What Russia taught Syria: When you destroy a city, make sure no one -- not even the story -- gets out alive.
It was a star-filled night in Chechnya's besieged capital
of Grozny. The snow crunched under my feet as I walked with the Chechen rebel
commander away from the warmth of our safe house. When we entered a bombed-out
neighborhood 15 minutes away, I put the battery in my Iridium satellite phone
and waited for the glowing screen to signal that I had locked on to the
satellites.
I made my call. It was short. Then the commander made a
call; he quickly hung up and handed me back the phone. "Enough," he
said, motioning for me to remove the battery.
As we walked briskly back to the safe house, it was
exactly 10 minutes before the cascade of double wa-whumps announced the Grad
rocket batteries pounding the vacant neighborhood we had just left.
It was December 1999, and the Russian assault on Grozny
was unfolding in all its gruesome detail. After the dissolution of so much of
the former Soviet empire, Chechnya was one country that the newly minted prime
minister, Vladimir Putin, refused to let go of. His boss, Boris Yeltsin, and
the Russian army had been defeated and then humiliated in the media by Chechen
forces in the first war. Five years later, Russia was back. And Putin's new
strategy was unbending: silence, encircle, pulverize, and "cleanse."
It was a combination of brutal tactics -- a Stalinist purge of fighting-age
males plus Orwellian propaganda that fed Russians a narrative wherein Chechen
freedom fighters were transformed into Islamist mercenaries and terrorists.
More than 200,000 civilians were to die in this war, the echoes of which
continue to this day.
This time, journalists were specifically targeted to
prevent sympathetic or embarrassing reports from escaping the killing zone. As
such, you can't find a lot of stories about the second Chechen war. One of the
few and best accounts was written by Marie Colvin, who described her terrifying
escape from Grozny for the Sunday Times. Last month, Colvin thought she could
roll the dice and enter the besieged Syrian city of Homs to defy yet another
brutal war of oppression. This time she lost.
It's impossible to know whether Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad -- a longtime ally of Russia -- studied the success of the last
Chechen war before launching his own assault on the restive city of Homs.
However, his Russian military advisors surely know the tactics well. The
crackdown in Homs carries a grim echo of Grozny, both in its use of signals
intelligence to track down and silence the regime's enemies and in its bloody
determination to obliterate any opposition, including Western journalists.
Assad's ability to lethally target journalists using
satellite-phone uplinks could well have cost Colvin her life. Multiple reports
have suggested that Syrian forces used phone signals to pinpoint her location
and then launched a rocket barrage that resulted in her death on Feb. 22, along
with that of French photographer Remi Ochlik and multiple Syrian civilians.
The use of satellite and cellular transmissions to
determine a subject's location was relatively new a decade ago, when I was in
Grozny. Tracking phone transmissions to hunt down targets began in earnest with
a covert unit of U.S. intelligence officers from the National Security Agency
(NSA), CIA, Navy, Air Force, and special operations called "The
Activity." This snooping unit was also called the Army of Northern
Virginia, Grey Fox, and even Task Force Orange. We see much of this technology
used to inform modern drone and U.S. Joint Special Operations Command strikes.
My decade covering U.S. spec ops, intelligence gathering, and their contractors
highlighted the impressive ability of various countries to monitor, locate,
network, and act on what is called SIGINT, or signals intelligence.
The Russians have their own version of this capability,
which fell under the command of the Federal Agency of Government Communications
and Information, now part of the Federal Protective Service. In the United
States, it would be equivalent to the NSA and FBI combined, and the agency
provides sophisticated eavesdropping support to Russia's military,
intelligence, and counterterrorism units -- and to Russia's allies, including
Syria.
Russia has spent a long time perfecting these techniques.
On April 21, 1996, Chechnya's breakaway president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was
speaking on a satellite phone with Russian envoy Konstantin Borovoi about
setting peace talks with Yeltsin. During the phone call, he was killed by a
signal-guided missile fired from a Russian jet fighter. The warplane had
received Dudayev's coordinates from a Russian ELINT (electronic intelligence)
plane that had picked up and locked on to the signal emitted by the satellite
phone. It was Russian deception and brutality at its finest.
It should have been clear even back then that there was a
benefit and a distinct penalty to modern communications on the battlefield.
Flash forward to Syria today. The opposition Free Syrian
Army is officially run by a former air force colonel who commands a barely organized
group of army defectors supported by energetic youth. They rely almost entirely
on cell-phone service, satellite phones, the Internet, and social media to
organize and communicate. Early in February, according to a Fox News report,
Qatar provided 3,000 satellite phones, which the Syrian rebels have used to
upload numerous impactful videos and stories.
These past few weeks, under a barrage of mortar, tank,
and artillery shells, their plaintive calls for help from inside the besieged
Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs sparked international outrage. But without
Western journalists filing for newspapers and television outlets, these videos
-- mostly shaky, low-resolution footage of corpses and artillery strikes --
wouldn't have had the impact they deserve.
In a welcome resurgence of non-embedded journalism, brave
reporters like Colvin and many others risked their lives to enter Homs and
report from the ground. What they showed us was moving, horrific, and
embarrassing. Once again, Western governments were caught doing nothing --
while women, children, and innocents were murdered by their own government.
It's a playbook the Syrians are good at: The shelling of Homs began on Feb. 3,
2012 -- exactly 30 years after the Hama massacre, in which Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's
father, killed up to 15,000 civilians over three weeks in a similar program of
wanton destruction.
What we haven't seen as clearly is the extent to which
the Syrian regime (thanks to its Russian advisors) now has the tools of
electronic warfare to crush this popular uprising -- and anything that happens
to get in the way. Syria is one of Russia's biggest clients for weapons,
training, and intelligence. In return for such largesse, it has offered the
Russian Navy use of Tartus, a new deep-water military port in the
Mediterranean. Moscow sold Damascus nearly $1 billion worth of weapons in 2011,
despite growing sanctions against the oppressive Assad regime. With these
high-tech weapons comes the less visible Russian-supplied training on
technologies, tactics, and strategies.
The sounds of rockets pulverizing civilians should have
brought back memories and warnings to Colvin. She would have recognized all the
signs from her previous reporting in Chechnya, where she and her escorts were
hunted relentlessly by Russian domestic security agents who sought to arrest,
silence, or kill any journalist attempting to report on the slaughter of
civilians.
My time in Grozny included being surrounded three times
by the Russian army, numerous direct bombardments, and frequent close calls. I
paid attention to the safety warnings of the Chechen rebel commanders who kept
me alive. These rebels were once part of the Soviet military and intelligence
apparatus and were fully schooled in Russia's dirty tricks. They taught me much.
Chief among them was not communicating electronically while in country, not
trusting "media guides," and never telling people where I was going.
If captured by Russian troops, they urged me -- for my own safety -- to say
that I had been kidnapped by Chechen forces.
Just as I exited Chechnya, I met Colvin, who was heading
in. She wanted to know as much as she could. I warned her of the duplicity and
violent intent of the Russian military and their Chechen proxies. Despite my
warnings, she bravely entered Chechnya and wrote riveting, award-winning
stories that now sound almost identical to her coverage from Syria.
I was distressed to read of Colvin's death in Syria, and
even more distressed to think she might still be alive now if she had
remembered some basic warnings. Her first error was that she stayed inside the
rebel "media center" -- in reality, a four-story family home
converted to this use as it was one of the few places that had a generator.
The second was communication. The Syrian army had shut
down the cell-phone system and much of the power in Baba Amr -- and when
journalists sent up signals it made them a clear target. After CNN's Arwa Damon
broadcast live from the "media center" for a week, the house was
bombarded until the top floor collapsed. Colvin may have been trapped, but she
chose to make multiple phone reports and even went live on CNN and other media
channels, clearly mentioning that she was staying in the bombed building.
The third mistake was one of tone. She made her
sympathies in the besieged city clearly known as she emotionally described the
horrors and documented the crimes of the Syrian government.
Unsurprisingly, the next day at 9 a.m., a barrage of
rockets was launched at the "media center." She was killed -- along
her cameraman, Remi Ochlik, and at least 80 Syrian civilians across the city --
targeted with precision rocket barrages, bombs, and the full violence of the
Syrian army.
In Grozny, Russian forces decided that they would
eliminate everything, everybody, and every voice that stood up to the state --
including journalists who tried to enter. Syria has clearly made the same
determination in Homs. This military action is intended to be a massacre, a
Stalinist-style lesson to those who dare defy the rulers of Syria.
The United Nations estimates that more than 7,500 Syrians
have so far been killed in the yearlong spasm of violence there. Perhaps this
ghastly toll would be even higher now if brave reporters like Colvin had not
entered. With the recent news that the rebels have retreated from the
bombardment of Baba Amr to safer territory, Assad's forces, as well as their
Russian advisors, are claiming victory. According to official news reports from
the Syrian Information Ministry, "the foreign-backed mercenaries and armed
terrorist groups" have fled, the corpses of three Western journalists have
been "discovered," and Homs is now "peaceful."
Despite what Damascus claims, this fight is not yet over.
And we need more brave and bright journalists who will shine a light in places
like Syria, where a regime works diligently to plunge its people into darkness.
But let's not forget whose callous playbook they're using.
**California-based Robert Young Pelton wrote The Hunter,
the Hammer, and Heaven about his experiences in Chechnya in 1999 to 2000. He is
currently publisher of Somalia Report, a 24/7 news source that works with over
100 Somali reporters. His book The World's Most Dangerous Places contains
survival tips from what he has learned in over a dozen conflicts.