off everybody. We forced Bush to apologize during the hearing.” Still, the Bush family continued to push false narratives about the Welch murder for years. In the 1990s, Agee, the former CIA officer, sued Barbara Bush for libel after she wrote in her memoir that Welch had been killed after Agee’s book blew his cover. The suit was dropped in 1997 after Bush acknowledged that Agee’s book was not responsible for Welch’s assassination.

Meanwhile, Church also had to convince other senators, whose support for his committee was wavering in the face of the White House and CIA disinformation campaign, that his investigation was not responsible for Welch’s murder.

“One of the things we did was tell other senators that we didn’t reveal Welch’s name,” recalls former Church Committee staffer Loch Johnson. “We had to make it clear to other senators that we had nothing to do with it.”

The controversy over Welch’s murder hit just as Church was about to launch his own bid to run for president in 1976. After the Church Committee had completed its investigations, Church announced his candidacy in March 1976. But by waiting until the committee’s work was done, Church started off far behind the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. Still, Church surprisingly won several primaries before dropping out and became a leading contender to be Carter’s running mate. When Carter instead chose Walter Mondale, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Church began to suspect that CIA officials had worked behind the scenes to torpedo his selection. Church confided to his son that, just before the Democratic convention in New York, he’d gotten a call from the CIA saying the agency had been told that The Economist magazine was going to publish a story revealing that the Church Committee had been infiltrated by the KGB.

“Can you imagine any rumor more certain to spook a presidential candidate than that his prospective vice president has overseen an operation which was infiltrated by the KGB?” Church told his son, Forrest, who recounted the conversation in his 1985 memoir.

It turned out that the reporter the CIA had told Church was writing the story did not exist, and no story was ever published. “Church’s feeling that he had been sandbagged by the CIA might have been an illusion,” Forrest Church wrote. “One thing is certain, however. There is no member of the Senate whom the leaders of our intelligence services would have less preferred sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Former Church staffer Peter Fenn corroborated that account: “We talked a good deal about the CIA torpedoing him.”

The CIA’s hatred of Church didn’t end in 1976.

In 1980, Church was facing a tough reelection campaign in Idaho. As the election loomed, Rep. Steve Symms, a hard-right Republican who represented Idaho’s first congressional district, appeared the most likely candidate to run against him. Symms, whose family owned a large fruit ranch near Caldwell, Idaho, had been plotting to take on Church for years. He had even urged Bob Smith, his friend and chief of staff, to run against Church in 1974 as a stalking horse.

But just in case Symms had any last-minute doubts, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s former chief of counterintelligence, stepped in to give him a push.

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Angleton felt he had been humiliated by being forced to testify in public before the Church Committee, and Church was at the top of his personal enemies list. In the late 1970s, Angleton, who was originally from Idaho, began meeting with Symms to convince him to run against Church.

“He was from Boise, and he really despised Frank Church,” Symms said in an interview. “He used to come over to see me in the House,” he added. Angleton would recount to Symms all the damage he claimed Church had wrought on the CIA, Symms said, and then Angleton would say, “You should run against Church.”

“I got exposed to that [intelligence] stuff through Angleton,” Symms added. “I still remember him coming over to my office and sitting on my couch, and he would smoke one cigarette after another. He would kind of put his leg up and talk to me on intelligence. He wanted Church defeated.”

Symms beat Church in 1980, which was cause for celebration in CIA circles.

“After I won the Senate race, I was invited to a party at someone’s house and I was just about the only person there who was not former intelligence,” Symms recalled. “It was quite impressive to meet all these people and see how deeply they all despised Church.”

This article was adapted from “The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys — and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy” by James Risen with Thomas Risen, which will be published on May 9, 2023, by Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2023 by James Risen. All rights reserved. 

The post How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic appeared first on The Intercept.

The 17-year-old then approached a fellow student, pulled a hunting-style knife out of his backpack, and repeatedly stabbed the other student in the hands and back.

The Utica City School District had installed the $4 million weapons detection system across 13 of its schools earlier that summer, mostly with public funds. The scanners, from Massachusetts-based Evolv Technology, look like metal detectors but scan for “signatures” for “all the guns, all the bombs, and all the large tactical knives” in the world, Evolv’s CEO Peter George has repeatedly claimed.

In Utica, the 17-year-old’s weapon wasn’t the first knife, or gun, to bypass the system. Earlier that month, at a parents’ night, a law enforcement officer had walked through the system twice with his service revolver and was puzzled to find it was never detected. School authorities reached out to Evolv and were subsequently told to increase the sensitivity settings to the highest level.

The detector did finally go off: It identified a 7-year-old student’s lunch box as a bomb. On Halloween, however, it remained silent.

“They’ve tried to backtrack by saying, ‘Oh no, it doesn’t pick up all knives,’” said Brian Nolan, who had been appointed acting superintendent of the Utica City School District 10 days before the stabbing. “They don’t tell you — will it pick up a machete or a Swiss army knife? We’ve got like really nothing back from Evolv.”

Ultimately, Utica City School District removed and replaced the scanners from their high schools, costing the district another $250,000. In the elementary and middle schools, which retained Evolv scanners, three knives have been recovered from students — but not because the scanners picked them up, according to Nolan.

Stories about Evolv systems missing weapons have popped up nationwide. Last month, a knife fight erupted between students at Mifflin High School in Ohio. It’s not clear how the knives entered the building, but it was less than three months after the school district spent $3 million installing Evolv scanners.

As school shootings proliferate across the country — there were 46 school shootings in 2022, more than in any year since at least 1999 — educators are increasingly turning to dodgy vendors who market misleading and ineffective technology. Utica City is one of dozens of school districts nationwide that have spent millions on gun detection technology with little to no track record of preventing or stopping violence.

Evolv’s scanners keep popping up in schools across the country. In a video produced by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district in North Carolina about its new $16.5 million system, students spoke about how the technology reassured them. “I know that I’m not going to be threatened with any firearms, any knives, any sort of metallic weapon at all,” one said.

“Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.”

Over 65 school districts have bought or tested artificial intelligence gun detection from a variety of companies since 2018, spending a total of over $45 million, much of it coming from public coffers, according to an investigation by The Intercept.

“Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, or NYCLU, “and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.”

In December, it came out that Evolv, a publicly traded company since 2021, had doctored the results of their software testing. In 2022, the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, a government body, completed a confidential report showing that previous field tests on the scanners failed to detect knives and a handgun. When Evolv released a public version of the report, according to IPVM, a surveillance industry research publication, and underlying documents reviewed by The Intercept, the failures had been excised from the results. Though Evolv touted the report as “fully independent,” there was no disclosure that the company itself had paid for the research. (Evolv has said the public version of the report had information removed for security reasons.)

Five law firms recently announced investigations of Evolv Technology — a partner of Motorola Solutions whose investors include Bill Gates — looking into possible violations of securities law, including claims that Evolv misrepresented its technology and its capabilities to it.

“When you start peeling back the onion on what the technology actually does and doesn’t do, it’s much different than the reality these companies present,” said Donald Maye at IPVM. “And that is absolutely the case with Evolv.”

Evolv told The Intercept it would not comment on any specific situations involving their customers and declined to comment further. (Motorola Solutions did not respond to a request for comment.)

The overpromising of artificial intelligence products is an industrywide problem. The Federal Trade Commission recently released a blog post warning companies, “Keep your AI claims in check.” Among the questions was, “Are you exaggerating what your AI product can do?”

At an investor conference in June 2022, Evolv CEO George was asked if the company would have stopped the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. “The answer is when somebody goes through our system and they have a concealed weapon or an open carry weapon, we’re gonna find it, period,” he responded. “We won’t miss it.”

In January, the scanners caught a student trying to enter a high school with a handgun in Guilford, North Carolina. Subsequently, an Evolv spokesperson told WFMY News that their systems had uncovered 100,000 weapons in 2022. In a presentation for investors in the fourth quarter of 2022, George said the detection scanners, on average, stopped 400 guns per day.

There is little peer-reviewed research, however, showing that AI gun detection is effective at preventing shootings. And in the case of Uvalde, the shooter began firing his gun before even entering the school building — and therefore before having passed through a detector.

“The odds of that happening — someone walks in with a displayed gun — are really, really small. It just doesn’t make sense that that’s what you’re investing in.”

“The odds of that happening — someone walks in with a displayed gun — are really, really small,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at American University’s law school and an expert on surveillance. “It just doesn’t make sense that that’s what you’re investing in.”

Even in airports with maximum security protocols, Evolv’s technology has proved to have gaping holes. When an official at Denver International Airport expressed interest in Evolv scanners, he asked a colleague at Oakland International Airport, which uses the machines.

“It is not an explosives detection machine per se,” wrote Douglas Mansel, the aviation security manager in Oakland, in an internal email obtained through a public records request and shared with The Intercept, “So if an employee (or law enforcement during a test) walks through with a brick of C4” — an explosive — “in their hands, the Evolv will not alarm.” (The Oakland Airport told The Intercept it does not comment on its security program.)

In a BBC interview in 2020, Evolv said the density of metal is one key indicator of a weapon’s presence. But the company firmly denies that their scanners are akin to metal detectors. “We’re a weapons detector, not a metal detector,” George said on a conference call in June 2021. (A large competitor of Evolv is CEIA, which manufactures metal detectors without AI, used in airports and schools.)

Yet in many cases, Evolv hasn’t picked up weapons. And researchers have also highlighted how metallic objects, such as laptops, repeatedly set the system off. “They go through great lengths to claim they are not a metal detector,” said Maye of IPVM. “To the extent to which AI is being used, it’s open to interpretation to the consumer.”

Despite claims by George that the system can scan up to 1,000 students in 15 minutes, in the Hemet Unified School District in California, false alarms slowed ingress to school buildings. The solution, according to Evolv, was to simply encourage educators to let students proceed.

“They only need to clear the threat(s) and not figure out what alarmed the system,” wrote Amy Ferguson, customer manager at Evolv, in an internal email to the school system obtained through a public records request and shared with The Intercept. “I recommended not doing a loop back unless necessary. … Many students were looping back 2 or 3 times.” (The Hemet Unified School District did not respond to a request for comment.)

Across the country in Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, the system had 250 false alarms for every real hit in the period from September 2021 to June 2022, according to internal records obtained by IPVM. The school district spent $1.4 million on the Evolv software, which it bought from Motorola.

“It plays an important role in our efforts to keep our School District safe,” the district told The Intercept. “And we plan to expand its use within the District.”

Evolv isn’t the only company making bold claims about its sophisticated weapons detection system. ZeroEyes, a Philadelphia-based AI company, states in contracts that “our proactive solution saves lives.” Founded by Navy SEALs in 2018, the firm uses video analytics and object detection to pick up guns.

ZeroEyes’s website lists the timeline for the Sandy Hook shooting, arguing its technology could have materially reduced the response time. When a gun is visible on camera, an alert gets sent to a “24/7/365 ZeroEyes Operations Center Team,” with people monitoring the feed, who in turn confirm the gun and alert the school and police. It claims to do all of this in three to five seconds.

The human team is key to the group’s system, something critics say belies the weakness of the underlying AI claims. “This is one of the fundamental challenges these companies have. Like if they could fully automate it reliably, they wouldn’t need to have a human-in-the-loop,” said Maye. “The human-in-the-loop is because AI isn’t good enough to do it itself.”

“We have never suggested that AI alone is enough,” Olga Shmuklyer, spokesperson for ZeroEyes, told The Intercept. “We would never trust AI alone to determine whether a gun threat is real or fake, nor should anybody else.”

In addition to Philadelphia, the company also has an operations center in Honolulu, Hawaii, “to cater to different time zones.”

ZeroEyes seems determined to overcome its critics and is so far faring well. The company raised $20 million in 2021. According to co-founder Rob Huberty, in a LinkedIn post, the team’s mantra is “F*** you, watch me.”

“We are problem solvers, and this is a difficult problem,” said Shmuklyer, the spokesperson. “Without the mentality proposed in that post, we wouldn’t have a solution to offer to school districts around the country.”

During the pandemic, school shootings rose in tandem with a spike in gun violence in general. The sort of panic that ensued can lead to impulsive and ineffective action, according to safety experts.

“We are seeing some school boards and administrators making knee-jerk reactions by purchasing AI weapons detection systems,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. “Unfortunately, the purchase of the systems appears to be done with little-to-no professional assessment of overall security threats and needs.”

Schools in Colorado and Texas brought weapons detection software from a now-convicted fraudster. Barry Oberholzer developed SWORD in 2018 under the startup X.Labs, registered as Royal Holdings Technologies, which he claimed to be the first mobile phone case providing gun detection software.

“I can identify you and identify if you are carrying a gun in 1.5 seconds,” Oberholzer told WSFA 12 News in Alabama in February 2019. “You don’t even have to click. You just need to point the device at the person.”

Later that year, it was reported that Oberholzer was on the run from over two dozen fraud and forgery charges in South Africa. (Todd Dunphy, a board member of and investor in X.Labs, denied the charges on Oberholzer’s behalf and produced an unverified letter from South African authorities clearing him.)

His SWORD product was endorsed by former high-level U.S. officials.

Former FBI agent James Gagliano, who was listed as an adviser to X.Labs, praised the product as “next generation public safety threat-detection.” Charles Marino, a retired Secret Service special agent, was listed as the company’s national security adviser.

Marino said he invested in the company but has not been involved for years and did not work on the SWORD project. “He swindled everybody,” Marino told The Intercept, referring to the conspiracy conviction. “Look, you kiss a lot of frogs in this world.”

Gagliano said in an email that he severed ties with Oberholzer after hearing of the fraud charges. “I was as stunned as anyone,” he said. “Have had no contact with him since I learned of his indictment in the Summer of 2021. I was excited about the technology he was seeking to introduce to law enforcement.”

In June 2020, X.Labs announced the rebranding of SWORD to X1, a standing device and “full-featured weapons detection system” in partnership with another firm.

Last month, Oberholzer and his business partner Jaromy Pittario pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to defraud investors and creditors. The Department of Justice accused Oberholzer of posing as Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director, while pitching the product to venture capital firms.

“Instead of attracting investors honestly, Oberholzer lied continuously to make his company more appealing to investors,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement.

None of it deterred the company. Its scanners, despite problems, remain in schools — and X.Labs continues to cultivate new business. “All of the devices that are purchased by clients are in their possession and can be used as they see fit,” Dunphy said. “The company, like last year, is run by the board and is working with parties to complete the last phase of development for the purpose of slowing down mass shootings globally.”

Oberholzer is no longer involved with X.Labs, said Dunphy, the board member, who responded to emails addressed to Oberholzer.

“Mr Oberholzer is a professional helicopter pilot and his comings and goings has nothing to do with X.labs,” Dunphy said, “as he resigned from the company in February 2021.”

There is a reason districts in New York, such as Utica, have been a target of gun detection vendors. Most of this technology is being funded by taxpayer money and, in the Empire State, there is a lot to spend.

Under the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services aid, school purchases get reimbursed based on a school district’s poverty level. Utica City School District, which has a high poverty level, was reimbursed 93 cents on the dollar on the Evolv sale, according to acting superintendent Nolan.

The Boards of Cooperative Educational Services told The Intercept, “As a coalition of the state’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, BOCES of NYS has neither authority nor oversight regarding the budgets, purchases, or reimbursement rates of any school district.” The regional Oneida-Herkimer-Madison Counties BOCES office — which covers the Utica school district — did not respond for comment.

While the district gets most of its money back after the disastrous purchase of the Evolv scanners, “New York state taxpayers are still on the hook for the system,” Nolan said.

The Smart Schools Bond Act, passed in 2014, also set aside $2 billion funding to “finance improved educational technology and infrastructure,” drawing the attention of vendors nationwide.

Related

Kathy Hochul Is Ready to Spend Millions on New Police Surveillance

“Folks in the school security industry got wind that New York State was sitting on this big pot of money that school districts had access to,” said Coyle of the NYCLU. “And that kind of opened the floodgates for companies to try to convince school districts to use that state funding to buy products they don’t need, they don’t know how to use, and are potentially harmful.”

New York isn’t the only state ready to spend a fortune. A 2019 Texas bill allocated $100 million in grants for schools seeking to purchase new equipment.

Federal Covid-19 relief dollars can also be directed to things like school security systems, through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Companies, including ZeroEyes and a similar firms, advertise how schools can receive a grant for the “development and implementation of procedures and systems to improve the preparedness and response efforts of a school district.”

“We are targeting sales to all states,” Shmuklyer, of Zero Eyes, said. “A lack of funds should not be the reason why a school cannot be proactive in addressing the mass shooting problem.”

Experts argue schools are just a cheap training ground for technology vendors to test and improve their object detection software so that they can eventually sell it elsewhere.

“Part of the reason why these companies are offering schools the technologies at a relatively cheap price point is that they’re using the schools as their grounds for training,” said Ferguson, the American University professor. “And so those schools or students become data points in a large data set that’s actually improving the technology so they can sell it to other people in other places.”

“They keep saying how the artificial intelligence system they use gets refined after more usage, because they collect more data, more information. But what’s it going to take, 20 years?”

Acting superintendent Nolan himself was told by Evolv the system would get smarter over time with more use. “They keep saying how the artificial intelligence system they use gets refined after more usage, because they collect more data, more information,” he said. “But what’s it going to take, 20 years?”

The lack of regulation leads to a lack of transparency on the use of the data itself. “There’s no protections in place,” said Daniel Schwarz, privacy and technology strategist at NYCLU, “And it raises all these issues around what happens with the data. … Oftentimes, what we’ve caught out is that they actually worsen racial disparities and biases.”

An analysis by the MacArthur Justice Center found that 89 percent of ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago from 2019-2021 turned up no gun-related crime. “Every unfounded ShotSpotter deployment creates an extremely dangerous situation for residents in the area,” according to the report.

There has been extensive reporting on police departments and other agencies’ use of ShotSpotter nationwide — but not schools. Public records show Brockton Public Schools, in Massachusetts, for instance, bought access to the technology for three years in a row. The school system said in a statement that the public document showing its purchase of ShotSpotter was in error and referred instead to a purchase by the police department; the school spokesperson said Brockton schools received a separate donation of ShotSpotter, but never activated it. (The school system did not say who donated the system, and the police department did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Contrary to claims that the ShotSpotter product leads to over-policing, ShotSpotter alerts allow police to investigate a gunfire incident in a more precise area,” Sara Lattman, a SoundThinking spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Additionally, ShotSpotter has maintained a low false positive rate, just 0.5%, across all customers in the last three years.”

For many advocates against gun violence, particularly in schools, gun control measures like an assault weapons ban would go a long way in curtailing the deadly effects of attacks. With Congress failing to enact such policies, experts argue that schools should refrain from turning to shoddy technology to support their students.

“We advise schools to focus on human factors: people, policies, procedures, planning, training, and communications,” said Trump, the National School Safety and Security Services head. “Avoid security theater.”

Vendors, though, continue to emphasize the risk of gun violence and rely on the steady drumbeat of attacks to generate fear in potential clients — and to make sales.

“While recent high visibility attacks at publicly and privately-owned venues and schools have increased market awareness of mass shootings,” said Evolv’s recent annual disclosure report, “if such attacks were to decline or enterprises of governments perceived the general level of attacks has declined, our ability to attract new customers and expand our sales to existing customers could be materially and adversely affected.”

The company even helps schools market the technology to their own communities. In an email from Evolv to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, a bulleted list of talking points makes suggestions for how the school system might respond to public queries about the scanners. One of the talking points said, “Security approaches included multiple layers,” adding that “this approach recognizes the reality that no single layer or single technology is 100% effective.”

When reached for comment by The Intercept, Eddie Perez, a spokesperson for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, quoted the talking point verbatim in an emailed response.

That hedged view is out of step with how people in the district itself speak about the system: as an absolute assurance of a gun-free safety. Students in the video produced by the school district said, “You get a certain reassurance that there are no dangerous weapons on campus.”

Correction: May 11, 2023
This story has been updated to use the correct spelling of ZeroEyes spokesperson Olga Shmuklyer’s name. It has also been updated to reflect a clarification received after publication from Brockton Public Schools in Massachusetts that the ShotSpotter system donated to the schools was not received from the police.

The post AI Tries (and Fails) to Detect Weapons in Schools appeared first on The Intercept.

In the courtyard of her family’s tree-lined compound in a well-to-do neighborhood in Niger’s capital, members of Miriam’s ethnic group had been describing jihadist attacks on their historic community in a rural region to the north. Now, the six or seven men wearing tagelmusts — a combination of turban and scarf worn by Tuareg men to provide protection from sun and dust — were also glued to their phones as chimes announced incoming texts and calls. Voices on the phones sounded panicked. There were gunshots, and a familiar roar rumbled through the desert scrubland 100 miles away. At any moment, relatives warned, they expected an attack by the “motorcycle guys.”

Over the last decade, Niger and its neighbors in the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have taken the notion of the outlaw motorcycle gang to its most lethal apogee. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on “motos” — two to a bike, their faces obscured by sunglasses and turbans, armed with Kalashnikovs — have terrorized villages across the borderlands where Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger meet. These militants, some affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State group, impose zakat, an Islamic tax; steal animals; and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians.

Jihadist motorcyclists, Miriam reminded me, had thundered into the village of Bakorat on March 21, 2021. As described afterward by one of the survivors, the motos “swept into the village like a sandstorm, killing every man they saw. They shot one of my uncles in front of me. His 20-year-old son ran to save him, but he perished as well. We found them, slumped over each other.” Attacking in overwhelming numbers and with military precision, the jihadists executed men and boys while looting and burning homes. “They attacked the well like it was a military objective, opening fire on the dozens of men there. As they killed, I heard the attackers saying, ‘This is your time … for working with the state,’” another survivor told Human Rights Watch. “I collapsed, seeing the carnage … my father, my brothers, my cousins, my friends lying there, dead and dying.” Human Rights Watch said more than 170 people were massacred near Bakorat and Intazayene villages and nearby nomad camps that day. Miriam and her relatives put the number at 245.

As we sat in the courtyard, it all seemed to be happening again.

U.S. Military Aid

In 2002, long before motorcycle attacks became commonplace in the tri-border region of the Sahel, the United States began providing Niger with counterterrorism assistance. The U.S. flooded this country with military equipment, from armored vehicles to surveillance aircraft. Since 2012, the tab to U.S. taxpayers is more than $500 million and climbing, one of the largest security assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, Niger hosts one of the largest and most expensive drone bases run by the U.S. military. Built in the northern city of Agadez at a price tag of more than $110 million and maintained to the tune of $20 to $30 million each year, Air Base 201 is a surveillance hub and the lynchpin of an archipelago of U.S. outposts in West Africa. Home to Space Force personnel, a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment, and a fleet of drones — including armed MQ-9 Reapers — the base is an exemplar of failed U.S. military efforts in this country and the wider region. With terrorism skyrocketing in the Sahel while the U.S. pours hundreds of millions of dollars into security assistance, base construction, and troop deployments, this drone outpost — built to enhance security in the region — can’t even protect its own contractors and the U.S. tax dollars that keep it running. Less than a mile from the base’s entrance, as The Intercept recently reported, bandits conducted a daylight armed robbery of base contractors and drove off with roughly 24 million West African CFA francs late last year.

U.S. troops in the country also train, advise, and assist local counterparts and have fought and even died — in an ambush by ISIS near the village of Tongo Tongo in 2017. Over the last decade, the number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Niger has jumped more than 900 percent from 100 to 1,001. Niger has seen a proliferation of U.S. outposts that includes not just the huge drone base in Agadez, but also another one in the capital, at the main commercial airport. You can sit in a departure lounge and watch drones land and take off.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum and decried the growing regional influence of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group. “Where Wagner has been present, bad things have inevitably followed,” said Blinken, noting that the group’s presence is associated with “overall worsening security.” The U.S. was a better option, he said, and needed to prove “that we can actually deliver results.” But the U.S already has a two-decade record of counterterrorism engagement in the region — and “bad things” and “overall worsening security” have been the hallmarks of those years.

Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism assistance to Niger. Last year, the number of violent events in Burkina Faso, Mali, and western Niger alone, reached 2,737, according to a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. This represents a jump of more than 30,000 percent since the U.S. began its counterterrorism efforts. (Wagner has only been active in the region since late 2021.) During 2002 and 2003, terrorists caused 23 casualties in Africa. In 2022, terrorist attacks in just those three Sahelian nations killed almost 7,900 people. “The Sahel now accounts for 40 percent of all violent activity by militant Islamist groups in Africa, more than any other region in Africa,” according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

The impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on Nigeriens has been enormous.

Last year, an estimated 4.4 million people experienced dire food insecurity — a record number and a 90 percent increase compared to 2021. Between last January and September, almost 580,000 children under 5 suffered from wasting. This year, the United Nations estimates that about 3.7 million Nigeriens, including 2 million children, will need humanitarian assistance. Many of those in need are also the most difficult to reach due to insecurity.

It’s worth noting that in 2002, when the U.S. began pumping counterterrorism funds into the country, the overall food situation was described as “satisfactory” and undergoing “progressive improvement,” according to a food security monitoring agency set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Banning Motorbikes

As quickly as it began, the telephonic flurry of rings and chimes that took over Miriam’s courtyard in Niamey ceased. I heard later that one motorbike was spotted — and that the gunfire may have been shots from the local self-defense group at the rider of that moto.

To Miriam and her relatives, shooting at someone for riding a motorcycle sounds completely prudent. This mindset meshes with a parade of government policies instituted in the tri-border region and the far east of the country, near Lake Chad, where the terror group Boko Haram has been a persistent menace.

Niger and its neighbors have intermittently imposed emergency measures, including the banning of motorbikes. Local markets have also been closed because authorities say that terrorists use them to purchase supplies. There have been other restrictions on people’s movement, the purchase of fertilizer, and fishing — all in the name of counterterrorism. Violating these strictures may brand you as a terrorist or sympathizer. Your ethnicity may too. People in this compound, just like those in the Nigerien government, will tell you that while many jihadists are ethnic Peul, all Peul are not jihadists. They also say there is no ethnic component to this conflict. Peul leaders disagree. They say they’re the victims.

A week later, I’m in a different compound in another part of town to meet two men who want their stories told. As we sit in a darkened room, I ask if it’s OK to use their names; they shoot each other worried looks. “The military will come find us. They’ll say, ‘You talked to the journalist,’” said a man in a white tagelmust as his colleague in a blue turban nodded. It’s a common fear here. People are afraid of their U.S.-backed government, so while they gave me their names and those of their villages, I can only call these men “Puel community leaders.”

“The emergency measures just impoverished people. The jihadists kept their motos. They were able to purchase supplies. They eat and drink. They do whatever they want. But average people lost everything.”

“The emergency measures just impoverished people. The jihadists kept their motos. They were able to purchase supplies. They eat and drink. They do whatever they want. But average people lost everything,” the man in white explained. “There’s a 6 p.m. curfew, but it takes two days by moto to travel to the health clinic. People are dying because they can’t get treatment.” The man in blue explained that the closure of markets meant finding a car — another major expense — to drive to Mali. “So instead of paying 10,000 CFA for a sack of millet, you pay 50,000 CFA,” he said, referring to the local currency, West African CFA francs. “There’s a lot of hunger.”

Predominantly seminomadic Muslim cattle herders, ethnic Peuls across the Sahel express discontent with government neglect of their communities. Many say they have been tagged as terrorists, and the stigma has further marginalized them and encouraged abuse by government troops. “They arrest people without cause,” said the leader in white. “Peul youth laid down their arms and wanted to join the state security forces or form a militia, but the government rejected the offer.”

Hassane Boubacar, a colonel major — a rank between colonel and general — and an expert on radicalization detailed to the Nigerien prime minister’s office, agreed that socioeconomic issues are key drivers of terrorism. “The jihadists do what the state fails to do and provides services that the government fails to provide,” he said. “The people in these areas are very poor, and the jihadists have a lot of money to pay them from illegal activity, like drug trafficking.”

A recent U.N. Development Program report on terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa found much the same. Drawing on interviews with 2,200 people in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and five other African nations, UNDP discovered that roughly 25 percent of voluntary recruits cited job opportunities as their primary reason for joining terror groups. Only 17 percent mentioned religion. The report found that most who joined extremist groups grew up “suffering from inter-generational socio-economic marginalization and underdevelopment.”

As a disaffected minority, the Peul have been the prime focus for recruitment by Islamist militants, even as Peuls are often victims of jihadist attacks. “They say, ‘The Peul are terrorists,’ but the terrorists terrorize us,” said the Peul community leader in the white tagelmust. “They steal our animals. They kill our family members.” At the same time, Peul are also a prime target of arrests, abuse, and attacks by Nigerien security forces.

Nearly half of those interviewed for the UNDP report said a specific event pushed them to join militant groups, with 71 percent citing human rights violations, often at the hands of state security forces. According to the report, “in most cases, state action, accompanied by a sharp escalation of human rights abuses, appears to be the prominent factor finally pushing individuals into [violent extremist] groups in Africa.”

Col. Maj. Boubacar was dismissive of reported Nigerien atrocities. “Sometimes, we’re accused of human rights violations,” he said. “But we pay a lot of attention to allegations.”

The U.S. government doesn’t agree. A State Department analysis of human rights in Niger released last month cited significant abuses, including credible reports of arbitrary and unlawful killings by the government. “For example, the armed forces were accused of summarily executing persons suspected of fighting with terrorist groups,” reads the report, which also details arbitrary detention, unjustified arrests of journalists, life-threatening prison conditions, and rampant impunity among the security forces.

In 2020, for example, Niger’s National Commission on Human Rights investigated allegations that 102 civilians had disappeared during a weeklong military operation. “There have indeed been executions of unarmed civilians and the mission discovered at least 71 bodies in six mass graves,” said Abdoulaye Seydou, the president of the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy, and Development, which took part in the investigation. “It is elements of the defense and security forces which are responsible for these summary and extrajudicial executions.” Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that an additional six mass graves containing 34 bodies were also uncovered nearby.

Last fall, the Nigerien military also bombed a gold mine during a counterterrorism operation. While the government claimed that only seven people died, locals said many more civilians were killed. After Seydou spoke out about it, he was charged with “publishing information likely to disturb public order” and arrested. The case was dropped, but as he attempted to leave the courthouse, Seydou was again arrested, cited for “creating false evidence to overwhelm” the Nigerien military and sent to a high-security prison.

Direct Operations

As with allies the world over, from Cameroon to Saudi Arabia, human rights violations haven’t deterred the U.S. from supporting Niger’s government. Hang around the airport in Niamey and you’ll see a parade of white faces, tattooed arms, and goatees. Waiting for flights in and out of the country, you hear talk of the trials and tribulations of Veterans Affairs medical care. When discussing their seats on the plane, it isn’t 23D but 23-Delta. “What are you teaching?” a paunchy contractor with a Southern accent and a goatee asked a younger man with an artfully groomed beard traveling with a group of Americans who, it turned out, were providing instruction on battlefield medicine.

When asked what U.S. troops were doing in Niger, U.S. Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan offered a boilerplate response: “The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger and we remain committed to helping our African partners to conduct missions or operations that support and further our mutual security goals and objectives in Africa.” What are those “missions or operations”? The most famous came to light in October 2017 when ISIS fighters ambushed American troops near Tongo Tongo, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others.

AFRICOM told the world that a small group of U.S. troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. In truth, the ambushed team was working out of the town of Ouallam with a larger Nigerien force under Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging regional counterterrorism effort. Until bad weather prevented it, that group was slated to support another team of American and Nigerien commandos based in Arlit — a town 700 miles northeast of the capital — attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, a so-called 127e program that allows U.S. forces to use local troops as proxies.

A 2018 investigation by then-Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier found that AFRICOM’s advise-and-assist story was a fiction. “Missions described in this report and executed by Team OUALLAM and Team ARLIT were driven by U.S. intelligence, planned entirely by U.S. forces, and directed and led by [U.S. forces]. Nigerien forces had no input in the planning process or the decision to execute the missions,” he explained. “Advise, assist, and accompany operations that Team OUALLAM and Team ARLIT were conducting … more closely resembled U.S. direct action than foreign partner-led operations aided by U.S. advice and assistance.” Direct action, to be clear, is a special ops euphemism for strikes, raids, and other offensive missions.

Cloutier wrote that U.S. commandos in Niger “are planning, directing, and executing direct action operations rather than advising Nigerien-led operations.” Is this still the case? The official answer is no. But the official answer used to be that these were “advise-and-assist” missions. It took a tragedy that couldn’t be suppressed for the truth to slip out.

Commandos, however, don’t only conduct clandestine raids. When I happened to encounter three men who said their names were Cam, Chuck, and Brock at Agadez’s Ministry of Justice headquarters, they were on a different kind of mission. Cam sported a shiny lavender dashiki-style top — they call it bazin here — with an embroidered placket and matching lavender pants, dark wraparound sunglasses, a backward black baseball cap, and a beard that would satisfy the Taliban. He said he hailed from Colorado and had been in-country almost eight months. Chuck had more conventional facial hair, wore a green Fjallraven cap, a blue Osprey Daylite shoulder sling strapped tight to his chest with one radio or satphone carabineered to it and another walkie-talkie clipped to his pocket. Brock wore a black and gray ballcap, a polo shirt and khakis, a hand-held radio clipped to the right front pocket, and had a haversack strapped to his back.

While the U.S. spends significant time and money training, advising, and assisting Nigerien troops, Americans also devote substantial resources to courting government officials and building influence with local elites.

Cam said he was on a farewell tour and had a gift for the top local prosecutor. It highlighted another facet of American efforts in Niger — one that plays out across the globe whenever Americans sit down for an awkward cup of tea with, or provide Viagra to, some local chieftain they hope to win over. While the U.S. spends significant time and money training, advising, and assisting Nigerien troops, Americans also devote substantial resources to courting government officials and building influence with local elites.

When I spoke with him recently, Mohamed’s tune had dramatically changed. He had gone from a vocal critic to an ardent believer. “In the beginning, they didn’t have anything to do with me,” he said of the U.S. military in Agadez. “Now, the Americans come here every two weeks, every month. They were here just yesterday. We exchange information about security issues,” he gushed. “I’m very pleased with the relationship.”

AFRICOM ignored questions about their relationship with Mohamed, but it seems clear that the U.S. military decided to court this formerly critical local leader. Mohamed showed me a certificate, commemorating a 2021 drone mission and bearing the logo of Special Operations Command Africa, presented to him by his American friends. But it didn’t stop with press-the-flesh attention and meaningless keepsakes. After Mohamed told the Americans about a nagging medical condition, he said that they brought him to the drone base in Agadez where he was treated by a U.S. doctor.

Drones and Hope

While the base may come up short as a surveillance and security bastion, it has had an undeniable impact. If you’re a local elite like Mohamed, the Americans apparently invite you in and provide you with free medical care. But if you’re living on the outskirts of the facility in the hard-scrabble Tadress neighborhood, it’s a different story.

To most in Tadress, Air Base 201 is a mystery. “We don’t know what they do there,” said several women in a rough-hewn compound a short distance from the outpost. The only tangible impact of the U.S. military on their lives, they told me, were the cracks that formed in their mud walls due to huge transport planes that shook their homes as they passed overhead.

Maria Laminou Garba, 27, runs a recycling collective in Tadress that pays unemployed youths to gather recyclables and subsidizes schooling for neighborhood orphans. When there were only Nigeriens at the base, Garba could make a little money selling them food. When the Americans arrived, she said she was no longer welcome. With permission from the mayor of Agadez to collect plastic in that section of Tadress, she approached the base with her young employees, hoping to gather discarded water bottles. But Garba quickly grew scared of the guards’ guns when a booming voice from a loudspeaker told them to leave.

The U.S. military touts good works in Tadress, like rebuilding a primary school. “I’ve heard about them helping, but I’ve never seen it,” said Garba. The U.S. also publicizes opportunities for locals to sell trinkets at craft bazaars at Air Base 201. “People from town get to sell stuff,” Garba told me, referring to Agadez proper. “They’re not from here.”

Garba and a local leader — the chef de quartier of Tadress, Abdullah Bil Rhite Chareyet — led me to a reservoir near the outskirts of the base where locals use the water to make mud bricks. But the site is also, they explained, a danger to children. “A 6-year-old child drowned here a few years ago,” said Garba. “Every year, someone dies here.” Last year, a 17-year-old girl became the latest victim, she and Chareyet told me.

Chareyet meets with American military personnel from time to time. They asked him to look out for suspicious activity — most notably sightings of Toyota Land Cruisers. (A Land Cruiser pickup truck apparently carried out the 2021 armed robbery on the outskirts of the base.) The Americans gave him a phone number to call in reports.

In 2021, after years of requests from the village chief for American assistance, Chareyet, Garba, and other local leaders met with a U.S. officer and his interpreter at this same spot. The American, they said, pledged to install a fence around the reservoir and post a guard, to protect local children. Chareyet showed me photos of him with the American. AFRICOM refused to comment on the man’s identity, but a U.S. contractor working at the base, who was not authorized to speak with the press, examined the images and verified that the man pictured was a civil affairs officer who had since left Niger.

Chareyet had hoped that the Americans would honor their word. But six months later, when I visited the site, there was no fence. Chareyet said the Americans had not been back. “I thought they would build the fence like they said,” he told me. Garba shook her head, adding, “The Americans gave us false hope.”

The post After Two Decades of U.S. Military Support, Terror Attacks Are Worse Than Ever in Niger appeared first on The Intercept.

Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the pastoral hills surrounding Yatta, is one of several areas across the occupied West Bank where the Israeli state has for decades forced out Palestinians and replaced them with Israeli settlers. The goal, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated plainly after returning to power last year, is to give the state absolute and ultimate control over what he called “all areas of the Land of Israel” —including land widely expected to one day form the territory of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli government has deployed an array of legal and policy pretexts to extend its domination of the West Bank, most notably by supporting the more than half million Israeli settlers who illegally moved there. Since a new, far-right coalition took power, Israel has been roiled by mass protests that reached an apex this week, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to oppose plans by Netanyahu — who is currently fighting corruption charges — to severely curtail the independence of the country’s judiciary. But the political crisis means little to Palestinians, including the 1.6 million with Israeli citizenship, who have long viewed Israel’s courts as complicit in their oppression, and the legal system many Israelis are now rushing to defend as an enabler to the regime of racial domination forced upon them.

“Palestinians know that Israel has only ever been a democracy for its Jewish citizens, and never for us,” George Bisharat and Jamil Dakwar wrote in an op-ed for Haaretz this week. “What we are witnessing today is an internal Israeli Jewish struggle over who will administer an apartheid regime over the Palestinians, not a genuine fight for democracy for all.”

Few Israelis took to the streets last May, for instance, when Israel’s highest court put an end to a decadeslong legal battle Palestinian residents of a dozen communities in Masafer Yatta had been fighting to stay on their lands — inside what Israel had unilaterally declared a “firing zone.” The proceedings followed Israel’s declaration in the 1980s of a large section of Masafer Yatta as a restricted, military area for the army to train in. Since then, Palestinians living there faced forcible expulsions, frequent home demolitions, rising settler violence, and a host of other coercive measures seeking to drive them off the land — all while illegal Israeli settlements expanded around them with no consequence. Last May, their legal battle ended when the same court whose legitimacy hundreds of thousands of Israelis are now fighting to preserve ruled definitively that there are no “legal barriers” to the planned expulsion of Palestinians from the firing zone. The court — which is Israel’s Supreme Court but rules as the High Court of Justice when deciding matters of state authority, as in the Masafer Yatta case — is made up of 15 judges. The court is being targeted by Netanyahu, who wants to change the way judges are selected as well as the laws the court can rule on, in addition to giving Parliament the power to overturn its decisions.

Last May’s ruling, the final one on the Masafer Yatta case, essentially sanctioned the forcible transfer of Palestinians from the firing zone — even as the forcible transfer of an occupied population is a form of ethnic cleansing and, under international law standards, a war crime.

Performative Law

The Masafer Yatta ruling has brought renewed international attention to this pocket of the southern West Bank and prompted widespread condemnation of Israeli actions. But it has also intensified the Israeli military’s and settlers’ joint efforts to force the nearly 1,200 Palestinians who remain in the firing zone to leave. Harassment of local residents has become a daily affair, and violent attacks by settlers are on the rise. For the Palestinians who have already lived in limbo for three decades, the court’s decision means that they may now face forcible transfer any day — even as human rights observers note that efforts to drive them out are likely going to be more insidious so as not to draw further global condemnation.

“We don’t believe we’re going to see people put on trucks and being transferred — although it could happen — because of the optics of it,” said Dror Sadot, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, during a recent visit to the firing zone, noting that Israeli authorities did force people onto trucks in an earlier effort to evacuate the area in 1999. “Instead, what we’re seeing already, and what we think we’re going to see even more, is efforts to make their lives impossible to live. Demolitions, checkpoints, confiscating cars. They really isolate these communities and basically try to do everything they can to make them leave.”

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces wrote in an email to The Intercept that “in the ruling of the Supreme Court on May 4th, 2022, the Court approved the State’s position which determined that at the time of the declaration of the area as a closed zone, the area was uninhabited” — even though dozens of families lived in the area at the time.

“In recent months dialogue has been held with the Palestinians in the area, in order to enable them to leave the closed zone in an agreed upon and independent manner,” the spokesperson added. “The training zone has great importance for training security personnel including in the use of live fire, which cannot be carried out effectively with civilians present in the area.”

In recent years, a growing number of global human rights organizations has begun to describe the Israeli state’s control of Palestinians as a form of apartheid — a parallel to South Africa that Palestinians themselves had been drawing for decades. The political backlash has been fierce, even as those reports — by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but also the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the Israel-based B’Tselem — have offered careful legal analysis to explain their conclusions, and referred to an established, legal definition of the crime of apartheid as defined under multiple international statutes. Left with no other recourse, Palestinians have increasingly taken their plight to the international community and international mechanisms of justice like the International Criminal Court, which includes apartheid under the crimes against humanity over which it has jurisdiction, and which in 2021 opened an investigation on the situation in Palestine.

Until now, those seeking to defend Israel’s conduct have largely done so by referring to its democratic character, including the integrity and independence of its judiciary, even as Palestinians have long argued Israel is no democracy when it comes to them.

Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School who has researched legal policies pertaining to land in Israel and the West Bank, noted that the Israeli state has perfected the use of the law as an instrument to control Palestinians, shrouding its actions in a façade of legitimacy. Dispossession is often disguised as a bureaucratic matter of enforcing the law, with Israeli officials declaring homes illegal and subjecting them to demotion orders, designating land as restricted, and issuing eviction orders.

“The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

“There is definitely this culture of hyper legalization and performative law,” Eghbariah told me, pointing for instance to a legal distinction Israel draws between settlements and outposts — even as it mostly treats both equally, and even as both are illegal under international law. “The whole distinction between outposts and supposedly legal settlements is absurd. But it’s part of the legitimizing force of the law to try to use this façade of rule of law, of supposedly a democratic state, that practices so-called measured violence, and that has checks and balances in place. The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

The protests in Tel Aviv, many Palestinians have pointed out, are an effort to preserve rather than challenge the system that has enabled Israel’s regime of racial domination. “Now all these liberals are roaming the streets outraged because of the idea that the independence of the judiciary is going to be supposedly compromised,” Eghbariah said. “It makes perfect sense: because Israel tries to maintain and use the law in its service.”

That was well on display this week in Tel Aviv, when amid a sea of protesters waving Israeli flags, a lone man waving a Palestinian one — which Israel has banned — was quickly tackled by police and protesters.

The Firing Zone

For the Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta’s firing zone, the court’s decision sanctioning their forcible transfer has exacerbated the uncertainty and fear that has dominated their lives for generations. Nasser Nawajah, a community organizer and field researcher for B’Tselem, has been living with his family in Khirbet Susya, a cluster of homes and verdant vegetable gardens near the firing zone, since the 1980s, when the village’s families were forcibly expelled from their original homes in Susya, a few hundred meters away, which Israel had declared an archaeological site. Since then, Khirbet Susya’s residents have been living with no connection to water and electricity. When they formally applied for access to infrastructure, they were told “No, you’re illegal,” Nawajah told me, even as nearby Israeli outposts were quickly connected to infrastructure. “At the end of the day it’s just a policy to make Palestinians’ lives miserable in all kinds of ways, firing zones, declaring buildings illegal, calling land ‘state land.’ All the roads lead to making Palestinians’ lives miserable.”

“All the roads lead to making Palestinians’ lives miserable.”

For years, residents of the area have relied on ingeniousness and the solidarity of nongovernmental organizations and activists who have provided them with a microgrid of solar panels and water tanks that the army regularly confiscates and that settlers vandalize. Settlers also regularly damage olive trees, set fields on fire, uproot vegetables from gardens, and destroy Palestinian property. In Khirbet Susya, Nawajah pointed to a stone monument that settlers had ripped out, a tribute to a Palestinian baby who was burnt to death along with his family in a 2015 settler attack. Not far from the village, a patch of olive trees was shriveled dry by poison. Signs in Hebrew called on people to report international peace activists to Israeli police.

Nawajah described a combination of daily harassment, increasingly violent attacks, and a seemingly endless stream of new techniques devised by settlers, under the watch of the army, to seize ever-larger swaths of Palestinian land. Sometimes, he said, settlers fly drones over herds of sheep to scare them off course; often, they send their own sheep and livestock to graze on Palestinian crops. And a new practice was taking hold in the area, by which a lone, armed settler would set up a “pastoral outpost” on a hilltop, bringing animals to graze on the lands below — a faster and more efficient way to stake a claim on a piece of land than to set up an entire residential community. Where residential outposts are often made up of a few caravans and makeshift homes, a pastoral outpost only requires some tools, animals, and one person who, using this tactic, can significantly alter control of the land. “It’s enough to set up something like this to clear out a lot of land that belongs to Palestinians,” Nawajah said, noting that most Palestinian farmers would give up trying to reach that land for fear of being attacked.

During my visit to the South Hebron Hills, one such settler, a young man standing alone on a hilltop overseeing Palestinian crop lands, used binoculars to watch me, Nawajah, and a couple Israeli human rights observers. Then he approached us to ask about the purpose of our visit. Moments later, a “civil administration” vehicle pulled up: a quiet reminder that we were in the firing zone, where the army could choose to confiscate our car at any point. “Don’t be fooled by the word ‘civil administration,’” said Roy Yellin, B’Tselem’s director of public outreach, who was with the group that day. “It’s a part of the army that’s in charge of running the civil aspects of the life of Palestinians — but it’s the army.”

Palestinians and human rights observers stress that while the army is ubiquitous in the firing zone, it is not there to protect Palestinian land or lives: It is there to protect settlers or stand by when they attack Palestinians. In Khirbet Susya two years ago, Palestinian residents filmed a group of adult settlers playing with the children’s toys in the village playground while soldiers watched without intervening. (The IDF spokesperson wrote in reference to the playground incident that “the video that was published on social media represents only the beginning of the encounter and does not depict the rest of the incident in which the settlers were removed from the playground premises within minutes.”)

The army generally stands by and does little while settlers engage in violence, but sometimes the violence goes too far even for them. In Tuba, a Palestinian village inside the firing zone near the outpost of Ma’on, settler attacks on Palestinian children have become so frequent and violent that the army now escorts the children on their way to school and back home.

“They’re not doing anything to the settlers, they just escort the children,” noted Sadot, of B’Tselem.

“This is why when we talk about settler violence, we talk about state violence, because you can’t separate it.”

“This is why when we talk about settler violence, we talk about state violence, because you can’t separate it,” she added. “A lot of people will say, those settlers are a few bad apples, or something like that. But first of all, they are being allowed to live there even though it’s been declared an illegal outpost, and they get electricity and water, and the army protects them, and nobody’s getting charged when they are being violent. They have the backing of the state and they are all going for the same goal: to take over land from the Palestinians.”

Often the harassment and threats turn into open violence. Nawajah, who has been documenting dozens of such incidents for years, tells his neighbors to continue to report settler attacks to the army so as to create documentation of what happens — even as most Palestinians have given up reporting them because they fear retaliation and because they have come to view settlers and the army as one.

The IDF spokesperson wrote to The Intercept that soldiers are required to stop violations of the law by Israeli citizens, including by detaining them. “A Palestinian who was harmed as a result of an incident of violence or damage to his property can also file a complaint with the Israel Police,” the spokesperson added.

A day before I arrived, a Palestinian farmer was attacked by settlers with brass knuckles and hospitalized. The settlers were residents of a one-family outpost, Talia Farm, named after a South African convert to Judaism who moved to the West Bank from South Africa in the 1990s, after the end of apartheid there.

“I loved apartheid,” Yaakov Talia, the outpost’s founder, once told an Israeli journalist. “I still think that apartheid is the best thing in the world.”

Palestinian homes are demolished by Israeli forces in Area C in the village of Mufagara south of Yatta near Hebron in the occupied West Bank on Sept. 11, 2019. Photos: Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images

Apartheid’s Playbook

In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords, with the aim of creating a Palestinian state, divided the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip into different areas. The carved-up territory would allow limited Palestinian self-governance in anticipation of an eventual state while, in a nod to Israeli security concerns, letting Israel maintain full control of much of the land. “Area A” contains the largest Palestinian cities, where 2.8 million people live under the civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority, the home-rule body and the closest thing to a sovereign government Palestinians were ever granted. “Area B” includes the areas immediately surrounding the cities, under Palestinian civil management and, in theory, joint Palestinian and Israeli security control. Then there is “Area C”: the largest swath of the West Bank. In addition to encompassing all the Israeli settlements, whether urban or rural, Area C included the pastoral and agricultural land from which Palestinians have drawn their sustenance for generations, and the economic lifeline of any future state. Covering 60 percent of what after Oslo was widely understood to be the land of a future Palestine, Area C remained under full Israeli military control, with the army frequently and increasingly making incursions into other areas as well.

Over the years, the Israeli government seized on Oslo’s unresolved parameters to deploy an intricate framework of land policies and legal justifications for taking territory that belonged to Palestinians. Perhaps the most effective tool has been the development of settlements.

The Israeli government seized on Oslo’s unresolved parameters to deploy an intricate framework of land policies and legal justifications for taking territory that belonged to Palestinians.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law. As part of the Oslo process, in order to preserve the possibility of Palestinian statehood, Israel committed not to change so-called facts on the ground. That should have meant no new settlements, but Israeli officials cited what it described as natural population growth as justification to expand existing settlements, building more neighborhoods and towns in the hills surrounding existing ones, often naming each new development with a numeral next to the name of the original settlement. In addition to those settlements, which in some cases have grown into cities fully supported by the state, more than 140 outposts have sprung up over the years. Those were built by settlers without official authorization, but while authorities occasionally issue — and rarely carry out — demolition orders against outposts, they more often provide them with electricity, water, public transportation, and army protection.

In Masafer Yatta, for instance, the rural areas surrounding Yatta have been cut off from the city by a circle of ever-expanding Israeli settlements and outposts, the latter of which are illegal not only under international law but also even under Israeli law. Yet in several cases, outposts that were built illegally were later recognized and legitimated by Israeli authorities — as is the case of Avigail, an outpost near Masafer Yatta that the Israeli government “legalized” along with several others in February, ostensibly in response to two attacks carried out by Palestinians in east Jerusalem that month.

Over the years, the settlement enterprise has turned the prospect of a viable Palestinian state into a near-impossibility by precluding both territorial integrity and access to enough land to sustain a future state’s population. Settlements, usually built on hilltops, often with unnaturally narrow and long footprints so as to create a longer barrier, have not only encroached on Palestinian land: They have also effectively cut off one Palestinian community from the other. Each settlement is also surrounded by a — usually unofficial — “security zone,” in theory a buffer between Palestinians and settlers where nobody is supposed to stand. But settlers have regularly expanded into those areas too, therefore pushing the security zone further and taking over more land.

Overall, in the West Bank, Israeli officials have confiscated more than 2 million dunmas, or nearly 800 square miles of Palestinian land, more than one-third of the West Bank — much of it the private property of Palestinians. They have done so under an array of justifications, including the designation of much of it as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now, which tracks the expropriation of Palestinian land, estimated that the Israeli government declared up to a quarter of the West Bank state land. B’Tselem, which also tracks Israeli land grabs, found that settlements and the roads and infrastructure that serve them have effectively encircled Palestinians in the West Bank into “165 non-contiguous ‘territorial islands’” — a fragmentation that observers have long compared to apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans.

The reference to Bantustans evokes the pockets of territory that South Africa’s apartheid government designated for Black residents, forcing their resettlement there with the goal of ultimately creating independent “homelands.” This is one of many ways in which Israel’s regime of racial domination over Palestinians has been compared to apartheid South Africa.

The references to apartheid, however, offer not only a historical comparison, but also a legal one. While the South African experience coined the term itself and popularized the concept of apartheid, the crime of apartheid has since been defined and codified in a number of international treaties, including the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute, the International Criminal Court’s founding document.

“Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy,” Human Rights Watch concluded in its 2021 report on Israeli apartheid. “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity.”

Maximum Land, Minimum Palestinians

While apartheid policies encompass a range of institutionalized discrimination practices — from restrictions on residency for non-Jews to the recent introduction of legislation that would seek the death penalty for Palestinians only — the element of racial domination that is intrinsic to the concept is particularly evident in Israeli land policies.

“They want maximum land with minimum Palestinians,” said Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans opposed to the occupation. “They don’t want to annex tens of thousands of Palestinians because eventually they’ll have to give them citizenship.”

Givati, who served in the military in the West Bank, described a close collaboration between the state — through the military — and the ideological settlers driving the land grab in the West Bank. The two regularly worked together, he said, with representatives of the settlement movement often participating in military drills and speaking to soldiers sent to serve in the territory.

“Basically we’re seeing a system which deprives Palestinians of their lands and aims to push them away from living in Area C, into Areas A and B,” he added, during a visit to the South Hebron Hills. “And that element of using settlements in order to divide the land is very visible here.”

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In many ways Masafer Yatta is a microcosm where the dynamics playing out across the entire West Bank are magnified by the designation of the firing zone. Daily harassment of Palestinians, illegal settlement expansion, and settler violence have been growing steadily throughout the occupied territory for years. So has the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces — which last year reached the highest toll since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. So far, 2023 has been even worse, with Israeli raids in cities like Nablus and Jenin killing dozens, and settlers setting fire to homes and cars in a series of attacks that have been compared to “pogroms” and that were encouraged by top officials of Israel’s new fundamentalist government.

The extremism of the current Israeli government has in many ways laid bare the reality of Israel’s project of domination. As settler violence in the West Bank has reached historic records in recent months, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently called for a Palestinian village attacked by settlers to be “wiped out,” before being forced to apologize. And as protests in Israel reached a peak this week, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a settler once convicted of supporting an Israeli terrorist organization, worked out a deal with Netanyahu to delay the controversial judicial reforms in exchange for the establishment of a new security force that will operate under Ben-Gvir’s direct orders — a prospect that some have likened to handing the extremist minister a “private militia.”

But before the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reached the highest level of the Israeli government, the groundwork for the supremacist project they have championed had been in motion for years, advanced under more liberal Israeli governments as well — much of it unfolding with at best tepid criticism from Israel’s closest allies, including the U.S.

Across the Green Line

While Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land is most visible in Area C of the West Bank, it is a reality also in Jerusalem, as well as inside Israel, defined as the territory of Israel before the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, even though Israel’s borders remain an unsettled matter. There, like in the occupied territories, an array of laws and legal justifications have resulted in the seizure of much of the land belonging to Palestinians who became citizens of Israel after an estimated 750,000 others were made refugees during the 1948 establishment of the state. Today, there are approximately 1.6 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, comprising more than 20 percent of Israel’s population.

Eghbariah, the human rights attorney and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, argued a particularly effective tool deployed by Israel has been the legal fragmentation of Palestinians themselves into different categories, with different IDs, rights, and legal frameworks applying to each. “It’s a regime of legal fragmentation that classifies some Palestinians as citizens, and some as residents of the West Bank, or Gaza, and some as residents of Jerusalem, and each of them have different legal statuses,” he told me. “It designs different tools to experiment. It’s labs of oppression and domination.”

Land grabs inside Israel are often overlooked, Eghbariah added. But there too “is dispossession, there is segregation in the ways that accessibility to resources and land is distributed,” he said.

Since 1948, for instance, officials have authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” inside Israel, but have only granted a handful of permits for government-planned townships for Palestinians. Most of those are communities the Israeli state has created for Bedouins that it continues to displace across the Negev desert — even as those Bedouins have for years resisted forced relocation to these poverty-stricken townships.

In the Negev, the historical land of the Bedouins dating back centuries, Israel has announced plans to forcibly displace 36,000 people living in roughly 40 “unrecognized” communities, in order to expand military training areas and implement what it called “economic development” projects. In total, some 90,000 people live in unrecognized Bedouin communities in the desert, and also face an uncertain future. Adalah, an Israel-based human rights group, has been representing many of the Bedouin communities facing eviction as they fight in court for the right to stay on their land.

“The plan provides clear confirmation that Israel’s Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouins in the Negev overtly discriminates against the Bedouin population,” the group wrote, referring to the government agency set up to handle Bedouin affairs — which Bedouins view as the agency tasked with their oppression. The agency, according to Adalah, views Bedouins “as an obstacle that must be removed from the landscape in order to clear a path for Jewish settlement and ‘development’.”

That dynamic is not unlike that unfolding in Masafer Yatta, even as the Bedouins targeted for displacement are Israeli citizens. For those Bedouins, who over the decades have watched the desert become urbanized and threaten their way of life, the eviction orders are a bitter irony.

“They call us invaders, they say we are trespassers in this land,” Freij Al-Hawashleh, an 86-year-old Bedouin man, told me when I visited his community, Ras Jrabah, on the outskirts of the industrial city of Dimona.

Al-Hawashleh remembers when the area was under the control of the British Mandate, before the establishment of the state of Israel. One day, after 1948, some officials came to hand the members of his community blue ID cards: their Israeli citizenship. The Bedouins stayed on their land and continued growing their crops. Then, in the early 1950s, came the first settlers; Al-Hawashleh said that the Bedouins shared water and milk with them when they arrived. “Dimona was established on our land,” he added.

Left/Top: Moussa Al-Hawamsha, a resident of Al-Bqea’ah, an unrecognized Bedouin community that is facing eviction in the Negev Desert. Right/Bottom: Freij Al-Hawashleh, a resident of the unrecognized community of Ras Jrabah, facing expulsion, has lived there since long before the nearby city of Dimona was established. Photos: Alice Speri/The Intercept

Today, Dimona is a rapidly expanding city, with construction projects underway on multiple sides. A campaign launched under the previous Israeli government offers an array of benefits to convince Jewish Israelis to move here. On the city’s main thoroughfare, a monument nods to the roots of the city: a mural with the figure of a man in Bedouin dress walking camels across a desert landscape. But that’s as far as Dimona’s recognition of its Bedouin residents will go. Al-Hawashleh’s community is one of the unrecognized Bedouin villages under eviction orders. The government wants its residents to move to Gasir as-Sirr, one of the townships it has designated for Bedouins, five miles away. When that proposal was announced, the Bedouins petitioned to stay in Dimona and presented a plan to establish their own recognized neighborhood there — but they were denied and told they could only move to towns specifically created for them.

For now, as construction has continued in the city, the Bedouins have stayed put. Feet away from to their homes, the municipality has built a large new playground for Dimona’s children, but the dozens of children living in the Bedouin village only play there late in the evenings, if nobody else is there, adhering to an unwritten rule that they are not wanted there. Still, members of the community have no plans to leave.

“If they want me to move, they can take a gun and shoot me,” said Al-Hawashleh. “I will sit here and never move.”

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Intercepted

The Israeli government has shrouded its policy of displacement in the language of modernization and the promise of better services. But the towns Bedouins are moved to are among Israel’s most impoverished and with poorest access to resources, with some of the country’s worst unemployment and crime rates. “The government always tries to tell the Bedouins, ‘If you want services, you need to move. If you want water, you need to move,’” Marwan Abu Frieh, a coordinator with Adalah, told me. “When that doesn’t work, they try to move them by force, by demolition orders.”

Home demolitions, he noted, are becoming increasingly common inside Israel. And as in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Israel often forces those facing demolition orders to destroy their own homes themselves — or face hefty fines to cover the cost of the bulldozers.

“The same things that are happening in the West Bank are happening here,” Abu Frieh added, noting that the practice has deeply traumatized the Bedouin population. “The same apartheid that’s there, is here.”

Al-Bqea’ah, another of the unrecognized communities facing eviction, stands against the backdrop of Masada, one of Israel’s most iconic tourist attractions, but the state is seeking to forcibly relocate its residents to the township of Mar’it, some 20 miles away. Next to Al-Bqea’ah, an Israeli-run tourist village offers visitors rides and photos with camels. But while camels have been a part of Bedouins’ lives for centuries, it has become increasingly difficult for them to keep them, as officials have refused to recognize camels as farm animals and have denied their owners grazing rights on lands where they traditionally kept them. Officials regularly confiscate camels “trespassing” into areas declared off-limits — sometimes lifting them with cranes to transport them away. They then charge exorbitant fees to return them to their owners.

The government’s resettlement plan — in addition to having been established without consulting the Bedouins — is fundamentally at odds with their traditional lifestyle.

“You can’t take a Bedouin from the desert and move him to a town; the Bedouins need freedom,” Moussa Al-Hawamsha, an elderly resident of Al-Bqea’ah, told me. His family has been living there since 1953, when they were moved there by Israeli authorities who evicted them from their original lands near Dimona, to make room for an industrial zone. When a Jewish man came in the 1980s to set up the tourist village next door, Al-Hawamsha said, they gave him camels and helped him get established; many residents of the village still work at the tourist site. At times, they helped authorities search for hikers lost in the desert, which they know intimately.

“Now, he has a permit to stay, and we are in court,” Al-Hawamsha added, stressing that Al-Bqea’ah’s residents do not want to leave. “If they want to move us again, they should move us back to the land we came from.”

Holding Onto the Land

Sami Huraini grew up in Al-Tuwani, a village in Masafer Yatta just outside the firing zone, near a large settlement and its surrounding outposts. He was 3 years old when Israeli authorities began evicting people from the area. “When I was young, I was terrified of the army; I was kind of traumatized; when I saw the army was coming to the village, I would run,” he said. “They would come search our house, they would wake everybody up and encircle them in one place in the middle of the village and then they’d go and search all the houses.”

“They want to delete us from this land, delete our identity from this land.”

Huraini grew up in an activist family, although merely choosing not to heed to pressure to abandon one’s home is an act of resistance in this area. “As I grew up, I understood the situation, and I understood that I don’t have to run; I need to stand on the land and defend this land,” he said. “They want to delete us from this land, delete our identity from this land.”

Al-Tuwani, a smattering of homes constantly under construction — even as authorities frequently demolish them — has in recent years become a hub for global solidarity with the residents of Masafer Yatta. The village is home to international and Israeli activists whose presence offers a measure of protection against violence by settlers and the army, even as the activists have increasingly been targeted for attacks as well. “The international presence is very important for documentation purposes, the army is a little more quiet when there are internationals than when it’s Palestinians alone,” noted Huraini.

Last fall, his father was attacked and severely injured by settlers, but when the army came, they stopped his relatives from taking his father to an ambulance and arrested him instead. The older Huraini spent 10 days in jail and was only released because a 20-minute video filmed by an international activist left no doubt about the dynamics of the incident. International pressure, Huraini added, has helped stave off the demolition and eviction of other communities, such as Khan al-Ahmar. That community, a group of Bedouin villages in the central West Bank, was slated for forcible eviction a few years ago, but it remains in place largely thanks to widespread international condemnation of the Israeli plans.

Still, Huraini noted, the reliance on international support is not sustainable. During the pandemic, when Israel imposed severe travel restrictions, the residents of Masafer Yatta were left to fend for themselves. “Settler violence was crazy during the pandemic,” he said.

In 2021, the army arrested Huraini, who had begun organizing regular Friday protests, and accused him of assaulting a soldier. The IDF spokesperson said that a verdict in the case is pending. Meanwhile, every Friday morning, Huraini has to turn himself in to the military, who hold him until the afternoon. “The main goal was to stop the protests and the organizing,” he said. “They thought that by putting me in prison and giving me these charges they could stop my work and my activism.”

But Huraini and others here live by the principle of sumud, an Arabic word that translates as “steadfastness” and that has long been a cultural pillar of Palestinian resistance.

“Police and army and settlers are all working hand by hand to evict us from our land,” he said. “But despite this, we need to continue to live our life here. Despite this court decision, we have no other place to go, and we’ll remain and struggle here. Even if the eviction happens, we’ll go back, because this is our land. We’ll continue to live in our land. At some point, this is going to end.”

Many Palestinians in Masafer Yatta refer to the notion of sumud. In Khalet a-Daba’, a small village inside the firing zone that is home to more than 90 people, half of them children, Jaber Dababsi described the daily harassment residents are subjected to. In the last couple years, the village, which is powered by solar panels provided by NGOs and reliant on a network of water cisterns, saw much of its infrastructure demolished. When residents planted 12,000 trees, the army destroyed their water system, killing the plants. Soldiers also cut 500 olive trees that they claimed were planted on “state land.” Once, the military held a drill so close to the village that a large bullet pierced the roof of Dababsi’s home. The drill, with helicopters flying by the village, causing a large dust storm, “didn’t feel like real training,” he said. “It felt a little bit staged, like they were doing it for the purpose of harassment, intimidation.”

Older children in the village go to school in Al-Tuwani and often face settler intimidation on their way there. When residents built a school in Khalet a-Daba’ for the younger kids, the civil administration shut it down. The younger children began to take classes in the home of Dababsi’s brother, so the army came and demolished it. In total, he said, the army demolished his and his brother’s homes five times. Many people from the area, he added, started moving into caves: traditional dwellings in this part of the West Bank that locals are now returning to in order to avoid the constant demolitions.

“It’s not life,” said Dababsi, noting that the recent court decision only adds to the instability so many families have already faced for years. “The civil administration has a plan for us, we don’t know what it is. They can come here and shoot us and force us to leave, but this will be the only way that we will go: if they kill us.”

Clowns and Cactuses

On a cold, sunny afternoon, earlier this year, a handful of Palestinian farmers — surrounded by twice as many children and a group of British, German, and Israeli activists — unloaded dozens of cactus plants wrapped in black plastic and distributed them across a patch of shrubby land where they would plant them for their animals to graze on. The Palestinians were residents of Jawia, in Masafer Yatta. This was their land, but it had become increasingly dangerous for them to go there alone.

Just before I arrived, a group of soldiers had come to the field and loaded half the cactuses into their jeep. The activists on the scene said the army left without taking the remaining cactuses after there seemed to be a disagreement between soldiers about what justification to cite for taking them.

As the group returned to work with the remaining plants, a few men watched with binoculars from a jeep parked on a hill. The Palestinians and international activists drank coffee and an Israeli woman dressed as a clown in army uniform helped the children take the cactuses to their planting spots. The men on the hill were in plainclothes and appeared to be settlers, but on the road atop the hill, a line of soldiers in uniform also monitored the scene. Standoffs like these, the Palestinians in the field told me, would sometimes last hours and other times erupt into violence. The presence of international activists reduced the risk of being attacked while farming their lands.

The farmers knew that if the remaining cactuses were not planted, they would be stolen by the settlers. If they were planted, there was still a chance the settlers would come and rip them out of the ground. But today, the Palestinians would plant the cactuses and hold onto their land.

The post As Israelis Protest Mounting Authoritarianism, Apartheid Regime Over Palestinians Goes Unchallenged appeared first on The Intercept.

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Uber but for African Schools

In the early days of the era of Silicon Valley disruption, two Harvard University graduates dreamed up a bold experiment in education.

Shannon May, who studied education development in rural China, and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, an education software developer, spied an untapped opportunity for some of the moving-fast-and-breaking-things going on all around them.

“In 2007, we came to Africa,” May explained in a promotional video for the company they would go on to found: Bridge International Academies. “Due diligence had shown us that there were an incredibly high number of enrolled children who were still illiterate upon graduation — and was there a possible business model that could solve this? Was there something that could be done, even though people said there wasn’t anything that could be done?”

The couple did the math and found that parents of impoverished children around the globe were spending many billions a year on schooling. Kimmelman invited his former roommate, Phil Frei, a tech consultant, to join as a co-founder. “We all moved to Nairobi in 2008, and within six months, we had the first school up and running,” May said.

Bridge is the largest for-profit primary education chain in the world.

Over the next decade, Bridge grew into a chain of schools providing a homogeneous curriculum developed by researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to hundreds of thousands of students in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, and India. Today, it is the largest for-profit primary education chain in the world.

As the company mushroomed, it found ready investors. “It was not social impact investors,” May said in a 2016 MIT video case study, “it was straight commercial capital who saw, like, wow, there are a couple billion people who don’t have anyone selling them what they want.”

But the social impact investment crew was behind Bridge, as well. The company is financed today by some of the highest-profile do-good donors in the game — or rather, the for-profit arms of their networks, including Chan Zuckerberg Education, LLC, linked to Mark Zuckerberg; Pearson Education; Gates Frontier LLC, tied to Bill Gates; Imaginable Futures, linked to eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, a major funder of The Intercept; and Pershing Square Foundation, tied to billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman. The United Kingdom’s development bank, the European Investment Bank, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank funded it too.

To become profitable, May and Kimmelman had to scale up quickly while keeping costs down. “Bridge International Academies was founded from day one on the premise of this massive market opportunity, knowing that to achieve success, we would need to achieve a scale never before seen in education, and at a speed that makes most people dizzy,” an early version of the company’s website boasted. To do well with small margins, thousands of classrooms would be needed, because each classroom could bring in a profit of just tens of dollars a month. “The urgency is because the only way you can have a price of $5 a month is if you have hundreds of thousands of customers. We need 500,000 pupils to break even,” May said in 2013.

Their idea of how to accomplish such scale was straightforward: The largest cost when it comes to education is teacher salaries. But if curricula can be centrally produced and distributed on tablets that teachers read to the class, word for word, then teacher pay can plummet.

“You can’t have a brilliant-teacher hypothesis and expect to change the education for hundreds of millions of children.”

That, May believed, would not hurt the quality of education children received. While the school reform movement in the United States at the time was fighting against what it called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — easier curricula for minority students that reflected racist assumptions about their learning capacity — May argued that in Africa, high expectations are bigoted. “‘Don’t you have to have brilliant teachers in every room in order to have a well-educated child?’ ’Cause honestly, that’s how a wealthy person would think of it,” May explained. “You can’t have a brilliant-teacher hypothesis and expect to change the education for hundreds of millions of children.”

It was also appropriate to pay those teachers less, she argued. “You have to be able to upscale the teachers that would be available within the same community as your child. How are you going to get tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, of teachers to be working with hundreds of millions of impoverished children? They need to be from the same community. They need to face similar challenges. But also economically, they need to be part of the same economy.” Hiring teachers who are “part of the same economy” meant paying them just a few dollars a day.

Bridge ran into difficulties staffing up quickly. “The operations still have lots of tweaks they need, but they’re working well enough that it makes sense to now blow the business out a little more,” May said at the time. She admitted it was “much more hard to hire” good teachers who could grow as quickly as the business, yet Bridge plowed ahead with its breakneck expansion, hiring less qualified teachers at significantly less cost than rival public schools.

In 2022, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer conducted a study in Kenya to assess the efficacy of standardized learning at Bridge schools. The resulting report, which Bridge heavily promotes, found that public school teachers in Kenya were paid between $235 to $392 per month plus generous benefits, while Bridge teachers worked longer hours but earned around $80 per month with considerably fewer benefits than their public school counterparts.

“By not requiring post-secondary credentials, which typically represent a smaller share of the labor force in lower-middle income countries, Bridge has been able to draw from a larger pool of secondary school graduates,” the study read.

Bridge told The Intercept that all the teachers it hires meet the changing requirements stipulated by the Kenyan government. According to Bridge’s 2017 administrative data, only 23 percent of its primary school teachers held recognized primary education certificates.

Bridge also whacked away at the second highest education costs: facilities. According to Kremer’s study, while public schools in Kenya were required to have stone, brick, or concrete walls, Bridge designed standardized schoolhouses largely out of wooden framing and mesh wire, enclosed by iron sheeting — derisively dubbed “chicken coops for kids.” “Bridge’s founders recognize that the model deprioritizes physical infrastructure and they have argued that this frees up resources for expenditure on other inputs that can improve school quality,” the Kremer study noted. “Bridge schools are not made of ‘mesh wire’; they have windows with mesh wire,” a Bridge spokesperson said.

“Our biggest challenge is that we need to ensure we standardize everything,” Kimmelman was quoted as saying in “Bridge International Academies: School in a Box,” a 2010 Harvard Business School case study. “If we want to be able to operate like McDonald’s we need to make sure that we systematize every process, every tool, everything we do.” They later revised it for branding purposes to “academy in a box,” May said, “when we realized everyone here calls a private school that’s good an academy.”

Investors were familiar with the model: The company would understandably lose money in the early years, but as long as growth was steady, profitability could ultimately be reached. And, with enough scale, it might eventually loosen regulatory obstacles in the same way that ride-hailing app companies become too big for a city or state to do anything but accept them and adapt.

And Bridge saw explosive growth, opening hundreds of schools across Kenya and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as India, sometimes without obtaining the bureaucratic approvals and permits required to do so legally.

“Technically, we’re breaking the law,” May said in a 2013 article in the education publication Tes — a quote that was reused in a mostly favorable 2017 New York Times profile of Bridge. “There would be more people and more organizations willing to try and push the envelope and get higher pupil outcomes if the regulatory and legal framework was less restrictive,” May went on. “You have to be extreme. You have to take real risks to work in those environments. Often there are [laws] preventing most companies from trying to figure out how to solve these problems.”

Bridge quickly became the darlings of the Davos world. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim lauded the firm publicly in a 2015 speech. Whitney Tilson, a New York-based Bridge investor and hedge-fund manager, called it “the Tesla of education companies” in 2017.

That year, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lavished nearly 1,000 words of praise on Bridge schools in the West African nation of Liberia, chastising teachers unions and other opponents of outsourcing public education abroad to for-profit companies. “So, a plea to my fellow progressives,” he concluded. “Let’s worry less about ideology and more about how to help kids learn.”

By 2022, the World Bank noted, Bridge was reaching some 750,000 kids. And the results were encouraging. The Kremer study found that underserved pre-primary and primary school children received more learning and had higher test scores at Bridge than in other Kenyan schools. The study also showed that “higher-order skills” and creativity did not appear to be affected by Bridge’s “highly-structured pedagogical approach” to teaching. And, for the last eight years, Bridge Kenya students have exceeded the national average examination score in their primary school exit exam, according to data compiled by Bridge. The numbers seemed so promising that Liberia even contracted out some of its struggling public schools to Bridge, as the company’s global expansion only accelerated. Had global investors honed in on a business model that could do well by doing good?

Then, in March 2022, the World Bank’s financing arm — the International Finance Corporation — quietly divested from NewGlobe, the parent company of Bridge International. No announcement was made. No reason was given. Just a short disclosure in small print at the bottom of a portal that reads, “Update: IFC has exited its investment in NewGlobe Schools, Inc.”

The World Bank’s financing arm quietly divested from the parent company of Bridge International. No reason was given.

Among locals and within the global network of civil society organizations that work on development projects, rumors swirled that the dark side of Bridge’s success may have played a role — specifically, a series of abuse and neglect allegations in Kenya that had caught the eye of a Nairobi-based human rights group, the East African Centre for Human Rights, or EACHRights, as well as the internal watchdog at the World Bank, known as the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, or CAO.

“I think you are referring to unsubstantiated allegations lodged several years ago,” Bridge spokesperson Philip Emase told The Intercept in February when we first inquired about the allegation of “abuse and neglect” the World Bank watchdog was probing. Emase pointed out that the CAO was duty-bound to assess all allegations pertaining to their investments, but suggested that these complaints lodged by EACHRights, “an organization with a longstanding opposition to the education provision Bridge Kenya provides,” stemmed from a vendetta against Bridge, rather than factual evidence. “EachRIGHTS [sic] has campaigned against Bridge Kenya for many years. Bridge Kenya has been fully cooperative with the ongoing CAO process over the years,” he said.

It’s true that EACHRights has campaigned against Bridge, but behind some of the allegations lodged with CAO was a haunting story of abuse.

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An Alarming Discovery

During lunch break on a school day in the spring of 2016, David Nanzai, an eighth-grade teacher at Bridge Kwa Reuben, a school in the Mukuru informal settlements in Nairobi, found an anonymous handwritten note between the pages of a Kiswahili textbook sitting on his desk.

The note, which Nanzai surmised had been left by a girl in the upper grades, described sexual abuse by another teacher. The man had touched her, the letter said, taken her hand and put it on his private parts, and asked her for oral sex and intercourse. Nanzai shared what he learned with a colleague, Andrew Omondi, and the two set out to investigate. They would soon discover that the student had been one of many.

Nanzai met privately with each of the female students in grades six through eight, and Omondi encouraged him to record the conversations so they’d have evidence. “I had developed my own rapport with the kids. They looked at me as a father figure,” Nanzai said.

Eventually, they figured out who had written the note, and as they investigated further, they found at least 11 girls, aged 10 to 14, had been assaulted. They suspected three other girls may have been too frightened to come forward.

Reporting by The Intercept — including interviews with parents, former Bridge teachers and staff, nonprofit workers, community leaders, education activists, and police officers — corroborated the scope and many of the details of the sexual abuse. Many of the sources asked for confidentiality, expressing fear of reprisal from Bridge and concern about a culture of secrecy.

The students’ stories were eerily similar, as relayed by parents and teachers to The Intercept. The accused teacher would instruct them to come to school as early as 6 a.m. for extra prep. He would call them into an office one by one and close the door. His alleged crimes ranged from unwanted touching to rape without a condom.

“We brought him on board. He came for an interview,” Omondi said. “He was a good friend, a close friend.”

Married and a devout church attendee, the abuser had styled himself as a man of God. “He was camouflaged in Christianity,” said Nanzai. “So, he won the trust.”

During an interview at a community center in the Mukuru settlements, Omondi said he received training on how to identify and handle cases of sexual abuse when he first started teaching at Bridge in 2012.

Bridge told The Intercept that it has been providing “safeguarding training” to teachers and school leaders since December 2008.

Nanzai reported his findings to Josephine Ouko, his school’s academy manager, similar to a principal. Ouko, whom The Intercept was unable to reach for comment, called a staff meeting in her office with the alleged perpetrator in attendance. The other teachers confronted him, seething. Initially, he denied the allegations, according to four Bridge teachers present, but the teachers played audio recordings of Nanzai’s conversations with the students and shared their written testimonies.

Conceptor Shisia, a former teacher at Bridge, dropped to the floor, hysterical, when she heard the recordings. “When you see the kids that were abused, they are very innocent. You feel like a parent,” she said. “These kids, actually, they were tortured.”

“We were questioning why, why, why? Our question was why was he leaving the wife at home and abusing the kids at school?” said Shisia. “And he was like, ‘I don’t know what Spirit is this.’”

The accused teacher eventually admitted his guilt to his infuriated colleagues at the meeting, the four teachers said. The Intercept identified the man but was unable to reach him.

After the meeting, the teachers expected Ouko, the academy manager, to notify Bridge and call the police. But Ouko told them to leave her office so she could speak to the teacher alone, the four teachers said. The next thing they knew, the man had disappeared into the maze of crowded dirt streets that make up the Mukuru informal settlements. He was gone.

The following day, Omondi got the parents involved. He called Daniel Wambua Ndinga, one of the survivor’s fathers who was on the school’s parents’ board, requesting that he come in immediately.

At the school, Omondi told him what happened. Ndinga called his daughter and several other students in, and they verified the story. Ndinga then mobilized the other parents and escorted them to the nearby police station to begin an investigation. The Intercept spoke with a police officer involved in the initial report who confirmed that the incident was reported to the police but did not provide further details.

The girls were taken by ambulance to a nearby Doctors Without Borders clinic for check-ups. One student’s medical records, provided to The Intercept by a parent, describe her testimony to the doctor: She had been forcibly violated by a teacher in the early morning hours before school started and was suffering from anxiety. The records show that she was prescribed prophylaxis for sexually transmitted infections, given vaccines for Hepatitis B and tetanus, and encouraged to attend counseling.

The effects of the serial assault on the students and parents involved has been severe. The aunt of one of the survivors at the Mukuru Kwa Reuben school in Nairobi, an illiterate laundress who was caring for her sister’s child when the incident occurred, said she has never spoken out until now.

Months of being raped by her teacher changed her niece in front of her eyes, she said, and the jovial child who wanted to become a teacher herself grew unhappy and withdrawn. Often, when she came home, the aunt saw that she had been crying.

“I saw that my niece had waited for a very long while before reporting, and the days had passed. I did not know what else I could do,” she said. “No one from the school has ever followed up on the matter. … No one else has come out to ask me about this issue.” Her niece declined to speak to The Intercept about the incident. Her aunt said she wanted to put it behind her and forget the whole thing ever happened.

The abuse could have been caught sooner. Sometime in 2015, a year before the serial assault came to light, two class eight girls had attempted to get help from another teacher, Jackline Anudo. The girls had approached her, she told The Intercept, alleging that the same teacher was sexually assaulting them. Anudo tried to speak with the accused teacher but said he initially denied any wrongdoing. Several days later, Anudo said three class six girls approached her with the same story. Anudo said she spoke with the teacher again, and this time, he admitted the assault, “so it forced me to go to the academy manager.” When Anudo raised the issue with Ouko, she said Ouko warned her not to tell the parents and refused to investigate the allegations.

“I kept quiet,” Anudo said. “I feel very, very bad because when we are there, we, as the teacher — I wanted to make the pupils’ future better, to better their future.”

“These girls, some of them were in class six, and they were very tender at that time,” she added. She said she was subsequently warned by another teacher that she should not talk further to reporters from The Intercept, as the reporters might have her arrested.

In the months following the incident, Ndinga and several Bridge teachers attempted to find the man in the depths of Nairobi’s informal settlements. Several times, they got word from their contacts that he was in a certain location, but by the time they arrived, he had disappeared.

Told that The Intercept had identified the alleged perpetrator by name, a Bridge spokesperson acknowledged the abuse had taken place and confirmed the former teacher’s identity. Asked why the company had previously dismissed our inquiry, the spokesperson said that the company thought we were referring to different allegations.

And, in a letter from Bridge’s attorneys, the company added the threat of a lawsuit against The Intercept, citing the “potential for legal action” if the story was published. “The rare and isolated misconduct of a few bad apples should not tarnish the incredible work that these educators are doing in their communities every day,” read a letter from Andrew Philips, an attorney with Clare Locke LLP, positing that the problem was simply endemic in Kenya. It was, he wrote, “important to acknowledge the sad reality that sexual abuse of students by teachers has historically been a serious problem in Kenyan schools.”

The legal threat was a glimpse into the aggressive posture Bridge had become known for, a reputation that was forged in the global press amid its battle in Uganda with a Canadian graduate student named Curtis Riep.

3

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“You Need to Come With Us”

On May 30, 2016, just weeks after the teachers and parents had reported the abusive teacher to the police in Nairobi, Curtis Riep sat down in a café in Kampala, Uganda. A Ph.D. candidate in educational policy studies at the University of Alberta, Riep was in the city compiling a report on Bridge schools for Education International, a global federation of teachers unions.

He had managed to schedule an interview with a Bridge national director and a regional manager. As the men began their conversation, Riep began recording, as he did for all such meetings, so that he could later transcribe the answers.

So Riep’s recorder was rolling when moments later, a plain-clothed police detective dressed in a suit — or, at least, a man identifying as one — and two self-proclaimed officers in militarized uniforms carrying assault-style weapons approached the table. Riep later transcribed the resulting exchange verbatim in his dissertation.

“I work with the police — the Uganda police,” the “detective” said to Riep after exchanging pleasantries with the executives. “I’m going to be taking you now.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need you on the case of trespassing.”

“Trespassing where?” Riep asked.

It would later emerge that Bridge officials in Uganda had accused Riep of gaining access to Bridge schools by impersonating a teacher.

“There’s a school where you went to,” the plain-clothed man claiming to be a police detective said, telling Riep he “must come with me now.”

“I’m sorry but could you explain why? Where did I trespass?”

“Bridge International schools,” the man said.

“Bridge International schools? I’m speaking with these gentlemen right now, they come from Bridge International schools,” Riep said, naively and momentarily believing the mix-up would quickly be resolved.

“Those ones I’m not concerned with,” the detective said, “but you, you need to come with us.”

Riep again suggested confirming with the Bridge men at the table that no crimes were being committed. “Maybe we can speak to these men as well because they are the directors of Bridge International,” Riep responded.

“We are moving to Kyengera police. The details you can know from there,” the man said.

Riep demurred, saying the detective had no right to take him. “I’m telling you. You trespassed at their school,” the detective repeated.

“I had permission to be there,” Riep insisted. “These are the directors of the schools, so maybe we could have a conversation here.”

The Bridge national director’s voice finally entered the recording. “I, umm, this has nothing to do with me. You have your issue here. As for me, I’m out of this,” the man said, who Riep referred to later in his dissertation under the name Mr. Snow but has elsewhere been identified as Bridge executive Andrew White, a U.K. expat and a top Bridge official in Uganda. White was also later part of the Bridge team that responded to the investigation into serial assault in Kenya.

“Did you make a complaint to them?” Riep asked. There was no answer from the national director. He asked again.

“I don’t know what you mean. This has nothing to do with me, personally. I don’t know what it is,” the Bridge national director said, sipping his coffee.

The detective suggested the Bridge director would come to the Kyengera station with them.

“Yes, no problem. We will follow you there,” he said.

“I feel very uneasy about this. I should make a call before I go anywhere,” Riep interjected. “Can I ride with you?” he asked the Bridge director. “Because I have a few questions.”

“You can go with them,” he said. “We’ll follow you guys.”

“This seems fishy.”

“Yeah well, we’ll follow you.”

Riep asked to be able to send a message first. “OK, I’m just going to send a quick email to my family in Canada so they know if anything happens,” Riep said.

“Let’s go now,” the detective said.

Riep asked to see his badge as he opened his laptop to send his family an email.

There was no response. He turned to the Bridge director as he typed. “So, my friend, what is going on here?”

“All I know is what I’m seeing in front of me. The police have come and they’re asking you to go and answer questions about the charges that have been raised against you.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“What I’m seeing is what I know.”

“So, you haven’t had any contact with the police?”

“Do I know these three people? No, I don’t know these people.”

“No, that’s not what I asked.”

“It’s my first time seeing them.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Riep tried a different version. “So, it was just a coincidence that we meet here and then just a few minutes after, the police are here too?”

“Can we go now?” the increasingly impatient detective asked.

“OK, just give me a moment to send this email.”

The Bridge director stood up. “I guess we’ll have to finish our conversation another time,” he said.

“I thought you were coming with us?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

Riep hit send, and the email to his fiancé went through. He reproduced it in his dissertation:

… being escorted by police for something related to my research, not sure what is happening. Think its an inside job. Dont freak out. everything will be fine. but just wanted to let u know. If you dont hear from me within 24 hrs than take action. BUT PLEASE I WILL BE FINE!! PROMISE!! LOVE U

None of the three men with guns would identify themselves, and Riep made one last bid to connect on a human level with the Bridge director. “Please, I don’t know if these are real police. I mean, I don’t want my life to be in jeopardy. So, if you feel like you really need to protect yourself and Bridge to this extent, I think it is a mistake. Let’s not make this more of an issue. You are the director of Bridge so obviously we can sort this out another way,” Riep pleaded. The director was silent.

“Can we get moving?” the detective asked.

“Sure, well it was nice to meet you and I think we will see each other again very soon,” Riep told the two Bridge executives, and then turned off his recorder.

He was escorted to an unmarked car, noting that the men bore a “striking resemblance” to the private security guards the Ugandan elite hire to protect their homes and businesses.

Inside the car was another man, who identified himself as an attorney for the government of Uganda, but whom Riep later told the press he learned was a lawyer working for Bridge. They passed the Kampala Central Police Station and kept driving for more than an hour and a half, arriving at a two-room, clapboard police station in Kyengera, home to a front office and a holding cell. Four media outlets waited outside, filming Riep’s arrival. Two Bridge officials held forth about the danger Riep represented to the community. Riep, in his dissertation, said that the station’s police were confused about why he was there, which raised further questions about who the men who had “arrested” Riep at the café were.

He was interrogated by the police for several hours and told that Bridge had taken out an advertisement in a major local paper a few days earlier, on May 24. The ad warned the public Riep was “wanted by the police,” underneath a photograph of his face.

Riep in his dissertation later described the ad as “a very risky proposition in a country with an upswing of violent mob justice happening in the streets of Kampala.”

After being released on bond, Riep was required to return the next day for more questioning. Fortunately for him, he had consistently signed into logbooks at schools under his own name and affiliation, according to reporting by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Bridge could produce no staff witnesses or other evidence to sufficiently back up the claim that he had impersonated Bridge personnel. The police dropped the charges, he later wrote, but they warned him that Bridge may “come after you again.”

“The police cautioned me not to go out at night, to move to a more secure hotel, not to interact with anyone I didn’t know, to restrict my movements, and to protect the research data I had collected,” he wrote. Two days later, he went to meet with the permanent secretary at the Ugandan Ministry of Education in Kampala, and coincidentally spent 20 minutes in the visitor’s lobby with White, who also had a meeting. He said White seemed less than pleased to see him as a free man. From there, he was escorted by Uganda teachers union colleagues to the airport and, cutting his visit short by two weeks, fled the country.

Riep’s arrest was covered by the Washington Post and CBC and led to the co-founder of Bridge, Shannon May, being questioned in the U.K. Parliament about the arrest.

The British version of the World Bank had invested several million dollars in Bridge, but it withdrew its support following this incident. Bridge has stuck by its claim that Riep impersonated a Bridge employee, but it offered scant evidence to back up that claim. It provided The Intercept with a screenshot of a handwritten note by a Bridge teacher in Uganda making that allegation, though the note did not include the name of the author and Bridge declined to name the person or put The Intercept in touch.

Riep’s subsequent report for Education International, the teachers union coalition, did not paint Bridge in a positive glow, but Bridge offered a confounding response: “It is important to mention that our Academy staff members were especially open with Curtis Riep when he visited the Academies because they were led to believe they were speaking to a colleague,” Bridge said in a statement at the time. “They freely discussed work-related grievances, as one usually does with co-workers.”

“It is also important to note,” Bridge said, “that our teachers voluntarily choose to work with Bridge and can resign if an opportunity more suited to their current needs and interests arises.”

The High Court in Uganda soon moved to shutter 63 Bridge schools on the basis that they were “operating illegally because they have no provisional or other licenses.” Bridge fought the order in court but lost, though it has continued fighting and has not closed its schools.

Bridge has deployed the story of Curtis Riep to build its image as an aggressive corporation that offers no quarter for critics.

Bridge has deployed the story of Curtis Riep to build its image as an aggressive corporation that offers no quarter for critics. One Kenyan man looking into Bridge recalled Anthony Mugodo, Bridge Kenya’s legal director, coming to his workplace and making a casual reference to what Bridge had done to Riep, leaving him with a clear implication of a threat. (A Bridge spokesperson denied Mugodo intimidated critics.)

Bridge wasn’t finished with Riep, however; in October 2016, it filed a complaint with the University of Alberta accusing him of violating the university’s Code of Student Behaviour by allegedly misrepresenting himself. Riep said that a two-month investigation resulted in the complaint being dismissed. A university spokesperson said privacy rules barred him from commenting, though he said Riep received his doctorate from the school in 2021.

Riep, reached by phone, said that the campaign against him by Bridge was that much more outrageous given what The Intercept uncovered was happening at the same time. “They basically tried to paint me out to look like some perpetrator, which I find obviously just full of irony, especially given this new news that they had a sexual perpetrator within their own ranks, sexually abusing their students at this point in time.”

4

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World Bank Watchdog

Bridge had been battling a growing coalition of opponents for years, establishing a reputation as a sharp-elbowed company that responded aggressively to any hint of criticism.

In 2014, a Kenyan court ordered Bridge schools closed in one county for not complying with the minimum safety and accountability standards for educational institutions. When the county education board moved to enforce the court’s decision two years later, Bridge responded by suing the board and its director on the grounds that they had not followed the required process.

The following year, in 2015, more than 100 national and international organizations across the world released a joint open statement addressed to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, expressing deep concerns about the bank’s support for the development of Bridge in Kenya and Uganda.

In March 2017, Bridge sued the Kenya National Teachers Union and its leader, Wilson Sossion, in response to a 2016 report the union released called “Bridge vs. Reality.” Bridge requested a temporary injunction against Sossion speaking out against the company that was dismissed the following year.

Also in 2017, over 170 unions and civil society organizations globally released a statement calling on investors to withdraw support for Bridge, and the following year, 88 groups wrote an open letter to discourage current and potential investors from doing business with Bridge.

“It is clear that Bridge is a contentious partner,” a House of Commons report concluded, recommending that the United Kingdom’s development bank divest from Bridge.

In 2018, the Kenyan nonprofit EACHRights filed a complaint with the World Bank’s watchdog about general noncompliance with country regulations, labor abuses, unfair fees, and unqualified teachers on behalf of current and former parents and teachers.

That complaint kicked off an investigation that quickly mushroomed and, five years later, is still ongoing.

The investigation of the Bridge investment has become the center of a controversy at the World Bank over investor responsibility when it comes to “negative externalities” — the euphemistic term for damage that results from investments — and the nature of the accountability process inside the IFC, the World Bank’s financing arm.

The IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman was created in 1999 amid pressure from the anti-globalization movement for accountability related to private sector projects financed by the World Bank Group. In 2014, the CAO produced a damning report linking IFC funding to the murder of Indigenous people in Honduras, a scandal that would captivate the globe after the murder of celebrated activist Berta Cáceres. Under the tenure of CAO head Osvaldo Gratacós, which began later in 2014, the ombudsman completed a litany of hard-hitting investigations, uncovering major scandals.

In February 2020, responding to EACHRights’ 2018 complaint, CAO staff and experts traveled to Nairobi, the ombudsman later reported. There, investigators found something worse than what had been alleged. “The investigation team spoke to community members who raised concerns regarding several instances of alleged child sexual abuse at Bridge schools by school teachers,” according to a preliminary report published almost three years after the initial complaint.

Around the same time, in 2020, African civil society groups brought their concerns to Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., one of the more outspoken congressional advocates of human rights in Africa and the Caribbean. Waters, as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, wielded enormous influence over U.S. policy on the World Bank, which was looking for new capital from Congress. Waters conditioned the new capital on a series of demands, including the bank divesting from Bridge. Her letter cited EACHRights, which worked directly with some of the victims. The pressure from Waters led to the IFC’s eventual divestment from Bridge. (The IFC maintains an indirect $200,000 holding in Bridge as a limited partner in Learn Capital Fund, which itself is invested in Bridge.)

Meanwhile, the sheer length of time the CAO was spending on the investigation began to capture the attention of the global civil society community. But CAO’s head, Gratacós, was dedicated to pursuing it. Typically, CAO investigates allegations when a complaint is filed by a third party, but given the stigma surrounding sexual assault, such complaints are rarely filed. In September 2020, the investigative outfit announced the extraordinarily unusual step of effectively filing its own child sexual abuse complaint involving Bridge under Gratacós’s own name.

The decision to move ahead with the sexual assault investigation at Bridge ratcheted up the tension between the bank and the CAO. It was the last major decision Gratacós made at the bank. In October of that year, the World Bank announced that Janine Ferretti would be taking over as CAO head. Reached by phone, Gratacós, now listed as a realtor in Northern Virginia, said that he was unable to comment.

Ferretti’s appointment was alarming to many observers. Gratacós had been inspector general at the Export-Import Bank and had experience leading independent investigations of complex and sensitive publicly backed investments. Ferretti had a very different background; she came from the management side, and spent most of her career as an executive at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she set environmental and social policy — precisely the type of management official she’d now be tasked with investigating.

Three U.S. senators had even sent a last-minute open letter to David Malpass, the Trump pick to head the World Bank. Sens. Patrick Leahy, Chris Coons, and Tom Udall all expressed “concern with the selection process” and urged Malpass “to ensure independence” in the appointment.

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Intercepted

Human rights and advocacy group leaders worried that the move to part ways with the head of the watchdog was connected to the fight over accountability for the IFC and other mission-driven investors.

“I find it deeply suspect that CAO uncovers explosive child sexual abuse allegations in the course of a compliance investigation and shortly thereafter, the World Bank president unexpectedly terminates the head of the CAO,” said one well-placed civil society representative whose clients have complaints before the CAO, asking for anonymity for fear of reprisal against those clients.

“He appoints a management insider without experience in accountability or oversight to head the office, a decision that many of us in civil society questioned at the time,” the source said. “Meanwhile, three years after the child sexual abuse allegations came to light, the CAO has still not produced an investigation report.”

“CAO uncovers explosive child sexual abuse allegations in the course of a compliance investigation and shortly thereafter, the World Bank president unexpectedly terminates the head of the CAO.”

Then, Ferretti unleashed a storm of protest when she tried to bring in a new head of compliance, Emmanuel Boulet. Boulet currently oversees the grievance process at IFC, meaning that he is the point person when it comes to defending the bank in the face of CAO investigations. Ferretti proposed moving him to the other side of the table.

Outside organizations protested to the World Bank, with the heads of eight civil society groups — Inclusive Development International, Accountability Counsel, Center for International Environmental Law, Center for Financial Accountability, Arab Watch Coalition, Bank Information Center, Recourse, and the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice — sending a starkly worded letter to Ferretti in September of last year, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept. It described “Mr. Boulet’s current role with IFC management, which is defensive of IFC’s positions and practices,” and which he had held for 15 years, as incompatible with a watchdog function.

“Our trust and confidence is now deeply shaken because we fear that the appointment of someone to the role of Head of Compliance who is so irredeemably conflicted will seriously erode CAO’s independence, impartiality and integrity.”

A different letter was sent to the World Bank’s chief ethics officer, urging the hiring be paused pending an investigation. “This is the third recent senior level appointment at CAO from the Director General’s former unit at [the Inter-American Development Bank],” that letter noted.

The appointment was ultimately blocked, and Boulet remains at the IFC. But civil society groups are increasingly encountering former management figures as they interact with the CAO. “The whole office is just stacked now with management people, people who’ve spent their careers defending financial institutions against allegations of impropriety and environmental and social harms,” said the civil society source. “It’s very sad, because the CAO has always been the kind of beacon of accountability of any kind of institution, public or private. No more.”

Margaux Day, policy director at Accountability Counsel, a nonprofit that works closely with impacted communities who’ve filed complaints against the IFC and other international financial institutions, said she was grateful Boulet was withdrawn and expressed support for his replacement, but said the trend was worrisome. “It is concerning to us to see additional hires with that type of bank background,” she said. “And if you have too many people who are IFC- or bank-minded, communities will start not trusting the mechanism and it will be seen as just an arm of the bank.”

On top of that, said Day, “The IFC’s track record for remedying findings of noncompliance is bleak.” Her organization looked closely at 41 cases where the CAO had found the IFC culpable, and in only nine of them did they commit to any type of remedy. In those cases, rather than offering meaningful compensation to victims, they often simply made promises of improvement.

After the CAO found that a company funded by the IFC in India had harmed a fishing community there, for example, the IFC fought a lawsuit from the affected fishermen, taking its claim of absolute immunity from liability all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it lost that shield.

Elana Berger, executive director of the Bank Information Center, an outside watchdog that monitors the World Bank and other international financial institutions, agreed. “The real problem is the management of the IFC has never been committed to providing a remedy to communities harmed by the projects they finance, and this is particularly evident in their response to the Bridge Academies case,” she said.

Originally, the CAO expected to finish its health and safety-related investigation of the Bridge investment in September 2020. The CAO’s most recent update in the Bridge investigations was published in January 2022, an extraordinarily long delay.

“Progress on the investigations has been slower than expected due to CAO’s heavy caseload and staff turnover. CAO expects to publish the results of both investigations in the fall of 2023,” CAO spokesperson Emily Horgan wrote in an email to The Intercept. “While the investigations are in process, however, we are not able to share specific details.”

Left/Top: A young boy sits in an alleyway in the Mukuru settlements in Nairobi on March 11, 2023. Right/Bottom: A signpost promoting Bridge International Academies stands on a street corner in Nairobi. Photos: Brian Otieno for The Intercept

Seven years after David Nanzai discovered the note on his desk, the case remains unresolved and officially unsolved, and the victims uncompensated. The teachers we spoke to for this story have all left Bridge schools. But the IFC is working on a new framework to deal with such “negative externalities.”

In late February, the IFC put forward a new draft proposal addressing what it calls its “Approach to Remedial Action”: its effort to respond to the ongoing pressure to take responsibility for any harmful outcomes associated with its investments. “If harm occurs, they are committed to facilitating and supporting clients’ and stakeholders’ remedial action to address the harm,” the report read.

Dozens of civil society organizations panned the new proposal. The IFC’s proposed approach “falls short of expectations and fails to provide a comprehensive plan for delivering remedy to affected communities,” read a statement from a coalition of civil society organizations in February. “If IFC and [the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency] cannot guarantee remedy for project-related harm, they should not be funding development projects in the first place.”

Margaux Day also noted that the proposal would only cover future investments begun in 2024, “which leaves people harmed by the Bridge investment, among others, out.” Day does not have clients impacted by Bridge but has been following the case as a proxy for the global investment community’s willingness to take responsibility for its role in the world.

“Getting accountability right is critical for IFC and our clients,” said a World Bank spokesperson, though they denied the Bridge divestment was due to outside pressure. “Feedback from stakeholders will be considered as IFC refines” its approach to remedying harm and also to how it responsibly exits from investments. (The public can offer feedback, as well, the spokesperson said.)

The IFC has not offered the survivors of the serial assault any compensation.

The Intercept also asked the IFC, Chan Zuckerberg, and the Gates and Omidyar funds what, if any, responsibility investors had to remedy the situation. “Any instance of harm to a child is unacceptable,” said a Chan Zuckerberg spokesperson. “We would refer you to the letter from Bridge Kenya on the practices it has in place to safeguard students and immediately investigate reports of any safety issues.”

A spokesperson for Omidyar’s Imaginable Futures said the fund owns a 2.7 percent stake in the company. “We refer you to the statement provided to you by Bridge Kenya,” the spokesperson said.

5

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The Fallout

Even the best schools can find themselves in a situation in which a teacher or other school employee has broken the law and violated the trust placed in them by students. The question is what safeguards the school had in place and how the school responds in the wake of an incident.

Bridge provided The Intercept with a bullet-point list of nine action items the company took in the wake of the revelations of the abuse.

The serial assault, a Bridge spokesperson said, sparked the creation of the Critical Incident Advisory Unit, which advises schools on how to respond, and led to additional training to “recognize ‘grooming’ behavior” and otherwise stop abuse before it occurs, or report it as quickly as possible. “Since 2020, all staff are asked to affirm their commitment to child safeguarding every year by re-signing the ‘Child champion promise,’” the spokesperson said.

Students now learn “magic number cheer,” which teaches them to remember a phone number — also posted on walls of classrooms, signposts, and fliers — they can use to report abuse. The company takes a hard line, the spokesperson said, on failures to report abuse: “If you do not report a safeguarding concern and that is subsequently discovered it is a gross misconduct offense for which you are dismissed.”

When Bridge learned its academy manager, Josephine Ouko, had not reported the crimes, the company said, she was suspended and then fired.

Bridge said Nanzai was terminated in 2020 for defrauding parents who needed birth certificates; Nanzai said he suspects he was retaliated against for beginning to cooperate with the CAO investigation into the sexual abuse, which began in February 2020.

The company commissioned an education consultancy, Tunza, to evaluate its practices and policies. The report, published in 2020, found that public schools faced far greater rates of abuse than Bridge schools, though the methodology betrays an extraordinary confidence in Bridge’s reporting systems. For public schools, the study relies on anonymous surveys of students. For Bridge schools, the report largely relies on actual cases that were reported to higher-ups and investigated. The report, funded by Bridge, gently suggests that Bridge ought to, at some point, also survey its student body to find out if its assumption about nearly universal reporting through official channels is accurate.

The Tunza report also pointed to a lack of sufficient training and education for academy managers like Ouko: “From the academy manager interviews, we discovered that the academy managers did not fully understand that there was expert support provided by the CIAU or that Bridge would provide them with additional resources during the investigative process such as legal advice when going to court as a witness or financial support to cover associated expenses such as medical tests or transport to health facilities for the children.”

Many of the other actions that Bridge claimed to have taken were carried out by Bridge teachers, and parents, including taking the girls to the clinic and reporting the case to the police. The bullets also claim, “Bridge partnered with local institutions to provide ongoing counseling.” That counseling continued for months, Bridge said, and “would have continued as long as it was needed.”

That message didn’t always get through. Ndinga said his daughter never received counseling from the Wangu Kanja Foundation, a Kenya-based nonprofit focused on gender-based violence; Hope Worldwide, another nonprofit; or Bridge. “They did not take these children to counseling for the betterment of their lives in the future,” he said.

Ndinga was one of the parents who encouraged the others not to pursue the case, legally or in the media, because he feared that the girls would be stigmatized and shamed if the incident became public. And after his daughter went back to Bridge to finish her schooling there, Ndinga said he felt scared. He used to “monitor” her, checking in and investigating when she went to school early in the morning or came home later at night.

Bridge Kenya provided a statement from its director of gender and child empowerment, Lillian Wamuyu: “Bridge Kenya is appalled by any safeguarding breach. We have always treated safeguarding as our number one priority. All Bridge teachers and school leaders have been continuously trained in safeguarding since Bridge Kenya opened its first school in 2009 and students are recognised as safer in our schools. If any safeguarding concern is reported, swift and decisive action is taken, including alerting the authorities and providing full support to students affected. It is horrifying if any indecent act takes place in a school and it is the duty of all those that work in education to ensure perpetrators are brought to justice as quickly as possible.”

Wamuyu’s statement pointed The Intercept to the Tunza report and the list of measures it claimed to have taken in the wake of the 2016 incident to improve child protection at Bridge schools. “In 2022, Bridge Kenya became a founding member of the Child Safeguarding Association of Kenya (CSAK). Bridge continually ensures that safeguarding policies and practices are reviewed and updated, so they remain best in sector.”

Despite its efforts to address these issues, there have been other troubling cases at Bridge Kenya, both before and after the 2016 incident at Mukuru Kwa Reuben.

Court records show that in 2017, several prepubescent female students were sexually harassed by a teacher at another Bridge school in Mukuru. The teacher was arrested, and the case is still being adjudicated in court.

In one particularly gruesome case, a Bridge teacher at a third school was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for cutting the genitals of a 7-year-old student with a razor. After publication, a Bridge spokesperson, in a request for a correction, insisted to The Intercept that the man was found “innocent” on appeal and his conviction was overturned. His conviction was indeed overturned, but the court did so, it ruled, because the child was too young to give sworn testimony and the testimony was not corroborated. Nothing in the opinion declared the teacher “innocent.” The case, despite its made-for-the-tabloid details, was hardly reported, nor did The Intercept find any announcement or statement by Bridge International Academies pertaining to the incident.

One morning in September 2019, the mother of a Bridge student at another Nairobi school was startled to find a crowd of her son’s classmates outside her home. They were there to deliver harrowing news.

After the school’s daily assembly, her son, a young student named Bernard, reached up to touch a wire that was dangling inside from an adjacent building into school property. It was a live wire, and he was electrocuted and killed.

Another 9-year-old boy was badly hurt and rushed to a nearby hospital. His mother, Halima Ali, is currently fighting to get monetary compensation, support for her son’s ongoing medical care, and an apology from Bridge. The financial burden of the incident was devastating to Ali’s family, she said, but, at the time of her interview, Bridge hadn’t budged an inch.

“To be honest, I have so much pain,” she said, crying during an interview in her family’s one-bedroom shanty house in the informal settlements. “I wish it happened to me and not my son.”

The case around Bernard’s death was settled through a mediation process, with CAO bringing Bridge and the student’s mother and her advocates together to agree on terms. Throughout the process Bridge was reluctant to give her even the most basic remuneration for her son’s death, according to people briefed on the talks who could not speak on the record because the negotiations were confidential. The mother wanted to know exactly what happened to her son and to get back the sweater he was wearing that day. She also wanted a public apology. But the company fought to keep from admitting liability.

Bridge and the mother ultimately agreed to an antiseptic public statement that acknowledged the child’s death. “This is a joint statement between Bridge International Academies Limited and the Complainants on disputed circumstances related to the death of their child, who while attending a Bridge School was electrocuted by a live connection from a building adjacent to the School,” the statement reads. There was no apology, no detailing of events.

“It is clearly stated — and agreed — on the CAO website that Bridge was not at fault,” a Bridge spokesperson said, adding that the confidentiality agreement barred the company from commenting on the talks. Bridge argued that the wire was dangling from an adjoining building, and therefore Bridge wasn’t responsible.

Emily Horgan, the CAO spokesperson, pushed back on the claim that anything CAO had produced exonerated Bridge. “It is not correct to say that CAO’s website states that Bridge was not at fault. Neither CAO’s site nor the documents on the site state that,” she said.

Bridge said that it was bound by confidentiality not to discuss what was shared during the mediation, though it did share what a company spokesperson said was a statement it provided to CAO. It meticulously avoids any suggestion of culpability:

The safety of Bridge’s pupils is its absolute priority and we are deeply saddened by the tragic accident. This was a unique and terrible accident that has been devastating to the family and to all members of our community. As educators, parents, and members of the greater school community, it is difficult to comprehend the suffering that such a tragic accident causes. We know that many staff, parents and wider community members remain devastated after their desperate efforts to save the child’s life were sadly unsuccessful.

Bernard’s mother never got his sweater back.

Correction: April 1, 2023
This story previously stated that the UK development bank divested from Bridge. In fact, the House of Commons recommended a divestment but the bank did not divest. It also previously said that Bridge filed a complaint with the University of Alberta in December 2016; the complaint was filed in October 2016. The story has been corrected.

The story has also been updated to add that the conviction of the teacher in the 2014 case of genital cutting was ultimately overturned because the testimony of the young victim was not corroborated. We also clarified that the wire that electrocuted Bernard was hanging from an adjacent property, though Bernard was on Bridge school property when the incident occurred.

The post Two Harvard Grads Saw Big Profits in African Education. Children Paid the Price. appeared first on The Intercept.

“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.

The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.

“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”

But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.

Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes, including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.

To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation, a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.

The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.

For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.

This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”

The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.

“Nowhere Is Safe”

The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey, who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.

On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.

“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”

“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”

They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.

Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted: “Nowhere is safe.”

Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.

A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.

“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”

The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.

“Boot to the Face”

Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.

“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”

Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”

As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.

“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”

And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.

Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”

As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.

“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”

The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.

“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.

Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.

“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”

A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.

Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”

Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.

Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.

“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.

Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.

Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta (left/top) pushed her bike down in a panic as a police officer in riot gear charged toward her during a housing-rights march. Minutes later, police arrested Charles Johnson (right/bottom), forcing him to the ground. Left/top photo: Colorado Springs Police Department. Right/bottom photo: Colorado Indigenous Brown Berets.

“I Never Saw Any Grenades”

Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.

One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.

Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.

Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”

Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.

Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.

Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”

But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.

Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.

Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.

“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.

The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”

That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.

“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”

In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.

“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”

Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.

“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.

Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.

The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.

“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”

Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.

Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously, you know?”

Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.

“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”

In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.

During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.

The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.

“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.

“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.

“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.

“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.

“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”

“I respectfully decline to answer.”

“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.

“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.

Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.

“People have become more cautious, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.

Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.

Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

“Something Went Boom”

A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.

Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.

As with the killer in the Pulse attack, the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich. They closed that inquiry less than a month later.

As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.

“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”

Eleanor Knight contributed research.

The post The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Historic Error

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Miller in old photos from his time in Afghanistan, left, and Iraq, right. Photos: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

The Betrayal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Juice

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

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Intercepted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murderer’s Row

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Phantom Meltdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

He told me to look into it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clusterfuck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blah Blah Bluh Blah”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are their bonfires?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doug Smith shows his National Park Service credentials and poses for a portrait at his home in Bozeman, Mont., on Feb. 22, 2023. Photos: Max Lowe for The Intercept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People Riding Around With Guns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boundary Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind Your Own Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post appeared first on The Intercept.

Omar Assad had already stopped breathing when the soldiers left him, a man detained alongside him told reporters. When a doctor finally arrived, he found that Assad had been dead “for 15 or 20 minutes.” An autopsy found that he had suffered a fatal, stress-induced heart attack.

The brutal death of Assad, a U.S. citizen who had retired to his home village near the Palestinian city of Ramallah after four decades in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sparked widespread outrage. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group, denounced the soldiers’ “utter indifference” in failing to provide first aid or call an ambulance; the U.S. State Department called Assad’s death “troubling.” Following an internal review, the IDF itself acknowledged that “the incident showed a clear lapse of moral judgment.”

Israel recently moved the unit involved in Assad’s death out of the occupied West Bank. But the soldiers’ treatment of Assad was not unusual. While hardly the only ones accused of human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories, members of the Netzah Yehuda unit often committed gratuitous acts of violence, a former member of the unit told The Intercept in his first interview with an international news organization.

The Netzah Yehuda battalion was originally set up to allow ultra-Orthodox Israelis to serve in the military. But over the years, the unit has attracted not only some of the most religious soldiers, but also a growing number of far-right extremists, including many settlers. Unlike other units, enlistment in Netzah Yehuda is voluntary; until recently, it was deployed exclusively in the West Bank, where its members were in daily contact with Palestinians living under occupation. As such, the unit — whose name is an acronym for “Haredi Military Youth” — was known for getting “a lot of action,” the former member said.

The ex-Netzah Yehuda soldier asked not to be identified because of the enormous social cost associated with publicly criticizing Israel’s military. Since leaving the unit, he has come to reject the occupation and his own role in it. Netzah Yehuda has long been criticized in Israel — some senior political and military figures have even called for the unit to be disbanded — but testimonies from former members are rare. While The Intercept could not independently verify some of the incidents the former soldier described, he also spoke to Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli veterans who gather testimony from soldiers in the occupied territories.

The IDF did not answer a detailed list of questions for this story nor address the former soldier’s allegations on the record. But in a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson wrote that the Netzah Yehuda unit was moved from the West Bank to the Golan Heights “to diversify the IDF’s area of operation and accumulate operational experience.”

The spokesperson also referred The Intercept to an earlier statement in which the IDF wrote that it is “considering filing indictments” against the soldiers involved in Assad’s death. “As part of the investigation, anomalies were found in the conduct of the commander of the checkup force and the commander of the soldiers that guarded the detainees,” that statement read. “It was also found that it is not possible to establish a correlation between these abnormalities and the death.”

U.S. Pressure

Even before Assad’s death last January, Netzah Yehuda members had been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture, and beatings, among other abuses. In August, the unit made headlines after a video of some members beating two young Palestinians went viral on TikTok. The IDF suspended the soldiers involved in that beating and opened a criminal investigation. It wasn’t the first time: According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been convicted of offenses against Palestinians at a rate higher than those in any other IDF unit.

But it was the death of Assad — which came only weeks before the killing by a different IDF unit of another Palestinian American, journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — that put the unit on the radar of U.S. officials. The incident prompted calls for the U.S. government to impose consequences on a foreign military it supports to the tune of $3.3 billion a year. In particular, a growing number of critics have urged the Biden administration to apply U.S. legislation known as the “Leahy Law,” after recently retired Sen. Patrick Leahy, which limits the ability of the State and Defense departments to provide military assistance to foreign units that have a record of human rights violations. The law has never been applied to any units of the Israeli military, despite a number of cases — including the killings of several U.S. citizens by Israeli forces — likely meeting its criteria.

“The very least the US can do is to impose Leahy Law sanctions for the murder of an American against a repeat offender Israeli unit that has been killing and abusing Palestinians with impunity for years,” said Adam Shapiro, advocacy director for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a U.S.-based human rights group focused on the Middle East and North Africa. DAWN also submitted a complaint detailing a series of incidents involving the unit to the International Criminal Court, accusing its members and two of its commanders of war crimes. “While Netzah Yehuda might not be the worst abuser in the Israeli Army, its actions have been well-documented by Israeli and international media, offering a unique insight into the absolute unwillingness by Israeli governments to hold its soldiers accountable for violating international law and the Israeli army’s own rules of engagement,” the group noted last fall.

The State Department began looking into the unit’s record following Assad’s death, although officials would not confirm reports that they had asked the U.S. Embassy in Israel to draft an internal report on the unit’s conduct and begun interviewing witnesses. The IDF characterized the unit’s recent move out of the West Bank and its redeployment to the Golan Heights as an operational decision. But many have pointed out that the move followed increased U.S. scrutiny of the unit’s record. Israeli authorities have also opened a criminal investigation into Assad’s death and made a rare offer of compensation to his family — a signal, to some, that U.S. pressure was having an impact.

The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Israel did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. At a press briefing in December, State Department spokesperson Ned Price did not directly answer a reporter’s question regarding calls to apply the Leahy Law to Netzah Yehuda but said, “We manage our security relationships around the world in the context of human rights and the rule of law and in accordance with U.S. legislation, including in this case with the Leahy vetting laws.”

Stanley Cohen, an attorney representing the Assad family in the U.S., told The Intercept that the family has repeatedly asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Assad’s death but has received no response. “The U.S. government has an obligation at this point to initiate a grand jury investigation or certainly a preliminary FBI investigation of what happened and why and how,” Cohen said. “This is an elderly man, simply driving home, in a community filled largely with elderly Palestinians, many of whom are American Palestinians.” (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Cohen noted that the Assad family declined the Israeli government’s offer of compensation and rejected “Israel’s interpretation that the family only cared about money and not justice.”

“We didn’t have to press the so-called nuclear button in order to get accountability.”

For Shapiro, of DAWN, there is no question that U.S. pressure played a role in the redeployment and the compensation offer, even if those measures fall far short of Leahy Law requirements. “It wasn’t just a random decision to move this unit,” he told The Intercept. “For me, the biggest lesson of all of this is that when the U.S. does something even as minor as asking questions, there can actually be very positive results, though this is not a full, positive outcome yet.”

“Of course, we would like to see a cutting of aid,” Shapiro added. “But we didn’t have to press the so-called nuclear button in order to get accountability. There are things that can be done, and this is a perfect example of that.”

With Netzah Yehuda soldiers now out of the West Bank, however, it’s unclear whether the State Department will continue to investigate their record or demand accountability for their crimes. It also seems unlikely that U.S. officials will heed calls to finally apply the Leahy Law against a unit of the IDF.

“The fact that they moved the unit out of there was a positive step,” Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide to Leahy, told The Intercept. “But they should have disbanded it altogether and punished the soldiers who were responsible.”

Troubled Youth

The Netzah Yehuda unit, originally known as Nahal Haredi, was established in 1999 to offer ultra-Orthodox Israeli men, who are usually exempt from mandatory military service, an opportunity to serve in the IDF while keeping to strict religious codes. No women are allowed in the unit or on its bases, which also adhere to strict kosher standards. A rabbi works with the unit, and soldiers’ terms of service are shorter than in other branches of the military so that members can focus on religious studies. But the 500-man battalion, which started with only a few dozen recruits, was also intended to provide discipline to young men with troubled backgrounds, including some who had been shunned by their families or who had violent and sometimes criminal pasts, the former soldier said.

He had been drawn to Netzah Yehuda because of its religious accommodations, he noted, but had also been impressed to learn that the unit had received a series of awards, including for thwarting several attacks and “neutralizing” alleged terrorists.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be boring,” he told The Intercept. “As a 19-year-old, that gets the testosterone going. It was ‘Black Hawk Down,’ that type of thing.”

“It put a lot of very problematic people in the same place.”

He soon realized, however, that putting troubled young men, many with ultra-nationalist views, in a position of power and with constant access to Palestinians was a recipe for abuse. “I think that the intentions of the rabbis that came up with this were in the right place. I get where they came from, but I don’t think that it panned out very well because it put a lot of very problematic people in the same place,” the former soldier said. “Some were very politically motivated, I would say the settlers were the most politically motivated. And then there were a bunch of teenagers who drew a short straw in life and tried to take it out on other people.”

“There’s definitely a problem with discipline,” he added. “Some officers would not take some people with them on missions because they knew that they might lose a couple of soldiers on the way, because they might just wander off in the middle of a Palestinian village and do whatever they want.”

While it wasn’t until years later that the former Netzah Yehuda soldier began to reevaluate and ultimately disavowed his time in the military, the racist beliefs and often unruly behavior of his peers were readily apparent. One of the soldiers, he recalled, said that the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1994, by an Israeli extremist was “justified.” The soldier was disciplined over the remark, “but most people in the unit didn’t understand why — because in the eyes of a lot of people there, it was obvious that the murder of Rabin was justified.”

There were other incidents that revealed the unit’s extremist tendencies. On one occasion, while he was stationed in the northern West Bank, a group of unit members slashed the tires of an Arab driver — a fellow member of the Israeli military — in a nod to the “price tag” attacks frequently carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The incident infuriated some officers, “but a lot of people thought it was completely fine,” the former soldier recalled. “They said that we shouldn’t have Arabs in the military.”

Members of the unit made no secret of their extremism. On Friday nights, after sharing their Shabbat meal, they would sing racist anthems about Jewish power, including songs glorifying Meir Kahane, the U.S.-born founder of the Kach party, an ultranationalist political group that until recently was listed as a terrorist organization in both the U.S. and Israel. Kahane’s grandson himself served in the unit. “I had no idea how he got into the military to begin with,” the soldier said. “Usually, they wouldn’t let someone like that in.”

The IDF does not “intentionally” recruit soldiers with a criminal background and launches investigations “in cases where criminal offenses are suspected,” the spokesperson wrote in the statement to The Intercept, which also noted that “the IDF is a stately body and prohibits any form of political expression.”

Collective Punishment and “Hannukah Parties”

The Palestinians who members of Netzah Yehuda met daily had been completely dehumanized, the former soldier added. While The Intercept could not independently corroborate details about the specific incidents he described, the episodes are well in line with the violence, harassment, and restriction of movement that Palestinians living under occupation are routinely exposed to and that human rights groups have documented for decades.

The former soldier said that he once witnessed a commander punch a Palestinian man in the stomach and shove him into a military car, apparently because the man was moving too slowly. Some of the soldiers were not allowed to guard Palestinian detainees, he added, because their superiors “didn’t trust everyone to do that without harming them.”

Some of the most violent incidents happened when the ex-soldier was stationed near a large settlement in the West Bank. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal under international law and, in some cases, even under Israeli law. Nevertheless, the military is routinely deployed to protect settlers there, even as settler violence against Palestinians has been on the rise.

One Friday, after a funeral for a man killed by the IDF in a Palestinian village near the settlement, a crowd of residents turned up to protest, the former soldier recalled. “Usually, it would just be a couple kids throwing rocks. We would shoot a couple of gas grenades back. There would be back and forth for half an hour, and then we would each go home,” he said. “But after this funeral a huge crowd came together, and when we got there, we had almost no crowd control equipment because all that ammunition, like the rubber bullets and the gas canisters, had run out. So all we had was live ammunition, and it’s very difficult to do crowd control with live ammunition. That day, they actually told us that we are not allowed to shoot at anyone, because they had just killed someone. And in a situation like that, when you start opening fire on a crowd, you can kill a lot of people, and that was going to be an even bigger problem.”

Instead, the soldiers were instructed to pour mounds of dirt over the main road to the village, essentially trapping its residents. “It was collective punishment,” said the soldier.

Another time, the former soldier recalled, a commander took a group of soldiers into a Palestinian village, where they went door to door, knocking and then throwing flash-bang and gas grenades into each home — retribution after some children from the village had thrown rocks on a nearby road earlier that day.

The former soldier, who said he was not directly involved in the grenade-throwing or some of the other, more egregious incidents he described, remembers being disturbed by the episode. “The company commander said, ‘Let’s throw them a Hanukkah party, because it was during Hanukkah,’” he told The Intercept. His fellow soldiers, he said, “were very excited about that whole thing. They would say, ‘You should have seen the face of the family when we opened the door. Everyone was sitting and watching TV, and all of a sudden, they got tear-gassed.’”

“A lot of soldiers were excited about being able to just walk into a stranger’s house with little to no consequences,” he said. “You couldn’t do that in Tel Aviv.”

No Accountability

The harassment and dehumanization of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation are a daily affair, and Netzah Yehuda soldiers are hardly the only culprits. But on some occasions, the unit’s actions in the West Bank escalated into gross human rights violations and potential war crimes. Since 2015, members of the unit have killed several Palestinians and beaten and tortured others with electric shocks, according to documentation submitted by DAWN to the ICC, which in 2021 opened an investigation into alleged crimes committed in the occupied territories.

In that time frame, Netzah Yehuda soldiers killed three Palestinians, including a 16-year-old boy, “in incidents in which soldiers used lethal force against unarmed civilians without justification,” DAWN charged. “In almost every case […] soldiers were found to be lying or covering up the incidents to suggest that they were acting in self-defense.” In October 2021, unit members were also accused of beating and sexually assaulting a Palestinian man they had detained in the back of a military vehicle and later at a military base. Four soldiers were arrested following that incident; one of them was demoted and sentenced to four and a half months in prison. In 2016, another Netzah Yehuda soldier received a nine-month sentence and demotion for torturing Palestinian detainees on two separate occasions. In one instance, the soldier had attached electrodes to the neck of a man who was blindfolded and handcuffed, increasing the voltage when the man pleaded with him to stop. He did the same to a second detainee a few days later, while fellow soldiers filmed the torture on a cellphone.

It’s unclear whether Netzah Yehuda’s abuses were on the State Department’s radar before last year, but after Omar Assad’s death, U.S. officials began making inquiries about the unit. In September, the State Department’s Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, Hady Amr, met with Assad’s family and publicly called for accountability for his death. Israel’s offer of a reported $141,000 settlement to the family and later the decision to move Netzah Yehuda out of the West Bank also coincided with a growing chorus of voices, including in Congress, calling for a U.S. investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was shot in the head in May while reporting from the West Bank city of Jenin. Furor over the killing of Abu Akleh, who was wearing a clearly visible press vest at the time, eventually forced the U.S. Justice Department to launch an investigation — the first time the U.S. government has heeded demands for an independent, American investigation of an incident involving Israeli forces.

Whether growing demands for accountability for Abu Akleh’s killing or calls for Leahy sanctions against Netzah Yehuda — or both — factored into Israeli officials’ decision to move the unit is hard to establish. “I don’t know how much of this has to do with Israel being afraid of the Leahy Law versus Israel trying to manage a relationship with the U.S. after they have killed two U.S. citizens,” Brad Parker, a legislative consultant at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented the Abu Akleh family in the U.S., told The Intercept. The Leahy Law hardly seems to work as a deterrent when it comes to Israel, he added. “Even if it means absolutely nothing, a statement saying ‘This unit is problematic’ or something like that would be significant, given the fact that the U.S. really doesn’t do anything.”

Other critics argue that anything short of blocking U.S. financial support for Netzah Yehuda is not enough.

“What we need is the political will to apply the law, and thus far this administration has lacked that will.”

“That’s not accountability,” Matt Duss, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Intercept, referring to the unit’s redeployment and the compensation offer. “Some people might claim, ‘Hey, look, high five, we got the Israelis to do something,’ but that doesn’t begin to solve the systemic problem. What we need is the political will to apply the law, and thus far this administration has lacked that will.”

U.S. officials’ failure to apply their own laws against Israel has increasingly become a liability, Duss said, noting that while the U.S. “tends to be very serious about human rights in countries that don’t buy our weapons,” intervening in Israel and with some other allies is viewed as “too politically controversial … despite systemic abuses.”

For Rieser, Leahy’s longtime foreign policy adviser, that’s long been a cause of frustration. “The law has not been applied as consistently as Senator Leahy believes it should be with respect to Israel and some other key U.S. allies,” he told The Intercept. “I think that’s partly due to political calculations by the administration, whose job it is to apply the law.”

The sisters and relatives of Palestinian teenager Hamza Amjad al-Ashqar, shot dead by Israeli troops from a different unit in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, mourn during his funeral at the Askar refugee camp east of Nablus on February 7, 2023.

Leahy’s Legacy

There is no public record listing when and where the Leahy Law has been invoked, though public reports indicate that it has been applied to Colombian, Mexican, Turkish, Indonesian, and Pakistani forces, among others. The law is also used as basis for the State Department to vet thousands of foreign military personnel every year — a requirement for the provision of U.S. weapons and training.

More than two decades after it was first introduced, Leahy’s signature legislation “has been institutionalized to the point that it’s not going away,” said Rieser. “It has been built into the training and guidance of the State and Defense departments. It is permanent law. But Congress and human rights defenders still need to ensure that the law is applied as intended.”

Defense officials have at times resisted the law’s implementation. The Intercept reported last year on one of several programs set up to circumvent it. Before he retired, Leahy also worked to close a major loophole in the law that made it difficult to apply against countries that receive U.S. assistance in bulk installments, like Israel, whose security agreements with the U.S. are outlined on a 10-year basis. Previous arrangements made it hard for U.S. officials to know which units of the IDF received what — something Leahy addressed through a recent amendment to the defense budget. “We don’t know with certainty which IDF units receive U.S. equipment,” Rieser said. “We realized that was a loophole for countries that receive bulk shipments of equipment, and Congress modified the law to address that issue.”

The ultimate obstacle to the law’s implementation, however, remains a political one. “Many members of Congress or administration officials are reluctant to suggest that Israeli soldiers may have committed a gross violation of human rights,” said Rieser, noting that Leahy repeatedly called on multiple administrations to apply the law with respect to Israel. He noted that during the Trump administration, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggested that the law should not apply there.

The argument, Rieser noted, was that “Israel is a democracy, it has a credible justice system, and therefore the Leahy Law doesn’t apply.” But Israel’s investigations of alleged military misconduct are carried out by the IDF itself, he noted; they have often been cursory and rarely resulted in appropriate punishment. “The Israeli justice system, particularly the military justice system, is not perceived as being impartial in cases involving Palestinians.”

An Extreme Symptom

Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Al-Haq, a prominent Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank, told The Intercept that he first heard about the Leahy Law during a trip to the U.S. in 2001, a few years after the legislation was introduced. “We first called for Leahy sanctions to be applied against the IDF two decades ago,” he said.

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Over the years, the State Department has flagged several incidents of human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces as potential Leahy cases, including the 2003 killing by an Israeli military bulldozer of American peace activist Rachel Corrie. (Last year, The Intercept published exclusive documents revealing internal deliberations about the law’s application to that case).

Yet none of those incidents resulted in sanctions against any unit of the IDF. “Nothing happened,” said Jabarin. “Nothing happened because this is Israel.”

Multiple U.S. administrations have in the past responded to Israeli abuses with measured words of condemnation, but the U.S. government has never publicly imposed consequences on Israel for its military’s misconduct — neither by applying the Leahy Law nor by threatening to withhold military assistance or limit arms exports under other U.S. statutes. A formal sanctioning of Netzah Yehuda would have only minor practical impact but would convey that the U.S. government is ready to draw a line.

“Israelis got very upset when Ben and Jerry’s said it didn’t want to have ice cream sold in settlements,” said the former soldier. A U.S. rebuke of Netzah Yehuda would likely renew calls to address its history of abuses, he noted, but warned that singling out one unit for censure risks giving a pass to the rest of Israel’s military apparatus.

“For the Israeli public, Netzah Yehuda is very convenient because it’s a group of people that are not very popular in Israeli society to begin with, the Haredim. So it’s very easy to scapegoat and say these Haredim and these settlers, they are the ones who are a problem, it’s not our kids from Tel Aviv and these other nice cities, who also go and kill Palestinians.”

Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence — the group of former Israeli soldiers who have denounced the abuses of Israel’s occupation — told The Intercept that “anything that pushes the U.S. to do anything is a step in the right direction.”

“Every unit that serves in the territories is violent toward Palestinians — every unit,” he said. “Some are documented less, some are documented more. Netzah Yehuda has maybe a tendency to be more violent than others toward Palestinians, but they are not worse than any other unit which invades people’s homes in the middle of the night. They’re not the problem; they’re maybe an extreme symptom.”

Jabarin, the Palestinian human rights activist, agreed that sanctioning Netzah Yehuda would have only symbolic impact — but would be important nonetheless.

“It’s not just the unit, it’s the system behind it,” he said. “Still, this is a test. Can [the U.S.] act according to its principles, its laws, the values they speak about?”

The post Israeli Army Battalion Puts U.S. Ban on Funding Abusive Units to the Test appeared first on The Intercept.

He was a paunchy 5-foot-7 with a ruddy complexion and wore military fatigues with patches on the sleeves. By activist standards, he was an old-timer: pushing 50 as he swaggered through crowds of teens and 20-something protesters, a cigar clamped in his lips.

“I didn’t know much about him, but he drove a hearse,” said Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, a Black activist in Denver. “Inside this hearse was a lot of guns: AR-15s and all other kinds of shit.”

The driver of the hearse filled with guns was Michael Adam Windecker II. He went by the nickname Mickey and boasted of having been a soldier for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force known most recently for battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He claimed to have traveled to those battlefields and trained antifascist activists there in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and explosives.

“He was just this badass dude talking about how he worked in a foreign military and how he was for the Black Lives Matter movement,” Hall remembered.

Denver was a hot spot during the summer of 2020, with protesters enraged not just by George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis but also by the senseless death of Elijah McClain, who was forcefully subdued by police in 2019 in Aurora, a Denver suburb, and injected with a lethal dose of ketamine.

Trey Quinn, a muscular Black activist with a beard and large-framed glasses, led some Denver protests. One night, after Quinn had addressed a group of demonstrators, several young activists introduced him to Windecker.

“Hey, this guy’s really, really dope. He’s legit. He knows his shit,” Quinn remembered being told by the fresh-faced activists. “You should let him sit in, and he could probably help you out.” Windecker was “really pushy,” Quinn told me, “trying to put himself at the forefront.”

Bryce Shelby, another Black activist, remembered seeing Windecker walking around the protests. He had a GoPro camera strapped to his chest, which Shelby initially thought was suspicious. “He de-escalated any type of suspicion because he would start flashing his prison badge,” Shelby said. “So yeah. You know what I mean? OK, he’s not a fed.”

But Shelby and many other activists in Denver were wrong about the man behind the wheel of the silver hearse. Windecker was a fed. The FBI paid him tens of thousands of dollars in cash to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

The FBI declined to comment on Windecker and the investigation in Denver and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions I sent.

Windecker wouldn’t tell me much either. After I left a note at his old apartment south of Denver explaining that I wanted to interview him about his work for the FBI, he called me. “I do not work for the FBI,” he said. “I’ve never worked for the FBI. If you get proof of me working for the FBI, then I’ll say otherwise. But there’s no proof, because I didn’t work for them.”

I explained that I had FBI reports and recordings to the contrary.

“I don’t talk to the press, I don’t talk to politicians, and I don’t talk to police,” Windecker told me, before hanging up.

Windecker became an organizer of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations and ultimately undermined the social movement gaining momentum there.

FBI payment receipt records signed by Windecker show that he was paid more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020, when the FBI aggressively pursued racial justice and left-wing activists based on nothing more than First Amendment-protected activities. The story of the bureau’s infiltration of racial justice activist groups is particularly relevant now, as House Republicans launch a new committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that seems exclusively focused on the FBI’s alleged targeting of right-wing groups.

The FBI’s work in Denver, with Windecker as its eyes and ears on the street, demonstrates the falsity of that narrative.

While on the FBI payroll, Windecker became an organizer of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations and ultimately undermined the social movement gaining momentum there by deploying the same controversial tactics the FBI used to devastating effect against Black political groups during the civil rights movement.

Until now, little has been revealed about the FBI’s actions in the summer of 2020. The Denver undercover probe involving Windecker provides the first look behind the scenes at how the FBI viewed and investigated racial justice groups during that turbulent summer.

“I Got a Song for You Guys”

Any accurate description of Windecker sounds like a cartoon. With tattoos all over his body, a scraggly goatee, garishly large rings on his fingers, and a soggy cigar in his mouth, Windecker was hard to miss as he drove the streets of the Mile High City in his silver hearse.

One rainy summer afternoon after becoming a paid informant, Windecker met with his FBI handler, Special Agent Scott Dahlstrom. The federal agent clicked on a hidden camera device.

“It is August 28, 2020, at approximately 4:02 p.m.,” Dahlstrom said into the FBI recorder before handing it to Windecker. The video is part of more than a dozen hours of FBI recordings I obtained documenting Windecker’s work investigating racial justice activists.

Dahlstrom asked Windecker if he remembered his tasking orders — which involved enticing a Black racial justice activist into committing a felony.

“Yep, I got it,” Windecker said. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.”

Windecker walked to his silver hearse, placed the camera on the passenger seat, and started the ignition. Dahlstrom and his FBI colleagues watched the live feed from their black sedan.

“I got a song for you guys,” Windecker said, looking into the camera lens and speaking directly to the FBI agents. He turned up the volume on the silver hearse’s stereo and played “America (Fuck Yeah!),” the theme song from the puppet comedy movie “Team America: World Police”:

America, America

America, fuck yeah!

Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah

America, fuck yeah!

Freedom is the only way, yeah

Terrorists, your game is through

’Cause now you have to answer to

America, fuck yeah!

As the song ended, Windecker turned to the camera again, as if on a stage, confident that the FBI agents were watching him.

“America,” Windecker said.

The United States of America had become Windecker’s new employer, and the FBI was paying him to spy on activists that summer day as he barreled down the road. According to internal FBI reports I obtained, Windecker began attending demonstrations in May 2020. He witnessed firsthand what millions of Americans saw on their screens at home: protests turning violent, clashes between left-wing and right-wing activists, demonstrators and instigators setting fires and vandalizing storefronts.

Windecker offered to give the FBI information about protesters. In an internal report, the FBI claimed that Windecker’s motivation for becoming an informant was “to fight terrorists” and that he believed “people who participate in violent civil unrest are terrorists.”

Bureau documents detailed Windecker’s history as both an informant and a criminal, with prior arrests in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida.

In their report adding him to the bureau’s more than 15,000 informants, FBI agents described Windecker as something of a good Samaritan — a kind of volunteer Captain America. But that notion was undercut by other bureau documents, which detailed Windecker’s history as both an informant and a criminal, with prior arrests in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida for crimes including sexual assault.

When Windecker was 20, he had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old he met at a roller skating rink. Windecker, who claimed he didn’t know the girl was underage, pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.

In another case, for felony menacing with a weapon in 2001, Windecker stuck a gun in a woman’s face and claimed to be a police officer looking for a suspect. That incident resulted in a felony conviction, and Windecker served two years. While he was in prison, according to FBI internal reports, another inmate tried to hire him to murder someone; instead of committing the crime, Windecker became a cooperating witness and helped convict the people who’d sought to enlist him.

In addition to criminal charges, Windecker has had four protection orders filed against him in Colorado, the most recent in 2021. In a petition for a protection order filed in 2016, a friend of Windecker’s alleged that Windecker had presented a fake police badge and threatened to kill him and his family.

Windecker claimed to have been a fighter for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force in Iraq. He often said he had diplomatic immunity in the United States due to his association with the Kurds. In 2015, the Daily Beast reported that he was disliked by other volunteer Peshmerga fighters. One American fighter was reported to have described him as “a compulsive liar.”

I spoke to several volunteers who were with Windecker in Iraq; few of them wanted to be publicly associated with him. One of those fighters told me that Windecker claimed to be a demolitions specialist. “Dude was going around literally cutting wires off of IEDs,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices, also known as roadside bombs. “So he could have gotten anybody killed in the vicinity.”

Alan Duncan, a Scottish volunteer fighter with the Peshmerga, told me that he hadn’t fought with Windecker but knew his reputation from the other fighters. Windecker was better known for taking pictures with dead bodies, long after the fighting was finished, than for engaging in combat, Duncan told me. “He was floating about taking a few photos with the Pesh,” Duncan said. “It’s easy to claim to be Peshmerga. But claiming to be Peshmerga and actually being Peshmerga are two different things.”

Cassie Windecker, Mickey Windecker’s third ex-wife, told me that during one of his tours with the Peshmerga, Kurdish fighters had contacted her online to say that he was vacationing more than fighting.

When they first started dating, she recalled, Windecker sent her a picture of thousands of dollars in cash spread over a bed. “Do you want to come home to this every day?” Cassie remembered Windecker asking her. She said that she never knew Windecker to hold down a job during their marriage, but he often had a lot of cash in his pockets.

Cassie had long suspected that her husband was secretly working for the police in some capacity. She said she’d seen him visit local police stations to meet with cops. “Why do you have so much money?” Cassie, who was an exotic dancer at the time, would ask him. “I bust my ass, literally, on a pole. What are you doing?” She told me that Windecker would never give her a straight answer.

In July 2017, after she and Windecker separated, Cassie went to the apartment they had once shared to pick up her mail. In the apartment, Windecker allegedly grabbed Cassie by the neck, slammed her down on a table, and stood over her holding a gun. Cassie screamed as she ran out of the apartment; police arrived and arrested Windecker. The responding officers were wearing body cameras, and I obtained those videos. “He slammed me on my back, on the table, like freaking WWE-style,” Cassie told the cops, her voice breaking with fear.

While in jail following that arrest, Windecker revealed his talents as an informant, according to the police body camera footage.

“One of the officers said that you had to speak to me about a murder?” the arresting officer said to Windecker, speaking through the jail cell door about two hours after the arrest.

“Well, here’s the thing,” Windecker replied matter-of-factly. He then offered information about a murder, and the arresting officer told him he’d have to talk to a detective.

“Hang tight, all right?” the officer said as he walked away. The body camera footage then ended.

While in the hospital for her injuries, Cassie said she received a text from Windecker: “Hey bitch, I’m out.”

Cassie said police officers were still taking her statement in the hospital when the text arrived. “And I showed them the text, and they were just like, ‘We don’t know how he’s out,’” she said.

There is no record in Colorado court files of Windecker being charged, and Cassie said she was not contacted by police or prosecutors following her discharge from the hospital.

Three years later, in the summer of 2020, Windecker approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice activists.

“We Don’t Investigate Ideology”

As protests broke out in cities like Minneapolis; Denver; and Portland, Oregon, the FBI’s second-in-command, David L. Bowdich, compared the demonstrations to the 9/11 attacks. “When 9/11 occurred, our folks did not quibble about whether there was danger ahead for them,” Bowdich wrote in a memo first obtained by the New York Times. “They ran head-on into peril.” Bowdich described the racial justice demonstrations throughout the country as “a national crisis” whose “violent protesters” were “highly organized.”

Agents suspected these demonstrators could fit into a domestic terrorism ideology the bureau had defined during the first year of the Trump administration as “Black Identity Extremism”: a controversial, widely criticized catchall label for any domestic extremist ideology that drew a Black following. (The FBI has since abandoned the term in favor of a new category called “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism,” which combines white supremacist violence with so-called Black Identity Extremism.)

What’s been publicly known about the federal government’s activity during the summer of 2020 is astonishing: The Justice Department charged hundreds of people for their roles in First Amendment-protected demonstrations; the Department of Homeland Security deployed more than 750 agents, dressed in military-style uniforms, to Portland and abducted demonstrators in unmarked vans; and the Drug Enforcement Administration, using surveillance powers intended to stop drug runners, spied on more than 50 racial justice groups nationwide, among them a peaceful group that held a vigil on a public university campus in Florida.

The official position of the FBI, whose undercover activities during the summer of 2020 have been largely unknown until now, is that agents do not open investigations based on First Amendment-protected activities. “We don’t investigate ideology. We don’t investigate rhetoric,” the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, told a Senate committee in 2019. “It doesn’t matter how repugnant and how abhorrent or whatever it is.”

But internal reports I obtained suggest otherwise. These documents show that Windecker’s information was about speech, and this apparently justified hiring him as an informant and launching the undercover investigation. He reported that one local activist, Zebb Hall, used incendiary rhetoric in conversations with other demonstrators, claiming that Hall said: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”

Windecker also secretly recorded a conversation in which Hall spoke vaguely of violent revolution and a desire to train for combat. Windecker encouraged Hall with fantastical claims of training antifascist activists in Iraq and Syria as part of what he called the “Red Star Brigade.”

“My type of training that I do is anything from, like, I teach how to shoot a gun to, you know—”

“Hand-to-hand combat?” Hall interrupted.

“Yeah, hand-to-hand combat all the way to blowing up fucking buildings and guerrilla warfare tactics and sabotage,” Windecker replied.

Windecker, secretly working for the FBI, quickly became well-known among Denver’s most committed activists.

“He came off as maybe being a [rookie], but really being into the movement,” Brian Loma, who livestreamed many of the area’s demonstrations that summer, told me.

One of Loma’s videos from July 2020 shows demonstrators marching down a street in Aurora. “Our streets!” they chant. “Our streets!” Windecker’s slow-moving silver hearse can be seen upfront in the video, clearing the way for the demonstrators.

By the next month, Windecker had become a leader of Denver’s racial justice movement. The demonstrators had given him a nickname: Drill Sergeant.

With his military-style jacket and trademark cigar, he’d strut confidently in front of a line of demonstrators, some dressed in homemade armor.

“I can’t hear you!” Windecker would yell.

“No justice! No peace!” the demonstrators would chant back loudly.

“They’re Preparing for a Genuine Battle”

In 1975, a Senate committee led by the late Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho investigated the FBI’s civil rights-era domestic surveillance program known as COINTELPRO. Among the FBI abuses documented by the so-called Church Committee was the practice of informants becoming leaders in the organizations they were surveilling, and then accusing the real leaders of being informants themselves — a subversive technique known as “snitch-jacketing.”

While COINTELPRO no longer exists, some of its methods remain inside the FBI. This is clear from the bureau’s investigation of racial justice activists in Denver during the summer of 2020.

As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants. These baseless accusations sowed mistrust and undermined some of the most effective organizers in the community.

Trey Quinn, the Black activist leading protests in Denver, was among the first to suspect that Windecker might be an informant. Quinn devised a way to test Windecker: Speaking in hypotheticals, he asked him about burning down a neighborhood. Could we get it done?

“And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I got the right guy for the job,’” Quinn said. “This is how he’s talking.”

While COINTELPRO no longer exists, some of its methods remain inside the FBI.

Windecker’s enthusiastic response fueled Quinn’s suspicions, but he didn’t have proof, so he didn’t warn other activists then. But Windecker, appearing to view Quinn as a threat to his cover, started telling activists that he suspected Quinn was working for the FBI.

“Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”

Suddenly, Quinn found himself on the outside. His fellow activists stopped communicating with him. As Quinn was being marginalized, Windecker encouraged protesters to become more militant and go on the offensive against the police.

In late August 2020, Hall went to an apartment that served as a base for Windecker and the young allies he’d recruited. Inside, Hall saw a table covered with guns. “I’m like, ‘Holy fuck,’” Hall recalled.

Another activist, who was with Hall in the apartment but asked not to be named because she fears retribution for speaking publicly, confirmed Hall’s account. “There are guns, weapons, medical supplies, literally looking like they’re preparing for a genuine battle,” she told me.

From August 22 to August 29, 2020, a series of demonstrations in Denver morphed into assaults on police stations, with protesters carrying homemade shields and hurling rocks and fireworks at police. The demonstrators called one of these events “Give ’Em Hell.” More than 70 police officers were injured that week.

The police response was ferocious. Officers in riot gear broke bones and fired pepper balls and rubber bullets. One man was hit in the head with a lead-filled bag fired from a police shotgun. A stingball grenade exploded next to a woman, knocking out her teeth. In the first civil judgment awarded at trial for police brutality in response to protests triggered by the Floyd killing, Denver police were forced last spring to pay $14 million to 12 protesters.

According to more than a dozen activists I spoke to in the Denver area, Windecker, the FBI’s informant, helped organize and promote these protests, which quickly turned violent.

“You Need to Have an Objective”

A pervasive social media and cable news narrative in the summer of 2020 was that racial justice and antifascist activists were becoming increasingly violent and destructive.

“The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups,” President Donald Trump said. Right-wing news media reinforced and amplified that message. “Violent young men with guns will be in charge,” Tucker Carlson told his large audience on Fox News, adding: “You will not want to live here when that happens.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent, watched from his home in California as this narrative took hold. “It was frustrating for me to see how ably — usually that’s not a term that you use when you’re referencing former President Trump — but how ably he was able to make this boogeyman out of antifa,” German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told me.

According to FBI files and videos, Windecker’s mandate from the FBI wasn’t just to provide information about racial justice protesters — though his “intelligence” about activists filled dozens of reports — but also to try to set up protesters in a conspiracy that would have supported Trump’s claims.

On orders from the FBI, Windecker targeted two Black activists: Hall, whose incendiary rhetoric Windecker had first reported to his handlers; and Bryce Shelby, a slender man with a reputation for giving fiery speeches with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Windecker invited both men to lunch in late August 2020 at a barbecue restaurant. Windecker said he’d brought them together because they were “talking about the same shit,” by which Windecker meant the prospect of protests turning violent. Windecker told them he had a friend — “an outlaw biker buddy” — who could supply whatever they needed, including weapons.

“You need to have an objective of what you’re gonna do,” Windecker told the two men. “If Bryce is planning on like, ‘OK, I want to blow up a motherfuckin’ courthouse,’ I need to know what the game plans are.”

But Windecker’s operation in Denver failed to generate a headline-grabbing conspiracy. Hall declined to participate in a violent plot. Windecker introduced Shelby to his supposed outlaw biker buddy — an FBI undercover agent who went by the nickname “Red” — and together they drove to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s home. As a hidden camera recorded them, the undercover agent encouraged Shelby to commit to a plot to assassinate Weiser, and even suggested they could hire a hitman for as little as $500. Still, Shelby refused to move forward with any plans and immediately cut off contact with Windecker and the undercover agent. Although Shelby was not charged with a crime, local prosecutors used the FBI’s undercover recordings to convince a judge to seize Shelby’s guns under Colorado’s red flag law.

“I Was Just Afraid of Him”

A week after trying to rope Hall and Shelby into a violent plot, Windecker had drawn enough suspicion that an antifascist activist group in Colorado Springs, south of Denver, posted a Twitter thread detailing its concerns. “Be careful around this dude,” the group wrote on Twitter. “Probably wise not to let him in your protest space.”

Although the group didn’t have evidence that Windecker was an informant, the public allegation threatened to damage his cover. Activists in Colorado took the claim seriously.

“You heard through different groups: ‘Kick his ass on sight.’ ‘Fuck him.’ ‘Don’t let him around the groups,’” Hall remembered.

Windecker gathered his allies, including Hall, at the apartment in Denver where activists had seen the table covered with guns. Windecker wanted to record a video and post it to YouTube in response to the allegations. He created a stage for the video: a flag for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and an AR-15-style assault rifle propped against the wall behind him, and, on the table before him, a ball-peen hammer and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“He had a cigar and was acting all tough,” Hall said.

“This propaganda shit you guys posted doesn’t mean fuck all to me,” Windecker said in his gravelly voice, sounding furious. “But understand this: I will be polite and professional, but I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be … If you’re trying to implicate that I’m a fucking snitch, check this out. Three things I ain’t: a punk, I ain’t a bitch, and I ain’t a fucking snitch.”

Watching as Windecker recorded the video, Hall was struck by how defensive he seemed. He finally accepted what he’d long thought impossible: Windecker, the activist leader encouraging everyone to become more militant, must be a secret government informant.

That created a problem for Hall. Windecker had given Hall money days earlier and asked him to buy a gun. Hall had agreed and bought a Smith & Wesson handgun for Windecker, despite knowing that Windecker was a convicted felon. Hall didn’t think he had a choice in the transaction. He believed that Windecker, who made the looming prospect of violence part of his identity, would come after him if he refused. “I was just afraid of him,” Hall explained. “I was fucking terrified of this guy.”

After he made the video, Windecker and his silver hearse disappeared. In July 2021, nearly a year after he’d bought the gun for Windecker, federal agents arrested Hall. He pleaded guilty to a felony firearms violation — for buying a gun, with the government’s money, for the government’s informant — and received three years of probation. That was the extent of the plot Windecker and the FBI succeeded in engineering among the racial justice activists that summer.

Many of the activist groups in Denver have splintered or disbanded. There was a lot of distrust. Activists there told me they suspected government agents had infiltrated the groups to encourage the violence that occurred, but until now, they’d never had proof.

“The FBI caused violence here,” Hall said. “They don’t want people to know that.”

The post The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement appeared first on The Intercept.

If the new taxes were intended to cover new amenities or upgrades for the Villagers, perhaps a hike would be worth the sacrifice. But the money was instead destined to subsidize further sprawl south of The Villages, ultimately benefitting the entity known locally either as “the developer” or “the family,” which could then escape paying the fees associated with the impact of their development.

“This place has grown like crazy,” said Oren Miller, who would go on to run for a seat on the county commission. “The developers pay no impact fees for schools, for fire, for EMS, for police, for parks and recreation, for government buildings. The only impact fees they do pay are for roads, and they only pay 40 percent of the recommended amount.”

The developer is a spaghetti bowl of LLCs doing business collectively as The Villages, which is still owned by the Morse family, descendants of Harold Schwartz, who founded what became the community in the 1970s as a trailer park. The family owns the robust local newspaper, The Villages Daily Sun; owns the radio station, which pipes Fox News and right-leaning updates through speakers in common areas and at pools; owns the glossy magazine; and also owns local politics.

But a group of fed-up Villagers decided to fight back through the only remotely democratic chink left in the armor of The Villages, the county commission. The deck was stacked against candidates challenging the family and its allies, but there still had to be elections. Backed by the Property Owners’ Association, three Villagers stepped up to run: Craig Estep, Oren Miller, and Gary Search. They ran as a ticket under the clever moniker EMS, promising to rescue The Villages.

All three had moved south for the same reason as their neighbors: to retire and live the good Florida life. Miller had never been involved in politics before retiring, while Search had been a commissioner in South Whitehall Township in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, as well as a public school guidance counselor. Estep, a longtime Texan, had a successful career in emergency response management. The three ran as Republicans in opposition to the tax increase, arguing that businesses that profit from the development should instead shoulder the burden with an impact fee. They also vowed to reverse an initiative that had made it easier for the family to keep control of local politics and thereby return some power to rural areas outside the community. And Miller, whose wife was a committed opponent of the local high-kill animal shelter, added a promise to bring a no-kill shelter to The Villages, which won the support of the area’s animal rights supporters, concerned about what might happen to lost pets. While the population of The Villages had exploded, the capacity of the shelter system remained the same.

The amount of money at stake was eye-watering, well into the hundreds of millions for the developer. The Villages did more than $2 billion in revenue in 2021 alone, according to a Florida trade publication.

Contractors for the developer, led by the firm T&D, which primarily works for The Villages, swooped in to fund the campaigns of the incumbents who had enacted the tax increase, lavishing close to $200,000 on them, but it wasn’t enough. In November 2020, the EMS slate won in a landslide, giving them a 3-2 majority on the commission.

EMS immediately faced an onslaught from the Daily Sun, which portrayed the new commissioners as borderline communists set to destroy The Villages’ way of life. The paper accused them of “championing a reversal of the county’s longstanding pro-business strategy.”

A top official with The Villages made clear to the commissioners how rough a road they were about to go down, Search later told a meeting of the Property Owners’ Association. The day he was elected, he said, “I had a higher-up here at The Villages put his finger in my face and say, ‘Search, just remember one thing: I’m a big person, you’re a little person. I can squash you anytime I want.’”

“I said, is that a threat? And he said no, it’s a promise.” Search was later asked about his charge in a deposition and reaffirmed under oath that it happened.

The higher-up was Gary Lester, vice president of community relations for The Villages, Search separately told at least four other Villagers. Lester has been appointed to numerous boards by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and served on the commission that vets judicial nominations. (Asked if it was indeed Lester who issued the threat, Search told me, “I’m not going to say it was, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t. People know who it is.”)

Lester told Search that he had the personal phone number for DeSantis, telling him he could get the governor on the horn at any moment, Search later told his fellow commissioner Miller, according to Miller. “He indicated that he has the personal phone number of Ron DeSantis and can reach him at any point in time he deems that necessary,” Search confirmed. Lester did not respond to emails or messages left with his assistant.

Cracks formed early, with Estep, who became chair, drawing fire for going wobbly on the size of the impact fee needed, and the speed with which they could do the property tax rollback. But the trio quickly moved to make their campaign promises reality. By a 3-2 vote in March 2021, they hit businesses with a 75 percent increase in impact fees — less than what Miller and Search wanted, but a substantial amount nonetheless — to cover the cost of future development. There was no good reason, they argued, for residents to subsidize the cost of further development for the Morse family. If the family wanted to expand The Villages, they could fund it themselves. Estep didn’t respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case of democracy in action: Residents had banded together to make their voice heard and changed the direction of their community, rejecting a cozy arrangement between the area’s political and business elites. Next up was the property tax rollback.

None of that, of course, could be allowed.

The first counterpunch came in January 2021, from Tallahassee, with a push for statewide legislation that would block local officials from significantly increasing impact fees. The Villages had an ally in the right place. In 2018, Brett Hage, then the president of T&D, the main contractor, had been elected to the state House, beating his opponent — Oren Miller — by some 40 percentage points in the Republican stronghold. After his election, The Villages hired Hage directly, paying him $141,000 the first year and $350,000 the next, according to his disclosures, as vice president for residential development. (Previous disclosures had not included such income.)

On January 9, 2021, Hage, still on The Villages’ payroll, introduced legislation to block the proposed impact fee hike. On June 4, 2021, DeSantis signed the bill into law. The governor and the Morse family have close ties, with DeSantis frequently visiting for fundraisers, and The Villages and its executives bankrolling DeSantis. Crucially for The Villages, the law was retroactive.

Income shown on Brett Hage’s disclosures from 2019 through 2021. Credit: Public disclosures

The Daily Sun spiked the football. “The Estep-Miller-Search tax increase dismissed the warnings of economists, business owners and community leaders,” its report on the bill’s passage reads. “This law is a big win for new businesses and homeowners in Sumter County, where three newly elected commissioners reneged on a promise to study road impact fees over the summer and instead raised them by 75% last month.”

The article is broken into sections that leave readers no doubt how the Daily Sun feels about the commissioners and their tax hike: “Law stymies freshmen commisssioners,” [sic] followed by “Conservatives lead charge,” “Understanding economic therory,” [sic] and “Locals applaud new law.”

Meanwhile, Hage had gotten a hefty raise. His 2021 disclosure shows his pay had jumped to $925,096 in the year leading up to Hage introducing the legislation. Though his state House pay is only $29,697 a year, his net worth, according to those same disclosures, had climbed from less than $900,000 to $2.2 million — a total of nearly a million and a half dollars since getting elected to office. In April 2022, Hage announced he wouldn’t be running for a third term. His work in Tallahassee was done.

If the pushback from The Villages, aided by DeSantis, had ended there, it would represent a brazen flow of cash from a developer directly to the personal bank account of a state lawmaker, who passed legislation saving the developer hundreds of millions and instead spreading the costs to tens of thousands of Floridians. If that was all it was, it would be an outsized, unusually lucrative version of politics-as-usual that many cynics expect from their lawmakers, even if they shake their head at it while reading the paper.

But it didn’t stop there. In fact, it only escalated.

On January 30, 2023, a gaunt, 72-year-old Oren Miller — by then a former commissioner, ousted from his seat by a DeSantis decree — was brought handcuffed into the Marion County Courthouse. He had lost 20-plus pounds in the 75 days he spent jailed awaiting sentencing on a felony charge for, essentially, nothing. Or, perhaps more accurately, for fighting back against a powerful, well-heeled ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“It’s a very complicated story,” Angie Fox, Miller’s wife, told me when I first reached out to her. But it’s also a simple one. “Bottom line, he is a political prisoner.”

The governing structure of The Villages would be familiar to anybody who has lived under the thumb of an aggressively run American homeowners association, complete with its busybodies, covenants, restrictions, and the type of infighting iconically portrayed in “Seinfeld”’s fictional Del Boca Vista, the retirement community of Jerry’s parents. Del Boca Vista, like The Villages, had its own newspaper, The Boca Breeze.

Oren Miller moved to The Villages about a decade ago, after 40 years at the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois. His grandfather and father had worked at the same plant, and Miller had risen to logistics manager. But by his 60s, he’d had enough. He retired “on a Thursday and left Friday morning,” he later told investigators.

“My goal nine or 10 years ago was to retire, come down here, golf three days a week, watch some TV, read some books, mind my own business,” he said. “Then about five years ago, I decided to get actively involved in what was going on in the county, and I still golf two or three days a week.”

In the summer of 2018, Michael Grunwald, reporting for Politico magazine, traveled to The Villages and happened to interview Miller. Miller was just becoming involved in local politics, deciding to run for state representative. He told Grunwald that he had recently been talking to neighbors at a block party, and he mentioned to them how nice it was that a Black neighbor of theirs had taken it upon herself to pick up litter on her daily walk. It was something to be emulated and admired, he thought. “People responded with pure racism,” Miller told Grunwald. “I thought we were past that in America.”

The magazine noted that he and his wife had founded the group Lost Pets of The Villages that would try to connect lost pets with their owners before the kill shelter found adoptive homes or else euthanized them, as it would do as a matter of policy within days. The magazine also reported that Miller, alongside his state representative campaign, became commander of the Community Emergency Response Team, a group of residents who’d quickly respond in the event of a health emergency for another Villager. “I’m doing a very bad job of minding my own business,” he said at the time.

The developers were largely able to pick the commissioners.

Miller knew going in that, with power vested in a network of corporations acting in coordination with a political party and with control of the media, democratic decision-making potential is extremely limited. Even the area’s county commission had been tweaked to benefit The Villages by a clever bit of election reform. When the community got started, it needed significant upfront investments in infrastructure, something the existing population was uninterested in subsidizing. The wealthier Marion County to the north effectively kept the The Villages out, but the developers were able to make their moves in Sumter County. The company backed a ballot initiative called One Sumter that reorganized the county commission: No longer would each area of the county have a representative on the board. Instead, every commissioner would be elected countywide. With the Daily Sun trumpeting the measure, The Villages muscled through the reform, and in the elections hence, the developers were largely able to pick the commissioners, with the rural areas outside The Villages effectively disenfranchised.

Miller knew he never had a shot against any Republican for state House but ran for the experience. Brett Hage beat him in a blowout in the 2018 election, 70 to 30 percent. But the next year, when The Villages successfully muscled through its property tax increase, Miller decided to run for county commission.

To understand how Miller went from newly elected commissioner to under investigation by a Florida state attorney, a little background about Florida’s sunshine laws is required.

The state prides itself in its government transparency laws: the Government in the Sunshine Act and the Public Records Act. The Sunshine Act contains two relevant principles for Miller’s saga: County commissioners are not permitted to discuss county business privately with other commissioners; they can only do so publicly at official meetings. And the commissioners may not use a “third-party conduit” for those communications either. The commissioners were sworn in on November 2020 and received a series of trainings on sunshine laws over the next several months.

On February 16, 2021, the county board met at The Villages Sumter County Service Center. The main order of business was a recommendation by the county administrator, Bradley Arnold, that the commission not raise impact fees on businesses but instead negotiate a voluntary impact fee from the developer. The idea was voted down 4-1, according to minutes from the meeting.

As a final order of business, Miller turned to a simmering war between local animal rights advocates — of which he and his wife were two — and supporters of the local kill shelter. He proposed a reconciliation group be formed, and suggested Gary Search as the mediator, based on Search’s background in psychology. (Search is from Allentown, Pennsylvania, as am I, and coincidentally was my sister’s guidance counselor before he retired and moved to The Villages, though I never met Search before reporting on this story.)

“This is news to him, I’m blindsiding him with this,” Miller said of his nomination of Search at the hearing.

“Yes, you are,” Search said, sounding exasperated.

“If you don’t wanna do it, I’m OK. I’m saying he’s got a background in mediation and negotiating, and there’s some strong personalities in that group,” Miller said — referring to a group that included his wife, Angie Fox.

After some discussion among the board members, the county administrator, Arnold, interjected. “There’s a conflict that’s associated with sunshine law issues,” Arnold announced. “The problem that we had was, I had a meeting with Commissioner Search, and he relayed his conversation with Angie Fox that was advocating for this very solution to be presented to the board.”

Arnold, in other words, was accusing Miller of having communicated with Search about the proposal via his wife, in alleged violation of the Government in the Sunshine Act — a conspiracy to break the law in order to create a reconciliation committee aimed at cooling tensions around a high-kill shelter.

Arnold unspooled the evidence he had collected about the conspiracy. “I then had a directive email from Commissioner Miller that said go and do this and use Commissioner Search for that specific purpose,” Arnold continued. “That indicates clearly that Angie Fox is a conduit of communication between two commissioners, which is a violation of open records.”

Arnold said the committee idea should be put on hold awaiting a potential investigation. And he all but encouraged somebody in the audience to file a complaint, and two of them did. “My concern is that, where you have something that unfortunately I became a witness to a violation, that becomes an ethics-related issue,” Arnold said. “If that is filed by someone and the investigation occurs, my concern is, is that you may want to wait until that activity has happened and an investigation has been concluded before you’re involved in anything involving Angie Fox, who’s currently acting as a conduit.”

That, at least, was Arnold’s version of events.

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Intercepted

Behind the scenes, however, not only was Arnold already aware that Miller would bring the idea to the board, but Arnold himself — according to an email he sent to the county attorney that was obtained by The Intercept — had also directly encouraged Miller to do so.

On February 11, 2021, Miller had written to Arnold about his idea, according to emails obtained through an open records request by Fox. “I was out golfing today and Angie talked to Commissioner Search,” he wrote. “I don’t know what the conversation was, and I don’t want to know. I just know his background would come in handy to act as a mediator. I don’t know if he would be willing to do this or not, but I think he would.”

From: Miller, Oren
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:38 PM
To: Arnold, Bradley
Subject: Animal Control and Sumter County Animal Advocates

It is past time for the animosity between these two entities to stop. I am suggesting a meeting with Steve Kennedy, and Monica and Angie Fox, and Karen Taylor and Kim Pruett. I would like Steve to set this up. I would also like Commissioner Search to moderate this meeting. There are things that A/C can do that the advocates can not do. There are things that the advocates can do that A/C can’t. They returned a dog Wednesday morning that had a cchip connected to a bad phone number and only by having Angie do a background check was the real owner found. For Sumter County to be successful these groups must work together. I understand there are strong personalities involved but that is what fires the passion to get the dogs back home. I was out golfing today, and Angie talked to Commissioner Search. I don’t know what the conversation was, and I don’t want to know. I just know his background would come in handy to act as a mediator. I don’t know if would be willing to do this or not, but I think he would. It is time to put the past in the past and have a fresh start for everyone. I think we could put a model team together by having give and take on both sides. — Oren

“That is a good thought, but I will need Board direction,” Arnold responded, suggesting a future date.

From: Arnold, Bradley
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:46 PM
To: Miller, Oren
Subject: RE: Animal Control and Sumter County Animal Advocates

That is a good thought, but I will need Board direction to do so since the employees of Sumter County are not the only victims of false claims, personal and professional attacks from the three individuals cited – it also includes your fellow Board members. Perhaps a larger group to include Sumter County’s Humane Society (also a victim) since that is one of our largest rescue agency partners.

May 4th is the workshop for animal services — that might be the best time to broach the topic with the Board.

Bradley

Arnold forwarded it to the county attorney, Jennifer Rey. “I am asking that he bring this issue to the Board,” he said.

From: Arnold
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:49 PM
To: ‘countyattornney.sumtercounty.fl’
Subject: [Forwarded fom Intradyn] [Thu Feb 18 14:23:53 2021] FW: Animal Control and Sumter County Animal Advocates

I am asking that he bring this issue to the Board.

Bradley

“It was a setup,” Fox concluded.

Arnold, in an interview with The Intercept, said that his intervention in the meeting kicked off the resulting investigation. “That’s what ultimately led to the complaint with the State Attorney’s Office,” he said.

“It was a setup.”

Arnold had a backup plan if Miller didn’t bring it up. “If that had not been raised by him at the meeting, it was the plan of the county attorney to share how dangerously close the commissioners are coming to a potential open meetings violation,” Arnold told me. “But before [the county attorney] could provide that support, [Miller] had already proceeded. And then that basically met all of the conditions from my concern that I had raised with the county attorney.”

In other words, Arnold was planning to bring up an allegation of open records violation whether Miller brought up his proposal or not.

But when I asked Arnold if he had encouraged Miller to bring the issue to the board, he flatly denied having done so. “No, absolutely not,” he said.

Presented with the email, Arnold said, “That communication preceded my discovery of the open meetings issue which is covered in the meeting minutes.” However, Miller’s own email alerted Arnold to the fact that his wife and Search had spoken, adding that he didn’t know what they spoke about. Arnold later told Search, according to Search’s testimony, that he had tried to discourage Miller from bringing it up, but no evidence supports that claim. Arnold “said he was disappointed that [Miller] brought it up because he felt his conversation with Mr. Miller indicated that he should not bring it up,” Search said.

A third complaint was filed by former Circuit Court Judge George G. Angeliadis, who had put his name forward to DeSantis in August 2020 for a state Supreme Court opening. That complaint was even more absurd than the other two: Angeliadis had filed an open records request for the documents associated with an animal rights Facebook group run by Fox. Fox explained that the group was public, and Angeliadis could view any of it he liked. He demanded printouts of the entire page, and Fox’s attorney told him she would gladly do so but would need to charge a standard per-page and per-hour rate. He declined and filed a Public Records Act complaint instead, leading to a back-and-forth interrogation of Miller by the local prosecutors over the nature of a Facebook page versus a group. It later came up in court as evidence of Miller’s evasiveness.

Oddly, the three complaints bypassed typical ethics procedures and went directly to Republican State Attorney Bill Gladson. (A more appropriate venue would be the state ethics commission, housed in Tallahassee.) At that point, Miller and Search were on extremely unfavorable terrain. Gladson himself had been elected under unusual circumstances. Just before the deadline to file for reelection in 2020, long serving GOP State Attorney Brad King said that he would not be running for reelection. Gladson’s deputy was ready with his paperwork, and voilà, he became the area’s top prosecutor unopposed.

Also unusually, Gladson took personal control of the rather minor complaints, which, again, focused on the question of whether Fox was acting as a conduit between the two commissioners. In August, Gladson and a team of prosecutors interviewed Search. Estep was also invited to answer questions, but he declined, and the prosecutors never followed up. Citing a potential appeal, Gladson declined to comment on the prosecution.

A transcript of Search’s interrogation reveals a room full of Florida men struggling with the peculiar concept of a woman acting independently of her husband. Fox, Search told them, had been warned by Miller multiple times that there were concerns that she was acting as a conduit for him, and that she should be careful in how she talked to commissioners. But Fox insisted that she was a taxpayer and entitled to lobby her commissioners on behalf of the cause she cared about most deeply: ending the high-kill shelter’s slaughter of local animals.

Search told investigators about a call he had after a January board meeting in which he had declined to second a motion from her husband, Miller, about a new pet tethering ordinance he was suggesting. The investigators asked how long they had spoken. “Ms. Fox does not talk for a short period of time. I can’t tell you how long it went,” he said, but added that he told her, “You’re Commissioner Miller’s wife, we should not be talking.”

She told him, “I’m not calling you about Commissioner Miller as a wife, I’m calling you as the president of the Lost Pets of The Villages and I’m calling you as a constituent,” Search recalled. “I said, OK, I’ll listen,” Search said. “She just ranted for a while about tethering and things like that.” During the conversation, Fox had mentioned an idea for a reconciliation group to ease the tensions, and Search passed on word to the county administrator, Bradley Arnold, and the county attorney, Jennifer Rey, about the conversation. About two weeks later, in an email to Arnold, Miller proposed a different version of a group, this one with Search moderating it. That’s when Arnold suggested he bring it up at a board meeting.

That may be too much detail, but it’s worth understanding the context that led to the complaint, which itself led to the interrogation about Fox acting as a conduit between the two. During Search’s interrogation, one prosecutor asked Search if he thought Fox was acting of her own volition. “From your seat and from your perspective, is he asking her/telling her to knock it off, or is he using her as a conduit?”

“In my speculation, and it’s pure speculation of watching this the last, I’ll say, year before the election until now, is that Angie is a tremendously free spirit who no male is going to tell her — including a husband — what to say, how to say it, when to say it, and what to say. And a husband who is not going to go down that path,” Search answered.

“I get it,” said the prosecutor.

“No, you really wouldn’t get it unless you really met her,” Search said.

“I don’t think my wife is a conduit for me. I might be a conduit for her.”

In October, Miller was subpoenaed by the state attorney, despite repeatedly attempting to schedule a meeting in response to an invitation. The subpoena added to the breathless coverage in the Daily Sun.

Under oath, he told Bill Gladson the same thing as Search. His wife was her own woman. “I don’t think my wife is a conduit for me. I might be a conduit for her. She was the big animal rights advocate to begin with and I’m kind of supporting her on those issues. She brought those concerns to me, not me to her,” he tried to explain.

The prosecutors expressed confusion. “For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t see that this was clearly a conduit situation; I mean, you know all about the positions she’s on, you know about the emails she’s sent, you know she’s having communications with other county commissioners because you’ve seen these emails,” said one prosecutor.

“Right,” said Miller, “but she’s a voter, she’s a taxpayer. She’s not telling me how to vote or what to vote or — she’s not controlling me, she’s trying to be a citizen and a voter and a constituent.”

Apparently recognizing the cul-de-sac they’d found themselves in, prosecutors never went forward with the conduit charge.

In mid-October 2021, Ron DeSantis returned to The Villages for his 20th visit since becoming governor. He had even signed the state’s budget at The Villages. He was there this time to award the county a $6 million grant for road improvements.

Search saw Gary Lester, The Villages vice president who had previously promised to squash him like a bug, and reached out to shake his hand. “Get away from me, you liar,” Lester told him, Search recalled. He waited until after the event and asked him why he had said that.

“Why would you even do that as a fellow Christian brother?” Search asked.

“Don’t get religious with me,” Lester replied, according to Search, who asked again what he was trying to say.

“You’re gonna find out soon enough why you’re a liar,” Search said Lester told him. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Lester, but I haven’t lied about anything.’ And he said, ‘You’re gonna find out.’ And I kind of just took that tongue in cheek, like, OK, I’m not gonna get anywhere with this person.” At lunch after the event, he said, he told Bradley Arnold about the exchange, and Arnold told him not to worry about it, that Lester was just unhappy that Search was on the commission. (Arnold didn’t respond to request for comment on that exchange.) Search was disturbed enough by the encounter that he told his friend Gilbert Windsor from New Covenant United Methodist Church about it that evening, Windsor told me.

In December, Search would come to suspect what Lester seemed to be hinting at. Prosecutors had instead decided to charge both Search and Miller with perjury, saying they lied about the nature of their phone calls with each other. “I never put two and two together until two months later when you get the phone call,” he said, describing the moment he learned he was being charged with perjury. “And it’s like, wait a second, how would he — he had to have known? And why in the world would the state attorney be talking to him?” (Gladson declined to comment.)

Search and Miller, phone records showed, spoke somewhat frequently from November 2020 to February 2021. And, they readily admitted, they had occasionally discussed commission business before they were fully trained and understood that doing so ran afoul of sunshine laws.

The transcript of Gladson’s interview with Miller includes the supposed crime he is convicted of committing:

Miller: We got elected in November, the phone calls probably stopped in January or February when we all realized that could be an issue.

Gladson: Got it.

Miller: So I can’t give you the exact date they stopped, but it was somewhere in there.

Another prosecutor added: “Of more concern, sir, is that I asked you — I think a specific question: Do you have phone conversations with Mr. Search?”

Miller: Yes.

Prosecutor: OK.

Miller: I did.

Prosecutor: After January?

Miller: No.

Miller’s “no” to “After January?” would be used as the basis for a perjury charge, despite his having said multiple times elsewhere in the interview that he’s uncertain about when the calls stopped.

Gadson and his deputies showed Miller some phone records, showing calls in January, and also one on February 17, and another in March, and asked what they were about.

“In all honesty, I do not know what it was about, I don’t.”

“But you had phone conversations with him?”

“Yes, I promise you we had phone calls.”

“So it could have been county business?”

“We did not discuss anything the county was working on, anything we voted on or anything we were going to vote on, or anything that was coming up in front of us,” Miller said.

“Well, how do you know? You don’t remember what the phone calls were about.”

“Because we know from the ethics training we couldn’t do that,” Miller explained.

In the moment, Miller said he didn’t remember what most of the calls were about, and prosecutors didn’t show him a calendar or give him any heads up that might have let him cross-check his schedule. But some of the calls, Miller recalled, were about a golf outing. Some were to arrange who was going to bring apple fritters from Dough J’s for the staff at meetings. (The fritters took up an inordinate amount of time in Miller’s interrogation. Dough J’s was way out of the way, so the pickups had to be coordinated.) Some of the calls, he said, were about church functions or Covid relief. But none, after their training, were about active commission business, he said.

Scott Fenstermaker, a retired attorney and former FBI agent who lives in The Villages, knows both Search and Miller, and would talk to them about county business, he told me. “They would both say, don’t tell me what these other guys have said to me because I don’t want people to think you’re a conduit,” Fenstermaker said. “They were being very careful to observe the Sunshine Act.”

Miller’s lawyer later noted in a motion to vacate the conviction that Miller readily admitted to having violated the Sunshine Act, at least until January and February — undermining the idea that he lied to avoid implicating himself in breaking the law. The perjury charge, in other words, concerned when the calls stopped, but that fact is actually irrelevant to the question of whether they violated the law. And, again, prosecutors never charged either Miller or Search with violating any sunshine laws.

DeSantis stepped in and issued executive orders removing them from the commission.

Yet in December 2021, Gladson charged both commissioners with felony perjury, punishable by up to five years in prison. DeSantis stepped in and issued executive orders removing them from the commission.

“Two things are happening here: intimidation and humiliation,” Search said in January 2022, addressing The Villages’ Property Owners’ Association. “The second thing is … to intimidate any other candidate from running against the local government that they’ve controlled for so long.”

Throughout the whole episode, the Daily Sun routinely published Search’s and Miller’s mugshots. And the opposition to The Villages’ political machine was quickly eroding. Cliff Weiner, president of the Property Owners’ Association, spoke after Search. “I had a lot of people who were lined up to run in 2022 for the two seats that were open. Andrew is the only one who’s still standing,” he said, referring to a candidate in the audience Search had pointed out. “And some people that were gonna run in 2024 in other offices, slowly but surely they’re all dropping. They don’t want to go through what Gary and Oren are going through right now. That’s a sad state of affairs that we live in a community that people are afraid to run because if you win, you’re on the wrong side.”

“I’m also very disappointed in our governor,” Search added. “He made a financial move, but I think a very terrible political move. Hopefully when these charges are dropped, because they are all false, I hope the governor and I have a long talk.”

Soon, Search and Miller were drowning in legal bills. Search also had surgery scheduled, plus his medication schedule made a prison term less than ideal. He cut a deal with prosecutors to testify at Miller’s trial in exchange for avoiding prison and ending the legal battle. The deal barred him from for running for office for six months, blocking him from the next election.

But Search’s testimony was not, in the end, damning to Miller. Search confirmed that the two of them had spoken by phone after January or February, but they weren’t discussing commission business. They would, for instance, coordinate on who would bring which snacks to a meeting. Search did admit to bringing up the no-kill kennel plan with Miller sometime in the summer of 2021, cutting against their claims that they stopped discussing county matters privately after January or February. But that conversation didn’t happen by phone, so it isn’t relevant to the perjury charge.

Miller’s jury was empaneled on November 14, 2022, by Judge Anthony Tatti, who had previously put his name forward to DeSantis, hoping for an elevation to the state Supreme Court. The judge did two things. First, he empaneled the jury on a Monday but delayed the trial until Friday. Then he told them that under no circumstances should they go home and read coverage of the case in the local Daily Sun. Doing so might bias them, he said.

Miller’s attorney, Dock Blanchard, was flabbergasted, and later objected, showing the judge the biased coverage that he had elevated to the jury’s attention. “This is a newspaper, not a motion,” the judge told him, overruling his objection.

Not a single prosecution witness presented evidence that Search and Miller had talked about commission business on the phone after the time they said the calls stopped. But the existence of the calls themselves — perhaps coupled with relentless Daily Sun coverage — was sufficient circumstantial evidence to convict, the jury of six found.

Miller was floored. His attorney asked that he be allowed to go free on bond to await sentencing, but the judge rejected it, sending the 72-year-old out of the courtroom in handcuffs on the afternoon of November 18.

Two and a half months later, and some 20 pounds lighter, Miller was back before Tatti for sentencing. The Daily Sun had run a front-page story that morning on the sentencing, calling Miller a “convicted felon.” Dozens of his friends and supporters packed the courtroom as Miller, cuffed again, was escorted in. He was hunched over, now bearded, wearing an orange-and-white striped jumpsuit.

The last 74 days had been an ordeal. There are about 1,800 people in the county’s lockup facility; Miller was in a pod with 80, he said, but there were just 56 seats for meals. On his first day, a jailmate offered to adopt him and get him a seat at meals in exchange for some of his food, a bargain he eagerly accepted. On the second day, he said, he won protection from a gang leader. “Oren Miller, you are protected in here because you’re a senior citizen,” the man said, according to Miller. “‘But understand, don’t cross any lines.’ … And so I minded my p’s and q’s.” Violence broke out regularly, Miller recounted, and he watched two men beaten nearly to death. He moved to try to break up the first fight, but two men held him back, explaining that if he got involved, he’d be called later as a witness, and you don’t want to be a witness against somebody who sleeps in the same open room as you. So he let them fight.

Miller went days without his heart or thyroid medication, and grew weak and dizzy. Complaining of chest pain, he was eventually given an EKG, which the staff told him showed no problems. “My EKG hasn’t been good in 15 years,” he said. “I will never have a good EKG. I’ve got an irregular heartbeat all the time.” He said they gave him medication despite claiming to detect no heart trouble — the same type of heart medication he’d been prescribed but hadn’t been getting.

His logistics training from Caterpillar came in handy, and he devised a system for the headcount process which worked so well that the unit’s numbers were correct more often, meaning they rarely got punished for the wrong count anymore. He could see the guard coming from a neighboring unit, and Miller would yell “Headcount!”: a signal for the men to move to the predesignated places to be counted. He taught his jailmates how to document abuse and negligence when it occurred, so that if they later filed a complaint, they’d have something to stand it up. When he left the unit for what he hoped would be the last time, he turned around and yelled to the men: “Headcount!”

They all shouted back: “Headcount!”

Tatti began by acknowledging Miller’s motion for a new trial and quickly dismissing it. The judge reprimanded Miller’s attorney, Blanchard, for Facebook posts from Miller’s supporters saying that he had been “railroaded,” and asked if that was the argument Miller was planning to make at sentencing. It was not, Blanchard said, and asked to call three character witnesses.

Fox, ahead of the sentencing, had put out a request for testimonials. What came back shocked even her. If Miller saw somebody eating alone in a restaurant, friends said, he’d pay for their meal. If service was particularly good, he’d insist on speaking to the manager to compliment the staff. If he saw a veteran in a grocery store, he’d pay for their groceries. (“Oren doesn’t have much money,” Fox told me afterward, her pride mixed with a little financial concern.)

A 19-year-old young man from southern Sumter County, outside The Villages, took the stand to call him “the greatest man I’ve ever met,” saying Miller had mentored him since he was 14, including sitting with him as a loved one passed. The last time he saw him for lunch, Miller brought him a stack of used iPads he had collected, and instructed him to take them to a local repairman (at Miller’s expense) and donate them to local high school students in need.

When a family lost their home to a fire, Miller organized the effort to rebuild their lives. When Hurricane Irma hit, Miller didn’t wait for the winds to have fully died down before organizing recovery efforts. There didn’t seem to be a church charity program he wasn’t involved in or leading. Another man described the emergency response team Miller had set up. The first time he got a call, he said, he rushed to the distressed home in two minutes max, but when he got there, he found Miller already in the bathroom, doing chest compressions on a man in cardiac arrest. If somebody lost a pet, said another friend, Miller and Fox would drop everything and go searching immediately. “If it was 2 a.m., they wouldn’t say, we’ll be there at 7. They’d be there right away,” said one woman.

There was no victim, no violence, and Miller had no record. The pre-sentencing report called for time served and 30 months probation. The prosecution, in a subtle nod to the absurdity of the penalty, asked for less: time served and 24 months of probation. But Assistant State Attorney Sasha Kidney still laid into him. “The defendant has shown zero remorse,” said Kidney.

In the hallway, I asked her if she felt like justice was served in the case. “I think the jury listened to the evidence that was presented and returned a verdict based on that, and it was up to them and they made their decision,” she said.

The Daily Sun, also in the hallway, wanted more blood, and asked if the original investigation into sunshine law violations was still open. “Not to my knowledge at this point,” she said. The Daily Sun reporter pressed the question again. “I can’t really answer that question. It may still be open. I don’t know,” she said.

The next morning’s coverage of the sentencing, above the fold on the front page, would headline “Convicted Felon Miller Released from Jail: Legal Woes Not Over.” The article used the assistant state attorney’s answer to hang a new sword over Miller’s neck, reporting: “Prosecutors have not yet said they have closed the investigation into Miller’s potential Sunshine Law violations, and he remains under investigation by the state’s Commission on Ethics over an online fundraiser he created for the public to bankroll his lawyers.” (His GoFundMe to cover legal fees for his appeal remains open and is accepting contributions.)

Back in the courtroom, Tatti decided to add 200 hours of community service to Miller’s sentence, too, but he had a problem: How to punish a man with forced service who gives the bulk of his time in service to the community already? The judge’s solution: On top of going above the sentencing recommendation to give him 36 months of probation, Tatti ordered him to perform his community service at the local landfill.

Update: February 6, 2023

An earlier version of this story reported that The Villages was founded in the 1980s by Gary Morse. Morse’s father, Harold Schwartz, built a trailer park on the spot called Orange Blossom Gardens in the 1970s, which Schwartz and Morse transformed into The Villages.

The post How a Grassroots Revolt in the Iconic Retirement Community Ended With a 72-Year-Old Political Prisoner appeared first on The Intercept.

“The decision is made when you’re looking through the scope and there’s a grizzly bear there,” he says. “Are you gonna shoot him or not? You think, ‘I can get away with it. I don’t like grizzly bears. I can do this.’ Or do you think, ‘It’s worthwhile to have these animals around — I shouldn’t do this’? That’s where the bears live or die.”

For now, the solitary hunter in the crosshairs of Servheen’s speeches is choosing between letting the grizzlies be or poaching them — but that could soon change. While grizzlies are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, Republican lawmakers across the Northern Rockies are pressing the Biden administration to turn management of the bears over to the states, thus allowing for the opening of legal hunting seasons.

By the time he retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016, Servheen had become a prominent advocate of the view that federal grizzly bear recovery efforts had worked and the time for delisting had come. Now the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, the state’s oldest and largest conservation organization, Servheen’s position on the delisting question has turned 180 degrees. The reason is rooted in politics, and what he sees as a wave of fact-free “hysteria” sweeping the Rocky Mountain West.

In the past two years, Servheen watched with horror as a right-wing takeover in state politics — from Gov. Greg Gianforte’s 2020 election to the establishment of a Republican supermajority in 2022 — has radically reshaped Montana’s relationship to wildlife policy, particularly in the cases of protected predators that some Westerners see as living symbols of federal overreach.

“It’s a clown car of absurdities here. The people that are coming up with these ideas are totally misinformed about what really is going on.”

The first wave of the assault targeted wolves. During Montana’s last legislative session, in 2021, Gianforte — with the help of handpicked wildlife commissioners representing trophy hunting, outfitting, and livestock industries — signed bills to deregulate wolf-hunting techniques. The state also did away with hunting quotas on the northern border of Yellowstone National Park, leading to the deadliest winter the park’s biologists have ever recorded, with roughly a fifth of Yellowstone’s wolves killed in a matter of months.

With a new legislative session now underway, Servheen — who also serves as co-chair of the North American Bears Expert Team for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature — and other veteran wildlife biologists across Montana are profoundly concerned that Republican lawmakers are angling to apply the same regressive approach on grizzly bears.

“It’s a clown car of absurdities here,” he told me. “The people that are coming up with these ideas are totally misinformed about what really is going on, and it’s all based on their misconceptions and their crazy feelings about ‘I hate predators.’”

In Montana, the effort to delist grizzlies is led by Gianforte and his fellow Republican, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines. The pair bonded in the 1990s, working at RightNow Technologies, a tech company Gianforte co-founded with financial support from Daines’s father.

RightNow was purchased in 2012 for a reported $1.8 billion. The sale helped transform Gianforte and Daines from very wealthy to ultra-wealthy. A decade later, the two men are Montana’s most prominent Republican lawmakers, attending the same evangelical church in Bozeman, itself a node in the rapid rise of Christian nationalism fast transforming the state’s political landscape.

“As we await final delisting, we must do all that we can to ensure public safety, to stop the risks to human life, and to prevent further livestock depravation that is devastating Montana agriculture,” Daines said in a 2020 interview concerning the bears’ status in the state.

Though grizzlies do occasionally prey on livestock, the Republicans’ claims of widespread and devastating financial impacts overstate the scale of the problem. According to the Montana Department of Livestock, grizzly bears were responsible for killing 143 of Montana’s more than 2.7 million sheep and cattle in 2022, contributing to a loss of .0052 percent of the state’s livestock.” The state paid ranchers $234,378.37 to compensate for those losses.

In his many years dealing with the conflicts that arise from expanding human and grizzly populations, Servheen has learned to separate positions from interests.

“I talk to many people about bears. Many times what they say is that: ‘I hate bears. We don’t want the federal government telling us what to do. We don’t like the Endangered Species Act. We don’t want grizzly bears to be in this area or around my property.’ Those are all positions,” he said. “The position discussions are worthless because you end up hitting a wall.”

Interests, like not wanting to lose livestock to grizzlies, are a different story. In the half century since grizzlies were added to the endangered species list, Servheen and a wider community of researchers and conservationists have developed an array of conflict management practices to address the inherent challenges of living with grizzlies: from compensation for ranchers, to the installation of electrified fences and food storage containers, to the relocation — and in some cases, removal — of problem bears.

“Trying to key in on what those interests are to people, and listening to them as opposed to telling them — I found that to be the most productive approach,” Servheen said.

Once interests are addressed, the work of underlining the value that large predators bring to an ecosystem — the kind of conversations that may prevent a hunter from becoming a poacher in a moment of unsupervised opportunity — can begin.

At the time of his retirement, Servheen believed the future of grizzly recovery was on solid ground. Conflict resolution efforts were catching on and succeeding; Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, or FWP, still hung on to its reputation for considered wildlife management; and the bear populations in northwest and southwest Montana were growing. Servheen felt that his life’s work was in good hands. That confidence has been shattered in the years since.

Servheen’s theory of recovery and change turns on a respect for science. It requires a willingness to moderate and move on from long held but out-of-date positions, and it demands that state wildlife professionals operate free from political pressure and influence. In Montana, Servheen argued, those prerequisites have been blown to bits.

“I couldn’t have seen this coming,” the veteran bear biologist said. “For years, I was leading the recovery program and advocating that we should recover grizzly bears and delist the bears and turn them over to state management because I had a lot of faith in the state, that the state was making management decisions based on science and facts.”

That’s no longer the case.

“I can’t support that given the politicians doing what they’re doing,” Servheen said. “And this has just happened in the past two years. It’s totally new.”

Wildlife governance in Montana, like most states, is managed by a panel of commissioners. Appointed by the governor, the commission sets regulations for the fish and wildlife agency — in this case, FWP. Montana law requires that those appointees be selected “without regard to political affiliation” and “solely for the wise management of the fish and wildlife of the state.”

Despite the apolitical requirements, Gianforte, Montana’s first Republican governor in a decade a half, populated his commission with a former running mate and a collection of high-dollar campaign donors — none of whom possessed professional wildlife management experience. He also tapped Henry “Hank” Worsech, the former executive director of the Montana Board of Outfitters, the licensing authority for Montana’s powerful political constituency of outfitters and guides, as director of FWP.

In years past, Democratic governors would veto the more extreme bills introduced by Republican lawmakers eager to liberalize wolf killing in Montana. Gianforte, by contrast, signed those measures into law. Worsech directed FWP to come up with plans for implementing the measures, and the commission gave them the green light. International outrage followed, as well as an ongoing federal review to determine whether wolves should be returned to the endangered species list.

Along with the many anti-wolf bills passed last session, Republican lawmakers also zeroed in on bears. Part of the push came from Republican state Rep. Paul Fielder, who also serves as the Montana Trappers Association’s liaison to FWP. Fielder hails from Thompson Falls, a tiny community in northwest Montana, a remote region with a reputation for attracting anti-government types that’s recently become awash in MAGA-inspired politics.

With Gianforte’s support, Fielder secured the re-legalization of hound hunting for black bears, a practice that Montana outlawed a century ago.

“He wrote this bill for something that was not happening in Montana for generations, and the Legislature, because it was proposed by a Republican, they all voted for it, and the governor signed it,” Servheen said.

Like the legalization of snares to catch and kill wolves — which Fielder sponsored and Gianforte signed — the hunting of black bears with hounds can also impact grizzlies, leading to dangers for the hounds, hunters, and grizzlies alike. (Fielder did not respond to an interview request.)

“It’s a minuscule number of people that want to do this,” Servheen said. “They’re a super isolated special interest, and the Legislature is going in and granting these people privileges to do things which are harmful to grizzly bears.”

“They’re a super isolated special interest, and the Legislature is going in and granting these people privileges to do things which are harmful to grizzly bears.”

Another bill signed by Gianforte in 2021 prohibited FWP from relocating problem bears, raising the possibility that first-time-offender bears would be shot on site. A third authorized ranchers to kill bears that they deemed as a threat to their livestock and left it to ranchers to define what constitutes a threat.

The onslaught prompted Servheen to speak out. In the heat of the 2021 legislative session, he wrote an op-ed for the Mountain Journal, a Bozeman-based conservation news website, connecting the Manifest Destiny-inspired thinking that led to mass predator extermination in the 1800s to Montana’s present moment.

“If this is allowed to continue,” he warned, “we stand to lose all that we have gained to build and maintain healthy natural ecosystems and repair the historic wrongs done to wildlife and nature by past generations.”

With a new legislative session underway, Republican lawmakers are pushing for further deregulation of predator hunting. Building on his 2021 black bear hound-hunting legislation, Fielder is now pursuing a bill that would eliminate the FWP commission’s authority to designate where that hunting occurs, increasing the likelihood of hound hunting in grizzly bear recovery zones.

“This is crazy,” Servheen said. “The commission is supposed to be the managers of wildlife. They’re supposed to be making those decisions. The Legislature should not be getting into the weeds of making detailed decisions about where wildlife are taken and how they’re taken. That is really inappropriate. They’re not experts in this.”

The big question now is whether the Northern Rockies states will win the right to manage their grizzly populations themselves.

As wildlife species listed under the Endangered Species Act recover, states must submit plans showing that they can manage the animals in such a way to sustain viable populations. Last month, FWP released a draft grizzly management plan for public review that sketched out a new framework for managing the bears.

The final decision on the delisting will fall to Martha Williams, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A veteran of the Montana wildlife management scene, Williams was director of FWP before joining the federal government. A lawyer by training and an expert in the Endangered Species Act, Williams was central in Montana’s efforts to attain state management of wolves more than a decade ago. Her appointment to head U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received enthusiastic support from Daines and his Democratic counterpart, Jon Tester.

Some wildlife advocates, though, have questioned the legality of Williams’s appointment. She lacks a scientific degree, which is required under federal law. Others worry that Daines’s support for her appointment could be a sign of her potential openness to delisting grizzlies.

Servheen pushed back on the notion that U.S. Fish and Wildlife is certain to give Montana Republicans their long-standing dream of legalized grizzly hunts.

“It’s not a foregone conclusion,” he said.

While it’s true that Montana has petitioned for delisting, Williams and her team have yet to determine whether that petition merits a review. The process for removing an animal from the endangered species list goes beyond raw numbers, Servheen pointed out. He argued the laws on the books and those being considered — the hound hunting and authorizing private citizens to kill grizzlies any time they feel their property is threatened — make it impossible for Montana to satisfy requirements to ensure continued grizzly recovery.

Grizzly bears have one of the slowest reproduction rates of any large mammal on the planet. They don’t bounce back from heavy human-caused mortality the way wolves do.

“You could have dead bears everywhere, and you would be way beyond the sustainable limit,” Servheen said. “Fish Wildlife and Parks has no ability to control it, therefore you don’t have an adequate regulatory mechanism.”

“They would treat the grizzly bear just like they’re now treating wolves. That’s what would happen.”

While the laws could be tweaked to please U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the federal agency considers the delisting question, Republicans in Montana have already revealed their anti-predator intentions, Servheen argued.

“As soon as the bear was delisted, then what’s to stop the Legislature from putting those laws right back in place?” he asked. “There’s nothing to stop them from doing that and given where they are and where they’re coming from and what they’re doing — it’s a clear indication that’s probably what they would do.”

“They would treat the grizzly bear just like they’re now treating wolves,” he said. “That’s what would happen.”

The current moment is as decisive as any in the history of grizzly bear recovery in the United States. A half-century of hard work that for many symbolizes the best of what conservation can be hangs in the balance. Servheen and others are fighting to turn the tide, but he worries it won’t be enough.

“I don’t see things getting any better,” he said. “I just see them getting worse, unfortunately.”

The post A Biologist Fought to Remove Grizzlies From the Endangered Species List — Until Montana Republicans Changed His Mind appeared first on The Intercept.