British voters unleash a transatlantic tsunami
And it's headed for American shores.
By Joseph J. Schatz and Ben White
British voters didn’t just shock the world and the financial markets by voting to leave the European Union hours ago: They also ignored President Barack Obama, handed Hillary Clinton a potential economic burden and injected new energy into the populist currents roiling politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
The surprise 52 percent - 48 percent result in favor of leaving the European Union — which British networks projected just before 5 a.m. local time — came after a tense night of vote-counting throughout the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister David Cameron later announced he's resigning, citing a need for "fresh leadership." The British pound rose and fell rapidly as the anti-EU “Leave” movement piled up big margins in the northeast, swamping wins by the “Remain” camp in London, Birmingham and Scotland.
In addition to driving down the pound by nearly 10 percent, the vote slammed global markets, with shares in Asia down well over 3 percent in early trading. Futures markets also indicated a big swoon coming on Wall Street early Friday morning with shares expected to drop more than 3 percent. That would amount to a Dow drop of close to 600 points, a plunge frighteningly reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis.
Market analysts struggled overnight to reckon with the potential global impact of the Brexit vote. "Massive institutional uncertainty is now being superimposed on economic fragility and financial fluidity," said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz.
Central bankers and heads of state around the world sought to calm the financial markets and limit the damage from the vote on Friday morning.
But make no mistake: A Brexit represents nothing less than the partial splintering of the world’s largest political union and trading bloc — an $18 trillion economy. Many fear that other European countries will now hold their own exit referendums, leading to a chain reaction that will reverberate across the Atlantic. The Brexit vote could also break apart the UK, scramble transatlantic political unity amid growing tensions with Russia, and complicate U.S. trade ties.
It will almost certainly hit the U.S. economy, warned Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
"The economy is more fragile to a negative shock than at anytime since the second World War," Summers told POLITICO. "Always before when had a downturn there was room for monetary policy action to counteract that. Today there is essentially no such room."
In addition to volatility hitting U.S. markets, the surprise win for the Leave side is likely to ripple through the 2016 presidential campaign. The Brexit vote became largely a referendum on elites and immigration, the same themes likely Republican nominee Donald Trump has put at the center of his bid for the White House.
Trump, who spoke favorably of Brexit, applauded the U.K.'s decision to leave the EU Friday.
“They’re angry over borders. They’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over, and nobody even knows who they are,” Trump told reporters after his helicopter landed in Turnberry, Scotland. “They’re angry about many, many things.”
He also took the opportunity to take shots at Hillary Clinton, who along with President Obama had cautioned British voters against leaving the EU.
"Well, she’s always misread everything. She’s misread this, and I was surprised that she was so bold," Trump said of his likely Democratic opponent. "The only reason she did it is because Obama wanted it. You know, if Obama wanted it the other way — if he said 'leave,' she would have said 'leave.' She does whatever he wants her to do."
He added: "They're always wrong, and that's the problem with them."
The result could also suggest that polls showing a lead for Clinton are underestimating the extent to which voters across Western democracies are fed up with career politicians and concerned about Islamic terrorism and immigration. UK polls and online betting markets heading into the Brexit vote appeared to show a small but solid leave for Remain, similar to the leads Clinton holds in most U.S. surveys.
"Polls consistently underestimating right-wing support," Weekly Standard editor BIll Kristol tweeted. "Cameron & Bibi, now Brexit. So if polls show Clinton up 5, could Trump be even?"
The larger issue for the Clinton campaign will be potential economic fallout from the UK's decision to leave the EU. Indeed, if the apocalytpic economic predictions leading up to Thursday’s vote turn out to be accurate, get ready for a Brexit-fueled economic slowdown that could bleed into the presidential race.
The U.S. economy grew just 0.8 percent in the first three months of 2016, and even President Obama acknowledges frustration with the pace of recovery, even as he embarks on a legacy-polishing campaign to change the narrative around his economic stewardship.
Clinton — who has at times distanced herself from her former boss’s economic record — is counting on the economy improving the rest of the year to help her hold the White House for Democrats for another term. And the U.S. Federal Reserve is largely out of ammunition to try and fight a fresh downturn.
A new recession, if it happens, could hand Trump a political gift — allowing him to bash Obama and by extension Clinton for driving the U.S. economy into a ditch. Never mind that Obama lobbied against a Brexit, and Trump cheered it on.
But bad economic news could just as easily expose Trump’s lack of fluency with financial markets, reinforcing Clinton’s recent attacks on him as unfit to have his finger on America’s economic button.
The success of the “Leave” campaign represents a major failure for Cameron, who first called the referendum to satisfy anti-EU forces within his party and then tried unsuccessfully to persuade voters to stay in the EU.
“The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered,” Cameron said while announcing his resignation, his voice cracking with emotion. “It was not a decision that was taken lightly, not least because so many things were said by so many different organizations about the significance of this decision. So there can be no doubt about the result.”
The vote will now trigger a two-year disentangling process where London and Brussels will negotiate the terms of a messy divorce. For U.S. companies that use the UK as a launching pad into Europe, the coming months will bring hard choices about whether to stay or go. While the U.K. will negotiate some sort of new trading arrangement with the European Union, the “Leave” vote almost certainly means that British access to the European single market will be severed — a huge problem for U.S. companies in England that serve the European market.
With the United Kingdom on the way out of the European Union, negotiations over a giant U.S.-EU trade accord known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — already foundering — may be dead.
Regardless, Obama, and his successor, will face a difficult choice: Do they carry through on Obama’s warning in April that a Brexit would put the United Kingdom “at the back of the queue” for a new U.S. trade deal? Or do they cut a deal with the United Kingdom, as some Republicans have suggested in recent days?
Obama traveled to London in April at Cameron’s request to urge the Brits to vote “Remain” and argued that Britain is more influential inside the EU, and a more valuable partner for the United States. Now, administration officials and congressional leaders will be forced to reconsider, again, whether the U.S.-UK special relationship is as important as it once was.
Indeed, while U.K. “Leave” leaders like Nigel Farage were proclaiming Britain’s “Independence day” by early Friday, Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted: “If #Brexit happens, June 23 will not be remembered as Britain's Independence Day but as the beginning of the end of the U.K.”
Moreover, Britain’s decision to leave weakens Europe as a whole at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin, eager to get his country out from under Western sanctions, is trying to poke holes in the European Union and weaken transatlantic unity.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said earlier this week that he can understand British concerns about over-regulation from Brussels. “But,” he told POLITICO, “I think Putin is licking his chops at the breakup of the European Union.”
June 24, 2016
June 23, 2016
Obama immigration plan
Deadlocked Supreme Court deals big blow to Obama immigration plan
By Ariane de Vogue and Tal Kopan
In a crushing blow to the White House, the Supreme Court announced Thursday it was evenly divided in a case concerning President Barack Obama's controversial executive actions on immigration.
The one-sentence ruling, issued without comment or dissent, means that the programs will remain blocked from going into effect, and the issue will return to the lower court. It is exceedingly unlikely the programs will go into effect for the remainder of the Obama presidency.
Obama, speaking at the White House, lamented the ruling.
"For more than two decades now our immigration system, everybody acknowledges, has been broken," Obama said. "And the fact that the Supreme Court wasn't able to issue a decision today doesn't just set the system back even further, it takes us further from the country that we aspire to be."
The ruling will impact the more than 4 million undocumented immigrants seeking to be able to come out of the shadows and apply for these programs to stay in the United States. Immediately after Obama announced them in late 2014, Texas and 25 other states challenged the plans and they were blocked nationwide by a federal district court the next year.
Immigration has already been a prominent and highly charged topic of the 2016 election already this year, and this ruling guarantees it will only be more so.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton criticized the ruling, saying it is evidence not only of why the Supreme Court needs a ninth justice, but also that the delay of Obama's immigration programs adds importance to putting a Democrat in the White House to continue the fight to put them in place.
"Today's deadlocked decision from the Supreme Court is unacceptable, and show us all just how high the stakes are in this election," Clinton said in a statement Thursday morning. She later tweeted, calling it "heartbreaking."
The topic of undocumented immigrants has been a central theme this campaign. While Democrats have pushed for immigration reform and leniency to some people living in the country illegally, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has spoken forcefully about deporting the millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and disparaged Mexican immigrants during his campaign.
Obama used his statement to hit Trump as well, saying, "Immigration is not something to fear. We don't have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now or pray like we do or have a different last name because being an American is about something more than that."
The 4-4 split on the court is also more evidence of the long shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia's death this February.
"This is a ruling that affects millions of American families, but because the Supreme Court does not have its full complement of nine justices, the court was unable to deliver a definitive ruling a case of such national importance." said Elizabeth Wydra, president of Constitutional Accountability Center.
"The resolution of the immigration case -- or lack thereof -- underscores how handicapped the Supreme Court can be when it's not fully staffed," said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and professor of law at American University Washington College of Law. "Although proponents of President Obama's immigration plan might prefer this result to a 5-4 loss, which would have set a nationwide precedent, rulings like these create uncertainty for the courts and the country going forward --uncertainty that, at the end of the day, puts more pressure on the political branches and dilutes the role of the Supreme Court."
Texas was supported at the Supreme Court by the GOP-led House of Representatives, who said that the programs went forward after the President failed in his attempts to persuade Congress to revise immigration laws.
"This is a slap down to the President," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told CNN. "It shows there are limitations on the President's actions and the only way to resolve this problem is through the Congress."
"Today, Article I of the Constitution was vindicated," House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement. "The Supreme Court's ruling makes the President's executive action on immigration null and void. The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws -- only Congress is. This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Obama's action "an unauthorized abuse of presidential power that trampled the Constitution." In a statement, he added, "as the President himself said, he is not a king who can unilaterally change and write immigration laws."
Thursday's ruling essentially perpetuates indefinitely a legal limbo that undocumented immigrants who were potentially eligible for the program have been living since the first court ruling blocking the President's programs.
Millions had readied applications for the deferred action, only to enter a holding pattern as the court cases played out.
Thursday's ruling was not a final decision in the matter, it only continues an injunction preventing the programs from going into effect. The question of the constitutionality of the program still remains before the lower courts. The roughly 4 million undocumented Americans who were awaiting Thursday's decision find their situations largely unchanged, though the ruling guarantees their undecided status will continue likely through the end of Obama's presidency.
FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group with roots in Silicon Valley, called the ruling a "devastating loss" for millions.
"Today is a very tough, disappointing day," FWD.us President Todd Schulte said in a statement. "This morning, a few million United States citizens with undocumented parents, hundreds of thousands of DREAMers, and millions of their family and friends received devastating news. The hope that they would benefit from DAPA and expanded DACA and be able to live their lives in ways so many of us take for granted, such as driving to work without the fear that a broken taillight will end in our family being torn apart, remains out of reach."
Mi Familia Vota pledged to continue the political battle was well as the legal one, blaming Republicans for inaction.
"Let's be clear, our community will never forget that it was Republican elected officials and politicians who stood in the way of the well-being of our families and have blocked any solutions to fix our broken immigration system," Executive Director Ben Monterroso said in a statement. "While this is a setback in our fight, we are fully committed to find a fix to our broken immigration system through a comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. The solution is in the hands of our community, and we will demonstrate the power of our vote come November."
The White House announced the programs in November 2014, issuing a five-page guidance memo enabling qualifying undocumented workers to receive temporary relief from the threat of deportation and to apply for programs that could qualify them for work authorization and associated benefits.
The Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) targets the nearly 4.3 million undocumented parents of citizens and lawful residents, and the second program expands the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), initiative aimed at non-citizens who came to the country as children.
"We'll bring more undocumented immigrants out of the shadows so they can play by the rules, pay their full share of taxes, pass a criminal background check and get right with the law," Obama told an audience in Nevada after the programs were announced.
The challengers -- mostly Republican governors and attorney generals -- said the unilateral actions were unconstitutional and they violated a federal law that sets forward how agencies can establish regulations.
In 2015 a federal judge sided with the states and blocked the programs from going forward. A divided federal appeals court later upheld the preliminary injunction.
Obama's lawyers argued in court papers that the lower court rulings threatened great harm, "not only to the proper role of federal courts and to federal immigration law, but also to millions of parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, aliens who are the lowest priorities for removal yet now work off the books to support their families."
As a threshold issue, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said that the states didn't have the legal right to be in court, because the Constitution "assigns the formation of immigration policy exclusively to the National Government precisely because immigration is an inherently national matter."
He stressed that the guidance from the government does not provide any kind of lawful status under immigration law as the aliens remain removable at any time.
Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller argued that the states had standing to bring the challenge in part because DAPA would create a new class of recipients for state subsidized driver's licenses in Texas. He says that Texas would stand to lose millions of dollars if even a small fraction of DAPA eligible aliens applied.
"DAPA is an extraordinary assertion of executive power," Keller wrote in court papers. "The Executive has unilaterally crafted an enormous program -- one of the largest changes ever to our Nation's approach to immigration," he said. "In doing so, the Executive dispensed with immigration statutes by declaring unlawful conduct to be lawful."
He pointed to the guidance and said that the eligible undocumented immigrations would be permitted to be "lawfully present in the United States," which would make them eligible for work authorization and some types of Social Security and Medicare benefits.
By Ariane de Vogue and Tal Kopan
In a crushing blow to the White House, the Supreme Court announced Thursday it was evenly divided in a case concerning President Barack Obama's controversial executive actions on immigration.
The one-sentence ruling, issued without comment or dissent, means that the programs will remain blocked from going into effect, and the issue will return to the lower court. It is exceedingly unlikely the programs will go into effect for the remainder of the Obama presidency.
Obama, speaking at the White House, lamented the ruling.
"For more than two decades now our immigration system, everybody acknowledges, has been broken," Obama said. "And the fact that the Supreme Court wasn't able to issue a decision today doesn't just set the system back even further, it takes us further from the country that we aspire to be."
The ruling will impact the more than 4 million undocumented immigrants seeking to be able to come out of the shadows and apply for these programs to stay in the United States. Immediately after Obama announced them in late 2014, Texas and 25 other states challenged the plans and they were blocked nationwide by a federal district court the next year.
Immigration has already been a prominent and highly charged topic of the 2016 election already this year, and this ruling guarantees it will only be more so.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton criticized the ruling, saying it is evidence not only of why the Supreme Court needs a ninth justice, but also that the delay of Obama's immigration programs adds importance to putting a Democrat in the White House to continue the fight to put them in place.
"Today's deadlocked decision from the Supreme Court is unacceptable, and show us all just how high the stakes are in this election," Clinton said in a statement Thursday morning. She later tweeted, calling it "heartbreaking."
The topic of undocumented immigrants has been a central theme this campaign. While Democrats have pushed for immigration reform and leniency to some people living in the country illegally, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has spoken forcefully about deporting the millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and disparaged Mexican immigrants during his campaign.
Obama used his statement to hit Trump as well, saying, "Immigration is not something to fear. We don't have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now or pray like we do or have a different last name because being an American is about something more than that."
The 4-4 split on the court is also more evidence of the long shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia's death this February.
"This is a ruling that affects millions of American families, but because the Supreme Court does not have its full complement of nine justices, the court was unable to deliver a definitive ruling a case of such national importance." said Elizabeth Wydra, president of Constitutional Accountability Center.
"The resolution of the immigration case -- or lack thereof -- underscores how handicapped the Supreme Court can be when it's not fully staffed," said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and professor of law at American University Washington College of Law. "Although proponents of President Obama's immigration plan might prefer this result to a 5-4 loss, which would have set a nationwide precedent, rulings like these create uncertainty for the courts and the country going forward --uncertainty that, at the end of the day, puts more pressure on the political branches and dilutes the role of the Supreme Court."
Texas was supported at the Supreme Court by the GOP-led House of Representatives, who said that the programs went forward after the President failed in his attempts to persuade Congress to revise immigration laws.
"This is a slap down to the President," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told CNN. "It shows there are limitations on the President's actions and the only way to resolve this problem is through the Congress."
"Today, Article I of the Constitution was vindicated," House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement. "The Supreme Court's ruling makes the President's executive action on immigration null and void. The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws -- only Congress is. This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Obama's action "an unauthorized abuse of presidential power that trampled the Constitution." In a statement, he added, "as the President himself said, he is not a king who can unilaterally change and write immigration laws."
Thursday's ruling essentially perpetuates indefinitely a legal limbo that undocumented immigrants who were potentially eligible for the program have been living since the first court ruling blocking the President's programs.
Millions had readied applications for the deferred action, only to enter a holding pattern as the court cases played out.
Thursday's ruling was not a final decision in the matter, it only continues an injunction preventing the programs from going into effect. The question of the constitutionality of the program still remains before the lower courts. The roughly 4 million undocumented Americans who were awaiting Thursday's decision find their situations largely unchanged, though the ruling guarantees their undecided status will continue likely through the end of Obama's presidency.
FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group with roots in Silicon Valley, called the ruling a "devastating loss" for millions.
"Today is a very tough, disappointing day," FWD.us President Todd Schulte said in a statement. "This morning, a few million United States citizens with undocumented parents, hundreds of thousands of DREAMers, and millions of their family and friends received devastating news. The hope that they would benefit from DAPA and expanded DACA and be able to live their lives in ways so many of us take for granted, such as driving to work without the fear that a broken taillight will end in our family being torn apart, remains out of reach."
Mi Familia Vota pledged to continue the political battle was well as the legal one, blaming Republicans for inaction.
"Let's be clear, our community will never forget that it was Republican elected officials and politicians who stood in the way of the well-being of our families and have blocked any solutions to fix our broken immigration system," Executive Director Ben Monterroso said in a statement. "While this is a setback in our fight, we are fully committed to find a fix to our broken immigration system through a comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. The solution is in the hands of our community, and we will demonstrate the power of our vote come November."
The White House announced the programs in November 2014, issuing a five-page guidance memo enabling qualifying undocumented workers to receive temporary relief from the threat of deportation and to apply for programs that could qualify them for work authorization and associated benefits.
The Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) targets the nearly 4.3 million undocumented parents of citizens and lawful residents, and the second program expands the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), initiative aimed at non-citizens who came to the country as children.
"We'll bring more undocumented immigrants out of the shadows so they can play by the rules, pay their full share of taxes, pass a criminal background check and get right with the law," Obama told an audience in Nevada after the programs were announced.
The challengers -- mostly Republican governors and attorney generals -- said the unilateral actions were unconstitutional and they violated a federal law that sets forward how agencies can establish regulations.
In 2015 a federal judge sided with the states and blocked the programs from going forward. A divided federal appeals court later upheld the preliminary injunction.
Obama's lawyers argued in court papers that the lower court rulings threatened great harm, "not only to the proper role of federal courts and to federal immigration law, but also to millions of parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, aliens who are the lowest priorities for removal yet now work off the books to support their families."
As a threshold issue, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said that the states didn't have the legal right to be in court, because the Constitution "assigns the formation of immigration policy exclusively to the National Government precisely because immigration is an inherently national matter."
He stressed that the guidance from the government does not provide any kind of lawful status under immigration law as the aliens remain removable at any time.
Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller argued that the states had standing to bring the challenge in part because DAPA would create a new class of recipients for state subsidized driver's licenses in Texas. He says that Texas would stand to lose millions of dollars if even a small fraction of DAPA eligible aliens applied.
"DAPA is an extraordinary assertion of executive power," Keller wrote in court papers. "The Executive has unilaterally crafted an enormous program -- one of the largest changes ever to our Nation's approach to immigration," he said. "In doing so, the Executive dispensed with immigration statutes by declaring unlawful conduct to be lawful."
He pointed to the guidance and said that the eligible undocumented immigrations would be permitted to be "lawfully present in the United States," which would make them eligible for work authorization and some types of Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Shredded Star
X-ray Echoes of a Shredded Star Provide Close-up of 'Killer' Black Hole
By Francis Reddy
Some 3.9 billion years ago in the heart of a distant galaxy, the intense tidal pull of a monster black hole shredded a star that passed too close. When X-rays produced in this event first reached Earth on March 28, 2011, they were detected by NASA's Swift satellite, which notified astronomers around the world. Within days, scientists concluded that the outburst, now known as Swift J1644+57, represented both the tidal disruption of a star and the sudden flare-up of a previously inactive black hole.
Now astronomers using archival observations from Swift, the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton observatory and the Japan-led Suzaku satellite have identified the reflections of X-ray flares erupting during the event. Led by Erin Kara, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), the team has used these light echoes, or reverberations, to map the flow of gas near a newly awakened black hole for the first time.
"While we don't yet understand what causes X-ray flares near the black hole, we know that when one occurs we can detect its echo a couple of minutes later, once the light has reached and illuminated parts of the flow," Kara explained. "This technique, called X-ray reverberation mapping, has been previously used to explore stable disks around black holes, but this is the first time we've applied it to a newly formed disk produced by a tidal disruption."
Stellar debris falling toward a black hole collects into a rotating structure called an accretion disk. There the gas is compressed and heated to millions of degrees before it eventually spills over the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape and astronomers cannot observe. The Swift J1644+57 accretion disk was thicker, more turbulent and more chaotic than stable disks, which have had time to settle down into an orderly routine. The researchers present the findings in a paper published online in the journal Nature on Wed., June 22.
One surprise from the study is that high-energy X-rays arise from the inner part of the disk. Astronomers had thought most of this emission originated from a narrow jet of particles accelerated to near the speed of light. In blazars, the most luminous galaxy class powered by supermassive black holes, jets produce most of the highest-energy emission.
"We do see a jet from Swift J1644, but the X-rays are coming from a compact region near the black hole at the base of a steep funnel of inflowing gas we're looking down into," said co-author Lixin Dai, a postdoctoral researcher at UMCP. "The gas producing the echoes is itself flowing outward along the surface of the funnel at speeds up to half the speed of light."
X-rays originating near the black hole excite iron ions in the whirling gas, causing them to fluoresce with a distinctive high-energy glow called iron K-line emission. As an X-ray flare brightens and fades, the gas follows in turn after a brief delay depending on its distance from the source.
"Direct light from the flare has different properties than its echo, and we can detect reverberations by monitoring how the brightness changes across different X-ray energies," said co-author Jon Miller, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Swift J1644+57 is one of only three tidal disruptions that have produced high-energy X-rays, and to date it remains the only event caught at the peak of this emission. These star shredding episodes briefly activate black holes astronomers wouldn't otherwise know about. For every black hole now actively accreting gas and producing light, astronomers think nine others are dormant and dark. These quiescent black holes were active when the universe was younger, and they played an important role in how galaxies evolved. Tidal disruptions therefore offer a glimpse of the silent majority of supersized black holes.
"If we only look at active black holes, we might be getting a strongly biased sample," said team member Chris Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at UMCP. "It could be that these black holes all fit within some narrow range of spins and masses. So it’s important to study the entire population to make sure we’re not biased."
The researchers estimate the mass of the Swift J1644+57 black hole at about a million times that of the sun but did not measure its spin. With future improvements in understanding and modeling accretion flows, the team thinks it may be possible to do so.
ESA's XMM-Newton satellite was launched in December 1999 from Kourou, French Guiana. NASA funded elements of the XMM-Newton instrument package and provides the NASA Guest Observer Facility at Goddard, which supports use of the observatory by U.S. astronomers. Suzaku operated from July 2005 to August 2015 and was developed at the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, which is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in collaboration with NASA and other Japanese and U.S. institutions.
NASA's Swift satellite was launched in November 2004 and is managed by Goddard. It is operated in collaboration with Penn State University in University Park, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia, with international collaborators in the U.K., Italy, Germany and Japan.
By Francis Reddy
Now astronomers using archival observations from Swift, the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton observatory and the Japan-led Suzaku satellite have identified the reflections of X-ray flares erupting during the event. Led by Erin Kara, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), the team has used these light echoes, or reverberations, to map the flow of gas near a newly awakened black hole for the first time.
"While we don't yet understand what causes X-ray flares near the black hole, we know that when one occurs we can detect its echo a couple of minutes later, once the light has reached and illuminated parts of the flow," Kara explained. "This technique, called X-ray reverberation mapping, has been previously used to explore stable disks around black holes, but this is the first time we've applied it to a newly formed disk produced by a tidal disruption."
Stellar debris falling toward a black hole collects into a rotating structure called an accretion disk. There the gas is compressed and heated to millions of degrees before it eventually spills over the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape and astronomers cannot observe. The Swift J1644+57 accretion disk was thicker, more turbulent and more chaotic than stable disks, which have had time to settle down into an orderly routine. The researchers present the findings in a paper published online in the journal Nature on Wed., June 22.
One surprise from the study is that high-energy X-rays arise from the inner part of the disk. Astronomers had thought most of this emission originated from a narrow jet of particles accelerated to near the speed of light. In blazars, the most luminous galaxy class powered by supermassive black holes, jets produce most of the highest-energy emission.
"We do see a jet from Swift J1644, but the X-rays are coming from a compact region near the black hole at the base of a steep funnel of inflowing gas we're looking down into," said co-author Lixin Dai, a postdoctoral researcher at UMCP. "The gas producing the echoes is itself flowing outward along the surface of the funnel at speeds up to half the speed of light."
X-rays originating near the black hole excite iron ions in the whirling gas, causing them to fluoresce with a distinctive high-energy glow called iron K-line emission. As an X-ray flare brightens and fades, the gas follows in turn after a brief delay depending on its distance from the source.
"Direct light from the flare has different properties than its echo, and we can detect reverberations by monitoring how the brightness changes across different X-ray energies," said co-author Jon Miller, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.Swift J1644+57 is one of only three tidal disruptions that have produced high-energy X-rays, and to date it remains the only event caught at the peak of this emission. These star shredding episodes briefly activate black holes astronomers wouldn't otherwise know about. For every black hole now actively accreting gas and producing light, astronomers think nine others are dormant and dark. These quiescent black holes were active when the universe was younger, and they played an important role in how galaxies evolved. Tidal disruptions therefore offer a glimpse of the silent majority of supersized black holes.
"If we only look at active black holes, we might be getting a strongly biased sample," said team member Chris Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at UMCP. "It could be that these black holes all fit within some narrow range of spins and masses. So it’s important to study the entire population to make sure we’re not biased."
The researchers estimate the mass of the Swift J1644+57 black hole at about a million times that of the sun but did not measure its spin. With future improvements in understanding and modeling accretion flows, the team thinks it may be possible to do so.
ESA's XMM-Newton satellite was launched in December 1999 from Kourou, French Guiana. NASA funded elements of the XMM-Newton instrument package and provides the NASA Guest Observer Facility at Goddard, which supports use of the observatory by U.S. astronomers. Suzaku operated from July 2005 to August 2015 and was developed at the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, which is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in collaboration with NASA and other Japanese and U.S. institutions.
NASA's Swift satellite was launched in November 2004 and is managed by Goddard. It is operated in collaboration with Penn State University in University Park, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Virginia, with international collaborators in the U.K., Italy, Germany and Japan.
Ice Retreat
Pervasive Ice Retreat in West Antarctica
Along the Bellingshausen Sea coast of West Antarctica, ice has been retreating inland being lost to the sea. Scientists knew this, but they lacked a full picture of the scale. Now a team of researchers has compiled a Landsat-based data set and found that such losses have been going on for at least the past four decades and along the vast majority of this coast.
“We knew that ice had been retreating from this region recently,” said Frazer Christie, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author of the study. “Now, thanks to a wealth of freely available satellite data, we know this has been occurring pervasively along the coastline for almost half a century.”
The Bellingshausen Sea—named for the Russian Admiral who found the continent in 1820—lies to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Examining Landsat data collected between 1975 and 2015, the researchers mapped the approximate locations of “grounding lines” in the ice along the Bellingshausen coast. These lines mark the intersection where glacial ice flowing from the continent is connected, or grounded, to the seafloor. Any ice past the grounding line usually floats on the sea as an ice shelf. When ice is lost to the sea, the grounding line retreats. Meanwhile, the ice loss contributes to global sea level rise.
Christie and colleagues used Landsat data to locate “inflection points” on the surface of the ice that indicate the approximate location of grounding lines below. An inflection point—which can be tricky to detect by an untrained eye—is defined as the last location where the slope of the ice dramatically changes before flattening out into an ice shelf or meeting the sea.
The team combined its Landsat projections of inflection points with radar data from the European Space Agency’s ERS 1 and 2 and CryoSat-2 satellites. They found that the majority of the coastline along the Bellinghausen Sea experienced some grounding line retreat over the past four decades. The findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The widespread retreat has likely been caused by warmer ocean water licking at the undersides of the floating ice near the grounding line—or as the authors write: “an ingress of relatively warm circumpolar deep water.”
The image above shows an area near Eltanin Bay, where the majority of the grounding line is found at the seaward front of the ice. It was acquired by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 on March 2, 2015. The ice loss is most pronounced along the Ferrigno Ice Stream, which was named for Jane Ferrigno, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who used satellite data (including Landsat) to map Antarctica.
“Our study provides important context for understanding the causes of ice retreat throughout Antarctica as a whole,” said Christie. “We now know West Antarctica has been changing for many decades, so the next challenge is to ascertain the key ice, ocean, and atmospheric factors responsible for such ice losses.”
Along the Bellingshausen Sea coast of West Antarctica, ice has been retreating inland being lost to the sea. Scientists knew this, but they lacked a full picture of the scale. Now a team of researchers has compiled a Landsat-based data set and found that such losses have been going on for at least the past four decades and along the vast majority of this coast.
“We knew that ice had been retreating from this region recently,” said Frazer Christie, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author of the study. “Now, thanks to a wealth of freely available satellite data, we know this has been occurring pervasively along the coastline for almost half a century.”
The Bellingshausen Sea—named for the Russian Admiral who found the continent in 1820—lies to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Examining Landsat data collected between 1975 and 2015, the researchers mapped the approximate locations of “grounding lines” in the ice along the Bellingshausen coast. These lines mark the intersection where glacial ice flowing from the continent is connected, or grounded, to the seafloor. Any ice past the grounding line usually floats on the sea as an ice shelf. When ice is lost to the sea, the grounding line retreats. Meanwhile, the ice loss contributes to global sea level rise.
Christie and colleagues used Landsat data to locate “inflection points” on the surface of the ice that indicate the approximate location of grounding lines below. An inflection point—which can be tricky to detect by an untrained eye—is defined as the last location where the slope of the ice dramatically changes before flattening out into an ice shelf or meeting the sea.
The team combined its Landsat projections of inflection points with radar data from the European Space Agency’s ERS 1 and 2 and CryoSat-2 satellites. They found that the majority of the coastline along the Bellinghausen Sea experienced some grounding line retreat over the past four decades. The findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The widespread retreat has likely been caused by warmer ocean water licking at the undersides of the floating ice near the grounding line—or as the authors write: “an ingress of relatively warm circumpolar deep water.”
The image above shows an area near Eltanin Bay, where the majority of the grounding line is found at the seaward front of the ice. It was acquired by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 on March 2, 2015. The ice loss is most pronounced along the Ferrigno Ice Stream, which was named for Jane Ferrigno, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who used satellite data (including Landsat) to map Antarctica.
“Our study provides important context for understanding the causes of ice retreat throughout Antarctica as a whole,” said Christie. “We now know West Antarctica has been changing for many decades, so the next challenge is to ascertain the key ice, ocean, and atmospheric factors responsible for such ice losses.”
The day after
The day after Britain votes
‘You’re never the same after a near-death experience.’
By Matthew Kaminski
When David Cameron honored his pledge to hold a referendum on Europe following an unexpectedly resounding election triumph last year, the choice put before British voters was roughly this: Keep the status quo ante or leap into an unknown.
At some point in the last few months, status quo came off the ballot. Whether the U.K. stays or not after Thursday’s vote, there’s no business as usual to return to for Britain, the EU or even the Western world.
A Brexit campaign whose tragic coda was the assassination of a pro-EU member of the British parliament by the hand of an English extremist, exposed divisions within Britain that few realized went so deep. On the European Continent and in the U.S., the political ground has shifted jarringly since Cameron called the referendum. A historically unprecedented migration crisis in the EU and deep economic pain, particularly across the southern Greco-Latin belt, are propelling parties from the further reaches of the Right and Left up the polls and closer than ever to power in Europe. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump turned politics on its head, riding the same forces as the rising political outsiders in the EU.
The down-to-the-wire vote in Britain — a place seen as habitually pragmatic, even phlegmatic, in its electoral politics (if not its parliamentary theater or football viewing habits) — has coincided with and deepened a crisis of a Western political order built after World War II and reinforced and expanded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Thursday’s referendum, regardless of its outcome, may turn out to be merely a starter to a larger course of troubles.
The new Britain
The shock scenarios from an Out vote are clearer to sketch out, as Cameron has strained to do throughout the campaign. The markets are braced for immediate pain, expecting a sharp decline in the British pound and stocks, likely central bank interventions, and slower growth in years ahead when the U.K. would need to rebuild its global trade relations from virtually scratch. Even assuming a smooth handover of power at 10 Downing Street in the weeks after the referendum, as widely expected if Cameron loses this vote, the political fallout would last longer, particularly should Scotland — possibly along with Wales and Northern Ireland, who want to stay in the EU — move to break up the United Kingdom.
No matter what happens Thursday, Cameron faces immediate challenges to his leadership of his party and country. The anti-EU Tory base is livid with the prime minister who, strange as it looks from the vantage point of today, expected to unify the Conservatives in calling a referendum that would put its anti-European demons to rest for good.
His potential replacements, such as pro-Leave Boris Johnson, the former London mayor, or Home Secretary Theresa May, who backed Remain, haven’t been forced to sell any governing agenda to an electorate. Yet any successor would have to respect a Conservative mood hostile to what the EU (with or without Britain) stands for — open borders to people, free trade and close cooperation with allies.
Even if he stays, Cameron’s room for maneuver could well be hemmed in by the lingering bitterness from the campaign.
‘EU disintegration’
The other huge open question after Thursday is how will Continental Europe, perhaps even the transatlantic alliance, withstand the political aftershocks from Britain?
This ground feels shakier than in decades, and other potentially disruptive events are around the corner. A few months after the U.K. referendum, France and the Netherlands hold elections in which far-right parties that are as contemptuous of the EU, America and the global economic system as any found in Britain are slated to do better than ever. Last month in Austria, a far-right candidate came within a few thousand votes of becoming the head of state.
In these tumultuous days in Europe, the U.S. isn’t playing its customary role as bedrock of the West with the same sense of purpose. Barack Obama shifted America’s attentions to Asia with his “pivot,” as well as the Middle East, and away from Europe, which until recently was considered another century’s problem in Washington.
Bad feelings from the Iraq war followed by Edward Snowden’s revelations about American surveillance — which, in turn, exposed for many in Washington Europe’s knee-jerk anti-Americanism — left a sour taste around transatlantic relations. The notable foreign policy views expressed by Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, are admiration for Vladimir Putin and doubts about the utility of the NATO military alliance, the only club that brings together the U.S. and Europe’s democracies.
“You only need to look at who in Europe would fully applaud a possible U.K. exit from the EU — and that would be in the Kremlin,” the former Secretary-General of NATO and Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in a recent interview. “Mr. Putin would see it as a weakening of the EU and of the Western community as a whole, and rightly so.” He called the impact on Western security “devastating.”
Some dismiss such talk as hyperbole, yet other prominent figures in the European political establishment who are known for their sobriety have turned into would-be Cassandras.
“Whatever the outcome, their referendum [in Britain] may trigger the process of EU disintegration,” said Mario Monti, who held powerful posts in the European Commission and went on to lead a technocratic government in Italy after the financial crisis.
He put the aftershocks from Britain, regardless of what happens Thursday, as a greater existential threat to Europe than the continuing strain, though lessened this year, of mass migration or the relapse of the Greek debt crisis. “The mechanisms that allowed the EU to strengthen itself by crisis [in the past] have been weakened by populist forces,” Monti told a private gathering of Italian and U.S. business leaders in Venice last week.
“You’re never the same after a near-death experience,” said a senior EU official in Brussels. The past few months have shown to rivals outside the EU and Euroskeptics within the fragility of the whole construct, this official added, calling them “signs of an unraveling” that China, for example, would factor into its dealings with Europe.
Across the EU, support for the so-called European project has dropped sharply since the global financial crisis. The polls for extremist parties trend the other way. Podemos, a Spanish far-left group founded only two years ago, is slated to finish second in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, ahead of the old mainstream center-left Socialists. In less than a decade, the EU’s favorability rating in Spain went from 80 percent to 47 percent today, according to a Pew poll released this month.
In France, 38 percent now have a favorable opinion of the EU, compared with 69 percent in 2004, the poll found. In that sense, the French are even more Euroskeptical than traditionally Euro-weary British, 44 percent of whom had a favorable view of the EU.
In the bloc’s defense, support for most governing institutions, not just the EU, has dropped steeply across the West.
Wary Europtimism
There’s one possible bright spot: In France and Britain, a majority of people 18-34 years old view the EU positively, suggesting a potential source of future strength. The same Pew study that surveyed opinion in 10 European countries also found that, somewhat paradoxically in the context of overall unhappiness with the EU, 74 percent of respondents believed it “should play a more active role in world affairs,” also encouraging wary Europtimists. Seven in 10 Europeans said a Brexit would be a “bad thing” for the EU best avoided.
The search for silver linings has already begun.
“Maybe this will be the shock Brussels needs,” said Giles Merritt, founder of the Friends of Europe think tank in Brussels and author of the just-published “Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future,” referring to a Brexit.
European Digital Economy Commissioner Günther Oettinger, a senior figure in the ruling German center-right party, last week said it could spur remaining countries to come together. “My expectation would be that the European project would gather new dynamics,” he said at POLITICO’s Morgen Europa Live event in Brussels, though he did warn of a “domino effect” that might push others toward the EU exits.
EU leaders will take stock of the post-referendum realities at a previously scheduled meeting in Brussels next week. The 28 NATO allies, the Europeans plus the U.S. and Canada, gather for their biannual summit in Warsaw starting July 8, giving them an opportunity to put on a show of unity for the cameras.
Yet the current political mood and deeper changes will hinder any attempt to reboot not just the EU, but to inject new life into the Western camp.
The old leadership model in Europe — a strong French-German partnership, complemented by an outward-looking Britain that supported a muscular military and claimed a “special” connection to Washington — has come undone. France’s chronic economic woes have politically hobbled the past three French presidents, pushing their support into the teens and denying German Chancellor Angela Merkel a partner in Paris. With an election coming up next year and strikers in the street, the current French leader, François Hollande, is in no position to work with Merkel to lead a European renaissance.
End of liberal Europe, end of federal Europe
Since taking office in 2010, Cameron has focused his attentions on domestic and, more recently, on intramural Tory squabbles. As the Cameron government cut defense, Britain’s traditional leadership on security has been diminished. Inside the EU, North and East European countries welcome Britain’s sway on debates over more free trade, continued sanctions on Russia and a truer single market inside Europe for goods, labor and services.
Yet, if he survives, Cameron will find it hard to throw any weight around in the EU. European leaders, especially the Germans, are said to be furious with him for foisting what they view as a party dispute onto an EU straining to deal with so many other problems, such as migration and rising populism, and sucking up all this attention.
Anywhere you look these days, the Western camp is fraying.
Thriving transatlantic commerce used to be the glue that held it together. Now both the Democratic and Republican candidates, as much of the European mainstream, broadly oppose free trade. The proposed TTIP trade accord between the EU and U.S., which supporters touted as a renewal of transatlantic vows, is dead in all but name, at least for the conceivable future. The EU and U.S. are divided over how to regulate the digital economy.
And though the Paris and Brussels attacks in recent months brought home the renewed threat of terrorism, that hasn’t slowed the sense of unwinding ties. “Now is the worst possible time for any of this to happen,” said Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, referring specifically to Brexit. Britain, he told a POLITICO conference in Amsterdam this week, provides a large share of intelligence on terrorist threats to the EU’s law enforcement agency.
As much as the odds are against any imminent revival of a Europe built around liberal ideas of open borders, the other vision of a deeper federal EU faces equally long chances of being revived.
Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister and now president of the European Council, which groups EU countries together, sought in a series of recent speeches to bury the old “integrationist” reflex of “confronting reality with all kinds of utopias.” His views were endorsed by, among others, a former French foreign minister who had in the past been seen as a champion of deeper EU integration.
An old saying about Europe held that the so-called project was like a shark that had to keep moving forward to survive. What happens if the shark stops moving, even goes into reverse — with or without Britain in the club? Coming weeks will show.
If anything can be said with certainty about European politics in the past year, it’s that like America’s these days, they’re divisive and deeply unpredictable, particularly in the countries seen as part of what used to be considered stable, boring “old Europe.”
Speaking in the Czech capital Prague earlier this month, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said, “Europe is cracking up west of us.” His right-wing government took out ads this week in Britain to urge a Remain vote.
‘You’re never the same after a near-death experience.’
By Matthew Kaminski
When David Cameron honored his pledge to hold a referendum on Europe following an unexpectedly resounding election triumph last year, the choice put before British voters was roughly this: Keep the status quo ante or leap into an unknown.
At some point in the last few months, status quo came off the ballot. Whether the U.K. stays or not after Thursday’s vote, there’s no business as usual to return to for Britain, the EU or even the Western world.
A Brexit campaign whose tragic coda was the assassination of a pro-EU member of the British parliament by the hand of an English extremist, exposed divisions within Britain that few realized went so deep. On the European Continent and in the U.S., the political ground has shifted jarringly since Cameron called the referendum. A historically unprecedented migration crisis in the EU and deep economic pain, particularly across the southern Greco-Latin belt, are propelling parties from the further reaches of the Right and Left up the polls and closer than ever to power in Europe. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump turned politics on its head, riding the same forces as the rising political outsiders in the EU.
The down-to-the-wire vote in Britain — a place seen as habitually pragmatic, even phlegmatic, in its electoral politics (if not its parliamentary theater or football viewing habits) — has coincided with and deepened a crisis of a Western political order built after World War II and reinforced and expanded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Thursday’s referendum, regardless of its outcome, may turn out to be merely a starter to a larger course of troubles.
The new Britain
The shock scenarios from an Out vote are clearer to sketch out, as Cameron has strained to do throughout the campaign. The markets are braced for immediate pain, expecting a sharp decline in the British pound and stocks, likely central bank interventions, and slower growth in years ahead when the U.K. would need to rebuild its global trade relations from virtually scratch. Even assuming a smooth handover of power at 10 Downing Street in the weeks after the referendum, as widely expected if Cameron loses this vote, the political fallout would last longer, particularly should Scotland — possibly along with Wales and Northern Ireland, who want to stay in the EU — move to break up the United Kingdom.
No matter what happens Thursday, Cameron faces immediate challenges to his leadership of his party and country. The anti-EU Tory base is livid with the prime minister who, strange as it looks from the vantage point of today, expected to unify the Conservatives in calling a referendum that would put its anti-European demons to rest for good.
His potential replacements, such as pro-Leave Boris Johnson, the former London mayor, or Home Secretary Theresa May, who backed Remain, haven’t been forced to sell any governing agenda to an electorate. Yet any successor would have to respect a Conservative mood hostile to what the EU (with or without Britain) stands for — open borders to people, free trade and close cooperation with allies.
Even if he stays, Cameron’s room for maneuver could well be hemmed in by the lingering bitterness from the campaign.
‘EU disintegration’
The other huge open question after Thursday is how will Continental Europe, perhaps even the transatlantic alliance, withstand the political aftershocks from Britain?
This ground feels shakier than in decades, and other potentially disruptive events are around the corner. A few months after the U.K. referendum, France and the Netherlands hold elections in which far-right parties that are as contemptuous of the EU, America and the global economic system as any found in Britain are slated to do better than ever. Last month in Austria, a far-right candidate came within a few thousand votes of becoming the head of state.
In these tumultuous days in Europe, the U.S. isn’t playing its customary role as bedrock of the West with the same sense of purpose. Barack Obama shifted America’s attentions to Asia with his “pivot,” as well as the Middle East, and away from Europe, which until recently was considered another century’s problem in Washington.
Bad feelings from the Iraq war followed by Edward Snowden’s revelations about American surveillance — which, in turn, exposed for many in Washington Europe’s knee-jerk anti-Americanism — left a sour taste around transatlantic relations. The notable foreign policy views expressed by Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, are admiration for Vladimir Putin and doubts about the utility of the NATO military alliance, the only club that brings together the U.S. and Europe’s democracies.
“You only need to look at who in Europe would fully applaud a possible U.K. exit from the EU — and that would be in the Kremlin,” the former Secretary-General of NATO and Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in a recent interview. “Mr. Putin would see it as a weakening of the EU and of the Western community as a whole, and rightly so.” He called the impact on Western security “devastating.”
Some dismiss such talk as hyperbole, yet other prominent figures in the European political establishment who are known for their sobriety have turned into would-be Cassandras.
“Whatever the outcome, their referendum [in Britain] may trigger the process of EU disintegration,” said Mario Monti, who held powerful posts in the European Commission and went on to lead a technocratic government in Italy after the financial crisis.
He put the aftershocks from Britain, regardless of what happens Thursday, as a greater existential threat to Europe than the continuing strain, though lessened this year, of mass migration or the relapse of the Greek debt crisis. “The mechanisms that allowed the EU to strengthen itself by crisis [in the past] have been weakened by populist forces,” Monti told a private gathering of Italian and U.S. business leaders in Venice last week.
“You’re never the same after a near-death experience,” said a senior EU official in Brussels. The past few months have shown to rivals outside the EU and Euroskeptics within the fragility of the whole construct, this official added, calling them “signs of an unraveling” that China, for example, would factor into its dealings with Europe.
Across the EU, support for the so-called European project has dropped sharply since the global financial crisis. The polls for extremist parties trend the other way. Podemos, a Spanish far-left group founded only two years ago, is slated to finish second in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, ahead of the old mainstream center-left Socialists. In less than a decade, the EU’s favorability rating in Spain went from 80 percent to 47 percent today, according to a Pew poll released this month.
In France, 38 percent now have a favorable opinion of the EU, compared with 69 percent in 2004, the poll found. In that sense, the French are even more Euroskeptical than traditionally Euro-weary British, 44 percent of whom had a favorable view of the EU.
In the bloc’s defense, support for most governing institutions, not just the EU, has dropped steeply across the West.
Wary Europtimism
There’s one possible bright spot: In France and Britain, a majority of people 18-34 years old view the EU positively, suggesting a potential source of future strength. The same Pew study that surveyed opinion in 10 European countries also found that, somewhat paradoxically in the context of overall unhappiness with the EU, 74 percent of respondents believed it “should play a more active role in world affairs,” also encouraging wary Europtimists. Seven in 10 Europeans said a Brexit would be a “bad thing” for the EU best avoided.
The search for silver linings has already begun.
“Maybe this will be the shock Brussels needs,” said Giles Merritt, founder of the Friends of Europe think tank in Brussels and author of the just-published “Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future,” referring to a Brexit.
European Digital Economy Commissioner Günther Oettinger, a senior figure in the ruling German center-right party, last week said it could spur remaining countries to come together. “My expectation would be that the European project would gather new dynamics,” he said at POLITICO’s Morgen Europa Live event in Brussels, though he did warn of a “domino effect” that might push others toward the EU exits.
EU leaders will take stock of the post-referendum realities at a previously scheduled meeting in Brussels next week. The 28 NATO allies, the Europeans plus the U.S. and Canada, gather for their biannual summit in Warsaw starting July 8, giving them an opportunity to put on a show of unity for the cameras.
Yet the current political mood and deeper changes will hinder any attempt to reboot not just the EU, but to inject new life into the Western camp.
The old leadership model in Europe — a strong French-German partnership, complemented by an outward-looking Britain that supported a muscular military and claimed a “special” connection to Washington — has come undone. France’s chronic economic woes have politically hobbled the past three French presidents, pushing their support into the teens and denying German Chancellor Angela Merkel a partner in Paris. With an election coming up next year and strikers in the street, the current French leader, François Hollande, is in no position to work with Merkel to lead a European renaissance.
End of liberal Europe, end of federal Europe
Since taking office in 2010, Cameron has focused his attentions on domestic and, more recently, on intramural Tory squabbles. As the Cameron government cut defense, Britain’s traditional leadership on security has been diminished. Inside the EU, North and East European countries welcome Britain’s sway on debates over more free trade, continued sanctions on Russia and a truer single market inside Europe for goods, labor and services.
Yet, if he survives, Cameron will find it hard to throw any weight around in the EU. European leaders, especially the Germans, are said to be furious with him for foisting what they view as a party dispute onto an EU straining to deal with so many other problems, such as migration and rising populism, and sucking up all this attention.
Anywhere you look these days, the Western camp is fraying.
Thriving transatlantic commerce used to be the glue that held it together. Now both the Democratic and Republican candidates, as much of the European mainstream, broadly oppose free trade. The proposed TTIP trade accord between the EU and U.S., which supporters touted as a renewal of transatlantic vows, is dead in all but name, at least for the conceivable future. The EU and U.S. are divided over how to regulate the digital economy.
And though the Paris and Brussels attacks in recent months brought home the renewed threat of terrorism, that hasn’t slowed the sense of unwinding ties. “Now is the worst possible time for any of this to happen,” said Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, referring specifically to Brexit. Britain, he told a POLITICO conference in Amsterdam this week, provides a large share of intelligence on terrorist threats to the EU’s law enforcement agency.
As much as the odds are against any imminent revival of a Europe built around liberal ideas of open borders, the other vision of a deeper federal EU faces equally long chances of being revived.
Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister and now president of the European Council, which groups EU countries together, sought in a series of recent speeches to bury the old “integrationist” reflex of “confronting reality with all kinds of utopias.” His views were endorsed by, among others, a former French foreign minister who had in the past been seen as a champion of deeper EU integration.
An old saying about Europe held that the so-called project was like a shark that had to keep moving forward to survive. What happens if the shark stops moving, even goes into reverse — with or without Britain in the club? Coming weeks will show.
If anything can be said with certainty about European politics in the past year, it’s that like America’s these days, they’re divisive and deeply unpredictable, particularly in the countries seen as part of what used to be considered stable, boring “old Europe.”
Speaking in the Czech capital Prague earlier this month, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said, “Europe is cracking up west of us.” His right-wing government took out ads this week in Britain to urge a Remain vote.
Maybe they should have just done it anyway...
The Top-Secret Cold War Plan to Keep Soviet Hands Off Middle Eastern Oil
Fearing a Russian invasion, the U.S. and Britain were prepared to ravage the region’s oil industry—and even considered going nuclear.
By Steve Everly
On a cool summer day in London in 1951, an American CIA officer told three British oil executives about a top-secret U.S. government plan. The goal was to ravage the Middle East oil industry if the region were ever invaded by the Soviet Union. Oil wells would be plugged, equipment and fuel stockpiles destroyed, refineries and pipelines disabled—anything to keep the USSR from getting its hands on valuable oil resources. The CIA called it the “denial policy.”
Such a plan couldn’t work without the cooperation of the British and American companies who controlled the oil industry in the Middle East, which is why the CIA operative, George Prussing, ended up at the Ministry of Fuel and Power in London that day. To the British representatives of Iraq Petroleum, Kuwait Oil and Bahrain Oil, Prussing detailed how their production operations in those countries would in effect be transformed into a paramilitary force, trained and ready to execute the CIA’s plan in the event of a Soviet invasion. He asked for their help, and they agreed to cooperate. He also emphasized the need for security, which included keeping the policy secret from the targeted Middle East countries. “Security now is more important than the success of any operations,” Prussing told them.
The CIA’s oil denial policy is a snippet of a Cold War history that is finally giving up more of its secrets. In 1996, a brief description of the plan emerged after the Truman Presidential Library mistakenly declassified it—a security breach the National Archives deemed the worst in its history—and some additional details have trickled out over the years. But a recently discovered trove of documents stashed in Britain’s National Archives, along with some key American documents, now declassified, provide a more complete and more revelatory account—published here for the first time.
It turns out that the denial policy, long believed to have ended during Eisenhower’s presidency, was in place much longer than that, lingering into the Kennedy administration. And the newly discovered British documents reveal Britain was prepared to use nuclear weapons to keep the Soviet Union from Middle Eastern oil. The documents also show that the CIA played a far larger role than previously thought. The State Department and the National Security Council were always known to have been significantly involved, but in fact, it was the intelligence agency that was the driving force of the operation, organizing American and British companies to execute the denial policy, coming up with plans, providing explosives and spying on some of those companies as part of its oversight.
The history of this top secret U.S. government plot is a tumultuous mix of Arab nationalism, Big Oil and the CIA on the most oil-rich chunk of real estate on earth. Fundamentally, it is a tale of the growing importance of Middle Eastern oil and the West’s early thirst to control it. And decades later, with that thirst still driving U.S. involvement in the volatile region, it’s worth remembering the risky scheme that foreshadowed it all.
***
The oil denial policy was hatched in 1948 during the Berlin Blockade, when the Soviet Union tried to block the West’s access to the German city. The blockade stoked fears that further communist aggression would include a sweep through Iran and Iraq to the Persian Gulf—an invasion, the Truman administration worried, that U.S. troops and their allies wouldn’t be able to stop. But American and British companies controlled Middle Eastern oil, and the U.S. government decided a stop-gap measure could stymie the Soviet military by ensuring its taste for fuel wasn’t slaked with petroleum.
The National Security Council’s plan, officially known as NSC 26/2 (and which was approved by President Harry Truman in 1949), was for those American and British companies to destroy or sideline Middle East oil resources and facilities at the start of a Soviet offensive. According to the NSC 26/2 planning documents, the State Department would provide oversight; the CIA would handle operational details for each country.
Based on National Security Council documents, the intelligence agency immediately approached Terry Duce, Aramco’s vice president of government relations, for advice about implementing a covert denial plan in Saudi Arabia. Aramco owned the rights to produce Saudi Arabian oil and had a working relationship with the country’s government. Duce, who liked to wear a black beret and loved the spy game, had served a stint at the federal government’s Petroleum Administration during World War II and was well known in Washington. Allen Dulles, who later became the CIA’s director, was a frequent guest at Duce’s home.
Aramco, jointly owned at the time by predecessor companies of Exxon Corp., Mobil Inc., Chevron Corp. and Texaco Inc., threw itself into the effort by providing the CIA with crucial advice, including how to plug oil wells and disable refineries. Through Duce, Aramco also volunteered its employees to execute the plan and was even willing to consider their induction into the military if the plan were triggered. (Aramco and U.S. officials hoped military status would protect employees from execution for sabotage if they were captured.)
In the meantime, according to British Foreign Office documents, the British government was notified about NSC 26/2 and threw its support behind the measure, agreeing to prepare denial plans for its oil companies in Iran and Iraq. Britain’s approach differed from the outset: While the CIA’s strategy for Saudi Arabia relied entirely on Aramco employees and not at all on the U.S. military, the British plan used airborne troops to protect and assist the hundreds of oil company employees who would participate in destroying the facilities.
All appeared to be going well for the CIA’s ambitious plot. But it wasn’t long until this promising start began to degenerate. British oil companies turned out to be way more reluctant to cooperate than their government had been. In late 1950, Sir Thomas Fraser, chairman of Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., a jewel in the fading British Empire, learned for the first time his company was expected to provide hundreds of employees for the denial scheme. He feared economic blackmail, even expulsion, if the Iranian government learned about his company’s involvement—and, according to British documents, Fraser pulled Anglo-Iranian Oil out of the plan in late 1950.
George McGhee, an undersecretary at the State Department, was furious. In February 1951, he summoned a British official to Foggy Bottom and told him it was time for his government to make up its mind regardless of what Anglo-Iranian Oil—later to be renamed British Petroleum—thought. “It was quite unjustifiable that the oil denial arrangements should not be completed to the last detail,” McGhee said, according to a British memo about the meeting. In response a few weeks later, the British offered a denial blueprint for Iran that depended entirely on military troops and suggested a similar approach for Iraq. According to British documents that reveal communication with the State Department, this proposal stunned U.S. officials, who believed the plan would fail without the expertise and manpower provided by the oil companies.
What the United States didn’t know, however, was that the British were in fact willing to tap their oil companies for assistance, and that the oil companies were willing to provide it. London just didn’t want the United States to be aware of this, for fear that U.S. knowledge would jeopardize the secret. “We are bound not to let them know how much British oil companies are cooperating,” said D.P. Reilly of Britain’s Foreign Office to a senior British military official, a few weeks after the McGhee meeting.
***
When George Prussing, the CIA operative assigned to work with Middle Eastern oil companies on denial plans, stepped into the State Department on May 1, 1951, he hoped to convince the two British diplomatic and military officials there to meet him that they needed the CIA’s help to salvage their strategies. He gave them for the first time a detailed briefing of the Aramco plan he had helped develop, hoping that it would serve as a model for the rest of the region.
The Aramco denial plan, according to British notes of Prussing’s briefing, was organized around the company’s three administrative districts in Saudi Arabia. Forty-five senior Aramco employees were “fully in the picture.” Altogether 645 employees were earmarked to participate, but most knew only of their individual roles to prevent disclosure of the overall plan.
In addition, five CIA undercover agents were embedded in Aramco in jobs such as storekeeper and general manager’s assistant. They were charged with keeping the intelligence agency informed of the company’s work on the denial plan and any developments that might affect it. Outside the CIA, only one Aramco executive and one State Department official were aware of the agents’ real jobs, according to the British notes.
The goal was to keep the Soviets from tapping Saudi Arabia’s oil and refined fuels for up to a year in the event of an invasion. The plan would unfold in phases, starting with destruction of fuel stockpiles and disabling Aramco’s refinery. Selective demolitions would destroy key refinery components difficult for the Russians to replace. This would leave much of the refinery intact, making it easier for Aramco to resume production after the Soviets were ousted.
According to British notes of this meeting, the CIA had already imported military-grade explosives into Saudi Arabia, specially shaped to fit specific parts, to store in bunkers on Aramco property. Flamethrowers were to be widely used to melt small equipment parts. Other weapons included special grenades tested for destroying fuel stockpiles. Cement trucks were ordered for plugging oil wells.
Trucks, railway cars, generators and drilling rigs were also slated for destruction. Aramco employees, besides receiving military commissions, would be evacuated to safety once the denial operation was completed, Prussing said.
The briefing impressed J.A. Beckett, petroleum attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, who fired off a telegram to London advising that Aramco and the CIA had “developed a satisfactory modus operandi for this type of covert planning and are most anxious to extend their activities to cover the remaining [oil] fields.”
Prussing sought approval to install Aramco-style plans in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, where a mix of American and British oil companies were then operating, according to British documents. Britain, the governing authority in those countries, accepted Prussing’s proposal as long as Britain could remain responsible for triggering the execution of the denial plans in Kuwait and Qatar. (A decision about which country would order the plan to begin in Bahrain was deferred although Britain was inclined to give it to the United States.)
Britain remained responsible for developing the denial plans for Iran and Iraq, but Prussing offered the CIA’s assistance. To this end, British officials arranged a meeting in London for the next month, which is how Prussing ended up briefing executives from oil companies in Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq in June 1951. There, according to British notes of of the meeting, Prussing reviewed the Aramco plan with the businessnmen and said he was ready to advise and assist their own denial plans. They agreed to the assistance.
Yet, there was one key oil empire conspicuously missing from the meeting: Iran. Arranging plans for that country was proving to be far more difficult than for the others.
***
In early 1951, Iran was a steaming stew of resentment toward Anglo-Iranian Oil. The British company’s shabby treatment of its Iranian employees and its mercenary grip on the country’s oil riches had long soured relations between the company and the country.
Whispers about the denial plan were making things even worse. In December 1950, a Tehran newspaper published a story that reported rumors of high-level British government discussions to destroy Iran’s oil industry in the event of war—arousing astonishment and anxiety in Iranian political circles. The story also set off alarms bells in London and at Anglo-Iranian Oil, where efforts were redoubled to keep its cooperation a secret. Based on British Foreign Office documents detailing a conversation with an Anglo-Iranian executive, the company’s general manager was told—whether by his company or the government, it’s not clear—to disavow any knowledge of the denial plan. “The article was far too near the truth,” A.T. Chisholm, a company executive, said while dropping off a translated copy of the story at the British Foreign Office in London.
At the time, the British government owned 51 percent of Anglo-Iranian Oil, but an unusual clause in the ownership agreement prevented the government from being involved in the company’s commercial matters. According to Foreign Office documents discussing Anglo-Iranian’s participation in the plan, Fraser, the company’s chairman, shrewdly used this provision to push his view that the denial plan would be a financial disaster for the company. He warned that an American competitor might intentionally leak his company’s participation to Iran’s government to gain an advantage in the country—and he said he would not participate.
“He was convinced that no security measure would be effective once the American oil companies were brought into the picture,” said R. Kelf-Cohen, an official with Britain’s Ministry of Fuel and Power, during a meeting in London to discuss the denial policy.
But Fraser, under pressure after the McGhee meeting with British government officials in February 1951, eventually grudgingly agreed to allow a denial plan to use his company’s employees. He had conditions, though. His approval would be required, for instance, to execute the denial plan until he was sure the company could recover any financial losses incurred. The British government decided that his cooperation would be kept secret from the Americans so that U.S. oil companies didn’t try to undercut Ango-Iranian oil.
But then, Iranian politics put a wrench in the plan. On March 7, 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated by a nationalist and was replaced in April by Mohammad Mosaddeq, who promptly nationalized the company.
Seizure of Anglo-Iranian Oil’s assets by the Iranian government nixed the denial plan with consequences that threatened the entire NSC 26/2 policy. The company produced half the oil in the Middle East and more than half the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Its Abadan refinery was the largest in the world and by itself could probably satisfy a Soviet invasion’s thirst for fuel.
The nationalization triggered a scramble for options. According to British documents, the United States asked Britain if the plan’s mission to counter a Soviet invasion could be salvaged with airborne strikes aiding British troops on the ground. Britain rejected this idea, claiming spare troops were not available and the ground demolitions called for by the plan would be too dangerous without the expert assistance of refinery workers.
According British military documents, Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, responsible for the country’s denial planning, decided instead that “oil denial [in Iran] can only be carried out by air attack.” Still, they were skeptical about having enough aircraft to successfully attack the massive Abadan refinery. Because of this fear, the plan that emerged was highly targeted: If the Soviets invaded Iran, the British Royal Air Force based in Iraq would attack fuel stockpiles at the Abadan facility, which was then idled by a British embargo of Iranian oil, leaving the refinery intact. British aircraft would snip production at the Abadan refinery, if reactivated, by bombing a railway that delivered crude oil to the facility. Airstrikes would also hit two small refineries in Iran, at Kermanshah and Naft-I-Shah, along with their fuel stockpiles.
***
By late 1951, as the denial plan for Iran reorganized, the plan for Saudi Arabia was settling in. Prussing was even treating a handful of Aramco employees to a picnic in the desert where they discussed the gritty details of oil denial over sandwiches.
“Refinery explosions would work like Chinese firecrackers; when one exploded it would set off another,” Bill Otto, an Aramco employee and a manager of the company’s denial plan who was at the picnic, told me in an interview.
The CIA wanted a speedy timetable to ensure the plan could be completed before the Soviets arrived. The agency had already arranged a communications channel that would allow the U.S. secretary of state to send the order triggering the denial plan to a boat sitting off the shore of Saudi Arabia. Aramco did its part by filling binders with photos, diagrams and instructions needed to execute the plan. A handful of the company’s American employees stored the 20,000 pounds of dynamite and plastic explosives needed for the demolitions—a job done without arising suspicion since Aramco used explosives in its normal operations.
“The program didn’t have any meat to it until we started putting [demolition details] down,” said Otto, a former Army bomb disposal expert. “[The CIA was] happy to have someone else doing it.”
There were other signs of progress in the region, with Bahrain Petroleum Co. and Kuwait Oil wrapping up their Aramco-style denial plans while the British oil company in Qatar agreed to cooperate with the CIA, according to a National Security Council document tracking the denial plan’s progress. A U.S. delegation visiting the Middle East in late 1951 gushed that “pre-war plans for denial of oil facilities have never before been so perfected.”
But this confidence was premature as Aramco, Kuwait Oil and Bahrain Petroleum executives signaled second thoughts, according to a later NSC progress report. They told U.S. officials in 1952 that they had made no final decisions about their companies’ role in executing the denial plan. “I think they saw the difficulties,” said Parker Hart, the State Department consul general in Saudi Arabia at the time.
These difficulties included using employees to execute the policy. Though the companies had initially embraced the idea, they later had doubts about their authority to force workers to participate in the dangerous operation. That problem could be fixed by using volunteers, but the companies wanted military protection for them, something not part of the CIA’s plans. But the biggest issue for these companies, just like for Anglo-Iranian Oil, centered on the economic consequences if the denial plans leaked to the host governments: Aramco, for example, was producing more than twice the amount of oil it had been when it agreed to help the CIA in 1948—and bigger revenues meant the company was less prepared to risk Saudi Arabia’s wrath.
Looking for some insurance, Kuwait Oil and Bahrain Petroleum requested letters from the British and American governments stating their companies had been commandeered for the denial plan. They could show the letters to local government officials if the plan leaked, which they hoped would save their companies. But the State Department refused to provide the letters, saying they were unnecessary: There was ample evidence in its files to show it pressured the companies to cooperate. British officials summarily rejected the request fearing the “demand for such a letter appeared to be a lever which might be used in any subsequent discussions on compensation.”
Aramco and Kuwait Oil, by then the largest oil producers in the Middle East after production plummeted in Iran following the nationalization of Anglo-Iranian, tried another route and pushed for disclosure of the denial plans to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The United States again refused, since it was about to ask some Middle Eastern countries to join a military alliance (which became the Baghdad Pact of 1955). U.S. officials believed disclosure of the denial policy could derail the fledgling alliance.
With that, Aramco decided the economic risk for the company was too great and demanded removal of denial plans and explosives from its property. The company believed the surge in denial training and the growing number of Saudi employees at Aramco made a security leak inevitable, and American diplomats in the country agreed. “You’d never get away with it,” said U.S. Consul General Hart to the State Department.
***
The setback in Saudi Arabia threatened to kill the denial policy as it limped into the Eisenhower administration in 1953. But just a few weeks after the new president’s inauguration, a report on NSC 26/2 landed at the National Security Council, and ignited efforts to save it. The author of the report was Walter Bedell Smith, a former chief of staff and trusted aide for Ike during World War II who was settling into a State Department job. He told colleagues he was “vexed” by the denial policy, and his report, seasoned by his recent three-year stint as CIA director, reflected it. He sketched out the plan’s problems, which went beyond Aramco’s reluctance to participate. The use of volunteers was under review, but they might not be as effective as hand-picked employees. The program to plug oil wells was also in trouble because of the time it took to complete the job. The report noted high-level discussions taking place about giving the U.S. military more responsibility for the denial policy, which would diminish the CIA’s control.
The report led with a bullet-point list of the changes in oil demand and supply since the approval of NSC 26/2 four years before. The United States had become a net importer of 600,000 barrels of oil per day, double what it was in 1949, and the United Kingdom’s demand for imported oil climbed had to 161 million barrels in 1952, up from 126 million barrels just three years earlier. During the same period, Middle East oil production had soared to meet the needs of the West.
A follow-up review found that while denial plans were still needed to counter the Soviets, it was increasingly important that Middle East oil be preserved for later use by the West. The denial policy’s use of selective demolitions promised a quick production rebound once the Soviets were ousted. The problem was with plugging the oil wells, which could take a week or more to do—not fast enough in the face of a rapid Soviet assault. Unplugged wells could allow the Soviets to cause permanent damage to the oil fields, by setting the wells on fire or letting them flow freely.
In 1954, Eisenhower approved NSC 5401, which straddled these disparate goals. The new policy called for “conservation” of Middle East oil, with more emphasis on plugging oil wells in a timely way, while also maintaining ground demolitions. At the same time, a last resort plan was added: If the companies were unable to execute ground demolitions, the U.S. military would destroy the oil facilities with airstrikes.
The State Department also eyed the military to fill the vacuum left by Aramco’s refusal to execute the ground demolitions—that meant sending in troops to do the job. But the Defense Department pushed back. Smith told the National Security Council, as it mulled approval of NSC 5401, that he understood the military’s reluctance but it was inevitable that oil denial in Saudi Arabia was primarily a military job. Allen Dulles, by then director of CIA, agreed that for Saudi Arabia if “anything at all were to be done on D-Day, it would be done by the military.”
But the Defense Department, anticipating a shortage of troops in the region, refused to commit to ground demolitions. Airstrikes were still available as a last resort, but they were not ideal since disabling rather than destroying the fields was the preferred outcome. “The most therefore that could be hoped for was the [ground demolition] job could be done by experts from Aramco and the CIA with some degree of protection by the military,” said Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security, according to a National Security Council document in December 1953.
Had Aramco changed its mind? Cutler left it an open question, but William Chandler, vice president at the time of Aramco-owned Tapline, said in an interview before his death in 2009 that the company did resume cooperation, at least to some extent. He received a call in early 1954 from an Aramco executive to expect a briefing about a “special program” involving Tapline, which operated an oil pipeline across Saudi Arabia. The plan was to disable the pipeline if the Soviets invaded by destroying key valves in its pumps. Company supervisors were trained to use plastic explosives, which they stored in footlockers under their beds. “It was something we were ordered to do,” said Chandler.
***
Meanwhile, Britain was also rethinking its denial plans for Iran and Iraq. In 1953, a coup in Iran, backed by the United States and Britain, installed a friendlier government. An oil consortium, majority owned by British Petroleum and the four American oil companies that owned Aramco, was created to manage the bulk of the country’s oil industry. But Iranian government owned facilities were emerging despite the consortium, according to British documents.
The same thing was happening in Iraq, where hundreds of Iraq Petroleum employees were prepared to disable the company’s massive Kirkuk petroleum complex. The British company’s grip on the Iraqi oil industry had loosened, and the country’s government controlled refineries in Baghdad, Basra and Alwand.
For the denial plans to succeed in these countries, these government-controlled facilities had to be sidelined as well as all the others. But asking Iran and Iraq’s governments to develop denial plans would confirm existence of the policy and likely cause the two countries to lose confidence in their Western allies. That left Britain with the option to use airstrikes, but the military was wary of that option: German refineries during World War II had proven difficult to knock out using conventional bombs.
In 1955, when Britain was just starting to stockpile nuclear weapons, Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff showed interest in using nuclear weapons to destroy oil facilities in Iran and Iraq. The “most complete method of destroying oil installations would be by nuclear bombardment,” read a 1955 report endorsed by Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s not clear if U.S. officials were involved in these discussions at this stage. But according to British military documents reviewing denial plan options, the Joint Chiefs, had minister-level approval to ask the United States to help by using some of its nuclear arsenal on Iran if the denial plan were triggered, according to British Ministry of Defence documents. The request was discussed in a meeting with U.S. officials in London in early 1956. Meeting records don’t mention any American reaction to the proposal. But a decision was deferred until Prussing could review the denial plan for Iran and inspect its oil fields and facilities. A British memorandum to Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff after the meeting said in the “near future, the only feasible means [in Iran] of oil denial would be American nuclear action.”
After returning from Iran, Prussing concluded that oil denial using ground demolitions was still workable for the country. In British military documents dated after Prussing’s review, British officials noted the growing number of U.S. nationals working in Iran made it increasingly likely that ground demolitions would be successful, and that nuclear destruction wouldn’t be necessary. Otto, Aramco’s expert on ground demolitions, was dispatched to help the British restructure its denial plan for Iran.
Elsewhere, Britain and the United States agreed to extend the reach of the denial policy. A refinery in Lebanon owned by predecessor companies of Chevron and Texaco, and a British refinery in Egypt for the first time were covered by denial plans. A proposed refinery in Syria was slated for one as soon as it was completed. The United States agreed to be responsible for denial planning in the Kuwait Neutral Zone, a patch of land between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The British identified refineries and pipelines in Israel and Turkey to eventually target.
The progress was encouraging enough for the State and Defense Departments and the CIA in 1956 to propose continuing the denial policy essentially unchanged. But a junior staffer at the National Security Council had a different idea. He believed changing politics in the Middle East meant that “the whole operation” should be killed.
***
George Weber, 31, was no stranger to the denial policy, having assisted the government committee whose recommendations led to NSC 5401. But by 1956 the University of Cincinnati graduate and NSC staffer believed it should be shelved, in part because it only dealt with a war involving the Soviet Union. By that year, the Soviets weren’t the only problem for Western nations in the Middle East; burgeoning Arab nationalism movements were also a threat to the West’s hold on regional oil. President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal was a prime example.
Weber also questioned the usefulness of selective demolitions to disable facilities since the Soviets would probably completely destroy them when forced to retreat. Meanwhile, increased selective-demolitions training by the oil companies was raising chances of a security leak, “I think the Council should review very carefully the wisdom of such a program,” he said in a memorandum to Cutler, Eisenhower’s national security adviser.
The denial policy was not killed, but Weber triggered a transformation, and in a few months Eisenhower approved its replacement: NSC 5714. The destruction of oil facilities in the event of a Soviet invasion remained part of the plan as a last resort, but only with “direct military action” as opposed to employee involvement directed by the CIA. The CIA partnership with the oil companies was abandoned. “Covert denial by civilian agencies had become impracticable,” said William Rountree, a State Department official, in a memo.
The new policy also became more preemptive, swinging toward protection of oil facilities in the face of new threats in addition to Soviet invasion, like sabotage and regional war. In this, Middle Eastern countries were to be asked to play an unprecedented role. Oil companies and local governments were to work together to boost security, including hardening oil facilities for protection against attack. Local governments would also be asked to cooperate in plugging oil wells if they were threatened to save the oil for later use by the West.
“Thus the evolution of this policy has taken another step,” Weber said.
The shift did not put an end to other American and British plans involving Middle East oil. A broader U.S initiative in 1958—unrelated to NSC 5714—called for the possible use of military force as a last resort against Arab nationalists, to keep the oil flowing at reasonable prices. The British in 1957, deeming a Soviet invasion unlikely, refined plans to use its military to protect oil installations in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar if threatened by “Egyptian subversion.”
How NSC 5714 fit in to this new Middle Eastern security landscape is unclear. It was put in place, but the handful of declassified documents reveals little about its fate, including whether or not any local governments agreed to cooperate. In 1963, the Kennedy White House asked the State Department whether NSC 5714 should be rescinded, replaced by something else, or if it still represented U.S. policy. That is the last document I was able to find about the denial plan in America or Britain. A response is not in the file, and it’s unclear when the policy ended.
Those in the field did notice the shift brought on by NSC 5714. Otto was instructed to destroy the 10 tons of explosives stashed at Aramco, which rattled windows miles away. He was also was dispatched in the late 1950s to Tapline to remove the explosives still tucked under the beds of supervisors. Chandler, who became president of Tapline, was relieved to see them gone. The Saudis believed they owned the pipeline and would have been furious about the denial plan.
So why take the risk from the start? Patriotism was high in the years after World War II, Chandler later recalled, and so was the willingness to help the United States in its fight against communism.
“We had a good crowd and we didn’t have complaints and that was the amazing thing,” he said. “It was just we had to do this and everyone went along with it.”
Fearing a Russian invasion, the U.S. and Britain were prepared to ravage the region’s oil industry—and even considered going nuclear.
By Steve Everly
On a cool summer day in London in 1951, an American CIA officer told three British oil executives about a top-secret U.S. government plan. The goal was to ravage the Middle East oil industry if the region were ever invaded by the Soviet Union. Oil wells would be plugged, equipment and fuel stockpiles destroyed, refineries and pipelines disabled—anything to keep the USSR from getting its hands on valuable oil resources. The CIA called it the “denial policy.”
Such a plan couldn’t work without the cooperation of the British and American companies who controlled the oil industry in the Middle East, which is why the CIA operative, George Prussing, ended up at the Ministry of Fuel and Power in London that day. To the British representatives of Iraq Petroleum, Kuwait Oil and Bahrain Oil, Prussing detailed how their production operations in those countries would in effect be transformed into a paramilitary force, trained and ready to execute the CIA’s plan in the event of a Soviet invasion. He asked for their help, and they agreed to cooperate. He also emphasized the need for security, which included keeping the policy secret from the targeted Middle East countries. “Security now is more important than the success of any operations,” Prussing told them.
The CIA’s oil denial policy is a snippet of a Cold War history that is finally giving up more of its secrets. In 1996, a brief description of the plan emerged after the Truman Presidential Library mistakenly declassified it—a security breach the National Archives deemed the worst in its history—and some additional details have trickled out over the years. But a recently discovered trove of documents stashed in Britain’s National Archives, along with some key American documents, now declassified, provide a more complete and more revelatory account—published here for the first time.
It turns out that the denial policy, long believed to have ended during Eisenhower’s presidency, was in place much longer than that, lingering into the Kennedy administration. And the newly discovered British documents reveal Britain was prepared to use nuclear weapons to keep the Soviet Union from Middle Eastern oil. The documents also show that the CIA played a far larger role than previously thought. The State Department and the National Security Council were always known to have been significantly involved, but in fact, it was the intelligence agency that was the driving force of the operation, organizing American and British companies to execute the denial policy, coming up with plans, providing explosives and spying on some of those companies as part of its oversight.
The history of this top secret U.S. government plot is a tumultuous mix of Arab nationalism, Big Oil and the CIA on the most oil-rich chunk of real estate on earth. Fundamentally, it is a tale of the growing importance of Middle Eastern oil and the West’s early thirst to control it. And decades later, with that thirst still driving U.S. involvement in the volatile region, it’s worth remembering the risky scheme that foreshadowed it all.
***
The oil denial policy was hatched in 1948 during the Berlin Blockade, when the Soviet Union tried to block the West’s access to the German city. The blockade stoked fears that further communist aggression would include a sweep through Iran and Iraq to the Persian Gulf—an invasion, the Truman administration worried, that U.S. troops and their allies wouldn’t be able to stop. But American and British companies controlled Middle Eastern oil, and the U.S. government decided a stop-gap measure could stymie the Soviet military by ensuring its taste for fuel wasn’t slaked with petroleum.
The National Security Council’s plan, officially known as NSC 26/2 (and which was approved by President Harry Truman in 1949), was for those American and British companies to destroy or sideline Middle East oil resources and facilities at the start of a Soviet offensive. According to the NSC 26/2 planning documents, the State Department would provide oversight; the CIA would handle operational details for each country.
Based on National Security Council documents, the intelligence agency immediately approached Terry Duce, Aramco’s vice president of government relations, for advice about implementing a covert denial plan in Saudi Arabia. Aramco owned the rights to produce Saudi Arabian oil and had a working relationship with the country’s government. Duce, who liked to wear a black beret and loved the spy game, had served a stint at the federal government’s Petroleum Administration during World War II and was well known in Washington. Allen Dulles, who later became the CIA’s director, was a frequent guest at Duce’s home.
Aramco, jointly owned at the time by predecessor companies of Exxon Corp., Mobil Inc., Chevron Corp. and Texaco Inc., threw itself into the effort by providing the CIA with crucial advice, including how to plug oil wells and disable refineries. Through Duce, Aramco also volunteered its employees to execute the plan and was even willing to consider their induction into the military if the plan were triggered. (Aramco and U.S. officials hoped military status would protect employees from execution for sabotage if they were captured.)
In the meantime, according to British Foreign Office documents, the British government was notified about NSC 26/2 and threw its support behind the measure, agreeing to prepare denial plans for its oil companies in Iran and Iraq. Britain’s approach differed from the outset: While the CIA’s strategy for Saudi Arabia relied entirely on Aramco employees and not at all on the U.S. military, the British plan used airborne troops to protect and assist the hundreds of oil company employees who would participate in destroying the facilities.
All appeared to be going well for the CIA’s ambitious plot. But it wasn’t long until this promising start began to degenerate. British oil companies turned out to be way more reluctant to cooperate than their government had been. In late 1950, Sir Thomas Fraser, chairman of Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., a jewel in the fading British Empire, learned for the first time his company was expected to provide hundreds of employees for the denial scheme. He feared economic blackmail, even expulsion, if the Iranian government learned about his company’s involvement—and, according to British documents, Fraser pulled Anglo-Iranian Oil out of the plan in late 1950.
George McGhee, an undersecretary at the State Department, was furious. In February 1951, he summoned a British official to Foggy Bottom and told him it was time for his government to make up its mind regardless of what Anglo-Iranian Oil—later to be renamed British Petroleum—thought. “It was quite unjustifiable that the oil denial arrangements should not be completed to the last detail,” McGhee said, according to a British memo about the meeting. In response a few weeks later, the British offered a denial blueprint for Iran that depended entirely on military troops and suggested a similar approach for Iraq. According to British documents that reveal communication with the State Department, this proposal stunned U.S. officials, who believed the plan would fail without the expertise and manpower provided by the oil companies.
What the United States didn’t know, however, was that the British were in fact willing to tap their oil companies for assistance, and that the oil companies were willing to provide it. London just didn’t want the United States to be aware of this, for fear that U.S. knowledge would jeopardize the secret. “We are bound not to let them know how much British oil companies are cooperating,” said D.P. Reilly of Britain’s Foreign Office to a senior British military official, a few weeks after the McGhee meeting.
***
When George Prussing, the CIA operative assigned to work with Middle Eastern oil companies on denial plans, stepped into the State Department on May 1, 1951, he hoped to convince the two British diplomatic and military officials there to meet him that they needed the CIA’s help to salvage their strategies. He gave them for the first time a detailed briefing of the Aramco plan he had helped develop, hoping that it would serve as a model for the rest of the region.
The Aramco denial plan, according to British notes of Prussing’s briefing, was organized around the company’s three administrative districts in Saudi Arabia. Forty-five senior Aramco employees were “fully in the picture.” Altogether 645 employees were earmarked to participate, but most knew only of their individual roles to prevent disclosure of the overall plan.
In addition, five CIA undercover agents were embedded in Aramco in jobs such as storekeeper and general manager’s assistant. They were charged with keeping the intelligence agency informed of the company’s work on the denial plan and any developments that might affect it. Outside the CIA, only one Aramco executive and one State Department official were aware of the agents’ real jobs, according to the British notes.
The goal was to keep the Soviets from tapping Saudi Arabia’s oil and refined fuels for up to a year in the event of an invasion. The plan would unfold in phases, starting with destruction of fuel stockpiles and disabling Aramco’s refinery. Selective demolitions would destroy key refinery components difficult for the Russians to replace. This would leave much of the refinery intact, making it easier for Aramco to resume production after the Soviets were ousted.
According to British notes of this meeting, the CIA had already imported military-grade explosives into Saudi Arabia, specially shaped to fit specific parts, to store in bunkers on Aramco property. Flamethrowers were to be widely used to melt small equipment parts. Other weapons included special grenades tested for destroying fuel stockpiles. Cement trucks were ordered for plugging oil wells.
Trucks, railway cars, generators and drilling rigs were also slated for destruction. Aramco employees, besides receiving military commissions, would be evacuated to safety once the denial operation was completed, Prussing said.
The briefing impressed J.A. Beckett, petroleum attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, who fired off a telegram to London advising that Aramco and the CIA had “developed a satisfactory modus operandi for this type of covert planning and are most anxious to extend their activities to cover the remaining [oil] fields.”
Prussing sought approval to install Aramco-style plans in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, where a mix of American and British oil companies were then operating, according to British documents. Britain, the governing authority in those countries, accepted Prussing’s proposal as long as Britain could remain responsible for triggering the execution of the denial plans in Kuwait and Qatar. (A decision about which country would order the plan to begin in Bahrain was deferred although Britain was inclined to give it to the United States.)
Britain remained responsible for developing the denial plans for Iran and Iraq, but Prussing offered the CIA’s assistance. To this end, British officials arranged a meeting in London for the next month, which is how Prussing ended up briefing executives from oil companies in Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq in June 1951. There, according to British notes of of the meeting, Prussing reviewed the Aramco plan with the businessnmen and said he was ready to advise and assist their own denial plans. They agreed to the assistance.
Yet, there was one key oil empire conspicuously missing from the meeting: Iran. Arranging plans for that country was proving to be far more difficult than for the others.
***
In early 1951, Iran was a steaming stew of resentment toward Anglo-Iranian Oil. The British company’s shabby treatment of its Iranian employees and its mercenary grip on the country’s oil riches had long soured relations between the company and the country.
Whispers about the denial plan were making things even worse. In December 1950, a Tehran newspaper published a story that reported rumors of high-level British government discussions to destroy Iran’s oil industry in the event of war—arousing astonishment and anxiety in Iranian political circles. The story also set off alarms bells in London and at Anglo-Iranian Oil, where efforts were redoubled to keep its cooperation a secret. Based on British Foreign Office documents detailing a conversation with an Anglo-Iranian executive, the company’s general manager was told—whether by his company or the government, it’s not clear—to disavow any knowledge of the denial plan. “The article was far too near the truth,” A.T. Chisholm, a company executive, said while dropping off a translated copy of the story at the British Foreign Office in London.
At the time, the British government owned 51 percent of Anglo-Iranian Oil, but an unusual clause in the ownership agreement prevented the government from being involved in the company’s commercial matters. According to Foreign Office documents discussing Anglo-Iranian’s participation in the plan, Fraser, the company’s chairman, shrewdly used this provision to push his view that the denial plan would be a financial disaster for the company. He warned that an American competitor might intentionally leak his company’s participation to Iran’s government to gain an advantage in the country—and he said he would not participate.
“He was convinced that no security measure would be effective once the American oil companies were brought into the picture,” said R. Kelf-Cohen, an official with Britain’s Ministry of Fuel and Power, during a meeting in London to discuss the denial policy.
But Fraser, under pressure after the McGhee meeting with British government officials in February 1951, eventually grudgingly agreed to allow a denial plan to use his company’s employees. He had conditions, though. His approval would be required, for instance, to execute the denial plan until he was sure the company could recover any financial losses incurred. The British government decided that his cooperation would be kept secret from the Americans so that U.S. oil companies didn’t try to undercut Ango-Iranian oil.
But then, Iranian politics put a wrench in the plan. On March 7, 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated by a nationalist and was replaced in April by Mohammad Mosaddeq, who promptly nationalized the company.
Seizure of Anglo-Iranian Oil’s assets by the Iranian government nixed the denial plan with consequences that threatened the entire NSC 26/2 policy. The company produced half the oil in the Middle East and more than half the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Its Abadan refinery was the largest in the world and by itself could probably satisfy a Soviet invasion’s thirst for fuel.
The nationalization triggered a scramble for options. According to British documents, the United States asked Britain if the plan’s mission to counter a Soviet invasion could be salvaged with airborne strikes aiding British troops on the ground. Britain rejected this idea, claiming spare troops were not available and the ground demolitions called for by the plan would be too dangerous without the expert assistance of refinery workers.
According British military documents, Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, responsible for the country’s denial planning, decided instead that “oil denial [in Iran] can only be carried out by air attack.” Still, they were skeptical about having enough aircraft to successfully attack the massive Abadan refinery. Because of this fear, the plan that emerged was highly targeted: If the Soviets invaded Iran, the British Royal Air Force based in Iraq would attack fuel stockpiles at the Abadan facility, which was then idled by a British embargo of Iranian oil, leaving the refinery intact. British aircraft would snip production at the Abadan refinery, if reactivated, by bombing a railway that delivered crude oil to the facility. Airstrikes would also hit two small refineries in Iran, at Kermanshah and Naft-I-Shah, along with their fuel stockpiles.
***
By late 1951, as the denial plan for Iran reorganized, the plan for Saudi Arabia was settling in. Prussing was even treating a handful of Aramco employees to a picnic in the desert where they discussed the gritty details of oil denial over sandwiches.
“Refinery explosions would work like Chinese firecrackers; when one exploded it would set off another,” Bill Otto, an Aramco employee and a manager of the company’s denial plan who was at the picnic, told me in an interview.
The CIA wanted a speedy timetable to ensure the plan could be completed before the Soviets arrived. The agency had already arranged a communications channel that would allow the U.S. secretary of state to send the order triggering the denial plan to a boat sitting off the shore of Saudi Arabia. Aramco did its part by filling binders with photos, diagrams and instructions needed to execute the plan. A handful of the company’s American employees stored the 20,000 pounds of dynamite and plastic explosives needed for the demolitions—a job done without arising suspicion since Aramco used explosives in its normal operations.
“The program didn’t have any meat to it until we started putting [demolition details] down,” said Otto, a former Army bomb disposal expert. “[The CIA was] happy to have someone else doing it.”
There were other signs of progress in the region, with Bahrain Petroleum Co. and Kuwait Oil wrapping up their Aramco-style denial plans while the British oil company in Qatar agreed to cooperate with the CIA, according to a National Security Council document tracking the denial plan’s progress. A U.S. delegation visiting the Middle East in late 1951 gushed that “pre-war plans for denial of oil facilities have never before been so perfected.”
But this confidence was premature as Aramco, Kuwait Oil and Bahrain Petroleum executives signaled second thoughts, according to a later NSC progress report. They told U.S. officials in 1952 that they had made no final decisions about their companies’ role in executing the denial plan. “I think they saw the difficulties,” said Parker Hart, the State Department consul general in Saudi Arabia at the time.
These difficulties included using employees to execute the policy. Though the companies had initially embraced the idea, they later had doubts about their authority to force workers to participate in the dangerous operation. That problem could be fixed by using volunteers, but the companies wanted military protection for them, something not part of the CIA’s plans. But the biggest issue for these companies, just like for Anglo-Iranian Oil, centered on the economic consequences if the denial plans leaked to the host governments: Aramco, for example, was producing more than twice the amount of oil it had been when it agreed to help the CIA in 1948—and bigger revenues meant the company was less prepared to risk Saudi Arabia’s wrath.
Looking for some insurance, Kuwait Oil and Bahrain Petroleum requested letters from the British and American governments stating their companies had been commandeered for the denial plan. They could show the letters to local government officials if the plan leaked, which they hoped would save their companies. But the State Department refused to provide the letters, saying they were unnecessary: There was ample evidence in its files to show it pressured the companies to cooperate. British officials summarily rejected the request fearing the “demand for such a letter appeared to be a lever which might be used in any subsequent discussions on compensation.”
Aramco and Kuwait Oil, by then the largest oil producers in the Middle East after production plummeted in Iran following the nationalization of Anglo-Iranian, tried another route and pushed for disclosure of the denial plans to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The United States again refused, since it was about to ask some Middle Eastern countries to join a military alliance (which became the Baghdad Pact of 1955). U.S. officials believed disclosure of the denial policy could derail the fledgling alliance.
With that, Aramco decided the economic risk for the company was too great and demanded removal of denial plans and explosives from its property. The company believed the surge in denial training and the growing number of Saudi employees at Aramco made a security leak inevitable, and American diplomats in the country agreed. “You’d never get away with it,” said U.S. Consul General Hart to the State Department.
***
The setback in Saudi Arabia threatened to kill the denial policy as it limped into the Eisenhower administration in 1953. But just a few weeks after the new president’s inauguration, a report on NSC 26/2 landed at the National Security Council, and ignited efforts to save it. The author of the report was Walter Bedell Smith, a former chief of staff and trusted aide for Ike during World War II who was settling into a State Department job. He told colleagues he was “vexed” by the denial policy, and his report, seasoned by his recent three-year stint as CIA director, reflected it. He sketched out the plan’s problems, which went beyond Aramco’s reluctance to participate. The use of volunteers was under review, but they might not be as effective as hand-picked employees. The program to plug oil wells was also in trouble because of the time it took to complete the job. The report noted high-level discussions taking place about giving the U.S. military more responsibility for the denial policy, which would diminish the CIA’s control.
The report led with a bullet-point list of the changes in oil demand and supply since the approval of NSC 26/2 four years before. The United States had become a net importer of 600,000 barrels of oil per day, double what it was in 1949, and the United Kingdom’s demand for imported oil climbed had to 161 million barrels in 1952, up from 126 million barrels just three years earlier. During the same period, Middle East oil production had soared to meet the needs of the West.
A follow-up review found that while denial plans were still needed to counter the Soviets, it was increasingly important that Middle East oil be preserved for later use by the West. The denial policy’s use of selective demolitions promised a quick production rebound once the Soviets were ousted. The problem was with plugging the oil wells, which could take a week or more to do—not fast enough in the face of a rapid Soviet assault. Unplugged wells could allow the Soviets to cause permanent damage to the oil fields, by setting the wells on fire or letting them flow freely.
In 1954, Eisenhower approved NSC 5401, which straddled these disparate goals. The new policy called for “conservation” of Middle East oil, with more emphasis on plugging oil wells in a timely way, while also maintaining ground demolitions. At the same time, a last resort plan was added: If the companies were unable to execute ground demolitions, the U.S. military would destroy the oil facilities with airstrikes.
The State Department also eyed the military to fill the vacuum left by Aramco’s refusal to execute the ground demolitions—that meant sending in troops to do the job. But the Defense Department pushed back. Smith told the National Security Council, as it mulled approval of NSC 5401, that he understood the military’s reluctance but it was inevitable that oil denial in Saudi Arabia was primarily a military job. Allen Dulles, by then director of CIA, agreed that for Saudi Arabia if “anything at all were to be done on D-Day, it would be done by the military.”
But the Defense Department, anticipating a shortage of troops in the region, refused to commit to ground demolitions. Airstrikes were still available as a last resort, but they were not ideal since disabling rather than destroying the fields was the preferred outcome. “The most therefore that could be hoped for was the [ground demolition] job could be done by experts from Aramco and the CIA with some degree of protection by the military,” said Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security, according to a National Security Council document in December 1953.
Had Aramco changed its mind? Cutler left it an open question, but William Chandler, vice president at the time of Aramco-owned Tapline, said in an interview before his death in 2009 that the company did resume cooperation, at least to some extent. He received a call in early 1954 from an Aramco executive to expect a briefing about a “special program” involving Tapline, which operated an oil pipeline across Saudi Arabia. The plan was to disable the pipeline if the Soviets invaded by destroying key valves in its pumps. Company supervisors were trained to use plastic explosives, which they stored in footlockers under their beds. “It was something we were ordered to do,” said Chandler.
***
Meanwhile, Britain was also rethinking its denial plans for Iran and Iraq. In 1953, a coup in Iran, backed by the United States and Britain, installed a friendlier government. An oil consortium, majority owned by British Petroleum and the four American oil companies that owned Aramco, was created to manage the bulk of the country’s oil industry. But Iranian government owned facilities were emerging despite the consortium, according to British documents.
The same thing was happening in Iraq, where hundreds of Iraq Petroleum employees were prepared to disable the company’s massive Kirkuk petroleum complex. The British company’s grip on the Iraqi oil industry had loosened, and the country’s government controlled refineries in Baghdad, Basra and Alwand.
For the denial plans to succeed in these countries, these government-controlled facilities had to be sidelined as well as all the others. But asking Iran and Iraq’s governments to develop denial plans would confirm existence of the policy and likely cause the two countries to lose confidence in their Western allies. That left Britain with the option to use airstrikes, but the military was wary of that option: German refineries during World War II had proven difficult to knock out using conventional bombs.
In 1955, when Britain was just starting to stockpile nuclear weapons, Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff showed interest in using nuclear weapons to destroy oil facilities in Iran and Iraq. The “most complete method of destroying oil installations would be by nuclear bombardment,” read a 1955 report endorsed by Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s not clear if U.S. officials were involved in these discussions at this stage. But according to British military documents reviewing denial plan options, the Joint Chiefs, had minister-level approval to ask the United States to help by using some of its nuclear arsenal on Iran if the denial plan were triggered, according to British Ministry of Defence documents. The request was discussed in a meeting with U.S. officials in London in early 1956. Meeting records don’t mention any American reaction to the proposal. But a decision was deferred until Prussing could review the denial plan for Iran and inspect its oil fields and facilities. A British memorandum to Britain’s Joint Chiefs of Staff after the meeting said in the “near future, the only feasible means [in Iran] of oil denial would be American nuclear action.”
After returning from Iran, Prussing concluded that oil denial using ground demolitions was still workable for the country. In British military documents dated after Prussing’s review, British officials noted the growing number of U.S. nationals working in Iran made it increasingly likely that ground demolitions would be successful, and that nuclear destruction wouldn’t be necessary. Otto, Aramco’s expert on ground demolitions, was dispatched to help the British restructure its denial plan for Iran.
Elsewhere, Britain and the United States agreed to extend the reach of the denial policy. A refinery in Lebanon owned by predecessor companies of Chevron and Texaco, and a British refinery in Egypt for the first time were covered by denial plans. A proposed refinery in Syria was slated for one as soon as it was completed. The United States agreed to be responsible for denial planning in the Kuwait Neutral Zone, a patch of land between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The British identified refineries and pipelines in Israel and Turkey to eventually target.
The progress was encouraging enough for the State and Defense Departments and the CIA in 1956 to propose continuing the denial policy essentially unchanged. But a junior staffer at the National Security Council had a different idea. He believed changing politics in the Middle East meant that “the whole operation” should be killed.
***
George Weber, 31, was no stranger to the denial policy, having assisted the government committee whose recommendations led to NSC 5401. But by 1956 the University of Cincinnati graduate and NSC staffer believed it should be shelved, in part because it only dealt with a war involving the Soviet Union. By that year, the Soviets weren’t the only problem for Western nations in the Middle East; burgeoning Arab nationalism movements were also a threat to the West’s hold on regional oil. President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal was a prime example.
Weber also questioned the usefulness of selective demolitions to disable facilities since the Soviets would probably completely destroy them when forced to retreat. Meanwhile, increased selective-demolitions training by the oil companies was raising chances of a security leak, “I think the Council should review very carefully the wisdom of such a program,” he said in a memorandum to Cutler, Eisenhower’s national security adviser.
The denial policy was not killed, but Weber triggered a transformation, and in a few months Eisenhower approved its replacement: NSC 5714. The destruction of oil facilities in the event of a Soviet invasion remained part of the plan as a last resort, but only with “direct military action” as opposed to employee involvement directed by the CIA. The CIA partnership with the oil companies was abandoned. “Covert denial by civilian agencies had become impracticable,” said William Rountree, a State Department official, in a memo.
The new policy also became more preemptive, swinging toward protection of oil facilities in the face of new threats in addition to Soviet invasion, like sabotage and regional war. In this, Middle Eastern countries were to be asked to play an unprecedented role. Oil companies and local governments were to work together to boost security, including hardening oil facilities for protection against attack. Local governments would also be asked to cooperate in plugging oil wells if they were threatened to save the oil for later use by the West.
“Thus the evolution of this policy has taken another step,” Weber said.
The shift did not put an end to other American and British plans involving Middle East oil. A broader U.S initiative in 1958—unrelated to NSC 5714—called for the possible use of military force as a last resort against Arab nationalists, to keep the oil flowing at reasonable prices. The British in 1957, deeming a Soviet invasion unlikely, refined plans to use its military to protect oil installations in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar if threatened by “Egyptian subversion.”
How NSC 5714 fit in to this new Middle Eastern security landscape is unclear. It was put in place, but the handful of declassified documents reveals little about its fate, including whether or not any local governments agreed to cooperate. In 1963, the Kennedy White House asked the State Department whether NSC 5714 should be rescinded, replaced by something else, or if it still represented U.S. policy. That is the last document I was able to find about the denial plan in America or Britain. A response is not in the file, and it’s unclear when the policy ended.
Those in the field did notice the shift brought on by NSC 5714. Otto was instructed to destroy the 10 tons of explosives stashed at Aramco, which rattled windows miles away. He was also was dispatched in the late 1950s to Tapline to remove the explosives still tucked under the beds of supervisors. Chandler, who became president of Tapline, was relieved to see them gone. The Saudis believed they owned the pipeline and would have been furious about the denial plan.
So why take the risk from the start? Patriotism was high in the years after World War II, Chandler later recalled, and so was the willingness to help the United States in its fight against communism.
“We had a good crowd and we didn’t have complaints and that was the amazing thing,” he said. “It was just we had to do this and everyone went along with it.”
C-SPAN moment..
C-SPAN's viral video moment
By Hadas Gold
That was definitely not your father’s C-SPAN.
Wednesday’s dramatic protest on the House floor over gun control was a powerful reminder of how dramatically the cable network’s role as the official chronicler of Congress has changed since its early years — and how technology has suddenly made C-SPAN less beholden to the congressional leaders who control its video feed inside the chambers.
It all unfolded quickly: When the sit-in began Wednesday morning, Republican leaders ordered the House into recess. And since only they, and not C-SPAN, oversee the camera, C-SPAN’s feed was cut off, as dictated by the chamber’s rules.
Normally, that would have been end of story.
But in a move that would not have been possible even five years ago, C-SPAN picked up a live video feed from a lawmaker recording the sit-in from inside the chamber — doing an end-run around House leaders.
The video feed — and the power to control it — was once a real lever of power in Congress. As a newcomer to the House in 1979 looking to make a name for himself, Newt Gingrich used C-SPAN, which had just launched months earlier, to full effect, regularly blasting Democrats before the budding audience of cable subscribers. Five years later, after Gingrich accused Democrats of being “blind to communism,” House Speaker Tip O’Neill used C-SPAN to exact revenge, ordering the House cameras to pan across an empty chamber as one Republican lawmaker was making a speech.
Congress’ tight control over what its viewers see has long been a source of frustration for C-SPAN, which has been trying to get its own cameras on the floor of since 1984. But congressional leaders, whether Democratic or Republican, have maintained power over the cameras, the audio, the angles and when they’re turned on and off.
That all changed on Wednesday afternoon, when members of Congress themselves became the cameras, using their smartphones to broadcast the sit-in live directly to C-SPAN after the network’s access to video feeds from the House floor was cut, despite the fact there were dozens of Democratic lawmakers still there, making speeches and making news.
Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) blasted the move, calling it a “publicity stunt.” His spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, said that because the House had gone into recess, the feed had to go. Rules are rules.
But C-SPAN soon found a way around those rules.
“This is a milestone moment,” said C-SPAN spokesman Howard Mortman, who said he was inundated with calls and interest on Wednesday. “We’ve got a commitment to C-SPAN as a public service, a privately funded public service to connect Americans to Congress to show what's happening in Congress … this certainly rises to the event of something happening in Congress."
With the cameras turned off, C-SPAN began broadcasting a Periscope livestream of the floor from Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), with the full graphics afforded to normal video feeds of the House floor. The network also switched at times to a Facebook Live feed from Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) and others. All three cable networks also picked up on portions of the livestream, but C-SPAN carried it for the entire duration and continues to do so as of this publishing.
"Cameras in chamber controlled by house. House is currently in recess subject to call. House cameras are not permitted to show sit-in," read the "Alert" on the bottom of C-SPAN’s shot explaining the situation.
Peters, speaking just off the House floor on an aide’s phone while his own kept up the broadcast, told POLITICO the idea for the livestream came from a young aide, who texted him the suggestions. Having never used the services before, Peters said he downloaded the Periscope app from the House floor and began broadcasting.
Technically, it’s against House rules to film from the House floor. But Peters said the sit-in was breaking the rules anyway, so he figured he’d keep going.
“This is a protest. If Rep. John Lewis is going to sit on the House floor, that’s against the rules, so I thought it’s better for people to know about it,” Peters said. “I think it’s appropriate as part of a protest. I really respect the rules of the House and don’t expect to break them, but today I think it’s appropriate for the American people to know what the heck is going on."
About six phones were livestreaming at a time, Peters guessed. At one point, he said, CBS called trying to connect to his feed.
The attention is vital to keeping up the sit-in, Peters said: “If no one were watching or knew we were here, it would be more difficult to sustain. We don’t have a filibuster mechanism that keeps the House open. We’re technically in adjournment so it’s really the only way for us to make a point."
In the past, lawmakers hoping to pull off similar stunts would have been out of luck. In 2008, when they were in power, Democrats recessed and even cut power when a group of Republican lawmakers, led by then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) opposed a motion to adjourn the House, arguing that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling was hurting the American economy. They refused to leave the floor for five hours, but the only way the protest was broadcast was via reporters observing from the press galleries.
“It’s always a big misunderstanding. People think we’re in charge of the cameras but we’re not, we’re not the government,” C-SPAN’s Mortman said. “This is an opportunity to explain how we operate and how TV gets from the House floor into American households. This is a great moment.”
Both Twitter and Facebook have invested heavily in Capitol Hill, dedicating staff members to training members of Congress on how to use their competing livestream features. Twitter featured the sit-in as a “Twitter Moment,” Periscope (which is owned by Twitter) dedicated a channel to it, and Facebook featured livestreams of the sit-in in its trending box with a red “LIVE” button.
"Today is an example of what drives us. Twitter and Periscope take you where other cameras don't — letting you experience breaking news through the eyes of those living it,” Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour said in a statement.
Twitter and Facebook are extremely eager — as is Google, owner of YouTube — to capitalize on the enormous interest in the 2016 campaign because it validates their claims that they are the “townhall” where modern American politics is playing out.
But good government and transparency aren't the only motives — the social-media giants are in a battle to the death over their respective livestreaming platforms, seeing the technology as a way to compete with TV networks for eyeballs and advertising dollars. Facebook Live is such a priority for the company that it is paying around $50 million to media companies and celebrities to use the product, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
In a dig at Facebook, Twitter spokesmman Nick Pacilio shared the Journal’s report on Wednesday, reminding followers “we're not paying anyone to use Periscope.” He later noted that tweets sent by Peters and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) with videos had been viewed more than a million times each.
“We may not have Chewbacca, but we have democracy,” tweeted Beykpour, in a reference to a viral Facebook Live video of a woman laughing as she wore a mask of the Star Wars character. (That video has been viewed 157 million times.)
Facebook declined to respond to Twitter’s taunts.
As of 7:30 p.m. Wednesday evening, the sit-in and the livestreaming were still going, with no clear end in sight.
By Hadas Gold
That was definitely not your father’s C-SPAN.
Wednesday’s dramatic protest on the House floor over gun control was a powerful reminder of how dramatically the cable network’s role as the official chronicler of Congress has changed since its early years — and how technology has suddenly made C-SPAN less beholden to the congressional leaders who control its video feed inside the chambers.
It all unfolded quickly: When the sit-in began Wednesday morning, Republican leaders ordered the House into recess. And since only they, and not C-SPAN, oversee the camera, C-SPAN’s feed was cut off, as dictated by the chamber’s rules.
Normally, that would have been end of story.
But in a move that would not have been possible even five years ago, C-SPAN picked up a live video feed from a lawmaker recording the sit-in from inside the chamber — doing an end-run around House leaders.
The video feed — and the power to control it — was once a real lever of power in Congress. As a newcomer to the House in 1979 looking to make a name for himself, Newt Gingrich used C-SPAN, which had just launched months earlier, to full effect, regularly blasting Democrats before the budding audience of cable subscribers. Five years later, after Gingrich accused Democrats of being “blind to communism,” House Speaker Tip O’Neill used C-SPAN to exact revenge, ordering the House cameras to pan across an empty chamber as one Republican lawmaker was making a speech.
Congress’ tight control over what its viewers see has long been a source of frustration for C-SPAN, which has been trying to get its own cameras on the floor of since 1984. But congressional leaders, whether Democratic or Republican, have maintained power over the cameras, the audio, the angles and when they’re turned on and off.
That all changed on Wednesday afternoon, when members of Congress themselves became the cameras, using their smartphones to broadcast the sit-in live directly to C-SPAN after the network’s access to video feeds from the House floor was cut, despite the fact there were dozens of Democratic lawmakers still there, making speeches and making news.
Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) blasted the move, calling it a “publicity stunt.” His spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, said that because the House had gone into recess, the feed had to go. Rules are rules.
But C-SPAN soon found a way around those rules.
“This is a milestone moment,” said C-SPAN spokesman Howard Mortman, who said he was inundated with calls and interest on Wednesday. “We’ve got a commitment to C-SPAN as a public service, a privately funded public service to connect Americans to Congress to show what's happening in Congress … this certainly rises to the event of something happening in Congress."
With the cameras turned off, C-SPAN began broadcasting a Periscope livestream of the floor from Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), with the full graphics afforded to normal video feeds of the House floor. The network also switched at times to a Facebook Live feed from Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) and others. All three cable networks also picked up on portions of the livestream, but C-SPAN carried it for the entire duration and continues to do so as of this publishing.
"Cameras in chamber controlled by house. House is currently in recess subject to call. House cameras are not permitted to show sit-in," read the "Alert" on the bottom of C-SPAN’s shot explaining the situation.
Peters, speaking just off the House floor on an aide’s phone while his own kept up the broadcast, told POLITICO the idea for the livestream came from a young aide, who texted him the suggestions. Having never used the services before, Peters said he downloaded the Periscope app from the House floor and began broadcasting.
Technically, it’s against House rules to film from the House floor. But Peters said the sit-in was breaking the rules anyway, so he figured he’d keep going.
“This is a protest. If Rep. John Lewis is going to sit on the House floor, that’s against the rules, so I thought it’s better for people to know about it,” Peters said. “I think it’s appropriate as part of a protest. I really respect the rules of the House and don’t expect to break them, but today I think it’s appropriate for the American people to know what the heck is going on."
About six phones were livestreaming at a time, Peters guessed. At one point, he said, CBS called trying to connect to his feed.
The attention is vital to keeping up the sit-in, Peters said: “If no one were watching or knew we were here, it would be more difficult to sustain. We don’t have a filibuster mechanism that keeps the House open. We’re technically in adjournment so it’s really the only way for us to make a point."
In the past, lawmakers hoping to pull off similar stunts would have been out of luck. In 2008, when they were in power, Democrats recessed and even cut power when a group of Republican lawmakers, led by then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) opposed a motion to adjourn the House, arguing that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling was hurting the American economy. They refused to leave the floor for five hours, but the only way the protest was broadcast was via reporters observing from the press galleries.
“It’s always a big misunderstanding. People think we’re in charge of the cameras but we’re not, we’re not the government,” C-SPAN’s Mortman said. “This is an opportunity to explain how we operate and how TV gets from the House floor into American households. This is a great moment.”
Both Twitter and Facebook have invested heavily in Capitol Hill, dedicating staff members to training members of Congress on how to use their competing livestream features. Twitter featured the sit-in as a “Twitter Moment,” Periscope (which is owned by Twitter) dedicated a channel to it, and Facebook featured livestreams of the sit-in in its trending box with a red “LIVE” button.
"Today is an example of what drives us. Twitter and Periscope take you where other cameras don't — letting you experience breaking news through the eyes of those living it,” Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour said in a statement.
Twitter and Facebook are extremely eager — as is Google, owner of YouTube — to capitalize on the enormous interest in the 2016 campaign because it validates their claims that they are the “townhall” where modern American politics is playing out.
But good government and transparency aren't the only motives — the social-media giants are in a battle to the death over their respective livestreaming platforms, seeing the technology as a way to compete with TV networks for eyeballs and advertising dollars. Facebook Live is such a priority for the company that it is paying around $50 million to media companies and celebrities to use the product, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
In a dig at Facebook, Twitter spokesmman Nick Pacilio shared the Journal’s report on Wednesday, reminding followers “we're not paying anyone to use Periscope.” He later noted that tweets sent by Peters and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) with videos had been viewed more than a million times each.
“We may not have Chewbacca, but we have democracy,” tweeted Beykpour, in a reference to a viral Facebook Live video of a woman laughing as she wore a mask of the Star Wars character. (That video has been viewed 157 million times.)
Facebook declined to respond to Twitter’s taunts.
As of 7:30 p.m. Wednesday evening, the sit-in and the livestreaming were still going, with no clear end in sight.
Reveled in his message..
Trump’s Clinton speech splits the GOP
Some Republicans reveled in his message discipline, but others couldn’t get over his policy apostasies.
By Daniel Lippman and Patrick Reis
Donald Trump’s Wednesday attack on Hillary Clinton was, for many Republicans, exactly what they’d been waiting for: a disciplined, scripted attack on what the GOP contends is a deeply flawed Democratic candidate.
But with Trump, it’s never quite that simple: Even as some Republicans praised his anti-Clinton jeremiad, others ripped their party’s presumptive nominee for pushing a policy agenda that, at points, strayed far from the party line.
“There was a lot to like. He did an effective job of connecting Hillary Clinton to the Washington cartel that is the insiders game and effectively connected her to her record ... He effectively gave the voters a choice between more of the same, anemic job growth versus a new vision,” said Rick Tyler, the former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.
But in his assessment of Trump’s economic proposals, Tyler was more muted: “I don't think he’s ideologically steeped in how economies work,” he said of Trump.
Others couldn’t get past Trump’s attacks on international trade deals, which have often enjoyed Republican support over the objections of Democrats.
“This is a populist speech. It speaks for a faction of the Republican Party but it certainly does not speak for most people who have considered themselves economic conservatives,” said Eli Lehrer, president of the free-market R Street Institute think tank and former speechwriter for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, noting Trump’s broadside against the North American Free Trade Agreement. “NAFTA and free trade agreements like it are key to the open and competitive economy that conservatives have traditionally favored.”
The rift between Trump and conservatives is nothing new. Throughout the primary, Trump turned his heterodox views into an asset, painting himself as a fighter for the American worker who was the lone candidate capable of taking power away from the elites and restoring prosperity to a working class in decline. But that message has gotten lost of late amid Trump’s attacks on a federal judge and his harsh comments about Muslims.
On Wednesday, Trump was much more disciplined, making an explicit appeal to Bernie Sanders’ supporters and lifting the Vermont senator’s language on a “rigged” economy and framing of a struggle between “large corporations” and struggling American workers.
It’s a delicate dance for Trump as he works to expand his support past the base that propelled him to the top of the GOP field but still leaves him trailing Clinton in national polls. Traditionally, the onset of general election has seen candidates work to win over moderates, but Trump seemed to be aiming Wednesday’s speech at the “radical center” — downscale white voters who generally don’t fit on the traditional political spectrum.
If so, his conservative critics said, it was unlikely that Trump’s message would win over new supporters.
“I can’t see this speech getting anybody who doesn’t support Trump already to support him and a handful of people who might think that he’s going to temper some of this economic populism will probably be sorely disappointed,” said Lehrer.
Still, Trump and the GOP remain in lockstep in one area: their disapproval of Clinton, both in her personal dealings and her policy record.
“It’s a good start because it walks through both the failures that Hillary had and where he wants to go,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “What people need to see and hear is the focus he had in the primaries which was so effective: jobs: jobs, jobs.”
And Rush Limbaugh, for one, was delighted by the tack Trump took in ripping Clinton, saying he would traffic in territory that other Republicans wouldn’t.
Indeed, many of Trump’s attacks were either unsourced or were at odds with publicly available information — his assertion, for instance, that Clinton is backed financially by “Communist China” — but Limbaugh saw that as Trump being willing to take off the gloves in a way that a more genteel class of politician wouldn’t.
“So Trump basically said things about Hillary Clinton that you just don't hear Republicans saying … But you just do not hear Mitt Romney say this, for example. You wouldn't hear the Bush family talk this way about Hillary,” Limbaugh said. “You wouldn't hear fellow establishment types talk about this, 'cause it's too close to home for all of them. But Trump can say this stuff as an outsider.”
Following Trump's speech, Tucker Carlson, editor in chief of conservative website The Daily Caller, captured conservatives' ongoing ambivalence over their party's presumptive nominee: "Like everything with Trump, it was both exhilarating to hear someone tell the truth but very frustrating to hear someone articulate it badly or muddy it with irrelevancies."
Some Republicans reveled in his message discipline, but others couldn’t get over his policy apostasies.
By Daniel Lippman and Patrick Reis
Donald Trump’s Wednesday attack on Hillary Clinton was, for many Republicans, exactly what they’d been waiting for: a disciplined, scripted attack on what the GOP contends is a deeply flawed Democratic candidate.
But with Trump, it’s never quite that simple: Even as some Republicans praised his anti-Clinton jeremiad, others ripped their party’s presumptive nominee for pushing a policy agenda that, at points, strayed far from the party line.
“There was a lot to like. He did an effective job of connecting Hillary Clinton to the Washington cartel that is the insiders game and effectively connected her to her record ... He effectively gave the voters a choice between more of the same, anemic job growth versus a new vision,” said Rick Tyler, the former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.
But in his assessment of Trump’s economic proposals, Tyler was more muted: “I don't think he’s ideologically steeped in how economies work,” he said of Trump.
Others couldn’t get past Trump’s attacks on international trade deals, which have often enjoyed Republican support over the objections of Democrats.
“This is a populist speech. It speaks for a faction of the Republican Party but it certainly does not speak for most people who have considered themselves economic conservatives,” said Eli Lehrer, president of the free-market R Street Institute think tank and former speechwriter for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, noting Trump’s broadside against the North American Free Trade Agreement. “NAFTA and free trade agreements like it are key to the open and competitive economy that conservatives have traditionally favored.”
The rift between Trump and conservatives is nothing new. Throughout the primary, Trump turned his heterodox views into an asset, painting himself as a fighter for the American worker who was the lone candidate capable of taking power away from the elites and restoring prosperity to a working class in decline. But that message has gotten lost of late amid Trump’s attacks on a federal judge and his harsh comments about Muslims.
On Wednesday, Trump was much more disciplined, making an explicit appeal to Bernie Sanders’ supporters and lifting the Vermont senator’s language on a “rigged” economy and framing of a struggle between “large corporations” and struggling American workers.
It’s a delicate dance for Trump as he works to expand his support past the base that propelled him to the top of the GOP field but still leaves him trailing Clinton in national polls. Traditionally, the onset of general election has seen candidates work to win over moderates, but Trump seemed to be aiming Wednesday’s speech at the “radical center” — downscale white voters who generally don’t fit on the traditional political spectrum.
If so, his conservative critics said, it was unlikely that Trump’s message would win over new supporters.
“I can’t see this speech getting anybody who doesn’t support Trump already to support him and a handful of people who might think that he’s going to temper some of this economic populism will probably be sorely disappointed,” said Lehrer.
Still, Trump and the GOP remain in lockstep in one area: their disapproval of Clinton, both in her personal dealings and her policy record.
“It’s a good start because it walks through both the failures that Hillary had and where he wants to go,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “What people need to see and hear is the focus he had in the primaries which was so effective: jobs: jobs, jobs.”
And Rush Limbaugh, for one, was delighted by the tack Trump took in ripping Clinton, saying he would traffic in territory that other Republicans wouldn’t.
Indeed, many of Trump’s attacks were either unsourced or were at odds with publicly available information — his assertion, for instance, that Clinton is backed financially by “Communist China” — but Limbaugh saw that as Trump being willing to take off the gloves in a way that a more genteel class of politician wouldn’t.
“So Trump basically said things about Hillary Clinton that you just don't hear Republicans saying … But you just do not hear Mitt Romney say this, for example. You wouldn't hear the Bush family talk this way about Hillary,” Limbaugh said. “You wouldn't hear fellow establishment types talk about this, 'cause it's too close to home for all of them. But Trump can say this stuff as an outsider.”
Following Trump's speech, Tucker Carlson, editor in chief of conservative website The Daily Caller, captured conservatives' ongoing ambivalence over their party's presumptive nominee: "Like everything with Trump, it was both exhilarating to hear someone tell the truth but very frustrating to hear someone articulate it badly or muddy it with irrelevancies."
Dump Trump convention plot
Trump’s secret plan to quash a 'Dump Trump' convention plot
The presumptive GOP nominee is building a massive whip team in preparation for a possible floor fight.
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Kyle Cheney
Donald Trump’s campaign is preparing a sophisticated operation to fight back against resurgent plans by recalcitrant conservatives to deny him the nomination at next month’s Republican National Convention.
In a Tuesday night conference call led partly by Trump’s top adviser Paul Manafort and including 200 staffers and volunteers, Trump’s senior convention aides sketched out a whip operation led by a half-dozen operatives with deep convention experience. The effort will rely on a team of 150 volunteers and paid staff to keep the convention’s 2,472 delegates in line, and it will utilize a database with information on many of the delegates.
The plans laid out during the call suggest that Trump’s campaign is working to reverse a narrative that it has lacked organization, and the planning also indicates that Trump’s aides are taking seriously efforts by his GOP opponents to out-maneuver him on the convention floor.
The campaign is planning to reveal an additional eight “regional whip” leaders in the coming days, sources familiar with the operation said. Each will oversee seven of the 56 states and territories sending delegations to Cleveland.
The team will be overseen primarily by Doug Davenport, a former lobbying associate of Manafort, who was brought on board by the Trump campaign in April to court supportive delegates.
Mike McSherry, a veteran Republican operative and former executive director of the Republican Governors Association, will handle operations pertaining to three crucial convention committees. That includes the rules committee, where hardcore Trump resisters intend to force a vote on a plan that could snatch the nomination away from Trump.
Trump campaign attorney Bill McGinley, who was counsel to the 2012 convention’s rules committee, will handle all of the campaign’s legal operations at the convention. And Brian Jack, who helped identify and elect supportive delegates at state conventions and caucuses around the country during the spring, will help gather intelligence on the delegates attending the convention to aid the whip team’s efforts.
It’s a reality check for the grassroots organizers of an attempt to stop Trump. While they cobble together a list of rank-and-file delegates willing to stand in Trump’s way, they’ll be up against an experienced and extensive operation — backed by the Republican National Committee — that will have eyes and ears on all convention activity.
Trump’s team is already building a database with detailed profiles of most of the delegates attending the convention and will spend the next few weeks reaching out to nearly all of them, seeking assurances of support and ensuring that any needs or concerns are heard.
Members of the whip team will be assigned a group of specific delegates and will be tasked with entering information about each into the database, Jack said on the call, according to someone who listened in. In order to beef up the database, Jack recommended whip team members place phone calls to delegates to learn about them and become “the campaign’s point of contact to them,” according to the person who listened in. Jack added that the team was going to schedule trainings “so that we can learn how best to use this database and download the information that you already know and the information you’ll learn.”
Anti-Trump delegates, meanwhile, have yet to compile even a complete roster of members of the convention Rules Committee, let alone the entire attendance list.
Davenport told participants on the call that the whip team leaders were already going “24/7” but that they would set up operations in Cleveland on July 5, six days before delegates arrive for convention committee meetings, and remain onsite until July 21, when the convention closes.
According to the person who listened in, Davenport announced that the campaign’s caucus team operation, which will lead outreach to each state’s delegation, will be headed by Mike Conforti and Pat Brady, both convention veterans who years ago worked at Manafort’s lobbying firm.
Davenport called the caucus teams “our first line of communication every morning at the delegation breakfasts,” adding that they will provide surrogates and talking points to “set the tone for the day going into the convention that evening,” according to the person who listened in.
Davenport assured participants that their lodging would be funded by the campaign, though travel arrangements were still being hashed out.
Davenport and Manafort did not respond to requests for comment. But the offer to pay for travel and accommodations for members of the whip team, many of whom are not campaign staffers, is notable, given the dire financial straits facing the campaign. It seems to suggest that Trump’s team is leaving nothing to chance when it comes to securing the nomination.
According to an operative on the call, there was a sense of optimism about the cohesiveness of the team after a primary season marked by campaign turmoil and infighting among loyalists to Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, who was fired as campaign manager on Monday. Though they’re taking efforts to block Trump from the nomination seriously, they view it similarly to the resistance that Ron Paul allies presented at the 2012 convention: loud but with limited influence to affect the outcome.
The presumptive GOP nominee is building a massive whip team in preparation for a possible floor fight.
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Kyle Cheney
Donald Trump’s campaign is preparing a sophisticated operation to fight back against resurgent plans by recalcitrant conservatives to deny him the nomination at next month’s Republican National Convention.
In a Tuesday night conference call led partly by Trump’s top adviser Paul Manafort and including 200 staffers and volunteers, Trump’s senior convention aides sketched out a whip operation led by a half-dozen operatives with deep convention experience. The effort will rely on a team of 150 volunteers and paid staff to keep the convention’s 2,472 delegates in line, and it will utilize a database with information on many of the delegates.
The plans laid out during the call suggest that Trump’s campaign is working to reverse a narrative that it has lacked organization, and the planning also indicates that Trump’s aides are taking seriously efforts by his GOP opponents to out-maneuver him on the convention floor.
The campaign is planning to reveal an additional eight “regional whip” leaders in the coming days, sources familiar with the operation said. Each will oversee seven of the 56 states and territories sending delegations to Cleveland.
The team will be overseen primarily by Doug Davenport, a former lobbying associate of Manafort, who was brought on board by the Trump campaign in April to court supportive delegates.
Mike McSherry, a veteran Republican operative and former executive director of the Republican Governors Association, will handle operations pertaining to three crucial convention committees. That includes the rules committee, where hardcore Trump resisters intend to force a vote on a plan that could snatch the nomination away from Trump.
Trump campaign attorney Bill McGinley, who was counsel to the 2012 convention’s rules committee, will handle all of the campaign’s legal operations at the convention. And Brian Jack, who helped identify and elect supportive delegates at state conventions and caucuses around the country during the spring, will help gather intelligence on the delegates attending the convention to aid the whip team’s efforts.
It’s a reality check for the grassroots organizers of an attempt to stop Trump. While they cobble together a list of rank-and-file delegates willing to stand in Trump’s way, they’ll be up against an experienced and extensive operation — backed by the Republican National Committee — that will have eyes and ears on all convention activity.
Trump’s team is already building a database with detailed profiles of most of the delegates attending the convention and will spend the next few weeks reaching out to nearly all of them, seeking assurances of support and ensuring that any needs or concerns are heard.
Members of the whip team will be assigned a group of specific delegates and will be tasked with entering information about each into the database, Jack said on the call, according to someone who listened in. In order to beef up the database, Jack recommended whip team members place phone calls to delegates to learn about them and become “the campaign’s point of contact to them,” according to the person who listened in. Jack added that the team was going to schedule trainings “so that we can learn how best to use this database and download the information that you already know and the information you’ll learn.”
Anti-Trump delegates, meanwhile, have yet to compile even a complete roster of members of the convention Rules Committee, let alone the entire attendance list.
Davenport told participants on the call that the whip team leaders were already going “24/7” but that they would set up operations in Cleveland on July 5, six days before delegates arrive for convention committee meetings, and remain onsite until July 21, when the convention closes.
According to the person who listened in, Davenport announced that the campaign’s caucus team operation, which will lead outreach to each state’s delegation, will be headed by Mike Conforti and Pat Brady, both convention veterans who years ago worked at Manafort’s lobbying firm.
Davenport called the caucus teams “our first line of communication every morning at the delegation breakfasts,” adding that they will provide surrogates and talking points to “set the tone for the day going into the convention that evening,” according to the person who listened in.
Davenport assured participants that their lodging would be funded by the campaign, though travel arrangements were still being hashed out.
Davenport and Manafort did not respond to requests for comment. But the offer to pay for travel and accommodations for members of the whip team, many of whom are not campaign staffers, is notable, given the dire financial straits facing the campaign. It seems to suggest that Trump’s team is leaving nothing to chance when it comes to securing the nomination.
According to an operative on the call, there was a sense of optimism about the cohesiveness of the team after a primary season marked by campaign turmoil and infighting among loyalists to Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, who was fired as campaign manager on Monday. Though they’re taking efforts to block Trump from the nomination seriously, they view it similarly to the resistance that Ron Paul allies presented at the 2012 convention: loud but with limited influence to affect the outcome.
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