inside the most important—and fraught

Egypt’s Descent / Christopher Walken Unplugged
20.05.2016
INSIDE THE MOST IMPORTANT—AND FRAUGHT—
RELATIONSHIP IN BRITISH POLITICS
BY ISABEL OAKESHOTT
MAY 20, 2016
VOL.166
NO.19
18 Hacking
+
Your Money
or Your Data
STRAY CAT BLUES:
Empty chairs in front
of the Sphinx and the
Great Pyramids are
becoming commonplace. Tourism in Egypt
has been down since
the 2011 revolution.
20 Intelligence
The Spy Who
Went Into the Cold
NEW WORLD
40 Innovation
Operation
Automation
42 Technology
Trump vs.
Silicon Valley
44 Torture
The Brain’s
Black Site
48 Brain
Rigging the
Mind Game
DOWNTIME
52 Travel
FEATURES
DEPARTMENTS
Continental Divide
and Conquer
57 Movies
22
BIG SHOTS
Bromantic Tragedy
Friends and rivals for most of their lives, top
Conservatives David Cameron and Boris Johnson
are now in open warfare over Britain’s role in
the EU. by Isabel Oakeshott
4 Carmel, Indiana
OMG-GOP
6 London
Yes, We Khan
8 Konya, Turkey
Cold Turkey
10 Pyongyang,
North Korea
Pump It Up!
Greetings From the
Egyptian Tourism Board
VINC IANE JACQUET FOR NEWSWEEK
32
Arbitrary detentions, torture, repression of the
press and a failing economy have made Egypt
a tinderbox. by Janine di Giovanni
PAG E O N E
Two Questions
With Christopher
Walken
58 Memorabilia
Magical
Memorabilia Tour
62 Style
The Needle
and the Damage
Undone
64 To-Do List
Your Week
Made Better
12 Politics
Make America
Grande Again!
COVER CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW PARSONS/EYEVINE/REDUX
17 Environment
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USA
Carmel, Indiana—
Republican presidential hopeful Donald
Trump speaks during
a campaign stop
on May 2. Now that
he’s the presumptive nominee, some
Republicans have
cautioned the real
estate developer to
tone down his rhetoric
heading into the July
convention. Speaker
Paul Ryan urged
Trump to get in line
on key GOP political
and ideological issues
such as trade, the
military, abortion and
immigration, saying
he was “not ready” to
endorse Trump otherwise. Trump brushed
off Ryan and said he
would not rule out
blocking the speaker
from serving as convention chairman.
ERIC THAYER
ERIC THAYER / THE NEW YO RK TIM ES/REDUX
OMG GOP
BIG
SHOTS
ENGLAND
Yes, We
Khan
JONATHAN BRADY
JONATHAN B RADY/PA /AP
London—Sadiq Khan
is greeted by supporters outside City
Hall on May 9, his
first day as London’s
mayor. Khan, the son
of Pakistani immigrants, became the
first Muslim mayor of
a major Western city
after a landslide victory over Conservative
Party candidate Zac
Goldsmith. With the
increasing popularity
of right-wing parties
across the continent,
supporters hope
Khan’s victory can
reaffirm Europe’s tolerance and diversity.
BIG
SHOTS
TURKEY
Cold
Turkey
Konya, Turkey—
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
and his wife, Sare,
greet supporters on
May 6, the day after
he announced that
he would step down,
following weeks of
tension with President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. Davutoglu
had been reluctant to
offer full support for
Erdogan’s efforts to
expand his executive
powers. The outgoing prime minister
was instrumental in
brokering Turkey’s
refugee deal with
the European Union,
which raises concerns
about its implementation. With Davutoglu out, Erdogan is
likely to push for even
greater presidential
power, to the dismay
of critics who worry
that human rights and
freedom of speech are
under threat.
HAKAN GOKTEPE
HAK AN GOKTE PE / PRIME M INISTER’S PRESS OFFIC E /REUTERS
BIG
SHOTS
NORTH KOREA
Pump
It Up!
Pyongyang, North
Korea—A hostess
adjusts the volume of
a TV broadcast showing North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un,
at a restaurant at the
Yanggakdo hotel on
May 6. The secretive
nation kicked off its
first ruling-party congress in 36 years with
state media lauding
the isolated country’s “prestige” as a
nuclear power, saying
it will strengthen
self-defensive nuclear
weapons capability,
a decision adopted in
defiance of U.N. resolutions. North Korea
invited numerous
foreign journalists
to visit during the
meeting but blocked
them from covering
the proceedings and
expelled a BBC crew
for its coverage.
ED JONES
ED JON ES/AFP/GE T T Y
P
HEALTH
A
POLITICS
G
E
BOOKS
INTELLIGENCE
O
N
HACKING
E
ENVIRONMENT
MAKE AMERICA GRANDE AGAIN!
The Trump campaign is gaining
mass appeal by using the tactics
of Europe’s far-right leaders
ALMOST A YEAR into his surreal campaign for
president, the American political class still
doesn’t know what to make of Donald Trump.
The billionaire mogul’s defiance of all the standard rules of American politics, not to mention
the orthodoxy of his own party, has left pundits scrambling to explain his takeover of the
Republican Party. They should look abroad.
Ironically, a campaign built on “making America great again” bears a strong resemblance to
right-wing movements overseas, past and present. Maybe the question, then, is not how Trump
did it but why the United States hasn’t seen this
kind of movement take off until now. Instead of
underlining American exceptionalism, Trump is
unleashing a political force that’s already prominent in other parts of the world.
Even a Trump rally feels different from a normal campaign event, something more akin to
a rock concert or a megachurch prayer session.
Trump took questions at a rally outside Cincinnati in mid-March, for example, but the audience
NEWSWEEK
was more interested in fawning over than grilling
him. “I love you, Donald Trump. Man, you’re the
future of America,” a middle-aged man, decked
out in an American flag and a Cincinnati Reds
baseball cap, told the mogul. “I’ve been waiting 17 hours to see you today...and I would love
to get a picture with you before I leave.” A white
middle-aged woman requested a hug from the
candidate, and another woman told him, “It is so
refreshing to have a presidential candidate that is
not bought and paid for. I believe in you, that you
will make America great again.”
“That’s better than a question,” said a beaming Trump. “I love it.”
Sure, Bernie Sanders has his groupies, as did
Barack Obama before him—voters swooning for
the symbolism of a candidate, more interested
in image than issues. With Trump, however, it’s
always been centered on the big man himself—
the guy with the personal helicopter, reality show
one-liners, “best ever” dealmaking abilities and
eponymous steaks. It’s a brand of politics very
12
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
BY
EMILY CADEI
@emilycadei
+
TRUMP’S AMERICA:
RHONA WISE /AFP/GE T T Y
Politicians are “all
bought and paid
for by somebody,”
says Trump supporter Nick Glaub.
“The only person
that isn’t is that
man right there.”
NEWSWEEK
13
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
unseemly campaign fundraising dance of his
primary rivals—make him inviolable. American
politicians are “all bought and paid for by somebody,” 62-year-old Trump supporter Nick Glaub
said outside the suburban Cincinnati Trump
rally. “The only person that isn’t is that man
right there,” said Glaub, gesturing to the community center where the real estate mogul had
just spoken.
Trump’s charismatic authority stems from
this belief that he is above politics-as-usual,
says Roger Eatwell, a politics professor at Britain’s University of Bath. And it goes beyond his
reality-TV fame. “Celebrity...tends to be a fairly
passing phenomenon, and it doesn’t tend to be a
very emotional phenomenon,” Eatwell explains.
But Trump’s campaign offers something deeper:
“a sense of identification.”
The feeling of solidarity Trump offers his
adherents—specifically those who have been
alienated from mainstream politics—is as central
to the mogul’s appeal as his blustery persona. It’s
true that he is shockingly shallow on policy, but
his populist and nationalistic appeals hit people
at a deeper level than his position on tax rates or
spending proposals. Or at least they are more visceral. They are also central to the pitches rightwing movements in Europe have been making
for more than a century.
PAGE ONE/POLITICS
familiar to those who study leaders in other parts
of the world. Critics and comedians have compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin of Uganda
and other notorious demagogues, suggesting the
mogul would govern like a murderous autocrat.
That’s a stretch. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the Trump campaign is employing
many of the political tactics those men used so
effectively. And he joins a crop of politicians currently using a similar strain of politics to amass
power in Europe and elsewhere.
THE POLICY-FREE CAMPAIGN
For months, pundits dismissed Trump’s candidacy, arguing that once voters started paying
attention, his lack of substance would crater his
support. Now that he’s the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, it’s clear the early naysayers
sorely miscalculated. The lesson from this race:
A strong cult of personality can trump ideology.
And that’s been proved by generations of demagogues. The support behind Italy’s Benito Mussolini was “more about the leader than...about
the party or the ideology,” bypassing or even
upending the traditional party structures, says
Arfon Rees, a specialist in Soviet and Russian history at the U.K.’s University of Birmingham.
There are other parallels, says Joseph Sassoon,
an associate professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. When Trump says
he’s his own best adviser and has no
speechwriters, “this is really a prototype of Saddam or Qaddafi or Nasser...
the wanting to control the language of
their speeches,” says Sassoon, referencing former leaders of Iraq, Libya
and Egypt. “An essential component
of the cult of personality is it cannot
be shared with anyone.”
German philosopher Max Weber
coined the term charismatic authority
to describe leaders whose power is
built on their “exceptional sanctity, heroism or
exemplary character,” as opposed to the rule of
law or simply brute force. Many may not regard
Trump the candidate in an admirable light, but
to his followers, his business success and his
personal wealth—which freed him from the
REVENGE OF THE MARGINALIZED
Trump’s ability to connect with angry American
voters also parallels that of European leaders
in today’s crop of ascendant right-wing parties.
The continent’s right-leaning populists of the
early 20th century galvanized “people who were
previously disenfranchised or had very little role
in terms of conventional politics,” says Rees.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and parties like
“AN ESSENTIAL COMPONENT
OF THE CULT OF PERSONALITY IS IT CANNOT BE
SHARED WITH ANYONE.”
NEWSWEEK
France’s National Front, led by Marine Le Pen,
and the Austrian Freedom Party are targeting
a similar demographic. And like the Donald,
Europe’s modern right-wing leaders “have quite
strong male support—they’re often 60-plus
percent male voting support,” notes Eatwell,
14
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
+
GROUPIES: With his
NAM Y. HUH/AP
personal helicopter, reality show
one-liners and
lack of political
correctness, Trump
has made the
campaign all about
celebrity, and his
fans love it.
who specializes in right-wing European politics.
Many of those men are “blue-collar workers who
fear losing their jobs, or they’ve been de-skilled
[and] feel threatened by the change, as a man.”
Trump frequently points out that he is bringing
into the political process people who rarely vote—
those who have been, in one way or another, marginalized. A Quinnipiac University poll released
April 5 shows the depths of alienation of Trump
supporters: While 62 percent of all U.S. voters
agree that their “beliefs and values are under
attack,” that number soars to 91 percent among
Trump backers. And 90 percent of Trump supporters agree that “public officials don’t care
much what people like me think.” Leaders like
Mussolini and Hitler played to similar audiences,
NEWSWEEK
those who resented the “dominance of a kind of
intellectual elite that tends to hold the masses in
a certain kind of contempt,” Rees says.
THE POWER OF BABY TALK
A common way populist leaders burnish their
anti-elite bona fides is through a lowbrow
speaking style. Trump’s third- or fourth-grade
language level has made him a media punch
line, but he’s hardly the first politician to use
little words to gain mass appeal. Many of the
most successful populists “talk in everyday
speech to their target audience,” says Eatwell.
Eschewing upper-middle-class academic sentence construction for short, declarative “common” phrasing “helps say they’re not part of the
15
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
opulence, is something people running for president and parliament in Africa bank on,” says
Georgetown professor Yonatan Morse, who specializes in African politics. “It’s rooted in…the
idea of being a successful person who can take
care of other people,” particularly “groups that
have not received as much until now.”
Of course, none of these messages spur a
movement unless there is broad disenchantment with the political system. It’s not fair to
compare American political gridlock today to
the economic collapse Germany suffered after
World War I, but it’s hard not to hear Trump
supporters’ complaints in Rees’s description of
the widespread feeling in the Weimar Republic that the country was failing “because of the
corruption of the existing order and the kind of
horse trading and shabby compromise that politicians engage in.”
Which is not to say Trump is the next Hitler
or Mussolini. Using a similar playbook doesn’t
always result in the same outcomes. Still, there’s
some irony in the fact that a man whose pitch
to voters is “America first” is selling a message
manufactured overseas—just like those Trump
suits and ties.
PAGE ONE/POLITICS
system,” he explains. This is a fundamental element of Trump’s appeal.
And it’s not just the speaking style that is simplified. Rees says a common theme of the rightwing regimes he studies is their simplification
of the entire political discourse, “reducing it
to basic binary opposites, of black and white,”
and, of course, of us vs. them. Psychological
theory holds that targeting the “other” helps a
group construct its own identity: “You say...what
you are not,” as Eatwell puts it. For Trump, the
“other” is immigrants—Mexican and Muslim, in
particular. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jews.
Rees sums up the mindset as: “We don’t really
need complexity. We know what the problem is.
We know what the solution is. All we need is the
will to do it.”
BIG-MAN POLITICS
NEWSWEEK
DAMON WINTER / THE N EW YORK TIMES/RE DUX
There is, however, one glaring difference between the Republican
front-runner and Europe’s right-wing
leaders in 2016: Trump’s conspicuous
wealth. While he flaunts his billionaire lifestyle, Europe’s populists play
up their everyman credentials. Nigel
Farage, head of the right-wing U.K.
Independence Party, “loves to be photographed in an English pub” having a
beer, says Eatwell. It’s a show of solidarity that’s important on a continent
where class remains a salient divide
and austerity’s bite is deep. Americans, in contrast, embrace capitalism
far more openly and aren’t necessarily
turned off by Trump’s gilded excess.
On that front, Trump’s behavior
resembles that of politicians on yet
another continent: Africa. The Daily
Show host Trevor Noah alluded to that
back in October, in a bit highlighting
how much some of Trump’s proclamations echo those of African strongmen like Muammar el-Qaddafi and
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. “Trump
is basically the perfect African president,” joked Noah, a South African.
“The branding of Trump, the
US VS. THEM: Protesters at Trump
rallies have faced
verbal abuse and
violence, which
Trump has done
little to discourage,
drawing comparisons to far-right
leaders who use
fear of the “other”
to win support.
+
16
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
Percentage
of Americans
who identified
as an “environmentalist,”
1991
TWO
NUMBERS
Percentage
of Americans
who identified
as an “environmentalist,”
2016
Crazy for the Red, White and Green
ILLUSTRATION BY MAËL LE D OLIVEUX
EVEN THOSE WHO CLAIM TO NOT CARE ABOUT THE EARTH SUPPORT CONSERVATION
The number of Americans
who self-identify as “environmentalists” has sharply declined over the past
25 years. In 1991, a large
majority—78 percent—
said they were environmentalists. In 2016, only
42 percent identified that
way, according to Gallup
polls. The reason for
the shift seems to be the
politicization of the term
environmentalist. Today,
the word carries negative
connotations for some,
particularly Republicans,
says Dave Metz, a partner
with the polling firm FM3.
In 1991, the same percentage of Republicans and
Democrats said they were
environmentalists; now
initiatives like protecting
public lands and research
into clean energy is
strong, says Grace McRae,
polling and research director at the Sierra Club.
For example, 79 percent
of Republicans (and 89
percent of Democrats)
consider conservation of
public lands to be “patriotic,” according to a 2012
poll conducted by FM3.
There are areas where
support for environmental initiatives has
declined, however.
According to Gallup,
compared with 25 years
ago, 12 percent fewer
people are concerned
about “pollution of rivers,
lakes and reservoirs,” and
only 27 percent of the former do so, compared with
56 percent of the latter.
One reason is climate
change. In the 1990s, it
was “a nonpartisan issue,
but it has now become
deeply partisan,” Metz
says. In a December Quinnipiac University poll, 47
percent of Republicans
said they’d like the next
president to support policies to combat climate
change, while 91 percent
of Democrats, and 70
percent of independents
did, meaning that 69
percent of all respondents
favored support.
This is good news for
the green movement, and
there’s more: Support for
SOURCE: GALLUP
NEWSWEEK
17
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
18 percent fewer say the
same about air pollution.
Only 4 percent care
less about pollution of
drinking water, but that
may change if the lead
pollution uncovered in
Flint, Michigan, becomes
more widespread, as
some evidence suggests.
A big issue is the
salience of people’s
concerns. “When you ask
people what they’re concerned about,” says Bill
Lowry, a researcher at
Washington University in
St. Louis, “they’re thinking more about other
things, like the economy
or terrorism.”
BY
DOUGLAS MAIN
@Douglas_Main
P A G E O N E/ H A C K ING
YOUR MONEY OR YOUR DATA
Ransomware viruses have been striking
hospitals and schools at an epidemic level
THE FIRST WAVE of emotions, victims say, is a
combination of panic and powerlessness. They
click and reclick on files on their desktops—agendas for the Christian camp, payroll data for hundreds of teachers or medical information for
veterans—to no avail. Someone, or something,
has converted the files to foreign MP3 files or an
encrypted RSA format. And next to these unopenable files the victims get a ransom note in a text
file or HTML file: “Help_Decrypt_Your_Files.”
“All your files are protected by a strong encryption with RSA-4096 [military-grade encryption],” reads one note shared with Newsweek by a
victim. “So, there are two ways you can choose:
wait for a miracle and get your price doubled,
or start obtaining BITCOIN NOW!, and restore
your data the easy way. If you have really valuable data, you better not waste your time.”
In February, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical
Center in Los Angeles made national news after
it was the victim of ransomware, a virus that
blocks owners from accessing their files. For
weeks, the hospital had to shuttle its patients to
nearby facilities. But hackers aren’t going after
only big targets. In the past few months, school
districts in South Carolina and Minnesota, hospitals in Kentucky and Georgia, and a church
in Oregon were paralyzed for days, and many
experts believe there are far more ransomware
attacks that have gone unreported.
Institutions have resorted to using handwritten forms as they try to retrieve data. In many
cases, the victims cough up hundreds or thou-
NEWSWEEK
sands of dollars in untraceable, open-source
cryptocurrency to get back their own information. Some cybersecurity experts call the attacks
an epidemic. The United States and Canadian
governments issued a rare joint alert in March
warning businesses about ransomware. In 2015,
affected Americans paid around $325 million due
to ransomware attacks; in 2016, cybersecurity
analysts estimate, it will be much higher.
“Ransomware is dangerous because anyone can [use] it and target anyone,” says James
Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology. “There are
two types of organizations now: those who
have been breached and those who have been
breached but [don’t] know it yet.”
While the culprits come from all over the world,
ransomware attacks are mainly coordinated by
highly organized mercenary hackers based in
Russia and other Eastern European countries,
prompting some to hark back to Cold War–era
concerns. “This is World War III,” says Clint Crigger, a cybersecurity manager for SVA Consulting,
though he insists he is not an alarmist.
Firewalls or antivirus programs do a bad job
detecting ransomware but aren’t the cause of the
epidemic. Instead, it is carelessness in clicking
on infected emails. Two-thirds of ransomware
cases stem from phishing emails, according to
cybersecurity research company Lavasoft. Rookie
hackers, known as script kiddies, can easily scrape
together a fake email from a senior hospital doctor
or school superintendent laced with ransomware
18
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
BY
SEUNG LEE
@seungylee14
ILLUSTRATION BY SKIP STE RL ING
viruses. A common method is mass-collecting
email addresses from the company’s domain
name, identifying the top executives of the company using LinkedIn or Facebook, creating a fake
email address under one of those executives’
names and sending a ransomware-laced email to
a lower-level employee with a subject line reading “Invoice” or something else that looks as if it
demands attention. One ransomware attack at a
Georgia Veterans Affairs hospital began with an
employee clicking on a fake USPS email, paralyzing the hospital for three days.
David Eppelsheimer, pastor of the Community
of Christ Church in Hillsboro, Oregon, speaks
from experience. He found all his PowerPoint files
converted to the MP3 format on February 18, and
he got a curt ransom note asking for 1.3 bitcoins—
about $500 to $800. “I felt helpless, and it felt surreal,” he says. After two days frantically trying to
obtain bitcoins in shady-looking online markets,
Eppelsheimer paid the hackers $570 of his own to
obtain the encryption key to open the files.
Several cybersecurity experts tell Newsweek that
paying ransom should be considered only in the
worst-case scenarios, when one has no backups or
lines of defense in place. “If you pay the ransom,
what you are saying is, you have been caught with
your pants around your ankles,” Crigger says.
Charles Hucks feels he had no choice. As executive director of technology at the Horry County
School District in South Carolina, he was a victim of ransomware. For a few weeks starting on
February 8, his county’s networks were frozen,
NEWSWEEK
bringing the daily routines of 42,000
students and thousands more staff
and teachers to a holt. Despite having ready backups and a full-time
information technology staff working 20 hours daily to get the data
back, Hucks and the school district
still had to pay 22 bitcoins ($8,500) to
the hackers for the key.
Experts say institutions and people aren’t helpless against ransomware. The best thing to do is to back
up data frequently, on a cloud storage
platform or external hard drive. Scott
also advocates training employees
about “cyberhygiene,” comparing not
clicking on malvertisements to washing one’s hands before working in a
restaurant or hospital. “Loose clicks
sinks ships,” Crigger says.
If a company or server is breached,
the recommended procedure is to
cut off all servers from public access
and then have IT staff comb every
folder and network for infections. Scott says
institutions need to be vigilant about ransomware viruses acting as diversions for an attack
elsewhere, perhaps downloading a company’s
personal data.
Institutions like small hospitals are easy targets,
but Scott worries that even more critical and outdated systems that control dams or nuclear silos
“WAIT FOR A MIRACLE AND GET YOUR
PRICE DOUBLED, OR
START OBTAINING
BITCOIN NOW!”
built during the Cold War can be similarly hacked.
The scale of the danger hit Scott during a recent
visit to a small town in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. “I was thinking, I can go to a public computer
right now and take down a local hospital in a day.”
For victims like Eppelsheimer, it can be hard
to deal with a faceless attack that can seem very
personal. “My theology is…love my neighbor even
if he steals from me,” Eppelsheimer says. “But I
was angry at the moment. It felt like a faceless,
nameless evil from the other side of the world
descended on me and my church.”
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P A G E O N E/INTELLIGENCE
SPY TALK
THE SPY WHO WENT INTO THE COLD
Former FBI agent Robert Levinson
vanished on a rogue CIA mission in Iran.
A new book explains the mystery
WHEN CIA VETERANS complain that their old
outfit needs to be less risk-averse, they probably
don’t have Robert Levinson in mind.
The retired FBI agent vanished nine years ago
on Kish Island, a kind of Iranian Grand Cayman
frequented by arms dealers, counterfeiters, smugglers and, of course, spies. Almost certainly, Iranian operatives kidnapped him. Years would pass
before the truth emerged that Levinson had been
working for a CIA analytical unit that had no business running amateur spies.
All this—and much, much more about the
Levinson affair—has been dug up and stitched
together by the distinguished New York Times
reporter Barry Meier in his troubling new book,
Missing Man: The American Spy Who Vanished in
Iran. Judging by Meier’s account, if ever there
were a case for blowing up the CIA and starting
over, the Levinson affair would be it.
For a long time, the truth behind Levinson’s
disappearance was one of Washington’s bestkept secrets. The official line was that Levinson,
an organized crime specialist who had been freelancing since his 1998 FBI retirement, was working on “private business” when he went to Kish.
That was only very narrowly true: Levinson’s
“private business” was spying for the CIA. The
former G-man had even ginned up his own cover
story, that he was investigating a cigarette-counterfeiting case in Iran for British American
Tobacco (BAT), a sometime client. He concocted
NEWSWEEK
a phony assignment letter on BAT stationery.
The truth was, however, that Levinson went
off to Kish in hopes of turning Dawud Salahuddin, a U.S.-born fugitive who decades ago had
assassinated an Iranian exile dissident outside
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BY
JEFF STEIN
@SpyTalker
JALIL RE ZAYEE /EPA
HELP WANTED:
A billboard in
Afghanistan near
the Iranian border
in 2012 promises a
reward for information leading to the
recovery of Robert
Levinson.
+
Washington, D.C., into his informant. A handful
of national security reporters eventually learned
that Levinson had been working for rogue CIA
analysts who had violated agency rules by using
him as a spy, that agency officials had allegedly
lied to congressional overseers about it and that
people had been fired for exceeding their authority. However incomplete, it was a hell of a story.
But they sat on it after hearing arguments from
Levinson’s friends and family, their U.S. senator,
Bill Nelson of Florida, and, of course, the CIA, that
revealing Levinson’s agency ties could be fatal.
In late 2013, however, with no movement on
Levinson’s case and smelling a
cover-up, the Associated Press
and Washington Post published the
real story. Reporters Matt Apuzzo
and Adam Goldman wrote that
Anne Jablonski, a highly regarded
senior CIA intelligence analyst,
offered Levinson a gig to provide reports to the agency’s Illicit
Finance Group. The unit tracked
black-market arms dealing and
money laundering. Six months
after Levinson vanished, a top CIA official told the
Senate Intelligence Committee that “they didn’t
know anything about the episode,” Meier writes.
But did anyone at the CIA green-light his mission to Iran? “Back in December 2005, when
Bob was pitching Anne on projects he might
take on when his CIA contract was approved,”
Meier writes, “he sent her a lengthy memo
about Dawud’s potential as an informant.” But
the CIA’s internal inquiry after he disappeared
“hadn’t found a ‘smoking gun,’” an agency
investigator told Levinson’s wife, Christine.
“If people at the agency ever talk—or are compelled to do so, perhaps we’ll get an answer to
that question,” Meier says. “But...there is nothing to suggest in the documents I reviewed to
indicate that anyone at the CIA ever suggested to
Levinson...stand down.”
Levinson had virtually circled the globe for
Jablonski and had “inundated” her with dozens
of investigative reports, Meier writes, on “subjects ranging from Russian crime to narcotics
smuggling to arms trafficking.” She was thrilled.
She relayed an email from the unit’s boss, Tim
Sampson: “This guy is a damn GOLD MINE.”
But she also knew that running agents was against
agency rules, “since we’re NOT anything but an
‘analytical shop.’” She even emailed Levinson,
warning him to keep their financial arrangements
“just between us girls” and FedEx his intelligence
reports to her home, not the office.
Yet it annoyed her to have to avoid “pissing
off the folks who are SUPPOSED to be collecting this kind of material for us but are too
busy jumping through bureaucratic hoops and
making excuses,” she wrote to Levinson. By
those “folks,” Jablonski meant the CIA’s directorate of operations, the people responsible for
recruiting and running foreign spies. From her
vantage point, they weren’t getting anything
useful on Iran’s shadowy network of nuclear
suppliers and money launderers.
The analysts had long chafed over the spying side’s swagger and condescension toward
them. But with the rise of Al-Qaeda in the 1990s,
LEVINSON HAD BEEN WORKING FOR A CIA ANALYTICAL
UNIT THAT HAD NO BUSINESS
RUNNING AMATEUR SPIES.
NEWSWEEK
female counterterrorism analysts, especially,
were demonstrating a gift for “connecting the
dots.” After the 9/11 attacks, they took a lead role
in tracking Osama bin Laden (as dramatized in
the movie Zero Dark Thirty). Managers on the
analytical side sensed an opening. The head of
the branch overseeing the Illicit Finance Group,
Meier writes, convened a meeting and “declared
that under his watch they were ‘going to destroy’
their rivals on the agency’s clandestine side.”
For years, anonymous CIA sources had been
saying—and CIA representatives had been denying—that Iran was a black hole. So in 2006, when
Jablonski brought Levinson aboard, agency
managers were nearly hysterical about intelligence gaps in relation to Iran’s nuclear designs
and operations in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Levinson
was their man—or at least one of them.
Returning from a meeting in June that year
at CIA headquarters, the ex-FBI agent had a
bounce in his step, recalls his longtime friend
Ira Silverman, a journalist who had retired from
NBC after an illustrious career. As they sat down
for lunch, Levinson talked about his meeting in
Langley. “Iran,” he said, “is the flavor of the day.”
In 2002, Silverman had gone to Tehran and
interviewed Salahuddin, the fugitive assassin,
and they had stayed in touch. The exile had been
voicing signs of disaffection with the Iranian
regime. Maybe he was ready to do a deal with the
U.S. Levinson hoped so. He was certainly determined to find out.
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B R I T A I N ’S
B R
M
TRAGE DY
A N T I C
FRIENDS AND RIVALS FOR
MOST OF THEIR LIVES, TOP
CONSERVATIVES DAVID CAMERON
AND BORIS JOHNSON ARE NOW
IN OPEN WARFARE OVER THE
COUNTRY’S ROLE IN THE EU
BY ISABEL OAKESHOTT
NEWSWEEK
23
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
The
public battle—one whose outcome will likely decide the
next leader of the world’s fifth-largest economy and one of
America’s most important allies. Johnson publicly declared
he would be campaigning for Britain to leave the European
Union, in direct opposition to Cameron, who called the referendum but is backing the Remain campaign.
Johnson’s announcement—on the issue that has repeatedly divided the Conservative Party over the past three
decades—added personal drama to the historic decision
facing the British electorate on June 23: whether to remain
part of the economic and political bloc that formed in the
four young women who make up the string quartet Bond
wake of two catastrophic wars in Europe to bring peace
hoisted their electrical instruments and threw themselves
and prosperity to the continent. The now-public contest
into a rendition of one of their hits. Looking on from their
between Johnson and Cameron will result in either the
dinner tables in the ballroom of the Grosvenor House
defeat and possible resignation of a sitting British prime
Hotel on London’s Park Lane on this mid-March evening
minister or a potentially fatal blow to the ambitions of his
were 500 of the most powerful figures in British politics,
rival, Johnson, who may be the most intellectually capable
media and finance. They had come to celebrate the 70th
and popular politician of his generation.
birthday of billionaire philanthropist and former Con“The last thing I wanted was to go against David Camservative Party donor Lord Michael Ashcroft, a former
eron or the government,” Johnson told reporters gathered
deputy chairman of Britain’s ruling party. There was no
outside his home on February 21, the day he made his pubsign, however, of the most powerful person in the party—
lic declaration.
British Prime Minister David Cameron. He and the host
The next day, Cameron hit back—and made his counhad fallen out. Also absent from the extravagant bash
terattack personal. Speaking in the House of Commons,
were most of the senior officials from the party Ashcroft
the prime minister, who has made it clear that this will
had for many years bankrolled.
be his last term in office, said, “I am
In the runup to the event, Camnot standing for re-election; I have
eron had let it be known that he
no other agenda than what is best
would consider it an act of disloyalty
for our country.” Johnson, who is
for government ministers to attend
a member of Parliament (MP) and
the festivities. Many stayed away.
ended his second and last term as
But there, seated at the top table,
mayor on May 5, sat in the secondwas another powerful Conservative,
to-last row of benches, listening to
Boris Johnson. If the then-mayor
his old friend.
of London had received the mesCameron’s clear implication was
sage from his party leader, he had
that Johnson’s decision was based
decided to ignore it.
not on principle but on political calJohnson had recently alienated
culation; about 130 Conservative
himself from Cameron, his old friend
MPs, the corps that will choose two
and rival. Since they first met at Eton,
candidates to be the party’s next
Britain’s most prestigious private
leader, are in favor of Britain leavboys’ school, the two men have lived
ing the EU and are more likely to
lives frequently in tandem—moving
support a fellow Euroskeptic. (The
on to Oxford University and later to
party membership, which is even
politics, and generally supporting
more anti-Europe than the Consereach other. Both are highly competvative parliamentarians, votes on
itive and were confident they had
the two candidates.)
what it took to become prime minisRelations between the two men
ter. Cameron got there first; Johnson
have only worsened since then.
+
became mayor of Britain’s vast capWhile Cameron remains in contact
PERFECT COUPLE: Cameron’s wife,
ital—a good job but not the top job.
with his close friend and Cabinet colSamantha, seen here in 1995 before their
marriage, is the daughter of a baronet.
For years, the relationship between
league Michael Gove, who is backing
these arch-frenemies has been the
the campaign for Britain to leave the
most fascinating, if slow-moving, story in British politics.
EU, insiders say the prime minister has largely stopped
On February 21, shortly before Ashcroft’s party, the tencommunicating with Johnson. “Cameron is still talking to
sion that had been building for decades between these two
Michael [Gove] about what Michael should and shouldn’t
privileged members of the British elite finally became a
say in the referendum campaign,” says a senior pro-Leave
NEWSWEEK
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0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
FROM LE FT: ROB M CM IL L AN/RE X; BRIAN SMITH/REUTE RS; PREV IOUS SPRE AD: PETER MACDIARMID/GET T Y
campaigner who talks to both Johnson and Gove. “But he’s
stopped trying to influence Boris.”
In an interview with Glamour magazine published on
May 3, Cameron explained how things stood between him
and his old schoolmate. “I’m still friends with Boris,” he
said, “just perhaps not such good friends.”
Channel to and from their boarding school unaccompanied
by adults. They would be dumped at the Bruxelles-Nord
station in Brussels with a few francs for french fries and
would have to find their way back to the U.K., via a train
to Belgium’s Ostend, a ferry to Dover, a train to London’s
Victoria Station and then another to Forest Row, where
they attended Ashdown House Prep School. On one return
journey, Rachel has said, they mistakenly boarded a train
The Bigger Brain
bound for Moscow.
By contrast, Cameron—also one of four siblings—could
CAMERON AND Johnson have been friends for more
not have come from a more conventional, quintessentially
than 30 years, but it has never been an easy friendship.
English background. He grew up in a Grade II–listed recAt school, Cameron looked up to Johnson, who is two
tory in the Berkshire Downs. His was a childhood of set
years older and was then
family mealtimes, ramone of the most brilliant
bles in the woods, horse
and charismatic boys at
riding, swimming in the
Eton, which has educated
family’s private pool and
19 British prime ministers
playing tennis on their
and many more Cabinet
own court. His stockbroministers. Its alumni conker father, Ian, remained
tinue to have an outsize
married to Cameron’s
influence on British polmother, Mary, until he
itics and business. Being
died in 2010.
two years apart and in difThe Camerons were
ferent boarding houses at
well-established
mema very large school, Cambers of the community in
eron and Johnson did not
the small Berkshire village
know each other well at
of Peasemore, where sevthat stage. It was not until
eral members of the famthey were at Oxford—and
ily remain. Cameron’s
were both in the notorinanny, Gwen Hoare, who
+
ous upper-class all-male
also raised his mother and
TOP DOG: At university, Johnson co-edited a satirical student
dining society known as
is now in her 90s, still lives
magazine and became president of the Oxford Union, a debating society that draws world leaders and celebrities as guests.
the Bullingdon Club—
with the family in a cotthat they became friends.
tage next door to the Old
Both men grew up in wealthy families. By upper-class
Rectory (the family home), where Cameron’s older brother,
English standards, Johnson’s family is unconventional;
Alex, now lives with his wife and children. Mary Cameron
his paternal grandfather was half-Turkish, and on his
lives in another house next to the rectory.
paternal grandmother’s side he is related to many of the
At the age of 13, Cameron went to Eton, following his
royal families of Europe—and to Cameron. They are
father and brother. Johnson was already there, excelling
eighth cousins. Though he also has blue-blooded lineage,
in English and classics, and was hugely popular with both
Cameron’s family is, for the most part, of unremarkable if
students and teachers. It is still a source of great pride to
generally privileged British stock.
Johnson that he was a “KS”—a member of a band of 13 or 14
Johnson’s childhood was somewhat chaotic. He was
particularly intelligent boys from each year at Eton called
born in New York, and his bohemian parents, Stanley and
King’s Scholars. Their intellectual prowess earned them a
Charlotte, were constantly moving—to Oxford, London,
modest reduction in tuition fees and separate accommoBrussels, Connecticut and Washington, D.C., studying
dations in the most historic buildings on the school’s camand pursuing various careers. They appear to have been
pus. In his final year, the headmaster appointed him head
particularly keen that their four children learned to fend
boy, a position known at Eton as “captain.” The captain of
for themselves.
the school is also “head scholar.”
According to Johnson’s unauthorized biographer, Sonia
Purnell, 11-year-old Boris and
T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N T H ES E
his younger sister, Rachel, rouARCH FRENEMIES HAS BEEN THE
tinely made the journey from
M OST FASC I N AT I N G, I F S LOW- M OV I N G,
Brussels, where the family was
STORY IN BRITISH POLITICS.
then living, across the English
NEWSWEEK
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+
SPECTATOR SPORT: After Oxford, Johnson focused on a media career and became editor of The Spectator magazine. British
audiences warmed to him when he was a regular guest on the TV quiz show Have I Got News for You.
Johnson has always been intellectually adept—but he
has also always been something of a buffoon and a clown.
One of his contemporaries at Eton remembers when Johnson, age 18, delivered an address to a visiting foreign dignitary from Malawi entirely in Latin. (At a recent launch
party for a friend’s book, Johnson repeated this stunt,
delivering about a third of his keynote speech in Latin.)
Cameron was less of a social and academic star at Eton.
“Although I was in several of the same divs [Eton slang for
“classes”] as David Cameron, I have absolutely no school
memories of him,” says another Old Etonian. “When
he first became an MP, I mentioned my non-memories
of him to another Old Etonian friend, and they couldn’t
J O H N SO N M AY B E T H E M OST
I N T E L L ECT UA L LY CA PA B L E
AND POPULAR POLITICIAN
O F H I S G E N E RAT I O N .
NEWSWEEK
26
remember him either. But everyone knew Boris.”
Johnson has found it hard to resist needling Cameron
about their school days. He has occasionally teased the
prime minister about the young Cameron’s failure to
make it into Pop, the Eton society for elite prefects. And
during the 2010 general election campaign, Johnson sent
Cameron a text message wishing him luck and saying that
if Cameron needed help in the months ahead, there were
two or three Old Etonian mates he could call on, all of
whom were KS. Unlike Cameron.
At Oxford University, the preferred destination for
many Eton boys, Johnson quickly established himself.
Cameron, who arrived two years after Johnson and studied politics, philosophy and economics, remained
largely a peripheral player. The future prime minister showed no interest in student politics or the
university newspaper, both of which were training
grounds for his generation of top-flight politicians.
By contrast, Johnson embraced student politics,
co-edited a satirical student magazine and became
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
+
FROM LEFT: DAVID SANDISON/THE INDEPENDENT/REX; JUSTIN TALLIS/REPORT DIGITAL-REA
THE LONG ROAD: Cameron took a job as a researcher for the Conservative Party in 1988 and quietly built a base of support
during the 1990s, before winning a seat in Parliament in 2001. Four years later, he launched his bid to lead the party.
president of the Oxford Union, the most prestigious and
keenly contested position at the university’s feted debating society. For the most part, they had different sets of
friends—although both belonged to the Bullingdon Club,
known for its debauchery and for wrecking restaurants
(and then paying for the damage).
Cameron, however, proved to be the better student.
Johnson was awarded an upper-second-class degree in
classics, while Cameron—whose tutor described him as
one of the ablest pupils he had taught—got a first. (In 2013,
Johnson jokingly dismissed Cameron’s achievements
at Oxford, calling him—and his own brother Jo—“girly
swots” for getting firsts.) It was an early sign, perhaps, that
even though Johnson might be a more gifted intellectual,
Cameron has greater self-discipline.
According to confidants, Johnson still considers himself the bigger brain—and many of those who know both
men well agree. “There is a world of difference between
the merely very capable, such as Cameron, and the brilliant, verging on genius, such as Johnson,” says a former
NEWSWEEK
“I’M STILL FRIENDS
WITH BORIS, JUST
PERHAPS NOT SUCH
G O O D F R I E N D S .”
Eton student who knew both men at school. “The latter can, and often do, make their own way in the world,
whereas the former have to compromise, rely on others
[and] work harder.”
It’s Their Party
AFTER OXFORD, the two men’s careers diverged significantly. In 1988, Cameron took a job as a researcher for
the Conservative Party. The previous year, Johnson had
embarked on his media career, first as a newspaper journalist and later, in 1999, as a magazine editor. Perhaps the
27
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Just Call On Me, Brother
THE FUTURE PRIME MINISTER
SHOWED NO INTEREST IN
STUDENT POLITICS.
NEWSWEEK
28
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ON A SPRING morning in April 2010, a
few weeks before Cameron would lead the
Conservatives back into government for
FROM LE FT: CARL DE SOUZA / REUTERS; ANDREW PARSONS/EPA
work that brought him the most attention was his appearpolitician as the leader they needed to signal that the party
ances as a frequent guest on television shows. He was
had shifted to the political center, where most British votquick-witted and funny, and national audiences warmed
ers were. By the fall of 2005, following the Conservatives’
to him. At that point, few people outside a small circle of
third successive general election defeat, Cameron was
Conservative Party activists had heard of Cameron.
ready to launch his bid to be party leader.
But Cameron was quietly building a base of support in
Johnson was one of his earliest backers in a leadership
the party. He became friends with other young Consercontest Cameron was not expected to win. But when
vatives, including Steve Hilton, who went on to become
Cameron pulled off a surprise victory, he did not give
his policy chief; Rachel Whetstone, now Hilton’s wife and
Johnson a senior post. Cameron, who was very close to
senior vice president of communications for Uber; and Ed
Howard and had been deeply unimpressed by Johnson’s
Llewellyn, now Cameron’s chief of staff.
handling of the row over his love affair, simply considered
By 2001, ahead of the general election, the Conservahim too much of a liability. (Johnson became the party’s
tive Party was a mess. Then–Prime Minister Tony Blair,
spokesman for higher education.)
leader of the ruling Labour Party, had a huge majority
Stung, Johnson decided to seek power in other venues.
in the House of Commons. It seemed to many political
In 2007, he applied to be the Conservative candidate in the
observers that Labour would be in power for a generation,
London mayoral contest. The Conservative establishment
but Cameron had witnessed the fall from grace of Marwas scrambling for a plausible candidate to go up against
garet Thatcher, the former Conservative prime minister
the Labour incumbent, Ken Livingstone. Cameron did
who had won three elections and had, for much of her
not originally want Johnson to run for mayor. The concern
time in power, seemed as unassailable as Blair seemed in
among many Conservative MPs and party strategists was
2001. So he ran for a parliamentary seat and won.
that Johnson was untested in high office, and party insiders
Johnson also sensed that Labour’s dominance could not
worried whether he could be relied upon not to stray into
last forever. In 2001, he too ran and won a seat, but he kept
new romantic engagements, embarrassing a party that has
his other jobs, including editor of The Spectator magazine.
traditionally framed itself as pro-family.
He seemed to be too busy
During a private conentertaining the nation
versation at a fundraising
during appearances on
dinner in 2007, Camthe TV quiz show Have I
eron trashed Johnson’s
Got News for You to engage
credentials as a mayoral
in the serious debate in
candidate. “Totally the
the Conservative Party
wrong profile,” he said,
about how to return it
with a dismissive wave
to power. “Boris was
of the hand. “Did he
impossible to talk to as a
really say that?” Johnson
member of Parliament
exclaimed when he was
because he was never
told of Cameron’s comaround,” says a veteran
ment. “The fucker!”
Conservative who knows
Somewhat in desperboth men well. “He
ation, the Conservatives
walked around in a sort
settled on Johnson as
of blond daze, a trance,
their candidate. In the
+
really. You couldn’t conelection, held in 2008, he
ALL FOR ONE: Before the 2010 general election, Johnson
verse with him.”
won with 43 percent of
campaigned with Cameron even though the latter had initially
offered little support to Johnson in his mayoral run in 2008.
In 2004, when he was
the vote to Livingstone’s
caught lying to then–
37 percent. The public
party leader Michael Howard about a four-year extramarseemed to love the man they simply referred to as “Boris,”
ital affair, Johnson was fired from his role as the party’s
even if he was from a party the electorate had repeatedly
spokesman on the arts—and his political career looked
rejected. Now Johnson had more governing power than
unlikely to go further.
Cameron—and he had won the party its first major elecCameron, on the other hand, had performed well in a
toral victory since it lost power to Labour in 1997.
series of increasingly senior roles; growing numbers of
Conservatives saw the moderate, young and personable
the first time in 13 years, the leader of the Conservative
mayor, has flourished. The city is experiencing a conParty arrived at Johnson’s handsome four-story house in
struction boom and remains one of the most important
London’s fashionable Islington neighborhood to meet up
financial capitals in the world.
before they were due to take part in a joint political event.
Perhaps most remarkably, many British people still seem
The pair soon set off on foot to the bus stop down the road.
to like Johnson. Politicians in power often lose their shine
As they walked, they talked.
after a year or two, never mind eight. Yet he has largely
“What’s the fare to central London?” Cameron asked
retained his gloss. And his ambition seems to have grown.
Johnson, who, as mayor, was responsible for the capital’s
Last year, Johnson, who gave up his original seat in
transport network.
Parliament in 2008 so he could focus on being mayor,
“Uh, £1.10 or £1.20, something like that,” Johnson
stood again for a seat in the House of Commons. He won
replied.
easily. That was a crucial step as he keeps his eye on the
“You should know things like that, Boris,” Cameron said.
prime ministership. Cameron had already said publicly
“Do you?” Johnson said.
that he did not intend to run again in 2020, so Johnson
“Oh yes,” Cameron said, and proceeded to rattle off a
needed to be in a position to succeed him. But he knew
long list of basic consumer goods and their prices—a pint
the top job might become open before then; Cameron
of milk, a loaf of bread, a pint of beer and a dozen or so
had promised, if re-elected in 2015, to hold a referendum
other items.
on whether Britain should stay in the EU. Cameron won,
Cameron, once derided by one of his own MPs as too
and in February of this year he officially called the referposh to know the price of milk, made it his business to
endum. He has said that he will not resign if Britons vote
know just that. He is a professional politician who knows
against his wishes and decide the country should leave
that little mistakes can prove fatal.
the EU. But many political analysts and insiders believe
That is not the way Johnson has traditionally worked.
his position as the leader of a party and a nation that
He is supremely confident in his ability to talk his way
ignored him on such a crucial issue would be untenable
out of a sticky situation and deploys wit and bluster to
and he would have no option but to step down.
compensate for knowlCameron’s announceedge gaps. Not looking
ment in February gave
or sounding too smooth
every member of his
is part of his public perparty a choice: to stand
sona, his charm.
with him or against him.
The early days of
One of the people whose
his administration sugsupport would matter
gested that Londoners
most to him was Johnson.
had elected the ill-disciplined clown they had
Taking
grown fond of watching
Frenemy Fire
on TV. At a press conference on day one, he
JOHNSON’S OLD farmstumbled as he climbed
house on the outskirts
onto the podium, telling
of the town of Thame
the assembled journalin Oxfordshire is a good
ists, “I hope you didn’t
+
place to consider a
catch that bit.” When a
TOP JOB: In May 2010, Cameron led the Conservative Party back
career-defining decision.
senior adviser and his
into power for the first time in 13 years, completing a rebranding
of the party as younger, more moderate and more personable.
Tucked down a muddy
deputy mayor resigned
country lane, the period
in separate scandals in
property is rarely frequented by photographers and is over
June and July, all the signs were that Johnson’s time in
50 miles from the Houses of Parliament. From the back
City Hall would be a disaster.
of the house are soothing views of green hills; inside, the
But during his eight years as mayor, Johnson changed.
book-filled rooms are messy and charming.
He demonstrated a formidable work ethic, rising around
It was to this quiet place that Johnson retreated before
5:30 to ensure he had time for a jog along the canal near
deciding where he stood on Britain’s place in Europe.
his home before starting every working day. During those
Rachel, his sister, has described in an article for The Mail on
two terms, he continued to churn out a lucrative column
Sunday how she joined him there and discussed his plans
for The Daily Telegraph and wrote several books. He does
over lasagna. According to several well-placed sources on
not use the services of a ghostwriter, often working on his
both sides, Cameron and Johnson had been having a series
manuscripts late into the night.
And in many ways, London, which was coping with
of increasingly fraught telephone conversations during
the global financial crisis during Johnson’s first years as
which Cameron tried to dissuade the mayor from backing a
NEWSWEEK
29
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+
TO STAY OR GO: Cameron has said he will not resign if Britons vote against his wishes and decide to leave the EU in the referendum in June, but critics believe his position as leader could be untenable if the nation ignores him on such a crucial issue.
“Brexit” by dangling offers of future Cabinet jobs.
“Pretty much whatever he [Johnson] wanted” is how
one of Johnson’s confidants puts it when asked what
Cameron offered his old friend. Both knew that their relationship—always rivalrous but warm—would be heavily
affected by the decision. “I’ve seen them looking at one
another and sensed Boris thinking: He’s taller; he’s better-looking; he says the right thing,” says one person who
knows both. “But then there are times when Cameron
looks at Boris and thinks: My God, the guy’s a magician!
In a million years, no matter how hard I worked, there’s
no way I would be able to produce that kind of stardust!”
The same source says that, privately, Johnson looks
up to the prime minister. “I’ve always thought that Cameron is slightly more relaxed about Boris than Boris
is about Cameron. But Boris definitely admires Dave.
Occasionally, when Cameron is doing some big set piece
on TV, Boris will say, ‘David is so good at this stuff.’ He
knows Cameron will never be as popular as he is, but
Cameron is prime minister, a job Boris would love.”
The prime minister had good reason to believe his
entreaties to Johnson might work. Johnson is multilingual
and fundamentally internationalist in outlook. Privately,
his doubts about the merits of the EU were usually outweighed by his appreciation of its benefits. But he wavered.
A friend of Johnson’s, who wants Britain to stay in the EU,
says Johnson once told him, “I have to warn you, one day I
might say we should come out of Europe.”
After Cameron’s election victory in 2015, the prime minister promised to negotiate a new relationship between
Britain and the EU, one that gave Britain more power
over its own policies. Still conflicted, Johnson waited until
Cameron had concluded his dealmaking before making
up his mind. In the end, it was Johnson’s wife, Marina
Wheeler, who helped persuade
him that the prime minister’s
deal did not reclaim enough Brit“THERE IS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE
ish sovereignty to stay in the EU.
B E T W E E N T H E M E R E LY V E RY
If Johnson ends up on the losing
CAPABLE, SUCH AS CAMERON,
side of the referendum it would
A N D T H E B R I L L I A N T, V E R G I N G O N
be a blow—but, in an odd twist, he
G E N I U S , S U C H A S J O H N S O N .”
could end up benefiting from the
NEWSWEEK
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+
FROM LE FT: PETER M ACDIARM ID/G ET T Y; P ETER NICHOLLS/REUTERS
WIN-WIN: Even if Johnson ends up on the losing side of the EU referendum, it may not hurt his chances of becoming prime
minister in the future as many Conservative members of Parliament will think he was on the right side of the argument.
defeat, because in the eyes of many Conservative MPs he
will have been on the right side of the argument. The next
few years might then play out like this: Cameron stays on
as leader and prime minister until 2019 (the process for
choosing a new leader takes several months), or he might
quit earlier; a leadership contest takes place; and Johnson
defeats Cameron’s key ally, George Osborne, chancellor of
the exchequer, who is less popular with the Conservative
legislators. (A March poll by YouGov showed 43 percent
of Conservative Party members backed Johnson to be the
next leader, while just 22 percent backed Osborne.)
In that scenario, Johnson would likely lead the Conservatives to an election victory in 2020, over a Labour Party
that has weakened since its catastrophic defeat in 2015.
That would bring Eton’s tally of prime ministers to 20.
Publicly, Johnson shrugs off the suggestion that he
is fixated on getting to 10 Downing Street. In truth, his
campaign for that job seems to be well underway. “Lowkey and loyal to Cameron” is how an insider describes
his strategy. By “loyal,” the insider means that Johnson
is not making it his business to challenge or undermine
the prime minister on subjects other than Europe. His
outriders—a handful of MPs working, very unofficially, on
Johnson’s behalf in an attempt to improve his prospects—
are assiduously avoiding the small but significant faction
NEWSWEEK
of anti-EU Conservative MPs who detest the prime minister and would like him gone at any cost. At this delicate
early stage, Johnson can’t come over as too grabby.
He is unlikely to find an easy path to the most powerful job in Britain. Osborne, who has played Cameron’s
understudy for years, will fight him hard. And while Tory
MPs like a winner—and even Johnson’s political enemies
acknowledge his electoral successes—he hasn’t cultivated
his colleagues. During his long years in City Hall, he spent
little time in the House of Commons tea room—networking, sharing gossip, forging friendships and alliances. Colleagues who envy his career or disapprove of his foibles
and indiscretions are unlikely to hold back from damaging his chances when they can.
Whatever the British people decide on June 23—polls
indicate the contest is too close to call—friends and rivals
all over the country will have little choice but to accept the
decision and find a way to live in relative harmony again.
For the two men at the unusually personal heart of this
national soul-searching, it may take an especially long
time for the wounds to heal.
Isabel Oakeshott is political editor-at-large at the Daily Mail
and co-author of Call Me Dave, the unauthorized biography
of David Cameron.
31
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
n
a
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t
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0
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NNI
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I
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By JAN hs by VINC
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NEWSWEEK
32
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
d
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a
o
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o
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,
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re,
Hundreds gathered in the Giza area of Cairo,
and police fired tear gas and live ammunition to
disperse crowds that called for an end to Sisi’s
rule. Police turned out in force to keep subsequent demonstrations in check and conducted
raids to detain suspected activists.
“Egypt is now a mediocre military dictatorship,” says Mohamed Lotfy, a former Amnesty
International researcher, now executive director of the Egyptian Center for Rights and
Freedom. “Even [former Chilean President
Augusto] Pinochet would be ashamed. Because
under real dictatorships, there is economic
development. People sacrifice human rights for
security. Here, people are not gaining anything.
The economy is collapsing, and they are cracking down on activists, journalists, NGOs.”
Two years after Sisi seized power following
the toppling of democratically elected President
Mohammed Morsi in a military coup in June
2013, and five years after the demonstrations in
Tahrir Square brought down Hosni Mubarak,
THE DAY I arrived in Egypt in April, President
Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi had just given two Red
Sea islands, Tiran and Sanafir, to King Salman of Saudi Arabia, who was visiting Cairo to
announce billions of dollars in aid and investment. The islands are in the Gulf of Aqaba,
where both Israel and Jordan maintain ports, so
the transfer of the land was strategically important. It was also a baffling and highly contentious
gift that angered many Egyptians.
“Do we have any idea why he gave them, what
his motivation was?” I asked Mohammed Zaree
of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.
He replied, “Good question. No one knows.”
The next day, President Sisi gave a two-hour
speech in which he defended his decision, saying the islands always belonged to Saudi Arabia,
and prompted an uproar after a daring member
of parliament tried to ask a question: “I did not
give anyone permission to speak,” Sisi retorted.
It set off a social media frenzy with a hashtag that
translates to #SpeechDoesNotNeedPermission.
Friday prayers, the traditional time for demonstrations and protests, were tense that week.
“People have actually gone
back to saying the days of
Mubarak were better.”
Egypt is in deep crisis. “It’s a very dangerous
time,” says Lotfy. “One can’t see prospects
for the future. Not because the government is
weak but because people don’t have a vision for
change. When the vision is this blurred, however, it is very easy for a government to fall.”
That could mean Egypt is set for another
wave of violence. Although there are no official
polls, many feel that Sisi’s popularity has plummeted. “There is no trust in the government,”
Lotfy says. “People have actually gone back to
saying the days of Mubarak were better.” As
repressive as he was, Lotfy says, Mubarak had
clear goals—to develop the economy and bring
peace to the troubled region.
Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman
Ahmed Abu Zeid says that is an “unfair biased
assessment” and such criticisms are “based on
rumors and inaccurate statistics” circulated
by media outlets and human rights organizations. “Egypt has taken legislative steps aiming
to make progress in the field of human rights,
most notably in the constitution, and is working
to ensure that these steps are implemented,”
Abu Zeid says.
Prominent Egyptian human rights activists
and groups such as Amnesty International and
NEWSWEEK
34
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
+
SISI FITS:
Human Rights Watch have said this is the worst
state repression in decades, citing enforced disappearances, 60,000 political prisoners in jails
across the country and alleged extrajudicial
killings by the state.
Gamal Eid of the Arabic Network for Human
Rights says 10,000 of those political prisoners
have not even come to trial. “It’s a form of punishment,” Eid says. “We are currently facing the
most violent attack against human rights groups
since the 1980s. I have been working in human
rights for 25 years. This is the worst I have seen.”
For all his proclamations that his policies
are necessary to fight terrorism, Sisi has not
brought security. (The president rarely talks
to foreign reporters and communicates to the
Arrests and surveillance of activists have increased
in Egypt, but the
street protests
calling for the
overthrow of the
military regime are
proliferating.
NEWSWEEK
35
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
media mostly through speeches or press conferences.) Militants related to the Islamic State
group (ISIS) operate with impunity in the Northern Sinai, making it a no-go area. Tourism, one
of the main drivers of Egypt’s economy, has all
but shut down. At the pyramids on a beautiful
spring morning, a time when just a couple of
years ago the attraction would have been packed
with visitors, I counted fewer than 10 Europeans
or Americans.
This past October, a bomb brought down a
Russian plane over the Sinai carrying tourists
from Sharm el-Sheikh, and in January suspected ISIS militants armed with knives, guns
and explosive belts stabbed three foreign tourists at a beach resort in Hurghada on the Red
+
SANDS SANS:
Sea. One of them, Jon Torp, told the Norwegian
newspaper Verdens Gang that he saw a sign indicating the assailants were ISIS. “I went out onto
the balcony and could see a man waving a black
flag with white lettering,” Torp said.
The combination of militant attacks, enforced
disappearances, a flagging economy and a military regime opposed to democracy has many
Egyptians in despair. It seems as though the
hopeful days of the Arab Spring, the jubilance of
Tahrir Square and the belief that it was time for
democracy in Egypt were centuries ago.
Shortly before the fifth anniversary of Tahrir
Square, on January 25, things grew even more
difficult, according to locals: Authorities raided
the homes of suspected activists and put up surveillance cameras near the square to monitor
activity. Paranoia started to prevail.
“I have not felt safe since 2014,” says one foreign reporter, who has lived in Cairo for more
than 20 years and asked not to be identified
for obvious reasons. “Since the Al Jazeera journalists were imprisoned, no one working in the
press feels they can operate safely.”
As violence against
civilians and
tourists spreads,
tourism has cratered, with even
the pyramids being
shunned by frightened foreigners.
NEWSWEEK
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0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
In recent months, foreigners have felt almost
as threatened as Egyptian activists. On the evening of the Tahrir Square anniversary, a young
Italian researcher named Giulio Regeni was
abducted while walking to the subway near
his home. For several days, he was brutally
tortured and finally dumped by the side of the
road, dead. Regeni, an Arabic speaker, had been
researching trade unions—a sensitive subject
under the Sisi regime. The state security services denied involvement in the killing, blaming
bandits. They identified five men as the killers,
whom they promptly assassinated. The Italian
government reacted strongly; it pulled back
its ambassador and demanded phone records
and an open investigation from the Egyptian
authorities, who balked.
“The extraordinary thing is how five people
who probably did not do it were just liquidated,”
says Lotfy. The death of Regeni symbolized a
ruthless approach by the security services: If
they would kill a foreigner with impunity, then
they would kill anyone.
In late April, Egyptian authorities filed a police
report against international news agency Reuters after it quoted six police and intelligence
sources as saying that Regeni was detained by
police before his death.
“Politically speaking, Egypt is going through a
period of loss of control over the security,” Lotfy
says. “But also a loss of credibility with the public opinion and a state of helplessness over the
economy. It’s not good.”
The official unemployment rate in Egypt is 11
percent (unofficially, it is thought to be closer to
20 percent). Tourism is at an all-time low. Prices
for food and everyday items are expensive. The
gravest worry, however, is the loss of civil liberties. After the death of Regeni, whose body was
so badly disfigured that his mother recognized
him from only the tip of his nose, according to one
local journalist, there is an underlying fear and
anger at the power of the security services.
“These guys come with an entrenched mentality of being above the law,” says Lotfy. “To
the extent where if they buy a car, they don’t
even bother to put up license plates—they just
put an eagle sticker on the back, which means
they are security.”
Abu Zeid of the Foreign Ministry says improving human rights is a process and that “in any
given country there will unavoidably be violations
and incidents that involve breaches of human
rights…. Violations happen, but they are tackled
with absolute seriousness and with no impunity.”
THE DISAPPEARED
office sits Ibrahim Metwaly,
a lawyer and the father of a young student,
Amr Ibrahim, who disappeared on July 8, 2013.
OUTSIDE LOTFY’S
“He is my son. He is a part
of me, and I won’t give
up until I find him.”
SNATCHED:
Metwaly, whose
son disappeared
in the summer
of 2013, leads a
grassroots organization called
Coalition of the
Disappeared.
+
NEWSWEEK
37
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Metwaly explains he is the leader of a grassroots organization called Coalition of the Disappeared. His son was not political, he insists, nor
a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group blamed by Sisi for undermining the
country. Ibrahim was last seen being taken away
blindfolded from the street while he was walking
home. The next day, his frantic father searched
hospitals, morgues and police stations, where
officials told him to go to the Ministry of Interior
(the department blamed by human rights groups
for many of the disappearances).
Nearly three years later, Metwaly believes
his son is still alive and most likely being held at
Azouly, a prison near the Sinai that is notorious for
brutal torture. He is not sure what his son did to
be picked up, and there is no record of him being
charged with anything. Metwaly filed lawsuits
against the person who was minister of defense at
the time of his son’s abduction, Sisi.
“He is my son. He is a part of me, and I won’t
give up until I find him,” Metwaly says, his voice
cracking as he sits huddled in a darkened office.
“How could I live without a part of me?”
As a lawyer, Metwaly has the advantage of
understanding Egypt’s tangled judicial system
better than most. He is now trying to help others
whose children and relatives have disappeared
and who have no idea where to start looking for
them. Some of these people, he says, live far
away and are so poor they “cannot even afford
to take a minibus to get to Cairo to file missing
persons reports.”
“It’s worse than Mubarak,” he says—perhaps
the 10th time I heard this from different people
in a single day, ranging from my taxi drivers to
students, to shoppers, to activists. “We live in a
disastrous time.”
Another woman at Lotfy’s office, Manal Ibrahim Sallam, is crying. She says she has searched
morgues for days, looking for her 24-year-old
son, who has been missing since 2014. Every
day, she takes a bus from her home in the Kafr
el-Sheikh district, about three hours outside of
Cairo, to plead for news and meet others in a
similar situation. “I will go to any gathering. I
will talk to anyone who might have information
about my son,” she says, adding that the authorities have not done anything to help her.
Students and those suspected of political
activism are not the only ones disappearing. Aya
Hijazi, a 29-year old American with a degree in
conflict resolution studies from George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia, came to Cairo
to try to “fix things,” says her brother, Basel, a
Google employee in Dublin.
Hijazi founded a charity for street children
called Belady (our country) with her husband,
Mohammed Hassanein, but was arrested within
months. She has spent nearly two years in a
Cairo women’s prison; her trial has been postponed five times. She reads a lot, her brother
says, and draws. “She used to be a good artist,”
he says darkly. “Now she is a great artist.”
Her crime? “Aya decided to tackle the enormous problem of street children,” Basel says.
She launched a nongovernmental organization
that focused on sanitation, combating sexual
harassment and attending to the needs of the
children. But she missed one small detail, and
that was her downfall: She failed to get a formal, registered NGO number before she started
working. “We’re not sure why they decided to
use her as a scapegoat,” says Basel, who says
the newspapers attacked her for days after her
arrest. Perhaps it was her American heritage
(she was born in the United States, to a Lebanese
father and an Egyptian mother).
“Egypt is now a mediocre
military dictatorship.
Even Pinochet would
be ashamed.”
WIRED SHUT:
Cairo's Tahrir
Square, the locus
of the popular revolt that overthrew
Mubarak, is now
heavily patrolled to
discourage similar
expressions of
dissent.
+
NEWSWEEK
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Hijazi was accused of sex trafficking and child
abuse, a charge her family and friends, as well
as human rights activists like Lotfy and others,
believe is fabricated. “Everyone knows the state
is using Aya as an example,” says Basel. “They
arrested her to send a message to tell young
people. You want to give us a different view of
how to run society? You want to start NGOs that
help people the government is not reaching?
Well, you cannot. You will go to jail.”
“Her case is one of those stories that we just
don’t have an answer for,” says Lotfy.
Growing repression by the security services
is a way of demonstrating that the government
can operate without restraints, says Zaree, of
the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.
“This is not a war against terrorism—which is
what the government says—but against civil
society. The security apparatus is running out
of control.”
In the minds of the leaders, Zaree
says, Tahrir Square was a terrible
event, “and they are determined
not to let it happen again.”
Asked about the detention of
people who seem to have no connection with terrorism, such as
NGO staff and bloggers, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Abu
Zeid, says anybody in prison is facing charges of violating national
laws and is guaranteed due process
and a fair trial. “Egypt is indeed
in the midst of an arduous battle against terrorism, and in light
of the indiscriminate targeting of
civilians and security personnel, it
has been necessary to take some
strict security measures,” he says.
Meanwhile, most of Egypt’s independent journalists have been
silenced, and the imprisonment of
Al Jazeera reporters, which lasted
for more than a year, has made
many foreign reporters wary of
traveling to or working in Egypt, or
indeed of asking too many questions. Many of Egypt’s most prominent political bloggers—including
+
SILENT TERROR:
Alaa Abd el-Fattah (the nephew of the popular
British-Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif ), who
worked tirelessly to expose corruption under
Mubarak—are also in prison.
Abu Zeid says freedom of speech and independence of the press are guaranteed by the constitution, as long as media outlets operate “within
the confines of the law.”
Most people I spoke to in Egypt believe that
things will come to a head soon, that Sisi cannot
continue his rule by repression and fear. It was,
after all, the high price of bread and the power of
social media that fueled the revolution at Tahrir
Square. There is anger, and it takes little to trigger
demonstrations. On April 19, police in the Cairo
area of Al-Rehab shot a man dead in an argument
over a cup of tea, leading to street protests. “People are utterly fed up with life here,” says Sara, a
young lawyer who declined to give her last name.
Egyptians looking
for missing sons
and daughters they
fear have been
detained line the
streets, keeping
alive the names of
their loved ones.
Even foreigners
are starting to
disappear.
NEWSWEEK
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Yasmin Hossam is a lawyer representing the
writer Ahmed Naji, who was imprisoned in
2014 for writing a sex scene in one of his novels,
which was syndicated in the newspaper Akhbar al-Adab. Naji was sentenced to two years in
prison, and Hossam and a team of lawyers are
appealing. “This is all a symptom of the fact that
there is a line in Egypt now. No one is allowed
to talk in a way that is outside the system,” says
Hossam. “They will not allow any kind of freedom of expression.”
She says she doesn’t regret the revolution in
Tahrir Square. “It was the best thing that ever
happened to us Egyptians,” she says. “But the
problem is simple now: There is no rule of law.
They beat doctors; they kill foreigners; they
imprison writers.”
“No one is safe,” she says. “There is too much
blood.”
NEW WORLD
SOCIETY
INNOVATION
INTERNET
TECHNOLOGY
BRAIN
TORTURE
GOOD SCIENCE
OPERATION AUTOMATION
The first successful robot-performed
soft tissue surgery heralds big changes
in the operating theater
+
RO BSON FE RN ANDJ ES/ESTADAO CONTEUDO/AGENC IA ESTADO/AP
SCRUB IN: Even
the best doctors
are not infallible
or indefatigable.
Computers, on the
other hand, make
precise calculations effortlessly
and drive consistent motions
without tiring.
BY
LECIA BUSHAK
@LeciaBoosh
SURGICAL ROBOTS may soon perform most
operations, ranging from sewing up tiny wounds
to executing heart procedures. Many of these
are already accomplished with the assistance of
robots that surgeons manually control. The da
Vinci Surgical System, for example, approved for
clinical use by the Food and Drug Administration
in 2000, enables surgeons to place their arms
inside instruments and use their hands to control the movement of robotic tools on the operating table from afar. A recent test conducted
by researchers at Children’s National Health
System (CNHS) and Johns Hopkins University
suggests that robots may soon go a step further,
performing on soft tissue on their own, start to
finish. The surgeons would simply watch.
The team tested the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, by letting it conduct several open bowel surgeries on pigs—all successful
and without complications. When they compared the results with those of manual surgeries,
NEWSWEEK
laparoscopies and robot-assisted surgeries by the
da Vinci Surgical System, the researchers found
that STAR performed better, with fewer errors and
more consistent sutures. STAR not only works on
its own, performing surgical motions with a flexible “hand,” but it’s also intelligent, able to react to
the uncertain, dynamic landscapes of soft tissue
surgery. STAR boasts a “suprahuman” visual system with multiple lenses that tell the robot where
objects are in three-dimensional space and what
type of tissue it’s looking at—and even enable it to
see through tissue and in the dark.
As for the surgeons standing guard? “Sixty
percent of [the surgeries] were done fully autonomously, and we made minor adjustments in 40
percent of cases—not because the robot needed
it,” says Peter Kim of CNHS’s Sheikh Zayed
Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, “but
because we were like expectant parents watching the child walk for the first time, so we were a
little nervous.”
41
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N E W W O R L D / T E C HNOLOGY
DISRUPTIVE
TRUMP VS. SILICON VALLEY
The U.S. is on the brink of war as new
tech guts the old manufacturing base
WE’VE GOT TWO Americas now: Atoms America
and Bits America. People used to worry about
a digital divide. Well, that’s now looking more
like the border between North Korea and South
Korea—tense and bristling with pointed missiles,
one nervous misunderstanding away from mayhem. This new dynamic is evident in everything
from the transgender bathroom laws in the South
to proposals from Silicon Valley to institute basic
income for all the people technology is going
to throw out of work. And while we’re at it, let’s
include the 2016 presidential election, which is
really all about Atoms vs. Bits.
Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, then
head of the MIT Media Lab, wrote about the
changing relationship between atoms and bits in
his book Being Digital. Atoms make up physical
stuff. Bits are digital. As Negroponte presciently
pointed out, atoms represent the old economy of
manufacturing and trucks and retail stores and,
as it turns out, a lot of middle-class work. Bits
drive the new economy—which today includes
mobile apps, social networks, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 3-D printing and other
technologies that are eating the old economy.
Atoms America is getting poorer and angrier.
Bits America pretty much rules the global economy and churns out billionaires. Atoms America
wants to “make America great again” because the
past seems a hell of a lot better than whatever the
future holds. Bits America patronizingly believes
that the Atoms people would be fine, at least in
the short run, if they would only take some Khan
NEWSWEEK
Academy courses and learn to code.
I saw this divide in real time in late April at
a convention in San Diego called Lightfair
International—the world’s big lighting industry
show. A decade ago, almost every exhibitor and
42
0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
BY
KEVIN MANEY
@kmaney
ARCHIVE /GET T Y
AUTOMATED
RESPONSE :
The call to “make
America great
again” is a battle
cry against tech innovations that are
upending traditional businesses and
eliminating jobs.
+
attendee was a hands-on lighting designer or
manufacturer—real Atoms people. They hailed
from Cincinnati or Calgary or Germany, possibly doing the same work their parents did.
At the 2016 show, all the excitement had
shifted to Internet of Things sensors in lights and
all the data the devices will collect. A new generation of Silicon Valley computer jockeys roamed
the floor, knowing they owned the industry’s
future. The Atoms people looked dazed. The air
in the hall smelled of careers getting incinerated.
So Atoms America is pissed, and it has been
giving the finger to Bits America—which is
really what’s behind the so-called bathroom
laws passed in North Carolina and Mississippi.
When people look backward for inspiration,
they rebel against those who push forward.
But in Bits America, talent is everything, particularly in red-hot fields like data science and
machine learning. No Bits America company
can afford to drive away talent that happens to
be gay or an immigrant, or even risk a hint of
bias. Bits companies pretty much have to be progressive. So when conservatives running North
Carolina passed a law that discriminates against
the LGBT community, PayPal and Deutsche
Bank canceled planned expansions there that
would’ve brought in many Bits-oriented jobs.
“We take our commitment to building inclusive
work environments seriously,” said Deutsche
Bank co-CEO John Cryan at the time.
North Carolina is heavily Atoms. It needs
more Bits. Instead, it decided to piss off Bits, creating a deeper chasm. Same thing happened in
Mississippi and Indiana, two other states firmly
in Atoms America. Seems like a trend.
The Bits are doing their part to be divisive jerks
too. Right now, for instance, the Bits are sending
the Atoms a very undiplomatic message about
guaranteed basic income.
Maybe you’ve heard about this. Basic income
movements have been around for decades, but
the concept made headlines this year when Sam
Altman, the influential chief of tech incubator
Y Combinator, got behind it. In the current Silicon Valley version, basic income is rooted in
the idea that Bits America is essentially going
to wipe out Atoms America’s jobs, and so we
need to make sure the outmoded Atoms schlubs
have enough money so they don’t revolt. “We
think there could be a possibility where 95 percent of people won’t be able to contribute to the
workforce,” said Matt Krisiloff, who manages Y
Combinator’s basic income project. “We need
to start preparing for that transformation.”
Even if the notion of guaranteed income is
well-intentioned, it sure sounds insulting to
NEWSWEEK
Atoms. It’s the Bits saying to them, “Your contributions will be worthless and unmarketable, so
don’t even try to work. In fact, maybe don’t even
go to college and rack up all that debt and waste all
that time studying hard stuff you’ll never be able
to use.” In this version of the future, all careers end
up with the structure of the NBA—a thin slice of
superstars get megarich, another thin layer might
eke out a living in minor leagues, and everybody
else just plays for fun. But no paycheck.
Oh, and in case they didn’t make it clear: The
tech elite will be the NBA. No wonder the Atoms
feel mounting anger at the Bits.
How do we know the Atoms are seething? Polls
show that the single best predictor of a Donald
Trump supporter in the GOP primaries is the
absence of a college degree—the kinds of people
already seeing their jobs automated away by software. His supporters tend to say they feel resent-
“THERE COULD BE A
POSSIBILITY WHERE
95 PERCENT OF PEOPLE WON’T BE ABLE
TO CONTRIBUTE TO
THE WORKFORCE.”
ful and powerless. They feel screwed by Bits
America. Voting for Trump is how they show it.
To Bits America, Trump’s protectionist, isolationist messages are those bathroom laws writ
large. His ideas are a threat to the Bits’ juggernaut. Turn away talented immigrant geeks? Make
Apple manufacture every iPhone in the U.S.? Start
trade wars that might lock Google or some coming cloud-based machine-learning technology out
of global markets? Whoa—that’s disruptive, dude.
Again, the digital divide is not new. A White
House report in 2015 concluded that it “is concentrated among older, less educated, and less
affluent populations, as well as in rural parts of
the country that tend to have fewer choices and
slower [internet] connections.” Just a year ago,
Atoms America and Bits America seemed to be
split in ways that were mostly tangible—technology access, age, geography.
Now the divide seems to be ideological. Atoms
and Bits are choosing sides and getting ready
to fight. If that doesn’t change, someday soon,
somebody’s going to launch a missile.
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NE W W O R L D / T O RTURE
THE BRAIN’S BLACK SITE
Science shows that torture is useless
at eliciting accurate information
IN EARLY 2003, Glenn Carle, an interrogator
with the CIA, arrived at a secret detention facility overseas to question a recently captured
Al-Qaeda suspect. The jail, whose location
remains classified, was cold and dark—so dark
Carle could not see his own hands—and music
blared loudly all around. Inside the cell, a man
lay shivering under a flimsy blanket; Carle called
to him, and he looked up slowly, weary and confused. When questioned, the man could manage
only a rambling, incoherent reply. “He was a
wreck,” Carle says.
The man’s dilapidated state of mind was
the result of a systematic program of torture
inflicted on terrorism suspects by the CIA after
9/11. Nudity, temperature extremes, sleep and
sensory deprivation, dietary manipulation,
waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” were meant to break down
detainees’ resistance to interrogation. The stress
and disorientation induced by these methods,
it was believed, would force them to cooperate
and release whatever precious information they
were hiding. But, according to Carle, this theory
is wrong. “Information obtained under duress is
suspect and polluted from the start and harder to
verify,” he says.
His views have been vindicated by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded in the executive summary of its 6,000page study of the CIA program, released in
December 2014, that the agency’s harsh methods failed to glean any intelligence not available
NEWSWEEK
through softer tactics. However, the CIA has disputed the Senate’s findings, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has vowed to
reinstate torture if elected. Trump has been particularly raucous in his support for brutal interrogation, urging that Salah Abdeslam, apprehended
as a suspect in the November 2015 attacks in Paris,
be waterboarded.
Meanwhile, compelling scientific evidence is
emerging that torture and coercion are, at best,
ineffective means of gathering intelligence.
Worse, as Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, wrote in a recent book, Why Torture Doesn’t
Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation, torture
can produce false information by harming those
areas of the brain associated with memory.
O’Mara marshals a large amount of scientific
literature to make his point. In one important
experiment from 2006, psychiatrist Charles
Morgan and colleagues subjected a group of special operations soldiers to prisoner-of-war conditions (including food and sleep deprivation
and temperature extremes).
These soldiers were highly trained and physically fit, and, unlike most detainees, they were
motivated to cooperate. But even they exhibited
a remarkable deterioration in memory as a result
of these stressful conditions. According to Carle,
enhanced interrogation techniques have similar
effects. “It is obvious that sleep deprivation and
temperature extremes disorient the detainee—
they are designed to do so,” he says. “If one is
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BY
RUPERT STONE
@RupertStone83
+
NO HALF MEASURES: A volun-
KEVIN L AM ARQU E / REU TE RS
teer undergoes
a demonstration
of waterboarding in a protest
outside the Justice Department
in Washington,
D.C. on November 5, 2007.
disoriented, virtually by definition one’s memory is impaired. It is simply shocking one could
be so stupid as to argue the opposite.”
Waterboarding was the CIA’s most notorious interrogation technique. In this procedure,
a prisoner is strapped to a board, his face covered with a cloth. Water is gradually poured over
the cloth until it fills the prisoner’s mouth and
nasal cavity, preventing him from breathing. As
he suffocates, panic and terror take hold, and it
is assumed the prisoner will “talk” and tell the
truth to be allowed to breathe.
Like other enhanced measures, waterboarding cannot be tested in a laboratory for ethical
reasons, but there is a sizable amount of relevant scientific literature on it. As O’Mara shows
in his book, studies of the “diving reflex” (a
set of physiological responses that occur when
mammals, including humans, are submerged
in water) have demonstrated that immersion in
cold water moves brain activity away from areas
supporting memory to those “principally concerned with survival,” such as the brainstem and
amygdala, which regulate fear, pain and stress.
By occluding the airways, waterboarding starves
people of air, and there is a “huge literature”
NEWSWEEK
“INFORMATION
OBTAINED UNDER
DURESS IS SUSPECT
AND POLLUTED
FROM THE START.”
showing that lack of oxygen (hypoxia) harms
cognition, O’Mara tells Newsweek. He highlights
one recent study, which found that hypoxia
“severely impairs” a person’s cognitive abilities. Furthermore, waterboarding causes carbon
dioxide to accumulate in the body (hypercapnia), which induces fear and panic. In this situation, the ability to think and recall information
will be “markedly reduced,” he says.
Despite the abundance of evidence relevant
to torture, O’Mara is the first brain scientist to
write such a book. “I’ve genuinely been surprised by the silence,” he says. O’Mara and his
colleagues at Trinity College Dublin are completing a research project that examines the
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+
NEWSWEEK
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A prisoner of war
is interrogated on
July 19, 2003, at a
detention center in
Balad, Iraq, where
suspects were
deprived of sleep
using glaring lights
and loud heavy
metal music.
RITA LE ISTNER /REDUX
80 student volunteers were asked to complete a
number of computer-based tasks. Beforehand,
they were told that pressing the Escape key on
their computers would damage essential data.
Having completed the tasks, the volunteers were
then divided into two groups: One was allowed
to sleep all night; the other had to stay awake.
The following day, the students in both groups
were asked to sign a statement admitting they
had pressed the Escape key during the tasks.
Sleep-deprived participants were 4.5 times more
likely to sign the false confession.
“This is a dramatic increase,” says Elizabeth
Loftus, a professor of cognitive science and law
at the University of California, Irvine, and one of
the study’s authors. “It should alert people to the
potential for false confessions” in cases of sleep
deprivation. This is especially pertinent to the
U.S. criminal justice system, Loftus says, where
sleep deprivation is common and false confessions have featured in a disturbing number of
wrongful convictions.
The caveat, says Kimberly Fenn, who runs the
Sleep and Learning Lab at Michigan State University and was one of Loftus’s co-authors, is that
their study does not ask participants to confess to
an actual crime, so rates of false confession connected to sleep deprivation might be lower in the
real world. Still, the work adds to a growing body
of scientific literature suggesting sleep deprivation is not an effective interrogation technique.
effects of water immersion and breath-holding
on memory. Participants are asked to lie down
with a wet cloth over their face and hold their
breath while their physiology is monitored; then
they are asked to recall bits of previously learned
information. The study is in its third round of
experiments and must still undergo peer review,
but the results so far seem to indicate that the
process impairs memory.
Indeed, the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school used to subject U.S.
soldiers to waterboarding as part of their resistance training (it stopped in 2007), and former
instructor Malcolm Nance says the procedure
does not elicit reliable information. It does, on
the other hand, generate false confessions. “The
captive will say absolutely anything and agree to
anything to make the torture stop,” says Nance.
Most of those subjected to waterboarding, he
says, confess as a result—and their distress is so
intense, they do not even remember confessing.
In a recent BBC documentary, for which Nance
served as a consultant, a volunteer underwent
waterboarding and confessed to “being born a
bunny rabbit.” He had no recollection of making
such an admission.
Depriving detainees of sleep is also unlikely to
help those trying to gather intelligence. A study
published in Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences earlier this year examined the effects
of sleep deprivation on false confessions. Over
BRIGHT LIGHTS,
BIG BRAIN DAMAGE:
“Performance in a wide range of cognitive functions, including the ability to retrieve information from long-term memory, is impaired under
sleep deprivation,” says Fenn.
An earlier project by the same team found
that sleep loss could even lead to the formation of false memories. Sleeplessness can also
induce psychosis—the Senate report describes
a sleep-deprived detainee who experienced
intense hallucinations, for example. Tony Camerino, a former senior interrogator with a special
operations task force, saw sleep-deprived prisoners frequently during his time in Iraq in 2006.
Sleep deprivation “absolutely” harms memory,
he says, and “leads to inaccurate information.”
President Barack Obama officially stopped
the CIA interrogation techniques by executive
order in 2009, although the program had effectively ended before then. And a new law enacted
last year requires all interrogations to comply
with standards set down in the Army Field Manual, which prohibits waterboarding, prolonged
sleep deprivation and other enhanced interrogation techniques. In an emailed statement, CIA
spokesman Dean Boyd tells Newsweek, “It is CIA
Director Brennan’s resolute intention to ensure
that Agency officers scrupulously adhere to these
directives, which the Director fully supports.”
This unusually firm posture comes
weeks after John Brennan told NBC that
he would not obey orders to use waterboarding, and signals a newly defiant
rejection of torture from the agency.
But, while enhanced interrogation
is now banned, some coercive methods remain on the table. The manual
contains a controversial appendix,
which could allow for some coercive
tactics, such as isolation or partial
sleep and sensory deprivation. For
example, it permits interrogators to restrict
detainees to four hours of sleep every 24 hours
over an indefinite period. And, according to
Fenn and O’Mara, research indicates that partial sleep deprivation like this could be just as
harmful as complete sleep loss. The appendix
might be rescinded, though, as a new law mandates a thorough review of the manual, which
is now underway and expected to be completed
in a few years. The Department of Defense did
not respond to Newsweek’s request for comment
While torture is slowly but surely being
excised from U.S. policy, new scientific research
is suggesting more effective interrogation techniques. The High-Value Detainee Interrogation
Group, or HIG, was set up by Obama in 2009 to
conduct interrogations of high-profile terrorism
NEW WORLD/TORTU R E
suspects and sponsor research into effective
interrogation techniques, and it has backed a
considerable number of important new studies. “The good news is that there is substantial
research on viable alternatives that do not rely
on coercion but instead on rapport building,”
says Maria Hartwig, a psychology professor at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has
contributed to a number of HIG-funded projects. The new law requires the HIG to produce
a report detailing “best practices for interrogation,” expected to be made public soon.
One research area backed by the HIG focuses
on methods used by the World War II–era German interrogator Hanns Scharff, who adopted a
friendly, subtle approach to interrogation, known
as “information elicitation.” Instead of posing
direct questions and pressing for details, Scharff
pretended he already knew everything. That
ONE VOLUNTEER UNDERWENT WATERBOARDING
AND CONFESSED TO “BEING
BORN A BUNNY RABBIT.”
NEWSWEEK
way, it was assumed, the detainee would deem
it futile to withhold information. Scharff would
slip details into casual conversation, which the
detainee would then confirm or deny, unaware
he was providing fresh intelligence.
Recent research has supported the efficacy of
the Scharff technique. According to Pär-Anders
Granhag, a professor of psychology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, these tactics
have just been tested successfully on Norwegian
policemen who handle informants. (The study is
currently under review and not yet published.)
Granhag says he and his colleagues are receiving
“more and more” requests to train practitioners
in the Scharff method. “So far, we have trained
police units in Sweden and Norway, and the
LAPD and FBI.”
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N E W W O R L D / BRAIN
RIGGING THE MIND GAME
A disregarded old technology
can rewire brains and treat many
cognitive and physical ailments
NEWSWEEK
deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic
stress disorder, anxiety, anger or depression can
simply sit in a comfortable chair for half-hour
sessions with a few wires protruding from their
scalp and get a mental tune-up, if not a complete rewiring of an off-kilter brain.
It sounds like quackery, but it isn’t. Neurofeedback, which uses real-time displays of brain
activity to teach the brain to self-regulate, is a
technique neurologists have wielded since the
1960s. Back then, NASA was concerned about
astronauts having rocket fuel–induced seizures.
They approached Barry Sterman, a researcher
at the University of California, Los Angeles,
School of Medicine, for help. Sterman soon discovered that he could minimize the damaging
effects of rocket fuel on cats with an early form
of neurofeedback he developed.
The way neurofeedback works is fairly simple: Electrodes are attached to various parts
of the skull and hooked up to a computer or
tablet of some kind with installed software
that reads activity in those regions and computes an appropriate response delivered back
to the brain. The brain then uses that data to
adjust itself, in the same way that you might be
inspired to fix an-out-of place lock of hair while
looking in the mirror. As the brain changes, the
feedback changes. “Think of neurofeedback as
a kind of learning for the brain,” says Kirk Little,
a Cincinnati psychologist and president of the
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+
STAY HEADS UP:
A neurofeedback
patient learns to
control his brain
activity by watching a video game of
a jet that flies
once he produces
the desired brain
wave pattern.
BY
WINSTON ROSS
@winston_ross
MARK BOSTE R / LOS ANGE LES TIMES/G ET T Y
WILL STRAHL walked up to my door with a
massive black briefcase in his hand, the kind
you could use to tote a dirty bomb. Once inside
my living room, he cracked open the case and
removed a laptop, a small amplifier, a resealable
plastic bag of stainless steel–tipped electrodes
and a jar of conductive gel. He applied the gel
to the peak of my forehead, then attached electrodes to my skull and ground wires to my ears.
I was about to play a video game with my brain.
To succeed, I needed only to keep the car
moving, the music playing and a gray fog
from enshrouding the entire screen. To pull
off those feats, I had to keep my mind as calm
and focused as possible. If I closed my eyes or
clenched my jaw or shifted in my seat, the car
stalled or the screen went gray or the music
faded to a whisper. There were other cars in the
race, but the true objective wasn’t to beat them.
It was to rebalance my brain.
Strahl is a doctoral student in psychology
at Pacific University in Portland, Oregon, but
before that he worked for a neurologist in Los
Angeles who founded a company called the
Peak Brain Institute, which has ventured into
neurofeedback, a decades-old field of neuroscience that word-of-mouth and some new technology have made newly popular. The promise
of neurofeedback is to shift our brain waves
back to health without drugs, exercise or even
meditation. Clients suffering from attention
aches and vertigo. After 30 sessions, “it made a
100 percent difference,” she says. “This is one of
mental health’s best-kept secrets,” Longo adds.
“The pharmaceutical companies don’t like us
because it gets people off of drugs. But there’s a
growing amount of literature and research, and
in the next five or 10 years you’re going to see a
lot of support when we say we can treat things
like traumatic brain injuries, anxiety, depression,
ADHD, insomnia, migraine headaches and people who have had strokes.”
Charles Tegeler, a neurology professor at
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North
Carolina, got into the field after running a
stroke center for 15 years. He became increasingly concerned that stress was killing people, he says, and “putting people on drugs was
just a big Band-Aid.” In 2009, Tegeler heard
about Brain State. “I thought it sounded like
bunk,” he says. But his daughter had developed migraine headaches so excruciating she’d
missed most of her classes during the previous
semester. Tegeler decided she could undergo
NEW WORLD/BRAIN
International Society for Neurofeedback and
Research. “If you tell a dog to sit, push its butt
down and give it a cookie 100 times, the dog
is going to learn how to sit on its own [when]
you just shake the [cookie] box. You’re doing
the same thing with the brain’s electrical discharges—rewardi ng people for modifying their
brain waves.”
While the practice grew slowly in the decades
after Sterman’s initial work, recent advances in
technology and processor speeds have allowed
more practitioners to offer the services with
less of an investment, and a consensus has
arisen based on research that peaked in the
early aughts that the brain is in fact
neuroplastic. Neurofeedback has
shown demonstrable results in hundreds of patients over the past few
decades, Little says, with more than
500 peer-reviewed research articles
published on the topic in the past few
years alone. Robert Longo, a Lexington, North Carolina, counselor on
the board of directors for the International Society for Neurofeedback
and Research, says it’s now widely
accepted that the notion of rewiring
the brain isn’t hocus-pocus. “The idea of neuroplasticity is really starting to catch on in the
wired public and scientific communities. It’s
very clear now that it works,” says Little.
I first stumbled across the concept of neurofeedback while researching a story on anger
in 2014. A couple of the experts I interviewed
mentioned the practice, and I found a company
called Brain State Technologies that offered a
neurofeedback treatment it called Brainwave
Optimization. The company connected me with
a practitioner in New York City, and in April that
year I underwent two sessions. After the first
session, I felt as if I’d just finished meditating,
and the world seemed a little brighter. After the
second, I felt like I’d taken a Xanax.
More committed users sometimes—though
not always—see even more dramatic and
long-lasting effects. Longo’s wife, for example,
started using neurofeedback after she fell down
a flight of stairs and suffered a series of head-
AFTER 10 SESSIONS IN FIVE
DAYS, TEGELER’S HEART
WAS BACK TO NORMAL,
AND HIS DAUGHTER’S
HEADACHES WERE GONE.
NEWSWEEK
the company’s brain wave optimization. “If it
helps her headaches, we’ll talk,” he says of his
feelings before the sessions. Tegeler also tried
it himself, to see if it could do anything for his
irregular heartbeat. After 10 sessions in five
days, Tegeler’s heart was back to normal, and
his daughter’s headaches were gone.
In 2009, he founded a research institute at
Wake Forest called HIRREM, which stands for
“high-resolution, relational, resonance-based,
electroencephalic mirroring.” The facility has
enrolled 400 people in five neurofeedback
research projects, all using Brain State’s technology. Participants included people with traumatic brain injuries, insomniacs and people
suffering from depression or stress. Most of
HIRREM’s participants have seen improvement, Tegeler says. On balance, the results are
“like condensing three years of medication into
three days,” with only a small rate of adverse
effects. The center is about to release the find-
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AN OLD SCIENCE:
fall, Gerdes gambled that he’d find demand for a
take-home version of his product. He launched
a Kickstarter campaign for the Braintellect 2, a
portable headband that offers a less-involved
version of the procedure I underwent in New
York. He raised $95,000 in two months and
started shipping the individual units not long
after the new year.
The headband straps to the back of the skull
and rests on the nose, sort of like Geordi La
Forge’s glasses in Star Trek. It is equipped with
sensors that deliver activity readings from
the brain to a Bluetooth-enabled device that
communicates with an included media tablet.
The tablet stores software that receives the
brain activity information and uses it to output a series of sounds—tones and chimes—that
change constantly, depending on the input.
I was one of the first people to receive the Braintellect, and Gerdes warned me there
would be “kinks” to work out. In the first
few short sessions I tried, I had trouble
getting the headset to fit comfortably and
securely, so Gerdes sent me a new set
of sensors and ultimately a whole new
and more flexible unit. Still, I’m a little
spooked to try it. Strahl’s “video game”
seemed to push me in the right neuro-direction. The more I calmed myself
and focused on moving the car through
a swamp, the more consistently the car
moved. When it stalled—and it stalled
frequently—I was frustrated and mentally flailing to try to get it going again,
which was counterproductive. After two
sessions held over two days, I got a little
better at the game and felt a bit more clearheaded afterward. But self-administering
is a different beast, and not everyone
thinks neurofeedback is ready—or will
ever be ready—for at-home application.
Not long after venturing into the neurofeedback field in 2005, Little found out
the hard way that self-experimentation—
even with expert training—can easily take
a wrong turn. “My wife would say, ‘What’s
the matter with you?’ And I’d say, ‘Nothing is the matter with me!’ And she’d say,
‘That attitude, right there.’ I had the beta
waves trained too high, which made me
irritable and obsessive,” he recalls. Little tells me he’d never “publicly” advise
someone to perform neurofeedback on
themselves, but “if you’re an adult who
wants to do this, it’s your prerogative,” he
says. “It could be really great for you, or it
could really mess you up.”
B ET TM AN/G ET T Y
This 1935 version
of an electroencephotograph machine records the
electrical changes
in the human brain
during periods of
rest and activity.
+
ings of a placebo- controlled study of 104 people
with insomnia and is launching trials later this
year to see if neurofeedback helps those who
suffer from PTSD.
Not everyone responds that well to neurofeedback. Search the web, and there are blog
posts from clients who’ve undergone neurofeedback sessions and complain that they resulted
in bouts of insomnia or anxiety. “You can train
people in the wrong way,” Little says. “You can
put sensors in the wrong spots, the training frequencies in the wrong direction. You can make a
person an insomniac, make people more angry
and agitated.”
Nevertheless, the number of patients using
Brain State’s technology—mostly in offices
set up by a network of practitioners across the
globe—has surged from 25,000 five years ago to
100,000 today, founder Lee Gerdes says. Last
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DOWNTIME
MEMORABILIA
TRAVEL
MOVIES
MARIJUANA
ART
STYLE
CONTINENTAL
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
DAVID JOSHUA FORD
Tired of his Manhattan office
job, Jeffrey Tanenhaus went
for a bike ride—to California
BY
ALEXANDER
NAZARYAN
@alexnazaryan
ONE NIGHT LAST summer, Jeffrey Tanenhaus
did in Manhattan what people in New York do
about 35,000 times each day: He unlocked a
Citi Bike from a bike-share station. With more
than 300 such kiosks sprinkled mostly around
Manhattan and Brooklyn, Citi Bike had become
New York’s newest mode of transportation, and
one of its more fashionable, at least until the
hoverboard came along.
Tanenhaus had an annual membership,
which allowed him to use a Citi Bike for 45 minutes at a time before having to dock it again.
He was thrilled because the Citi Bike he had
just selected was apparently new. “The spokes
sparkled,” he would write on his blog. “The bell
chime could summon angels.”
The ability to call forth seraphim is, in fact,
not a known feature of Citi Bikes. In the two
years since Mayor Michael Bloomberg had
NEWSWEEK
introduced New Yorkers to bike sharing, some
had derided the bicycles, sponsored by Citibank and prominently adorned with that institution’s logo, as bulky (45 pounds) and slow
(three speeds only, to discourage fatal encounters with tourists and yellow cabs). The newer
model Tanenhaus found promised to be slightly
more fleet and durable than the original issue.
Tanenhaus rode down Second Avenue, stopping when he saw a woman docking a Citi Bike
at 20th Street. “Excuse me,” he called out to
her. “What if I were to tell you that I’m going to
ride this bike cross-country tomorrow?”
The woman did not think this was a good
idea. “That’s gonna cost a fortune,” she told
Tanenhaus. “And I don’t think the bike is going
to make it that far.”
She was half right. Tanenhaus did have to pay
a $1,200 fee for exceeding the 45-minute limit
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that everyone makes and nobody keeps.
I had not kept in touch with him after graduation. Years passed. I did my thing; he did his.
I would have guessed that his thing was something corporate that afforded him a Manhattan
apartment with a Juliet balcony from which
you could see a slice of Central Park. As a matter of fact, he had been living in Brooklyn, in
a cluster of bland high-rises utterly bereft of
big-city glamour. I had no idea that, after college, he had done a miserable stint in Guam,
where he worked as a lifeguard. Or that, when
he returned, he became a tour guide on one of
those double-decker red buses that every New
Yorker wants to firebomb.
The Post article was headlined “Ride On,
Man” and showed a photograph of a triumphant
Tanenhaus at the border of West Virginia. He
had been an event planner bored with his job,
so he’d let the lease on his apartment go, put his
belongings in a storage unit, attached a small
trailer to the Citi Bike he’d chosen and headed
DOWNTIME/TRAVEL
by some 3,600 hours. But the bike did make it
to California, suffering nothing worse than a
flat tire near Claremore, Oklahoma. Tanenhaus
survived the trip intact, though he was punched
in the face outside of Tulsa, which oddly enough
proved to be his favorite place in the United
States, the one where he wants to live, now that
he is certain Manhattan will never again be
his home. The assailant—37-year-old Franklin
Burton, according to police—was arrested after
another alleged assault involving a man and a
woman that same day, while Tanenhaus continued west, a little bruised but utterly undaunted.
“My doctor said I needed a rest,”
he posted on Instagram in the wake of
the attack. “I told my doctor I needed
a root beer freeze at Weber’s.” And so
he had a root beer freeze at Weber’s.
He had nothing else to do, nowhere
else to be.
On a January afternoon, Tanenhaus pedaled the velocipede he had
rechristened as Countri Bike onto
the pier in Santa Monica, where he was met by
a small crowd affiliated with Breeze, that city’s
new bike sharing program. Also on hand was
Frances Anderton, a host for KCRW, a Southern
California public radio affiliate.
“He was looking very relaxed for someone
who had just spent five months riding up to 40
to 60 miles a day,” Anderton reported. She listed
a couple of statistics: 3,020 miles, 19 states. She
also spoke to an admiring middle school teacher
who called the trip “heroic.” The teacher gushed,
“It’s a fantasy, you know, to just take one of those
Citi Bikes and keep going. And just keep going.”
“THE SPOKES SPARKLED.
THE BELL CHIME COULD
SUMMON ANGELS.”
West, relying on the kindness of strangers for
places to stay. Three weeks into the journey,
all seemed to be well, though the Post reported
that while riding through Delaware, “he was
accused of being a terrorist by a local who was
shocked to see him protecting his face from the
blazing sun with a handkerchief.”
I finished my coffee. It was August, when heat
hangs over New York City in a wet gray blanket
that obscures the sun. I picked up after our toddler, kissed my wife and went out into another
morning. By the time I got to the subway station, I had forgotten all about Jeffrey Tanenhaus. But there he was, some days later, in the
Post again after the Tulsa assault. Then his story
started appearing elsewhere. We were jealously
following his journey, escaping for just a few
moments the workaday life that Tanenhaus was
escaping for good.
THE SUNBURNED TERRORIST
“I know this guy!” I shouted to my wife over
morning coffee. The guy in question was Tanenhaus. There he was, staring out at me from the
New York Post, with its usual procession of civilization’s most florid discontents. Jeff and I
had been classmates at Dartmouth; not quite
friends, but we’d pledged the same fraternity (Jews, comedians, a cappella singers) and
would have recognized each other on a Manhattan street, scheduling one of those lunch dates
NEWSWEEK
JOBLESS AND LOVING IT
Pretty much all media coverage of Tanenhaus—in outlets like People, The Guardian and
New York, which listed him as one of the magazine’s reasons to love the city, which he did
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+
OH, SAY CAN YOU
OK.C.? Tanen-
JE FFREY TANENHAUS
haus shot this in
Oklahoma City; the
Panhandle State
was a tough one
for him—he had a
flat in Claremore
and got punched in
the face in Tulsa.
not love anymore as much as he loved Tulsa—
has treated his ride as something charmingly
bizarre, to be admired but not replicated. References to Forrest Gump pervade. These make
Tanenhaus seem like a naïf whose endurance
exceeds his intelligence: a charming fool best
confined to Instagram.
I don’t see it quite this way, and while anything that involves leaving your life behind is
outlandish, what Tanenhaus did is not as outlandish as, I don’t know, using all your savings
to open a bacon-tasting room in Austin, Texas.
His was a break with the everyday that retained
a good deal of everydayness.
When I met him recently in Oakland, California, where he had come to stay with friends
before heading back to New York (on an airplane
this time), Tanenhaus told me he never thought
NEWSWEEK
about buying a fancy road bike or expensive
gear of the kind that instantly transforms weekend warriors into Tour de France competitors.
Riding the Citi Bike to and from work over the
Manhattan Bridge had been the best part of his
day, respite from a job that did not stimulate or
fulfill. So he took the best part of his day and
made it the thing that filled his days. This was
not only bold but also immanently reasonable.
I mean, did our middle school teachers not tell
us to follow our passions? And is it not the case
that middle school teachers are right about way
more stuff than most of us are willing to admit?
Aside from his inauspicious sojourn in Guam,
Tanenhaus had traveled plenty around the
world (the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South
America), but he says his parents were especially terrified when he told them he would be
55
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infrastructure (light rail in Denver, bike lanes
in Boise, etc.). His bike wasn’t an Abrams tank
either. But there is a fundamental similarity here,
a conviction that only while in constant motion
can we discover the fundamental soul of the land.
William Least Heat-Moon wrote of this in
Blue Highways, his classic about exploring the
nation’s back roads in a Ford Econoline van:
“Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is
strength to wander for a while.” And there is
Jack Kerouac too, preaching in On the Road
about how “there was nowhere to go but everywhere.” There may be no quality more American than restlessness.
Some say that bicyclists, like vegans, are a
humorless bunch. A few advocates adhered to
DOWNTIME/TRAVEL
traversing the United States. Aside from the
Tulsa ambush, their fears went unrealized.
There were a couple of times when cars menaced him on the road, but anyone who has biked
down Broadway is immune to such harassment.
Along the way, Tanenhaus relied on the
apparently boundless kindness of those he met
through WarmShowers.org, an organization
that connects cyclists with people willing to put
them up for free. On the coast of New Jersey, he
had a beach house all to himself. In Blythe, California, he stayed outside a bait-and-tackle shop
in a trailer nicknamed “the Marriott.”
There is something incredibly middle-American about his journey. Though cycling 60 miles
a day is strenuous activity, exertion is not the
first thing that comes to mind when you take
stock of the hamburgers Tanenhaus ate and
the microbrews he drank, two pursuits he prodigiously chronicled in his Instagram account.
He even grew to love fried pickles. Here was a
son of Jewish New York, who should have known
only pickles from a jar of half-sours purchased
on the Lower East Side, enjoying a greasy treat
of the Midwest. Here was an Ivy Leaguer jobless
and loving it. Here he was, plodding west with
the tenacity of the early pioneers. Here he was,
a true American.
THERE MAY BE NO
QUALITY MORE
AMERICAN THAN
RESTLESSNESS.
that stereotype in condemning Tanenhaus for
what they saw as nothing more than the brazen
theft of a Citi Bike. One Pecksniffian blogger thundered that Tanenhaus “should have been met at
the California border by the NYPD.” Someone
else suggested he be charged with grand theft larceny. Citi Bike itself does not appear thrilled with
his trip: It has routinely refused to comment on
Tanenhaus, including for this article.
Paul Steely White, executive director of
Transportation Alternatives, laughs off these
criticisms and says Tanenhaus’s detractors are
“really missing the point.”
“I think he’s a hero,” White says. Take that,
urbanist scolds and bike share doctrinaires.
I spoke to Tanenhaus when he returned to
New York from California. He had just taped
a segment for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, though he had been bumped by other
guests and wasn’t sure when the segment
would air. The bike that he had ridden across
the country was still in his possession. He had
paid for it, after all. He could dock it at a Citi
Bike station, but then it would be just another
two-wheeled workhorse making dull perambulations between Midtown East and Midtown
West, its glories subsumed by the daily grind.
No, there was too much road behind—and too
much ahead. There was still Tulsa.
A BRAZEN THEFT
About the time that Tanenhaus was making
his way through New Mexico, I was making
my way through Ways to the West, a new book
by the urban planner Tim Sullivan. Four years
ago, Sullivan was living in Oakland when he
became fixated on the idea that he had lost contact with the West because in the past several
decades he had seen it only from the window of
his car. He thus undertook “a car-less road trip
through the West,” conducted mostly on a bike,
with some reliance on public transit. Much like
Tanenhaus, he encountered tedium, disorientation and hardship. But he also saw a country he
would not have otherwise known.
Sullivan’s journey, which lasted three weeks,
was in many ways different from Tanenhaus’s.
The carefully planned trip served the clearly
defined purpose of exploring the West’s changing
NEWSWEEK
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TWO QUESTIONS WITH
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN
ARM ANDO GAL LO/CORBIS
The actor on how ‘you can do all sorts of
masochistic things’ with a computer
BY
ZACH
SCHONFELD
@zzzzaaaacccchhh
YOU MIGHT recognize
him as the obsessively
determined Vietnam vet
in Pulp Fiction returning a
gold watch to its rightful
heir. Or the mentally disturbed motorist in Annie
Hall. Or maybe you just
know his heady dance
moves in Fatboy Slim’s
Weapon of Choice video.
Christopher Walken
acknowledges that he’s
known for playing “troubled souls.” His latest
role isn’t an exception:
Walken, now 73, appears
in a well-acted and
deeply unsettling adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s
best-selling 2011 novel,
The Family Fang. Starring
alongside Maryann
Plunkett, he plays the
enigmatic performance
artist Caleb Fang, whose
defining belief is that
great art must be brash
and unpredictable and
whose cruel devotion to
that art scars his grown
children (Nicole Kidman
might want to find a place
for yourself. Someone
suggested that to me
early in my movie career,
when I was in Annie Hall,
which was followed
almost immediately by
The Deer Hunter. In Annie
Hall, I played a suicidal
driver; in The Deer Hunter,
I shot myself in the head.
It could be that very early
on in my movie career
I got known for playing
troubled souls. It stuck
a little bit, [and] I think
it makes sense. Movies
is a business, and if you
do something and it
works, then it makes
sense that you’d be asked
to do something similar
repeatedly. It happens
with people who play the
leading man. It happens
and Jason Bateman, who
also directs) by turning
them into guinea pigs and
props. The role reminds
Walken, a former child
actor, of his upbringing
and suits his oft-impersonated but rarely
matched intensity.
Walken spoke to Newsweek about his oddball
roles and why he refuses
to own a computer.
You play a pretty
bizarre and deranged
character in The
Family Fang. Do you
go out of your way
to seek out these
eccentric roles?
I think if you’re an actor
and you’re lucky enough
to work, especially over a
long period of time, you
NEWSWEEK
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with people who play the
leading man’s best friend.
Then there’s the funny
character. There’s the
villain. I think I got stuck
with—not stuck, but I got
familiar with—troubled
people, people who are
not so wholesome.
You don’t own a
computer. Why?
It’s something I missed. I
think I’m of a time where
I just kind of skipped over
it. Also, it’s kind of nice
and peaceful not to have
it. I live out in the country,
I don’t see a lot of people.
My wife…has a computer.
Apparently, you can look
yourself up—you can do
all sorts of masochistic
things! I never have that
temptation.
MAGICAL MEMORABILIA TOUR
From Ringo’s drums to Clapton’s
Strat, why is there suddenly so
much rock memorabilia for sale?
IN JANUARY, 32 NFL franchise owners met in
Houston to decide which of three teams would
be moving to Los Angeles—a decision with the
potential to massively change two of four metropolitan economies (the Rams won, St. Louis lost).
During a break in the haggling, Jim Irsay, owner of
the Indianapolis Colts, huddled with Paul Allen,
owner of the Seattle Seahawks. Their chat turned
from football to another shared passion. “Paul,”
Irsay confided, “I’m just glad you weren’t in on
Ringo’s drum kit.” The two are both major players
NEWSWEEK
in the world of high-stakes rock ’n’ roll memorabilia collecting. Just the month before, Irsay
had been high bidder on an auction item—Ringo
Starr’s drum kit—and he was relieved that Allen
hadn’t brought his deep pockets and unblinking
determination to the proceedings.
“Oh, I was in,” assured Allen, who had bid
anonymously. This, after all, is the Microsoft cofounder who, in 2000, created Seattle’s Experience Music Project Museum—home to the world’s
largest collection of Jimi Hendrix and Kurt
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BY
GREG EVANS
@GregEvans5
+
THE BEAT GOES
ON: The pieces of
the drumset that
Ringo Starr played
for the Beatles’
famed 1964 Ed
Sullivan Show
appearance have
been reconstituted
by billionaire Jim
Irsay, an avid rock
’n’ roll collector.
Cobain memorabilia. “Well, then,” said Irsay, “I
thank you for dropping out when you did.”
Just two guys chatting over a shared midlife
hobby, like baseball card collectors gloating over
their latest eBay finds or metal-detector enthusiasts commiserating over a pop-top day. Only
Ringo’s drums—the 1963 Ludwig kit with an
Oyster Black Pearl finish that Starr played during
the Beatles’ legendary debut on The Ed Sullivan
Show—had cost Irsay $2.25 million at that December auction. Outbidding Allen and a smattering
of other hopefuls, Irsay added this objet d’envy
to a remarkable private collection of rock ’n’ roll
treasures that includes Bob Dylan’s Newport Festival Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s custom-made
Tiger guitar and the Rickenbacker John Lennon gave a depressed Starr as a welcome-back
gift after the ego-bruised drummer had bolted
the contentious White Album (aka The Beatles)
sessions. With his latest transaction, Irsay has
reunited the drum kit’s long-separated bass skin
(featuring the familiar Beatles logo) to the kit
itself, the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of reattaching
the arms to the Venus de Milo.
Reconstituting the most recognizable drum set
in music history has Irsay approaching spiritual
ecstasy. “I really am beside myself,”
the 56-year-old Irsay tells Newsweek.
He describes his latest acquisition as
“a memorabilia Super Bowl.”
Lately, it seems some massively
important rock collectibles are popping
up every month or so. Last October,
the long-thought-lost Gibson guitar on
which Lennon co-wrote the first wave
of Beatles classics (“She Loves You,”
“I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Want
to Hold Your Hand,” “All My Loving”)
sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for $2.4 million. (Irsay dropped out at $1.6
million.) A few weeks earlier, Sotheby’s London
sold a 1962 contract signed by the Beatles and
their manager Brian Epstein for $569,000. In
December, Janis Joplin’s psychedelic Porsche
356 Cabriolet went to an anonymous bidder for
$1.76 million at Sotheby’s New York. It’s enough
to make Kurt Cobain’s ratty mohair cardigan
($137,500) and Alice Cooper’s old guillotine
($32,500) seem bargain basement.
Rock ’n’ roll’s history, it seems, is being bought
up by the 1 percent. And while that’s true about so
many buyable things, why are the rich spending
the money now, and why on this stuff? In some
strange convergence of economics, sentiment
and availability, wealthy baby boomers looking
for interesting places to park their money occupy
a historical moment in which the elders of rock’s
DOWNTIME/MEMORAB I L I A
greatest generation have realized they can’t take
it with ’em. As rock stars give up their long-held
keepsakes—and auction houses tap into a public
schooled on Antiques Roadshow and Pawn Stars—
modest items like lyric sheets and autographs
seem increasingly to share gavel time with
rock-museum-level items that would cost more
in insurance alone than the average 99 percenter
could scrape up.
Meredith Rutledge-Borger, who has been a
curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum in Cleveland for 20 years, says she first
noticed tremors in the rock market in the early
2000s. “Eric Clapton sold his Blackie guitar and
got so much money for it,” she says, referring
to the 2004 Christie’s sale of Clapton’s ’50sera Stratocaster that raised $959,500 for the
RB/ REDFERNS/GE T T Y
“I ALWAYS SAID THAT TO
SELL THAT GUITAR WOULD
TAKE AN ENORMOUS,
STUPID AMOUNT OF
MONEY AND THEN SOME.”
NEWSWEEK
guitarist’s Crossroads Center rehab facility. That
and other high-profile sales around the same
time “brought so many people into the market,”
says Rutledge-Borger. “Sotheby’s and Christie’s
started having more and more high-end rock
’n’ roll memorabilia auctions, and new auction
houses like CooperOwen and Heritage got into it
as well. Now it seems like every month there’s an
auction bringing in record amounts of money.”
She isn’t complaining. Institutions like the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame and L.A.’s Grammy Museum
rely hugely on private collectors for exhibitions.
“There are people who just have this collecting
gene,” says Bob Santelli, executive director of the
Grammy Museum. “And thank goodness they do
because music museums around the world rely on
them.” Though auction houses can be extremely
tight-lipped as donors demand anonymity, public
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D O W N T I M E / M E M O RABILIA
exhibits would dwindle without the kindness of
billionaires. How much good stuff is stashed away
in private vaults will likely remain unknown.
Garry Shrum, consignment director at Heritage Auctions, traces rock’s broader investment
appeal to 9/11. “After September 11, everything
went screwy,” says Shrum, whose Dallas-based
auction house recently sold a lock of Lennon’s
hair to a British collector for $35,000. As traditional investment options underwent a postattack slump, some of the more adventurous 1
percenters sought new financial havens, from
rare coins to Superman comics. Says Shrum, “It
was like, ‘Damn, this is really cool, it has good
value, and you know what? Twenty years from
now, it’s still going to be cool.’”
Cool, yes, but will the rock treasures hold
their monetary value? Collectors seem to think
so, even if sellers aren’t so sure (hence the
selling). But even the most seasoned buyers,
when pressed, admit that the sentimental tug
of owning your childhood guitar hero’s Les
Paul trumps potential resale value. Predicting
investment payoffs is a risky game, never more
so than when placing bets on the enduring
appeal of rock stars. Even if we agree that David
Bowie’s artistic legacy will hold strong, are his
fans the long-term collecting type, secure in the
knowledge that a post-mortem bump in stock
will hold value in coming years?
Certainly emotion will drive one of the biggest
upcoming auctions, when Prince’s black-andgray motorcycle jacket from 1984’s Purple Rain
is sold by California’s Profiles in History auction
house this summer. Bidding runs from June 29 to
July 1, and the auction house placed an estimated
price of $6,000 to $8,000 on the piece prior to
the rock star’s death in April, but a spokesman
for Profiles in History has said he wouldn’t be
surprised if the price sails past $100,000.
Stakes like that have their own special appeal.
Irsay can make a big-money auction sound as
exciting as any NFL playoff game, a contest made
all the more intoxicating by a sense of cultural
responsibility: Irsay, who also owns the scroll on
which Jack Kerouac typed On the Road, describes
himself as a temporary custodian of souvenirs
from an era when “multiple Shakespeares were
NEWSWEEK
+
walking around—like Lennon and Dylan—and
their likes won’t be seen again.”
That combination of idée fixe and financial
wherewithal makes for an exclusive club. “You’ve
got to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or
even billions, to spend $2 million on a guitar,” says
Andy Babiuk, author of the lovely and definitive
Beatles Gear and Rolling Stones Gear books. Match
the drive with the capability, he says, and “that’s
maybe 25 or 30 people worldwide.”
Longtime collectors ready to cash out aren’t
the only ones benefiting from the memorabilia boom. In 2014, San Diego contractor John
McCaw noticed that the Gibson acoustic-electric
he bought from a friend in 1969 for $175 looked
nearly identical to one featured in a magazine
article about the late George Harrison’s guitar
collection. After a bit of research and some guidance from Babiuk, McCaw confirmed that his
scratched-up Gibson once belonged to John
Lennon—the two Beatles had received their guitars from Gibson in 1962, and Lennon’s was left
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BABY, YOU CAN BUY
MY CAR: Janis Joplin,
above, stands with
her psychedelically
painted 1965 Porsche,
which sold for $1.25
million at auction
last year. Right,
Jerry Garcia plays
his “Wolf” guitar.
behind by a roadie at a 1963 London Christmas
gig. Over the years, the missing Gibson J160-E had
taken on near-mythic status in Beatles lore, unbeknownst to the man who bought it from a friend in
San Diego upon returning from a stint in Vietnam
decades ago. Though gaps in the guitar’s travels
have yet to be explained, the Gibson somehow
made it from Swinging London to a San Diego guitar shop in 1967—one theory holds that another,
unnamed British invasion band snatched
the left-behind instrument, toured with it
through the mid-’60s and finally traded
it in for an upgrade. Whether this hypothetical band knew it was strumming
Lennon’s guitar is unknown: Certainly
the guitar store and the 1967 purchaser
didn’t, or the price would have exceeded
$175, even back then.
In any case, once McCaw realized what
he’d had all these decades, he decided
that his San Diego home was no place for
a rock ’n’ roll holy grail. The guitar sold
to an anonymous bidder through Julien’s Auctions in Hollywood last October for $2.4 million,
proceeds that McCaw offered to share with Yoko
Ono’s Spirit Foundation charity.
Neither McCaw nor Julien’s Auctions owner
Darren Julien will disclose the identity of the
winning bidder—anonymity is guarded fiercely
in the auction industry.
Sometimes, though, the big game bidders
don’t mind who knows what’s in their collections. In 2000, Rick Tedesco, the owner of the
Guitar Hangar music store in Brookfield, Connecticut, tracked down the 1968 Gibson Les
Paul Custom once owned and played by Mick
Ronson, David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars
guitarist whose work on The Man Who Sold the
World, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Aladdin
Sane and Pin Ups defined the sound of glam
rock. “I wasn’t trying to sell it,” says Tedesco.
“It was just the purest form of ‘I want to own the
guitar that made me want to play the guitar.’ I
FROM LE FT: RB/ RE DFERNS/GET T Y; M ICHAEL PUTL AND/G ET T Y
“MULTIPLE SHAKESPEARES
WERE WALKING AROUND—
LIKE LENNON AND
DYLAN—AND THEIR LIKES
WON’T BE SEEN AGAIN.”
NEWSWEEK
always said that to sell it would take an enormous, stupid amount of money and then some.”
Enter Simon Dolan, the 46-year-old
British-born multimillionaire entrepreneur and
race car driver. In 2014, Dolan learned of the
Ronson guitar, and after a small bit of haggling
and a $200,000 check, the Les Paul was headed
to Monte Carlo, Monaco. “If someone offered
me $5 million, I wouldn’t sell,” Dolan says in an
email to Newsweek. “The first time I played it was
about a week after Bowie died. I knocked out the
Ziggy riff, and it was simply magical—actually
brought a tear to my eye.”
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D O W N T I M E / S TYLE
THE CURATED LIFE
THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE UNDONE
Bespoke London tailor Terry Haste has
an almost telepathic connection with
some of his regular customers
HAVING CLOTHES MADE is a powerful experience. I have been visiting a tailor for 30 years,
and the magic of a well-made coat or pair of
trousers continues to cast its spell over me. I am
not alone; the power of good clothes has been
documented by far loftier minds than mine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is often credited with
the observation that “the sense of being perfectly
well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.” While
those words do appear in his 1875 collection
of essays, Letters and Social Aims, they appear
in quotation, attributed to a “lady” to whom
he listened “with admiring submission.” (And
whatever that is, I suspect it is ironic.) His own
thoughts on the subject were rather different.
“If a man have manners and talent he may dress
roughly and carelessly,” he wrote. “If the intellect
were always awake, and every noble sentiment,
the man might go in huckaback or mats, and his
dress would be admired and imitated.” Clothes
are, he suggested, a crutch for the man who lacks
“firm nerves and has keen sensibility” and who
needs the confidence-enhancing power of good
clothes to endure the Sisyphean trials of daily life
and “dismiss all care from his mind.”
Alas, I am not a man of firm nerves. I also happen to have a keen sensibility. It would have been
little surprise to Emerson, then, that I am not
overly inclined to go about in huckaback, which is
a coarse cotton used in tea towels. I prefer to visit
NEWSWEEK
a good tailor—and I am lucky to have encountered
one as talented as Terry Haste. A good tailor is a
gifted craftsman, but a great tailor is a reader of
character and psychology as well. Haste is both.
By that, I do not mean he is constantly dipping into
his Freud and Jung, but he is aware that what his
customers desire and what their bodies permit are
often two very different things; his job is to dress
the mind as much as the body of the customer. “It
doesn’t matter how good the suit is,” he says. “If it
does not match the picture of themselves in their
mind, then you can forget it.”
At the age of just 15, Haste started work at
bespoke tailor Anderson & Sheppard, when Savile Row was still mired in almost Edwardian formality. “They said to me that once I made it as
a cutter, I would be able to wear a bowler hat to
work. They were serious—that shows how long
ago it was,” he says. Haste did have an interview
at Huntsman, one of the great Savile Row tailors,
but he says they wanted him to take elocution
lessons—and he’d had enough of school by then.
Somehow, he managed to get along without having to wear a bowler hat or speak like Noël Coward. He then moved to Hawes & Curtis and Savoy
Taylors Guild before he settled in at Tommy Nutter, making clothes for Mick Jagger, Elton John,
George Harrison and Jack Nicholson, who wore
Haste-cut clothes in Batman.
I was introduced to Haste in 1992 by British
designer Jeremy Hackett, who had hired him to
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BY
NICHOLAS FOULKES
+
THE UNCOMMON
THREAD: Haste has
made clothes for
the rich, discerning and famous,
including Mick Jagger, Elton John and
Jack Nicholson.
set up Hackett London’s bespoke tailoring department. It is a testament to
Haste’s skills that even though he left
Hackett almost 20 years ago, many of
his customers from that time—including the Goodwood motor sport impresario Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of
March and Kinrara—have remained
loyal to him. They first followed him
to Huntsman, where he was head
cutter and managing director. Haste
then went into private practice and a few years
ago joined forces with John Kent and Stephen
Lachter as part of the tailoring and shirt-making
triumvirate Kent Haste & Lachter, which counts
the Duke of Edinburgh as a customer.
To get the best out of bespoke tailoring, you
need time and patience to develop a good relationship between client and cutter. Being a good
bespoke customer requires almost as much experience as being a cutter—the first piece is always
going to take some time. A rapport must develop.
Having known Haste for almost a quarter of a
century, I feel that sometimes I can be almost telepathic in expressing what I want. He knows how I
like things to look. He is prepared to make some
truly exotic garments for me: the pink houndstooth tweed sports jacket with a belted back or
the heavier lovat green tweed with Bordeaux over
check and a suede gun patch that grew into a sort
of country-and-western-style yoke.
Most of his customers adopt the Haste cut:
slim chest, shape through the body and a struc-
ADRIAN WEINBRECHT
CLOTHES ARE, EMERSON
SUGGESTED, A CRUTCH
FOR THE MAN WHO
LACKS “FIRM NERVES AND
HAS KEEN SENSIBILITY.”
NEWSWEEK
tured shoulder. But like an Oscar-winning actor,
he can assume any character convincingly: He
is capable of tailoring for people like me, who
prefer a lot of drape and hate feeling constricted
by clothes, as well as those who favor the look
of contemporary British television presenters,
which, to my eye, gives the impression of a suit
that shrunk in the wash.
Technical ability aside, however, I suppose
what I and many customers appreciate about
Haste is his lack of pretension; there is no
branded pomp or marketing-led circumstance
about what he does. He mixes an informal
approach with an expert eye; his shop on Sackville Street in central London looks as haphazard as the clothes he makes are considered.
Dressing carefully, I would argue, is a sign of
respect to others—and I can’t help thinking that
had Emerson been lucky enough to have a suit
made for him by someone as talented as Haste,
he would have entertained slightly less sanctimonious views about bespoke tailoring.
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To-Do List
the
5
SAVOR
The new Midleton
Dair Ghaelach single
malt pot whiskey
($296) rests in virgin
Irish oak casks for almost
a year, giving it rich
vanilla, toasted wood
and caramel flavors.
1 HEAD UPSTAIRS London department store Harvey Nichols has
revamped its iconic fifth floor to include some new drinking and dining
options. For an aperitif, pull up a stool at the new Grey Goose bar for a
vodka cocktail and views over Knightsbridge.
2
6
SIT BACK
Watchmaker Patek
Philippe has unveiled its
latest collection, with 28
new designs. One piece to
look out for is the ladies’
white gold and diamond
Calatrava ($41,041),
Patek’s signature model.
A new luxury bullet
train service is running
between Tokyo and the
Japanese ski resorts of
Hokkaido. Gran Class
passengers ($357 one way)
can access an airport-style
lounge before departure.
4
LISTEN
BUTTON UP
The Arena Opera Festival
in Italy’s Verona runs June
24 to August 28. Watch
performances (from $27
to $233) of Carmen, Aida,
La Traviata, Turandot and
Il Trovatore in a Roman
amphitheater.
Hong Kong–based label
Shanghai Tang has created a new line of Mongolian cashmere cardigans
(from $914). They’re lined
with vibrant Shanghai silk,
so make sure to roll back
the cuffs for a pop of color.
NEWSWEEK
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0 5 / 2 0 / 2016
PRICES SUBJECT TO CHANGE
1. DAN IE L LYNC H/ EYEVINE /REDUX; 2. M ATEJ D IVIZNA /G ET T Y; 3. PATEK PHIL IPPE;
4. SHANG HAI TANG; 5. PERNOD RICARD; 6. KYODO/AP
3
FASTEN