Good afternoon, this is The Smoke Eater for Monday, December 12, 2022, and a bullet sends a Christmas message that is clear and loud.
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ABOVE THE FOLD
On Thursday morning, when most Americans were slapping mediocre non-recyclable coffee cartridges into overpriced caffeine drippers, the name "Viktor Bout" meant absolutely nothing.
And as far as the producers and editors of AM news casts were concerned, Bout was mustachioed Eurotrash rotting in a prison cell. A byproduct of the collapsing Soviet Union who found a way to capitalize on the Cold War after Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history. If Bout found the wrong end of a prison shiv, he'd be lucky to get 15 second segment in the D-block's newshole (before a cheekg story about a skateboarding dog, or a cancer kid dressed like a superhero). A printed brief, slapped together by an underpaid general assignment reporter with a 45-minute deadline, might get buried in the global affairs section of a newspaper's digital edition. He's not worth a breaking news banner, or a headline above the fold.
Save for the White House, career State Department officials, a few dozen federal agents across DC's alphabet soup, and the handful of prison guards responsible for his stay at United States Penitentiary Marion in southern Illinois, nobody in America gave a fuck about Viktor Bout.
If they knew him at all, the neo-Nazis, terrorists, gangsters, and religious nuts confined in Marion with Bout might have called him, "The Russian," but it's unlikely. Though Marion is now a medium-security prison, it was a supermax; designed to replace Alcatraz as the home for high-profile convicts. One of only two Communication Management Unit facilities, USP Marion restricts an inmate's access to the outside world, ensuring only their existence.
Stories about Bout might pop up in news reports whenever the Kremlin needed a convenient distraction. A high-ranking, Kremlin-sponsored bullshit artist would sit down with a respectable US or UK journalist for a game of whataboutism and false-equivalencies. They'd defend themselves against charges the regime has perpetrated crimes against humanity by bemoaning poor Viktor, a Russian patriot lost in America's savage prison system — which, they'd be quick to add, are disproportionately full of black men.
Distraction achieved.
The chattering classes would chase their shiny new object, and the regime could go back to its dirty, little business of fucking with the rest of the world.
But shortly after 9 a.m. last Thursday, everyone in America became an expert on Viktor Bout, and hostage negotiations, international diplomacy, Russian jurisprudence and arms trafficking in the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A man who had spent decades selling stockpiles of old Soviet arms to guerillas, warlords, mercenaries, political despots and any asshole with enough cash (and the logistical capacity) to buy old Soviet military weapons wholesale was finally worthy of breaking news banners and cellphone push alerts.
Daytime anchors began reading variations of the same script in teleprompters: "Russian arms dealer," "The Merchant of Death," "Lord of War," "paid in blood diamonds."
The Biden administration had (reluctantly) agreed to a prisoner swap with Russia: Bout for basketball star Brittney Griner.
About a year ago, Griner took a rather ill-advised trip to Russia. Like many professional athletes, Griner was trying to make money during the WNBA's off-season by playing for a team in another country. International teams often pay substantially more in the hope of luring athletes to their leagues.
Russian officials searching Griner's luggage at the airport found a vape pen about half-full of hash oil tucked in one of her bags. Draconian drug laws demanded she be immediately arrested.
Whether Griner was targeted is debatable. Like many travelers, I've left things in a bag that have surprised me as much as the poor bastard rifling through my underwear. And I've seen dumbfounded 20-somethings cuss out Secret Service agents for throwing out their weed vapes before entering a Trump rally.
Ignorance and accidents happen.
But under Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has criminalized and demonized homosexuality while peddling racism and xenophobia. A tall, black American lesbian covered in a patchwork of tattoos is likely to scare the piss out of a brainwashed customs agent in Moscow whose been instructed to really fuck with the foreigners. Especially Americans.
I was trying to ignore the obnoxious wall of silent TVs at the gym when a far-right cable news channel began flashing enough bright light breaking news graphics that I almost fell off the treadmill.
The network was using a hastily assembled Ken Burns effect to zoom in on a handful of old wire photos of Bout in handcuffs and prison jumpers. They just kept rerunning the same video package over and over.
An overuse of stock photos and cheap effects suggests a production crew is either lazy and stupid, desperate and scrambling, or both.
A talking head was jabbering authoritatively, but the network never ID'd the head on the chyron. In the 24 hour cable news business, this could mean a graphic wasn't entered correctly before airing, but they can easily be corrected live. The whole thing looked a producer grabbed some random dickhead off the street and prayed the idiot was capable of forming sentences for the six minute segments between commercial breaks from a delusional pillow salesman and diarrhea medication.
An unflattering photo of Griner flashed on screen. The anchor scoffed. The expert seemed to shrug and grimace.
The image evoked a subtle and subconscious prompt: "Biden trades bad guy for black lady."
The assumption was rather a dramatic conclusion, and I shook it off for a while. But it all came back some time later when I was asked, "Did you hear Biden let a Russian arms dealer go for that basketball star?"
On a side note, nobody seemed willing to use the most obvious alliteration(s): Breaking: Biden Boot's Bout for Brit.
Professional pearl clutchers quickly jumped on the story demanded to know why Griner was released instead of disgraced former Marine, Paul Whalen.
Whalen actually was a spy, it's doubtful he was working for the US government. Whalen was a desk jockey while serving in the US Marine Corps., and says he started going to Russia while serving in Iraq. In 2008, Whalen was demoted and slapped with a "bad conduct" discharge after he started bouncing checks and tried to steal $10,000. He eventually became a security chief for a car parts company, but the rest of his story gets pretty sketchy. There's multiple passports, a suitcase full of cash and mysterious thumb drive. The Russian side of the story makes Whalen out to be Liam Neeson, but comes off more like Leslie Nielson.
On Thursday, CBS was running commentary from John Bolton, a career bureaucrat who's spent the last half century skulking around bad DC cocktail parties hosted by morally repugnant and delusional cranks. Bolton called the prisoner swap, "desperate," and, "a surrender," and dodged a questions about Bout by bringing up Whalen's arrest while he served as National Security Advisor to the Trump administration. Bolton said questions about swapping Bout for Whalen did come up in 2018, but were ultimately shot down.
It was NBC who shit the bed with a three by-line story that included senior reporter, Andrea Mitchell, saying the White House was forced to choose between Griner and Whalen. NBC waited six hours before issuing a correction that the network had, "misstated the choice the Biden administration was given over hostages," adding, "It was to swap for Griner or no one, not a choice between Griner or Whelan.”
But the damage was already done.
A popular prime time cable news host, who regularly champions white supremacists, used the NBC story to claim (without evidence) that Griner's race and sexual identity were deciding factors for the White House, implying that race and gender identity are indictative of political beliefs. The host cited the NBC story and noted the correction -- which NBC posted around three hours before he went on air -- but claimed it was because, "Whalen is a Trump voter and he made the mistake of saying so on social media," that ultimately sealed his fate.
On the Sunday shows, former Vice President Mike Pence demurred when the topic was brought up, saying, "We weren't in the business of prisoner swaps," which is a load of bullshit seeing as Mike Pompeo, the former head of the State Department, was tasked with negotiating the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 other prisoners. The deal was signed on Feb. 29, 2020, and included the agreement to pull US forces in Afghanistan.
Coincidentally, Pompeo was on one of the Sunday shows yesterday, and nobody bothered to asked him about that Taliban deal seeing as he was there to gin up support for his own doomed presidential run. Host Shannon Bream asked Pompeo about Bolton saying the Trump White House didn't give a damn about Whalen and Pompeo didn't even bother to dodge the question! He just sat there, stone faced with that giant stick up his ass, saying, "I do not want to comment on our internal discussions."
While Pompeo bullshiting his way back into the public consciousness, former Deputy National Security Advisor Fiona Hill was telling CBS' Margaret Brennan that there were some in the administration that wanted to get Whalen out, but ,"[Trump] was not particularly interested in Paul’s case in the way that one would have thought he would be."
Pushing back at the arm chair analysts and power grabbers, White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told ABC's Martha Radatz that those people simply "weren’t in the room” during the negotiations:
“They weren’t on the phone. They weren’t watching the incredible effort and determination by [Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens] and his team to try to get both Paul and Brittney out together...In a negotiation, you do what you can. You do as much as you can. You push and you push and you push. And we did. And this deal we got last week, that was the deal that was possible."
Carstens tells the New York Times that he spoke with Whalen Friday, and told Whalen, "Keep the faith. We’re coming to get you." Carstens was blunt in acknowledging that the prisoner swaps Russia has grown fond of do incentivize crackpot regimes to take similar actions, adding, “It’s horrific to leave an American wrongfully detained in a foreign jail cell.”
Nobody knows why Putin would be so adamant about getting Bout back. CNN's former Moscow Bureau Chief thinks Bout likely has ties to Russian intelligence agencies seeing as how he was a prolific arms dealer. It's said Bout refused to talk to US authorities, which his probably true seeing as how Putin rewards lackeys with more cash and prizes than a game show host, and assassinates anyone who might threaten his authority.
There's no certainty that Bout can even go back to the international arms trade seeing as how many Soviet weapon stockpiles are reportedly empty thanks to Putin's war in Ukraine. Many of his Bout's best customers, like former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, are dead or deposed. The militant religious fundamentalists waging small wars all over the Middle East and Africa are less likely to tolerate the ethics of a used car (or tank) salesman than the warlords he dealt with 20 and 30 years ago.
And it's not without a sense of irony that Bout tells Russia's state-owned Russian press that, were he able, he would volunteer for Putin's war in Ukraine. He's since joined an ultra-nationalist political party that seeks to restore territory claimed by the Soviet Union.
BELOW THE FOLD
The core of the issue here is what's known as "hostage diplomacy." Simply put: it's kidnapping.
Terrorists and authoritarians are desperate for recognition by the US. It doesn't matter if it's a message of condemnation, a US official's utterance of a name, be it positive or negative, can be seen as a mark of legitimacy. Diplomats will often go out of their way not to say the names of people or groups so as to disenfranchise them. They're denying them free advertisement.
Some have found that without any resources to trade or sabers to rattle, kidnapping an American or two is an effective shortcut to simultaneously force the US to a negotiating table, and gain international recognition.
It's not a complicated maneuver. Just wait until some aid workers, tourists, journalists, bleeding hearts or idiots turn up at the border. Concoct a marginally plausible excuse to throw them in a dark basement, stage a hostage video and deliver a ransom note to the loudest bastard you can reach. Then wait for one political faction to start howling louder than a dog with its dick in a rat trap.
Trump got suckered by it. Several times.
Diplomatic hostage taking isn't new or unique. When the Iranians did it in the late 1970s, the CIA staged a rescue in 1981. When North Korea did it to journalist Laura Ling in 2009, Bill Clinton led negotiations for her release. The Chinese just did it to some Canadians in retaliation for Canada's detention of Meng Wanzhou, a tech executive the US charged with fraud.
Russian diplomats haven't gone so far as to openly admit they've kidnapped Americans to secure the release of Russians convicted of serious crimes, or for a reduction in sanctions, and Putin has denied this explicitly, but there's a clear pattern.
In April, the US traded convicted drug-smuggler Konstantin Yaroshenko for US Marine Trevor Reed -- who was arrested in 2019 for (allegedly) getting piss drunk and punching a cop. But nobody's talking about Trevor Reed.
Michael Calvey, a US-born foreign investor, was convicted of embezzling a few billion rubles despite an aversion to throwing money into enterprises that attract fuckery from Russia's criminals and government. Calvey's sentenced has since been reduced to house arrest.
Russia is now hoping to exchange Whalen for Vadim Krasikov, also known as the Teirgarten Killer. A former colonel in Spetsnaz, Krasikov executed Chechen national Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili in a central Berlin park while riding a bicycle in 2019. Journalists at Bellingcat uncovered Krasikov's real name, ultimately leading German courts to convict Krasikov of Khangoshvili's murder, and conclude it to be a state-sanctioned execution. Why Russia would ask the US to release Krasikov is a mystery seeing as how he's been caught, convicted and held in Germany.
ONE MORE THING...
Let's get down to brass tax here:
Griner and Whalen are two people who went to a country run by crooked assholes, and fucked up. It could happen to anyone.
If I did something stupid overseas (and I have) and some opportunistic regime found my stupidity exploitable, I'd hope my country's leaders bent over backwards to pull my ass out of the fire regardless of how many people back home cried about it.
A human life is not something to be argued, bartered or traded for political expediency, the fleeting orgasmic high of "winning" a 12-hour news cycle or TV ratings.
If talking heads, snotty bureaucrats and power-hungry political sociopaths whined about my prisoner swap, I'd behave exactly as one does in a civilized society.
I'd call their secretaries to make an appointment and arrive for the meeting early, as my mother taught me, dressed in an attire that fit the occasion. Greeting with firm handshake, I'd thank them for taking the time out of their busy schedule to meet with me. Then I would tell them very plainly to go fuck themselves.
OK, here's your cute critter video!
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