12:41 PM 12/27/2018 - Michael Cohen's cell phone briefly activated near Prague around time of purported Russia meeting - McClatchy Washington Bureau
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| Michael Cohen's cell phone briefly activated near Prague around time of purported Russia meeting McClatchy Washington Bureau
One of Michael Cohen's mobile phones briefly lit up cell towers in late summer of 2016 in the vicinity of Prague, undercutting his denials that he secretly met ...
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| Michael Cohen's cell phone briefly activated near Prague around time of purported Russia meeting Sun Herald
One of Michael Cohen's mobile phones briefly lit up cell towers in late summer of 2016 in the vicinity of Prague, undercutting his denials that he secretly met ...
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A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.
During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.
The phone and surveillance data, which have not previously been disclosed, lend new credence to a key part of a former British spy’s dossier of Kremlin intelligence describing purported coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s election meddling operation.
The dossier, which Trump has dismissed as “a pile of garbage,” said Cohen and one or more Kremlin officials huddled in or around the Czech capital to plot ways to limit discovery of the close “liaison” between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The new information regarding the recovery of Cohen’s cell phone location doesn’t explain why he was apparently there or who he was meeting with, if anyone. But it adds to evidence that Cohen was in or near Prague around the time of the supposed meeting.
Both of the newly surfaced foreign electronic intelligence intercepts were shared with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the matter said. Mueller is investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference and whether Trump’s campaign colluded in the scheme. Mueller also is examining whether Trump has obstructed the sweeping inquiry.
McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller had obtained evidence Cohen traveled to Prague from Germany in late August or early September of 2016, but it could not be learned how that information was gleaned.
Cohen has been cooperating with Mueller’s investigation since he pleaded guilty on Aug. 21 to charges of bank fraud, tax fraud and campaign finance law violations. He later pleaded guilty to one count of lying to Congress, and was sentenced in early December to three years in prison.
If the foreign intelligence intercepts are accurate, the big questions now are whether Cohen has acknowledged to investigators that a meeting in Prague occurred, informed them what transpired and revealed what, if anything, he told Trump about it.
Four people spoke with McClatchy on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of information shared by their foreign intelligence connections. Each obtained their information independently from foreign intelligence connections.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, declined to comment about the electronic evidence.
Cohen gained a reputation as Trump’s “fixer” during more than a decade working as a lawyer for the billionaire real estate developer. He has vehemently denied that he ever traveled to Prague, but it’s unknown what he has told Mueller’s team.
More recently, Cohen has avoided discussing Mueller’s inquiry, saying he does not “want to jeopardize the investigation.”
Cohen’s spokesman, Lanny Davis, reiterated his client’s denials about Prague in a phone interview this week.
Cohen “has said one million times he was never in Prague,” Davis said. “One million and one times. He’s never been to Prague. … He’s never been to the Czech Republic.”
Davis, a longtime Democratic political operative, declined to comment about the new foreign intelligence.
Davis, however, is no longer part of Cohen’s legal team. He acknowledged that he has not been fully briefed on what Cohen has told Mueller’s investigative staff in some 70 hours of interviews dating to last August, when Cohen pleaded guilty. Earlier this month, Mueller advised Cohen’s sentencing judge that Cohen has provided substantial assistance in four areas, including in “core” areas of the Russia inquiry. Mueller did not elaborate.
Mueller has already secured indictments accusing 25 Russians of unleashing a cyber broadside at the United States, including the hacking and public release of top Democrats’ emails and circulation of a flood of phony and harshly critical social media messages about Trump’s opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. The special counsel has yet to charge any Trump surrogates or allies with colluding in the Russian offensive, though several top campaign aides have also cut plea deals for unrelated crimes in return for their cooperation in the inquiry.
Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks said that if disclosures of the foreign intelligence intercepts are true, “This is a very significant break, because it looks like a direct link between Donald Trump’s personal fixer and Russians most likely involved in the disruption of our election.”
“It would prove that lying was going on, not only about being in Prague, but much beyond the Prague episode,” she said.
Steele’s dossier, a compilation of intelligence from his network of Kremlin sources, is full of uncorroborated details about the purported meeting.
It said Konstantin Kosachev, a longtime member of the Russian Senate and chairman of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee, “facilitated” the gathering.
Steele reported that Kosachev may well have represented the Russians in Prague, where he had extensive ties. But Mike Carpenter, a former Russia specialist at the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, said that seems unlikely – about “as discreet as sending (Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo to meet with an informant on a sensitive issue.”
Kosachev has publicly denied traveling to Prague in 2016.
Among the goals of the meeting, the dossier said, was to limit negative news reports about the Russia-friendly relationships of two Trump campaign aides— foreign policy adviser Carter Page and just-ousted campaign Chairman Paul Manafort — and to ensure that European hackers were paid and told to “lie low.”
While the foreign intelligence about Cohen does not confirm a meeting even occurred, it provides evidence that he traveled to the Czech Republic, where the sources said his phone was momentarily activated to download emails or other data.
Cohen’s denials about Prague stand in the face of court admissions that have damaged his credibility.
In his second guilty plea in late November, he confessed to a single count of lying to Congress in denying that he had contact after January 2016 with Russians in pursuit of a long-sought Trump-branded hotel in Moscow. Cohen now acknowledges his contacts with Russians about the hotel continued for nearly six more months while Trump wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination.
The most publicized charges in his earlier guilty plea in New York last August related to hush money payments he arranged days before the election for two women who were about to publicly allege they had sex with Trump. Cohen kept the payments secret for more than a year after the election.
Trump has repeatedly sought to disparage Mueller’s investigation, echoing the words “no collusion” and “witch hunt” over the last two years.
Davis said he hopes that, after Mueller has completed his investigation, Cohen “will be able to tell his story about Donald Trump and what caused him to change his mind about working for Trump and telling the truth about Trump … Then he’ll be able to talk about all the reasons why he believes Trump is a dangerous man to be president.”
Another former Watergate prosecutor, Nick Akerman, said Davis’ denials about a Prague trip can’t be taken too seriously because it would be “standard for Mueller to tell Cohen and his lawyers not to discuss publicly the details” of the investigation.
Cohen and Trump gradually became estranged after Trump’s election victory, and they severed ties entirely last May, as multiple investigations into Cohen’s activities heated up.
The cell phone evidence, the sources said, was discovered sometime after Cohen apparently made his way to the Czech Republic.
The records show that the brief activation from Cohen’s phone near Prague sent beacons that left a traceable electronic signature, said the four sources.
Mueller’s investigators, some of whom have met with Steele, likely also pursued Cohen’s cell phone records. It would be a common early step in such an investigation for a prosecutor to obtain a court warrant for all U.S. and foreign phone company records of key subjects, even those dating back more than 18 months.
Such data might enable investigators to track Cohen’s whereabouts whenever the phone was in his possession, even if it was turned off, said several experts, including a former senior Justice Department official who declined to be identified.
These officials said intelligence agencies and federal investigators often can examine electronic records to trace the location of a cell phone or any other device sending signals over phone lines or the Internet, so long as the data was still stored by phone carriers or cell phone manufacturers that offer location-tracking services, such as Apple and Google.
Jan Neumann, the assumed name of a former Russian intelligence officer who defected to the United States years ago, said that Cohen’s electronic cell tower trail appears to reflect sloppy “tradecraft.”
“You can monitor and control cell phones in Europe same as you do it here in US,” Neumann told McClatchy. “As long as the battery is physically located in the phone, even when it’s turned off, the mobile phone’s approximate location can be detected and tracked. Any attempt to use an app, to get mail, send texts, connect to a Wifi network, your phone and your location will be detected.”
“It would not be very professional to take your phone to a secret meeting,” said Neumann, who has consulted for the U.S. intelligence community. In this case, he said, “it would be more logical to leave it turned on and connected to a WIFI network in a hotel in Germany.”
It was during the same late August-early September time span in 2016 that an Eastern European intelligence agency eavesdropped on a conversation in which a Russian official advised another that Cohen was in Prague, two of the sources said.
The sources could not definitively pin down the date or dates that the intelligence indicated Cohen was in the vicinity of Prague. Cohen has insisted that he was in Southern California with his son from Aug. 23-29, 2016, but his public alibis have not been so airtight as to preclude flights to and from Europe during the relevant period.
Even if Cohen has told investigators about a furtive meeting in Prague, it could be difficult for Mueller to corroborate his story. Any Russians with whom he met are likely out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement officials, because the United States has no extradition treaty with Moscow.
If Cohen indeed made the journey to the Czech Republic, one lingering mystery is how he entered Europe’s visa-free, 29-nation Schengen area without detection. While those countries’ open-border arrangements would have spared Cohen from having to produce a visa to travel between Germany and Prague, U.S. and European authorities should have a record if he took a trip to Europe. Those records are not public.
Congressional committee chairs, including California Rep. Adam Schiff, who will lead the House Intelligence Committee beginning in January when Democrats take control, have asked Cohen to return to Capitol Hill to testify further about his knowledge of Trump’s ties to Russia.
But Davis said Cohen won’t appear publicly until Mueller completes his investigation.
Peter Stone is a McClatchy special correspondent.
Kevin G. Hall contributed to this report.
twitter: @greggordon2
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FERGUS FALLS, Minn. — Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.
To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.
But he did not.
Instead, Mr. Relotius invented a condescending fiction. On the venerated pages of Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, Mr. Relotius portrayed Fergus Falls as a backward, racist place whose residents blindly supported President Trump and rarely ventured beyond city limits. He made up details about a young city official. He concocted characters, roadside signs and racially tinged plotlines.
“I just think of the false impression it gave to the people of Germany,” said Mary Lou Bates, 85, as she drank coffee with a friend Wednesday at the Viking Cafe, one of the many places in town that Mr. Relotius described inaccurately in his March 2017 story.
But Ms. Bates, who suggested that bias against Mr. Trump may have fueled the article, said she was not one to hold a grudge. “If the story is retracted, and the true story comes out,” she said, “you can forgive. I’m one for forgiveness.”
In recent days, as Mr. Relotius was exposed for fabricating stories for years on multiple continents and was fired from Der Spiegel, Fergus Falls has found itself in the midst of an international furor that it did not ask to be part of. The American ambassador to Germany accused Der Spiegel of a pattern of journalistic malpractice. National and international news outlets have visited the city, about 175 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Painful memories of being lied about have resurfaced.
But as upset as Fergus Falls residents were with their treatment — upset enough to compile a damning point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Relotius’s story — many of them have also been willing to accept apologies, set the record straight and forge ahead, almost sanguine about the whole ordeal. Another Der Spiegel reporter, who visited Minnesota in recent days to chronicle Mr. Relotius’s missteps, suggested that Fergus Falls might be “the most forgiving city in the Western Hemisphere.”
“We’re taking the high road,” Mayor Ben Schierer said in an interview, in which he praised his city’s arts, parks and schools, which mostly seemed to escape Mr. Relotius’s notice. “We’ve moved on.”
Indeed, amid the heartache and hassle, some in Fergus Falls have seized an opportunity to tell the world what their city is really like. Sure, it has its struggles and tensions. But on the whole, residents get along, there is plenty to do, people enjoy living there.
“It’s not Mayberry, but there’s a lot of opportunity,” said Mr. Schierer, who owns a pizza restaurant and brewery where Mr. Relotius would write when he was in town. “There’s optimism.”
Michele Anderson, who works for a local arts nonprofit, said she had been eager to read Mr. Relotius’s work and used Google’s translation service last year to convert the German text to English. The translation was imperfect, but it was immediately clear that the story was a fabrication. When Ms. Anderson saw someone praise the article on Twitter in April 2017, she replied that the story was false, a “hilarious, insulting excuse for journalism.” For more than a year, Der Spiegel did not respond.
Because the article was published only in German, its readership in Minnesota was limited. But civic leaders commissioned a professional translation, the text of which circulated around town in a shared online document. Outrage simmered.
The article’s fabrications ranged from the trivial (an account of a foreboding forest that does not exist and a Super Bowl party that did not happen) to the personally devastating (the city administrator was falsely portrayed as a gun-obsessed, romantically challenged man who had never seen the ocean) to the downright inflammatory (Mr. Relotius claimed there was a sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out” at the entrance to town).
Frustrated but unsure what recourse they had, most Fergus Falls residents quietly moved on. But Ms. Anderson, along with a friend, went to work on a detailed fact check of the article, which they published last week after Mr. Relotius was outed as a fraudster. Its title: “Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town.”
“There’s really nothing like this feeling — knowing that people in another country have read about the place I call home and are shaking their heads over their coffee in disgust,” Ms. Anderson wrote in her post.
Mr. Relotius, who visited around the time of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, had been fixated on voters’ support for the new president. Indeed, about 64 percent of voters in Otter Tail County, of which Fergus Falls is the county seat, chose Mr. Trump in 2016, though Hillary Clinton narrowly won Minnesota.
The election results speak for themselves, but a series of interviews this week with Fergus Falls residents revealed political nuance — liberals, conservatives, people who politely said it was no one’s business.
“It’s not an eyes-closed, all-for-Trump type of community,” said Ward Uggerud, 69, a retired electrical engineer, who like many people declined to say whether he voted for the president. “It’s an all-for-the-community place. Everybody’s got to do their part.”
Unlike other American counties that voted for Mr. Trump, there was not a wild political swing in Fergus Falls, making it a strange place for Mr. Relotius to choose to profile. Otter Tail County had also supported Mitt Romney and John McCain. And well-trod story lines about factory closures and population decline, often cited in accounts of Mr. Trump’s success, did not apply in Fergus Falls, where the downtown is bustling and the population is steady. (A Target store closed recently, despite community efforts to save it, but that was after Mr. Relotius left town.)
All that left residents wondering: Why did Mr. Relotius write what he did? And since he wasn’t going to tell the truth, why did he even bother coming?
“What happened, I think, was that he was trying to look for a cliché of a Trump-voting town and he simply didn’t find it,” said Christoph Scheuermann, the Der Spiegel correspondent who visited Fergus Falls last week to apologize and write about the town’s true story.
Mr. Scheuermann said the Fergus Falls he encountered was “almost the opposite” of the one Mr. Relotius described.
“I felt a lot of warmth,” he said. “Everybody was welcoming.”
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Analysis of President Donald Trump’s December 19 announcement that U.S. military forces would withdraw from Syria within 30 days has rightly focused on the potential adverse consequences for the unfinished campaign to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS), and on identifying the geopolitical winners and losers. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was already in a strong position, is finally free of any meaningful threat from Washington. His principal backers, Russia and Iran, have gained prestige and regional influence. Meanwhile, the closest U.S. partners in Syria – the Kurds, but also Britain and France – have been left holding the bag.
But this is hardly the final round in Syria’s civil war, and U.S. policymakers and others would be well-served to think through what will happen when the strategic map resets. Of course, the United States was never the dominant actor in Syria, and its influence routinely has been overstated. Nevertheless, over the past seven years, big Syria policy decisions – good, bad, and ugly – have profoundly impacted the course of the war. If implemented, Trump’s latest decision will be no different. Russia and Turkey, the two most important external actors remaining in Syria, both stand to gain from the U.S. withdrawal, but both also have reason to be anxious over precisely how the resulting vacuum will be filled. How are Russia and Turkey likely to react, and what might be the consequences, positive or negative?
For several months, the war in Syria has effectively been frozen. After recapturing pockets of insurgent control in the Damascus suburbs and along the Jordanian border earlier this year, Assad’s military campaign has ground to a halt. Instead of the Assad victory some predicted, a series of ad hoc, internationally-brokered agreements have solidified lines of control and prevented further advances by any side. The result has been a de facto partition of the country into three clearly delineated zones of influence in the west, northwest, and east – backed, respectively, by Russia and Iran (west), Turkey (northwest), and the United States (east). While this arrangement has dramatically diminished the bloodshed, it has not satisfied the strategic objectives of any of the major parties and therefore remains highly unstable.
Two weeks ago, Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan forced the issue, stating that Turkey was ready to invade the U.S.-backed zone to remove from its border Kurdish military forces aligned with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which Ankara has been fighting for more than thirty years. After playing an instrumental role in the battle of Kobani in October 2014, these forces emerged as the key U.S. partner in the fight against ISIS in Syria. Turkey views their growing military strength and political legitimacy as an acute threat to its national security – a point Erdogan has made repeatedly to both President Obama and President Trump. Erdogan’s promise that a Turkish invasion would help to “eradicate whatever’s left of ISIS” is a rouse: Turkey’s objective is to weaken the Kurds, not ISIS, and in any case the remaining pocket of ISIS control is more than a hundred miles from the Turkish border, all through Kurdish-controlled territory. Nevertheless, Trump appears to have taken this promise seriously.
So long as U.S. forces remain in Syria, Erdogan’s military plans are a very risky proposition. But a U.S. withdrawal upsets the fragile equilibrium, opening the door for Turkey and leaving the Kurds exposed. The Kurds cannot maintain control over the territory they currently hold absent international security guarantees: Kurdish lines are too long, their control over traditionally Arab areas too tenuous, and they have no air force to counter attacks from either Turkey or the Syrian government. France has publicly expressed continued support, but it is unclear how a relatively small French contingent can operate without the larger framework of U.S. logistics and intelligence, or whether a French presence would be sufficient to deter an attack. If and when U.S. forces leave, Kurdish-controlled territory is likely to contract sharply.
The main question is who will claim the spoils: Turkey or the Syrian government (with Russian and Iranian help)? There are two basic scenarios. In one, Turkey launches an attack on Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates and seeks to expand its own sphere of influence on the Syrian side of the border. If successful, this would neutralize the Kurdish threat and create another buffer zone in which Syrian refugees might ultimately be able to return, analogous to the Euphrates Shield area in northwest Syria. In the second scenario, the Kurds cut a deal with Damascus that returns eastern Syria to government control, in return for some degree of Kurdish autonomy and protection from Turkey. Of course, these scenarios are not mutually exclusive: Turkey could proceed with a preliminary operation against Manbij, on the Kurds’ northwestern flank, at the same time that the Syrian military and its allies attempt to retake Tabqa Dam or oil and gas infrastructure in Deir ez Zor province, further south.
In any scenario, the scramble for territory is likely to sharply increase tensions between Russia and Turkey. While Turkish threats work to Damascus’ advantage, since they increase its leverage in negotiations with the Kurds, neither the Syrian government nor Russia want to see a fresh Turkish invasion. This would undermine Assad’s core objective of reclaiming “every inch” of Syrian territory, create a new safe haven for Turkish-backed Syrian forces that continue to oppose Assad’s rule, and potentially deny Damascus access to energy and agricultural resources that it desperately needs to fund reconstruction. Russia is therefore likely to seek to accelerate talks between the Syrian government and the Kurds, while offering Turkey assurances that its interests will be protected and, crucially, pressing Turkey not to press further into eastern Syria. Russia has cards to play here: in addition to Turkey’s dependence on Russian natural gas, Russia serves as the guarantor of the October agreement in Idlib that forestalled a Syrian government offensive which could send more than a million new refugees into southern Turkey. In Idlib, Russian and Turkish interests aligned; in the east they do not.
At the same time, however, Erdogan appears to have a green light from Washington, and in any case there are sound strategic reasons for Turkey to proceed, even in the face of protests from Moscow. The departure of U.S. military forces from eastern Syria is not an unambiguously positive development for Ankara. Turkey has lost the ability to play the United States and Russia off one another, and should the Syrian government and the Kurds reach an accommodation, there is every reason to suspect they will soon find common cause against Turkey, as they have many times in the past. This is likely to begin with Assad’s support for a Kurdish offensive to retake Afrin, which Turkey seized in March, and could develop into broader cooperation to harass and ultimately expel Turkey from all of northern Syria. There is no question that expanding Turkish operations into the east carries significant risks, which is probably one of the main reasons Erdogan has delayed his plans. But sitting tight while Turkey’s adversaries in Syria unite is not terribly appealing, either. By proceeding, Erdogan might be able to deal the Kurds a decisive blow, while keeping attention focused on the east (rather than the northwest) and giving himself more chips to trade in when he needs them.
Whatever happens, with the United States out of Syria it is hard to see how Russia and Turkey do not rapidly find themselves at loggerheads – either because Russia is unable to protect Turkey’s interests in Syria, or because a Turkish invasion undermines Russia’s efforts to bring the war to a successful conclusion. This would be welcome in so far as it might bring Turkey back into closer alignment with the United States, but an unintended confrontation between the two countries inside Syria or a major clash between Russian and Turkish proxies could easily spiral out of control. In the most extreme case, this could result in Turkey invoking collective self-defense under article 5 of the NATO treaty, which would bring the United States back to Syria in a very different, and far more costly, role. But even absent that, a fresh escalation of the war would be a disaster – for Syria, the region, and international efforts to defeat ISIS.
The challenge of preventing an unwanted escalation is of course made infinitely harder when consequential decisions are made on the fly, without adequate consultation or planning. A responsible withdrawal from Syria requires a diplomatic strategy to manage what comes next.
Photo: Turkish-backed Syrian fighters train in a camp in the Aleppo countryside, northern Syria, on December 16, 2018 (Aref Tammawi/AFP/Getty Images)
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President Donald J. Trump’s surprise announcement on Wednesday that he is withdrawing the US military from Syria has shaken the Washington, DC, foreign policy establishment like a thunderclap. While there have been nods of approval from skeptics about American interventionism in the Middle East, that’s a rare breed inside the Beltway.
Instead, DC foreign policy mavens, most of whom espouse neo-flavored beliefs (whether neoliberal or neoconservative) reacted with derision and horror to Trump’s proposed withdrawal from Syria’s terrible fratricide, ongoing for almost eight years. These media and think-tank denizens, once derided as ‘the Blob’ by Obama’s White House, have spoken with one voice, and it’s sharply critical of the president.
Prominent Republicans are among the harshest Trump critics, with Sen. Lindsey Graham leading the charge against the president’s Syria decision, which Graham claims ‘rattled the world.’ Most Democratic critiques of Trump’s announcement sound similar, when not identical. Here’s another reminder of the broad and deep Washington consensus that the only thing wrong with American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, is that there aren’t enough of them.
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A look at the best news photos from around the world.
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The cavalier expansively offers his hand in a descending arc through the air. As the ballerina places her hand in his, she steps onto point and extends one leg behind her.
Welcome to ballet. This grandiloquent action, an archetypal example of ballet classicism, is a crucial transaction within supported adagio, that singularly momentous idiom: With the man’s assistance, a female dancer blooms all the more fully.
What does it say to us? Logically, viewers should attend above all to that joining of hands. Here’s a formal ritual of courtship, in which the woman accepts the man, at least provisionally, as a suitor. Far more powerful, though, is how, now on point, she becomes a multidimensional work of ideal geometry, sculpturally firm and theatrically radiant. No longer entirely human, she’s now also — in line, shape and projection — transcendent.
Such images abound in the work of the Franco-Russian choreographer Marius Petipa (1818-1910): You can see them in the dances he made for “Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake” and “Raymonda.” They confront us with a problematic but beautiful central issue of ballet: its highly ambiguous sexism.
This year, his bicentennial, has brought Petipa conferences (at Harvard University, in Madrid, Moscow, Paris, St. Petersburg); new productions of his ballets in Europe and the United States; and important Petipa revivals around the world. Attention is certainly due. More is being learned about the man, his career and his creations, so central to ballet repertory today. Still, their central feature — the radical dualism he constructs between the sexes — tends to be taken for granted.
The woman goes on point; the man does the partnering. The positions may not be reversed. What’s going on here? Is he serving her or controlling her? He subordinates himself to making her all the more spectacular, but which one is in charge? We can say that such behavior glorifies women — or that it falsifies them. I’m among the thousands who are disarmed by it; I’m also well aware that it’s far from the behavior I encounter anywhere today.
Petipa was the chief architect of the classic ballets I’ve named. In addition, most versions of “Giselle,” “Paquita,” “Coppélia” and “Le Corsaire” contain extensive and crucial contributions by him. And, though he was too ill to make most of the original 1892 “Nutcracker,” he planned its score and scenario in detail with its composer, Tchaikovsky. It’s fair to say his work remains more widely and often performed than that of any other choreographer.
George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, the two greatest masters of ballet classicism in the 20th century, both acknowledged the vastness of their debt to him. Today’s most in-demand ballet choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, has now devoted a large portion of his time to reviving Petipa choreography from period sources.
Who are the women in these ballets? The destiny of Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” is controlled by others. The Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” is just the hostess with the mostest in the Realm of Sweets. Glorious, sparkling, full of dance variety, the heartbeats of every scene in which they appear, they’re figureheads whose inner lives remain unknown. Sure, some heroines — Nikiya in “Bayadère,” Odette in “Swan Lake” — love and trust, are betrayed and suffer.
But all these women, though doing far more of their ballets’ dancing, lead lives shaped by their men. Such was the late-19th century world that Petipa knew, in which few women shaped history or were allowed to create important art of their own.
Still, we shouldn’t assume all 19th-century ballet was like his. The works of the Danish choreographer August Bournonville (1805-79) show men and women dancing together as equals. They sometimes even show women partnering men.
Bournonville was part of a Scandinavian tradition that connects to Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and Ibsen’s plays. Petipa, a Frenchman working in Imperial Russia, made no links with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mussorgsky, Chekhov. Yet it was he who created enduring classics, central to ballet tradition as Bournonville’s are not. Petipa’s ballets show the powers of his powerless women.
Petipa’s command of space and time is that of a master architect. Whether he’s handling women en masse or alone, he maps the stage with their geometries. He’s also a jeweler, presenting dancers’ bodies this way and that, as if holding gems up to the light, showing us how they refract it in different directions. And he surrounds his queen-bee heroines with retinues. The dances for the female corps de ballet often count for far more than any for the leading men.
It’s reasonable to say that Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores — “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” “The Nutcracker” — surpass Petipa’s choreography. But that misses the point. Although Tchaikovsky’s music is marvelously evocative, it’s Petipa’s stage drama that shows us what’s at stake: a society in which men honor women, support women, frame women. He makes that seem the cornerstone not only of ballet but of psychology and civilization, too.
He shows us supported adagio as something that transports a hero when he envisions it (“Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère,” “The Sleeping Beauty”); something a heroine dreams about (“Raymonda”) as her shining hope; something children are shown as a peak of wonderland (“The Nutcracker”); something that happens in both courts (“Swan Lake”) and villages (“Coppélia”). Upon the foundation of this male-female negotiation, Petipa constructs the rest of almost every act — the central suite of classical dances with their solo variations, and coda, the other ensembles in various styles, the mime scenes, and more.
In life, Petipa’s view of the sexes was more complex. Many female dancers in Russia were high-class courtesans, feted by generous admirers, whose gifts of jewels then adorned their costumes like trophies. At the St. Petersburg premiere of “Swan Lake,” in 1895, Petipa’s daughter Marie (1856-1930) was only a supporting dancer, yet she wore jewels estimated at tens of thousands of rubles. Like prima ballerinas, she could wield influence beyond her father’s.
The first full-length biography of the choreographer, “Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master,” by Nadine Meisner is to be published in June (Oxford University Press). The most disturbing of its revelations is the formal complaint written in 1867 by Petipa’s wife, Maria Surovshchikova (1836-82), soon after she left him. She had been his muse, dancing the lead role (often with him as her stage partner) in ballets from 1855 to ’66.
In this document, she said that during 10 years of married life, her husband assaulted her every week, “leaving consequences for my already weak health.” According to her account, these often took place before their children and servants; Maria left him after an incident in which he began to throttle her and spit at her. It seems that he was maddened by jealousy; her many admirers were more than he could bear. (The case was settled out of court. Thereafter, they led separate lives.)
Though we have only her word for that complaint — and though Petipa’s ballets can’t readily be said to abuse or demean women — his temper was known to be atrocious. Will we ever understand him?
For most of his life, the famous Petipa was not this one, anyway. His brother Lucien (1815-98), three years his senior, had been one of the foremost dancers in the 1840s and the male star of the original “Giselle” (1841). Lucien went on to become a choreographer of renown, working on staging the premieres of ballet music by Verdi, Wagner and others, while Marius, working in Russia, was making ballets to far less remarkable music from Pugni and Minkus.
Having moved to Russia in 1847, Marius Petipa became the country’s senior ballet master by 1870. The Russian authorities, giving him resources beyond those of other nations, expected him to fill the stage with spectacle, bravura display and vast numbers of dancers. This probably turned him into an artist different from the one he would like to have been. In 1875, when Bournonville visited Russia, Petipa admitted to him that the showy irrelevances that cluttered his ballets were to satisfy the public and those in power, but against his own artistic instincts.
Yet Petipa was one of history’s great survivors; he outlived all the Western ballet masters of his youth and middle age. Far more of his choreography survives, too. Thanks in large part to his legacy, ballet became internationally known as a Russian art. The lineage of Russian ballet luminaries — Pavlova, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov — is one descended from Petipa.
While many of his Russian artist contemporaries (Dostoyevsky, Repin, Mussorgsky, Tolstoy, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov) were pursuing a cult of Russian subject matter for Russian people, Petipa kept looking to the West, pursuing art for art’s sake. This made him something of a kindred spirit to his later composer colleagues Tchaikovsky and Glazunov; and, in due course, a precursor of the modernism of Stravinsky and Balanchine. Many of his narrative works anticipate the plotless ballets of today. The story slows or stops; the dance flowers; a Romantically classical vision of womanhood is at the center of the frame.
The feminist Germaine Greer once argued that Shakespeare, in his comedy “The Taming of the Shrew,” gave to its tamed heroine Kate a final speech that’s “the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written.” We may claim the same for the heroines of Petipa’s wordless ballets. They live only for marriage and (even beyond their mate’s adultery and the grave) true love; yet they rule space, time, music and drama like monarchs. They’re the objects and the justification of Romantic chivalry at its most precariously sublime.
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9.25.18
The Russian Krasukha-4 mobile electronic warfare system, which can neutralize spy satellites and ground-and airborne radars and damage enemy EW, landed in Syria on Tuesday, Sept. 25.
It was unloaded at the Russian Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia, one day after Russian Defense Minister Gen. Sergei Shoigu pledged systems for jamming satellite navigation and the on-board radars and communication systems of combat aircraft attacking Syria, in punishment for Israel’s alleged role in downing the Russian IL-20 spy plane.
The Krasukha-4 is highly advanced, although not the most sophisticated EW system in the Russian arsenal. But it fits Shoigu’s book. The system can jam communications systems, disable guided missiles and aircraft, and neutralize Low-Earth Orbit spy satellites and radars (AWACS) at ranges of 150-300km, which cover northern and central Israel. The Krasukha-4 can also damage opposing EW.
Israel’s military has focused its response to Russia’s hostile measures on the eight S-300 aid defense batteries promised the Syrian army in the coming weeks. Little mention has been made by Israeli spokesmen of the electronic warfare duel awaiting the IDF with Russia. Israel’s military and air force know about the Krasukha-4 but have never met it in action. However, it is well known to the Americans.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to ask Donald Trump when they meet at UN Center on Wednesday to offer Vladimir Putin some incentive for removing the EW jamming threat. There is scarcely any chance of any such a trade-off. Our sources believe that Putin will hold out for nothing less than the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, to which President Trump will not agree.
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On the modern battlefield, electronic warfare can be just as destructive as a ... U.S. forces in Syriahave already reportedly been targeted by Russian electronic warfare ... Hypersonic weapons—conventional- or nuclear-armed missiles ... The great power contest may even extent to space. ... Cyber weapons.
How a chilling Saudi cyberwar ensnared Jamal Khashoggi
Washington Post-Dec 7, 2018
He had become the prime target in a 21st-century information war — one that ... MBS came to the information space armed, figuratively speaking, with a bone saw. ... by two Israeli companies — NSO Group and its affiliate, Q Cyber ... For the Saudis, as for Russian hackers in their assault on the 2016 U.S. ...
Giving Syria S-300 Surface To Air Missile Systems Won't Halt Israeli ...
The Drive-Sep 24, 2018
Russia says it will supply Syria with S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, will jam the radar, navigation, and communications systems on any ...
The true threat of S-300s is not that they're powerful, but that they're ...
The Times of Israel-Sep 25, 2018
The Times of Israel-Sep 25, 2018
Russia to Provide Assad With Up to Eight S-300 Systems to Defend All ...
International-Haaretz-Sep 26, 2018
International-Haaretz-Sep 26, 2018
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