Newsweek 05/11/2018

DANIEL ELLSBERG IS BEST KNOWN AS THE military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and exposed Defense Department lies about American involvement in the Vietnam War. But in 1971, when he took those top-secret documents out of his office safe at the Rand Corp., he also removed a cache of materials related to his job as one architect of America’s nuclear strategy of so-called mutually assured destruction, or MAD. (The idea being that two nuclear nations would be reluctant to attack each other.) He hid those top-secret nuclear papers in plastic bags on his brother’s farm in upstate New York, intending to reveal them after the furor over the Pentagon Papers died down. But Tropical Storm Doria in 1971 eroded the hiding place, and he never saw his papers again. Now a…

WHEN MIGUEL DÍAZ-CANEL formally accepted the presidency of Cuba on April 19, he became the first non-Castro to run the country since Fidel’s revolution swept the island in 1959. In his inaugural address, the new president pledged to continue Raúl Castro’s vision, most notably his unfinished “updating” of the economy, a Cuban form of market socialism launched in 2011 to replace the former Soviet-style central planning system. If he is successful, his reforms would produce the most profound transformation since Fidel took power six decades ago and lay the groundwork for what his brother Raúl called “prosperous and sustainable socialism.” But in taking the helm of government, Díaz-Canel faces strong political headwinds. He has to force Raúl’s economic reforms through a resistant bureaucracy—something even Raúl had trouble doing. He has to hold…

“She recognizes that waterboarding was morally reprehensible, if legal at the time. She is never going down that path again.” IN THE SUMMER OF 1969, THE CIA director urgently sought a meeting at the White House. Richard Helms was determined to get President Richard Nixon to quash an Army investigation into the murder of a Green Beret informant in Vietnam. The case was threatening to expose the CIA’s assassinations program in that country, as well as the agency’s more discreet killing devices, including lethal drugs. Nixon despised the urbane Helms—and the CIA as a whole, which he considered part of the fashionable Georgetown crowd that looked down on him. But after letting Helms stew over his decision for a few weeks, Nixon forced the Army to drop the case. Helms was eventually…

“Pretty much anything you post can be viewed as support of terrorism.” CHINA HAS ITS OWN GREAT firewall. Turkey has been blocking swaths of the internet, including YouTube, for at least a decade. So until last month, Russia was a glaring standout among authoritarian nations in allowing its people relatively free access to the World Wide Web. No longer. In what is shaping up to be a historic showdown, the Russian state has mounted its first major assault on cyberfreedom. On April 15, Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN) began trying to block Telegram, a secure messaging service and blogging platform used by more than 15 million Russians. Its crimes? Refusing to comply with a new law that obliges all internet companies to physically store their data on Russian users in the country,…

ON A SUNNY DAY THISAPRIL, TEENAGE GIRLS FROM A LOCAL school were having a picnic in a park. I was on a bench near them, reading a book, until the noise got too much. The students were in uniform, easy with one another and bursting with adolescent enthusiasm. They reflected London’s infinite class, race and ethnic variety. Some had clustered around a lovely, mixed-race girl and were weaving wild flowers around her curly hair: “Straighten your hair,” one said. “You’ll look just like Meghan!” They took selfies, squealed over sites for bridal gowns and pored over celeb mags with pictures of Meghan Markle. Idolized and envied by them, she was the luckiest woman in the world. The girl with the floral crown broke the spell: “That’s silly. It will be…

ON FEBRUARY 10, AN UNMANNED Iranian reconnaissance aircraft lifted off from a military base in central Syria and penetrated Israeli airspace over the Golan Heights. An Israeli Apache helicopter tracked the drone, filmed it and blasted it from the sky with an air-to-air missile. Israeli warplanes then roared into Syria and bombed the military base where the drone had been launched, destroying an Iranian control center. Amid the strike, Syrian anti-aircraft missiles shot down an Israeli F-16, the first Israeli fighter downed since 1982. It was two months before Israel responded, but on April 9, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conferred with President Donald Trump, Israeli warplanes attacked Iranian forces in Syria head-on. In addition to destroying additional Iranian drones, the Israelis wiped out an advanced Iranian air-defense system that had…