Posted on 07/30/2007 12:32:06 AM PDT by vertolet
Belatedly, here’s my tuppence on Alastair Campbell’s diaries: he was a spin-doctor, an unprecedentedly successful one. Did anyone seriously expect him to be anything other than utterly calculating and ruthless? What stings people most, especially the press, about Campbell is how he managed to manipulate us so skilfully for so long.
And yet it seems to be happening again, right under our noses. One of the most skilful media operators of recent times has turned Britain into the Gullible Man of Europe. He opens his mouth, we take what he says as gospel. Because of his enormous wealth – enormous wealth having become one of Britain’s favourite preoccupations – and his shadowy past, he makes us politically correct, environmentally conscious pauper squares feel a little bit close to the edge, a little bit glamorous. Much like that gangster chic phase we went through during which the Kray brothers suddenly became fashionable, we feel we’re playing with big boys now. Only this big boy is playing us. It is intolerably embarrassing.
I’m talking about Britain’s new best friend, Boris Berezovsky, who arrived on these shores in 2001 and has been wanted for extradition by his former friends at the Kremlin ever since. The four-times-married “original Russian billionaire” famously boasted in the 1990s about how he was part of a small coterie of so-called oligarchs who owned 50 per cent of Russia’s wealth. Despite this, the British people now happily accept that a man who became seriously rich in the turbulent, shadowy periods of recent Russian history has now been born again as a democracy-loving human rights campaigner, as he insists. When, further, it emerges that an attempt on his life has apparently been made we unquestioningly accept this as fact, as if real life in 2007 does in fact exactly mirror the plot of an Ian Fleming novel.
Let’s go through that “assassination attempt” again. What happened was this. The first version posited that a Russian man known to M15, armed with a gun and using a child as a decoy, was about to take aim at Berezovsky in the Park Lane Hilton when British Secret Service agents dramatically saved the day by apprehending the gunman. Subsequent reports present a less exciting scenario. The would-be assassin was actually staying at the Hilton and there was no gun. Oh, and Berezovsky was out of the country. Finally, who do you fancy was the primary source for the first story? It was our £800 million hero, of course. According to Berezovsky, he’s spent his whole time in Britain dodging bullets, which may be true but raises more questions. First, what was he doing last month giving a talk at Miller’s Academy, a lecture hall in West London with the security standards of a village town hall? Secondly, if it really is the life ambition of every former communist trained assassin to kill this man, why isn’t he locked up in a safe house, as Salman Rushdie was? Why, instead, was he granted a British passport? And in what way will this passport save his life? We rang the Home Office, but it wouldn’t tell us.
In Russia Berezovsky is wanted on a long list of charges, including embezzlement and financing Chechen guerrillas. Some of these allegations are undoubtedly part of a larger smear campaign, but are they all? And before you switch off to rant some more about that evil Campbell, here are some more questions, which concern you. Why do we in Britain think that Berezovsky is in any position to foment this revolution of his?
Ask anyone in his homeland about how popular he is there and they’ll tell you that he is almost universally loathed. Even Gary Kasparov – whom Britain erroneously believes also constitutes a threat to Putin’s power (when the champion chess player holds his protest rallies around Russia a couple of hundred people turn up) – has publicly derided Berezovsky and angrily denies that he helped to fund Kasparov’s opposition party.
What we must bear in mind about this undoubtedly intelligent, charismatic and occasionally charming man is that he knows the game, having had his finger in several influential media pies. In the period leading up to Putin’s election, Berezovsky owned, among other publicity vehicles, Kommersant, then Russia’s main business newspaper, as well as OTV, its main television channel. He was one of the architects of Putin’s rise to power and has spent the intervening years grinding an axe about his fall from grace.
It’s not clear what exactly his aim in life now is, other than to destabilise Russia or dream idly of using “force to change this regime”. To that end, he seems to realise how susceptible we British are to a bit of prejudiced speculation. Say bad things about the Kremlin and, parrot-like, British journalists and intelligence agents will start talking about the “new cold war”.
Berezovsky obtained British citizenship after he changed his name to Platon Elenin. Why he changed it has never been explained. The Brazilian authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of money-laundering.
Does it matter? Think back to 2000, when Mohamed Al Fayed lost his attempt for British citizenship. Judges at the Court of Appeal ruled against it on the ground that he was not of “good character”. But Al Fayed provides thousands of British jobs and has poured millions of pounds into various charities. He also pays British taxes.
By contrast, Berezovsky pays no tax in the UK on foreign earnings, while the legal cost of fighting Russia’s extradition request is running into millions. In this canny multi-millionaire, has the Home Office finally found a human form of that previously mythical creature, the shadowy tycoon with a heart of gold?
Is Stefanie MArsh retarded, or does she really believe this stuff?
You can say Berezovsky is pretty vile while still finding Putin to be reprehensible too.
Danny DeVito? Seperated at birth?
The cost of keeping Berezovsky, and his big mouth may be getting high. Too high for the British taxpayers and business.
I agree.
Let me point out a couple of details in the pro-Putin article by Stefanie Marsh (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2156186.ece):
1) Marsh writes of "a Russian man known to M15...", but notice the number 1 instead of the letter I. A typing error? Perhaps, but it may betray more. Any Briton or friend of 007 movies would know how to pronounce the name of their intelligence service. Only someone (f. ex. a Russian) who knows the abbreviation from writing rather than from speech, might have thought of it as M 15 instead of MI 5;
2) Marsh writes: "We rang the Home Office...", but who were the "we"? The writer hardly addresses herself in a royal plural. Was it a group work?
3) Marsh writes of "Gary Kasparov" with one r, although all chess players know him as "Garry" (or, except for Anglosaxons, as "Garri" with an i instead of y) with two r's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kasparov). Yet another spelling error in what is otherwise written in excellent English? This misspelling can, however, be found on many web sites - by a Greek (http://www.chess.gr/portraits/kasparov/kasparov.html), by a Russian (http://www.volokh.com/posts/1176577283.shtml and http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185689979.shtml), as well as by an Australian who worked four years in Russia (http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s1335618.htm)... It appears to be Russian-influenced. Thanks to Google, we should be able to compare the ratio of similar misspellings in various languages: 1:50 in Russian (Гари: Гарри), 1:58 in German (Gari:Garri), but only 1:170 in Finnish. To count the ratio in English, however, seems to cause particular problems - the hits with "Gary" actually include many Garry's and Gari's. So I leave for others to test this method further.
But who is Stefanie Marsh? She has written at least ten articles (http://www.byliner.com/writer/?id=15183), which reveal her as an atheist and feminist, who spent his youth in the 1980s, became a fashion writer by the 1990s, understands German and spent some time as a stipendiate in a Berlin magazine... There is nothing very political in her biography, and she is certainly no investigative journalist, although she has written a couple of articles on British Muslims. Where did she now get this sudden interest in Russian affairs? In the readers' comments, one reader from Moscow recalls knowing Marsh from the past ("So this is what you're doing these days."). That reader was Chloe Arnold, a Moscow correspondent of RFE/RL, and a former BBC reporter, who also used to write to The Times (http://www.rferl.org/features/authors/arnold.asp). It may be no surprise, that she is one of those careless reporters who have spread the ridiculous myth of Chechens fighting in Afghanistan (http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/5605-7.cfm).
We do not know how Marsh and her assistants (those mysterious "we" in her article) got the idea of becoming suddenly experts on Russia, but last year she visited Moscow to report on the plight of women whose relatives had died in the Theatre Siege four years ealier. And just two weeks ago, on July 17th, The Times did publish another article by Marsh on Russian women, indicating that she may have revisited Moscow. Otherwise, her references to Russia seem to be based on discussions with Russian models and customers at London fur exhibitions and dinners, in one of which she even mentioned Boris Berezovsky among many other guests. Most probably, her interest in Russia arose from apolitical acquintances - until she ended up presented in one of Russia's main news programmes as the voice of The Times, and being quoted in hundreds of Russian, Serbian (http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1185818207/last-1185818207/Berezovsky+is+playing+us+(britfags),+and+it%92s+embarrassing), and other easily misled web sites, even in Britain (http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2007/07/berezovsky-whos-playing-who.html) and America (http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=195486) - it remains to be seen, if the whole story gets as much publicity.
The good news is, that one of the last relatively free newspapers in Russia - the English-language Moscow Times, run the true story yesterday:
'Vesti' Designs Own Version of Front Page for Times of London
Moscow Times (02-08-2007)
State-run television channel Rossia displayed a fake version of Monday's issue of The Times of London on its news show "Vesti," featuring exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky on Monday.
Two pictures flanked the front page of the fake issue, one apparently showing Berezovsky and the other Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, with the headline, "Berezovsky is playing us, and it's embarrassing."
The newspaper did run the article, by Stefanie Marsh, and under that very headline, but in the comment and opinion six-page pullout section rather than the paper's front page.
"In no way did the piece suggest that the shown image -- which was a collage -- was the actual issue of The Times newspaper that came out on Monday," Yulia Polipova, a "Vesti" spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
In response, The Times highlighted the fact that a personal opinion piece had been presented as news reporting.
"The image shown by 'Vesti' gives a completely incorrect representation of The Times front page," said Anoushka Healy, editorial communications director for the newspaper, in e-mailed comments.
Polipova flatly dismissed speculation in the Russian media that the image may have been ordered by the Kremlin. The article referred to Berezovsky's recently announced allegations that Scotland Yard police foiled a plot to kill him. Berezovsky said police had told him to leave Britain because his life was in danger.
During the week he was gone, police apprehended a man suspected of the plot at a Hilton hotel in central London, Berezovsky said.
In the article, Marsh criticizes Britain's decision to grant Berezovsky asylum status and suggests that he abuses the status by using his British base as a platform for an anti-Kremlin campaign to "destabilize Russia."
Moscow shares that view. Boris Timoshenko, a media analyst at the Glasnost Foundation, called the program's actions "idiotism," but stopped short of blaming the program's editors. "In current conditions, people understand what is expected of them," Timoshenko said, alluding to pressure from the Kremlin. The front page of Monday's bona fide Times led with an article about a shortage of court judges in Britain.
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