M.P. Woodward's Blog: To Catch a Spy
January 15, 2023
The Girl Who Shook The World
In my novel The Handler, a real-world event puts the story in motion.
It was the January 2020 Iranian shoot-down of a Ukrainian Airlines 737 in Tehran. The plane was filled with young Iranian students headed back to school, many on their way to Canada. Fictionally, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Iranian nuclear scientist was on board. Her tragic death sparks an espionage drama that puts the world on the brink.
In real life, we’re seeing something similar play out in Iran right now. Mahsa Amini was a shy twenty-two-year-old from the northwestern Iranian Kurdish city of Saqqez. In September, along with her family, she’d boarded a train to visit an uncle in distant Tehran.
But the moment she stepped onto the arrival platform in the big city, she was arrested by the morality police and beaten to death.
Her crime? The morality police thought her pants were too tight.
Mahsa had never been political. She’d followed the traditional Iranian dress code to the letter of the law. But an officer in the morality police didn’t like the cut of her jeans. Now she’s dead.
During her arrest at the station, her family had begged the officers for forgiveness. They said they were from the provinces, less familiar with the rules of Tehran.
But that didn’t matter. The officers hurled Mahsa into a van and sped away.
Her family waited outside the detention center where Mahsa had been taken. Eventually, an officer came into the street to address them. He told them the charge against Mahsa had been formalized. She hadn’t been wearing her head scarf correctly. Her punishment was under review.
After a two-hour vigil, an ambulance arrived at the detention center. Fearing the worst, Mahsa’s family followed it to the nearest hospital. They’d already begun to piece together details of Mahsa’s fate. Other women arrested that day had recounted how the police had savagely beaten Mahsa in the van. She’d pleaded for her life.
At the hospital, Mahsa’s father confirmed she’d been admitted. He begged to see his young daughter. But he was denied.
Forty-five minutes later, the staff told him she was dead.
Paralyzed by grief, her father asked to see the medical charts. He wanted to know the cause of death. But they wouldn’t tell him. Instead, they called security, who escorted him out of the building.
As word of the tragedy spread, the Iranian government changed its story. They quickly produced a suspicious video that showed Mahsa falling inside the police station. They said the young woman had died of cardiac arrest. No one believed it.
It was the last straw.
For the past two months, the mullahs who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran have been in crisis. Tens of thousands of protesters have swarmed the streets, rebelling against the death of Mahsa and the repressive regime that killed her. As of this writing, the regime has arrested more than 15,000 people. The mullahs had hoped the protests would end after forty days—the traditional mourning period. But they’re still going on.
All over the country, rioters have desecrated symbols of the regime. Statues of the revolution’s founder, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, have been burned. Symbols of the IRGC have been ripped down and trampled.
The regime now blames it all on the Kurds. The IRGC has begun launching missile attacks against Kurdish regions in Iran. Most recently they’ve also launched an attack on Kurdish enclaves in Iraq. The killing has spilled over the Iranian border.
Where this ends is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear—it all started with the unjust murder of one innocent woman.
If you’re interested in reading more about what it’s like to live in Iran, I highly recommend the memoir A Time To Betray by Reza Kahlili. It’s a gripping true story of an Iranian dissident who decides to spy for the CIA.
It was the January 2020 Iranian shoot-down of a Ukrainian Airlines 737 in Tehran. The plane was filled with young Iranian students headed back to school, many on their way to Canada. Fictionally, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Iranian nuclear scientist was on board. Her tragic death sparks an espionage drama that puts the world on the brink.
In real life, we’re seeing something similar play out in Iran right now. Mahsa Amini was a shy twenty-two-year-old from the northwestern Iranian Kurdish city of Saqqez. In September, along with her family, she’d boarded a train to visit an uncle in distant Tehran.
But the moment she stepped onto the arrival platform in the big city, she was arrested by the morality police and beaten to death.
Her crime? The morality police thought her pants were too tight.
Mahsa had never been political. She’d followed the traditional Iranian dress code to the letter of the law. But an officer in the morality police didn’t like the cut of her jeans. Now she’s dead.
During her arrest at the station, her family had begged the officers for forgiveness. They said they were from the provinces, less familiar with the rules of Tehran.
But that didn’t matter. The officers hurled Mahsa into a van and sped away.
Her family waited outside the detention center where Mahsa had been taken. Eventually, an officer came into the street to address them. He told them the charge against Mahsa had been formalized. She hadn’t been wearing her head scarf correctly. Her punishment was under review.
After a two-hour vigil, an ambulance arrived at the detention center. Fearing the worst, Mahsa’s family followed it to the nearest hospital. They’d already begun to piece together details of Mahsa’s fate. Other women arrested that day had recounted how the police had savagely beaten Mahsa in the van. She’d pleaded for her life.
At the hospital, Mahsa’s father confirmed she’d been admitted. He begged to see his young daughter. But he was denied.
Forty-five minutes later, the staff told him she was dead.
Paralyzed by grief, her father asked to see the medical charts. He wanted to know the cause of death. But they wouldn’t tell him. Instead, they called security, who escorted him out of the building.
As word of the tragedy spread, the Iranian government changed its story. They quickly produced a suspicious video that showed Mahsa falling inside the police station. They said the young woman had died of cardiac arrest. No one believed it.
It was the last straw.
For the past two months, the mullahs who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran have been in crisis. Tens of thousands of protesters have swarmed the streets, rebelling against the death of Mahsa and the repressive regime that killed her. As of this writing, the regime has arrested more than 15,000 people. The mullahs had hoped the protests would end after forty days—the traditional mourning period. But they’re still going on.
All over the country, rioters have desecrated symbols of the regime. Statues of the revolution’s founder, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, have been burned. Symbols of the IRGC have been ripped down and trampled.
The regime now blames it all on the Kurds. The IRGC has begun launching missile attacks against Kurdish regions in Iran. Most recently they’ve also launched an attack on Kurdish enclaves in Iraq. The killing has spilled over the Iranian border.
Where this ends is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear—it all started with the unjust murder of one innocent woman.
If you’re interested in reading more about what it’s like to live in Iran, I highly recommend the memoir A Time To Betray by Reza Kahlili. It’s a gripping true story of an Iranian dissident who decides to spy for the CIA.
The Problem With Our Green National Security Strategy
In this month’s blog, I’d like to bring you up to speed on something that might seem counterintuitive at first: our shift to green energy is creating a dangerous national security threat.
I know that sounds a little off. Daily, we hear that green energy is good for the planet and a national security imperative. Once we go green, goes the story, we’ll take away our adversaries’ leverage. And who doesn’t want a cleaner, more sustainable planet?
To understand why this is a problem, read on.
In mid-2021, the Director of National Intelligence issued a National Intelligence Estimate stating that climate change represents a clear and present danger.
President Biden used the NIE to draft his official National Security Strategy in October ‘22. It called fossil-fuel dependence and climate change the second most significant security threat after Sino-Russo imperialism. The President cites green energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act as a national security bulwark more than ten times in the twenty-nine-page document.
But there’s a fatal flaw in the administration’s green security logic. A rapid conversion to green tech will make us even more dependent on other fossilized remnants in the soil: rare earth metals. And just about all of them come from China.
Silicon, magnets, and batteries form the building blocks of the conversion of electrical to mechanical energy and vice versa. They’re in wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, laptops, servers, and smartphones. Improving battery performance, miniaturizing magnets, and supercharging conductivity depend on an ever-expanding pool of mined rare earth metals. Your iPhone contains seven of them. Extra credit if you’ve ever even heard of your phone’s yttrium, lanthanum, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, or dysprosium.
We’ve become flat-out addicted to metals like these. The continued proliferation of digital devices and a new green energy model will require doubling rare metal production approximately every fifteen years. The next three decades alone will require mining more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the previous 70,000 years. Should we have sustainability concerns?
Yes—but not because these minerals are hard to find. The term “rare earth” is something of a misnomer as the metals are geologically abundant in the earth’s crust. Refining them to usable purities is the rare part, the dirty underbelly of clean tech that no one wants to talk about. Akin to enriching uranium, it’s a toxic, polluting regimen that’s both carbon and water intensive. The process spews tons of waste, often with high levels of radioactivity. For these reasons, we don’t like doing it in the US.
We’ve outsourced clean tech’s dirty business to China, which does 85% of global rare earth refining. The largest site is in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, operated by China’s state-owned mining concern Baogang. By offering refined rare earths at cut-rate prices, Beijing has cornered the global market.
But in the name of ecology, we’ve also outsourced an environmental and human rights disaster. Just ask the citizens of Baotou. It was once a pleasant place with grassy hills, a lake, and a fishing village. Then, as Baogang dumped ever more acid into the ground to help extract rare earth metals, the runoff turned the lake white, sometimes red. The ethnic Mongolians who lived in the fishing village developed unusually high rates of cancer.
By 2015, the villagers had had enough. Led by Chinese human rights lawyer Qin Yongpei, they began to protest. “Mountains of gold and silver are not better than mountains of blue and green,” went the chants before riot police. The protests spurred Beijing into action. They arrested Qin Yongpei on a subversion charge, razed the town locals called the “cancer village,” and barricaded access to the poisoned lake.
Eight years later, the mining at Baotou goes on and Qin Yongpei is still behind bars. The Chinese government is building a Ghengis Khan theme park nearby to distract the populace—anything to keep Beijing’s pipeline of rare metals flowing to the hungry west.
Does East Asia have a resource advantage when it comes to rare earths? Was North America dealt a weak geological hand?
No. In the 1980s, most rare earth metals came from the US. Believe it or not, the world’s largest rare earth mine is Mountain Pass, only 54 miles south of Las Vegas. Though it’s the only rare earth mine in the western hemisphere, it went bankrupt in 2016 because the environmental clean-up costs wouldn’t pencil out. A new firm is operating it today with a better business model: it ships its rare metals to China for processing.
But China’s rare earth processing dominance is more than just a narrative-defying ecological and human rights disaster. By moving up the value chain to rare earth magnet production, it’s also become a major vulnerability for the US military.
As an example of just how dependent the Defense Department is on Chinese magnets, note that the Lockheed Martin F-35—the new jet standard across all our services—comes equipped with them in its radars. After several congressional reviews, the Pentagon had little choice but to accept this irony since China manufactures 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets.
There is, at least, a single bullet point in the National Security Strategy about the rare earth metals Achilles Heel. And it should be noted that congress has appropriated $253M for a stockpile of rare earths maintained by the US Defense Logistics Agency. This investment will bring the total stockpile value to approximately $1B. While this is 98% less than the $42B stockpile (today’s dollars) held by the DOD at the height of the last cold war, it’s a start.
But that stockpile is for the military. No reserve could sustain us when our entire green-tech economy depends on rare earth metals. As the Chinese Communist Party increases defense spending by 7% year over year and sends fleets of fifth-gen fighters over the Taiwan Strait, Beijing could weaponize its rare earth monopoly as another form of diplomatic bullying.
Far-fetched? “…the Chinese government has blocked exports of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines, and guided missiles,” wrote the New York Times in 2010 when the Japanese detained a Chinese trawler captain who’d illegally fished the Senkaku Islands. Note that this was Beijing’s tactic for an insular sovereignty dispute when we were less dependent on Chinese rare metals. You don’t suppose they would try this when it comes to Taiwan?
History repeats, or rhymes, or—as the case here—smacks you right in the head. In 1939, the Japanese cut the US off from antimony, a rare earth metal used in the manufacture of ammunition. To head off the shortfall, FDR opened an antimony mine in Idaho. We still use antimony to make ammo today. But the FDR mine closed in 1997 and no other domestic source exists. China now sells 85% of the world’s antimony. Fear not though. Russia is the second-largest supplier.
Another President, JFK, famously wrote a 1940 Harvard thesis turned book that advocated unsentimental realism in world affairs. It was titled Why England Slept. Perhaps the refined mineral our national security team needs most right now is smelling salts.
For further reading on our growing rare earth metals dependence, consider reading The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Tech by Guillaume Pitroi.
Sign up for my newsletter at HTTP://www.mpwoodward.com
I know that sounds a little off. Daily, we hear that green energy is good for the planet and a national security imperative. Once we go green, goes the story, we’ll take away our adversaries’ leverage. And who doesn’t want a cleaner, more sustainable planet?
To understand why this is a problem, read on.
In mid-2021, the Director of National Intelligence issued a National Intelligence Estimate stating that climate change represents a clear and present danger.
President Biden used the NIE to draft his official National Security Strategy in October ‘22. It called fossil-fuel dependence and climate change the second most significant security threat after Sino-Russo imperialism. The President cites green energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act as a national security bulwark more than ten times in the twenty-nine-page document.
But there’s a fatal flaw in the administration’s green security logic. A rapid conversion to green tech will make us even more dependent on other fossilized remnants in the soil: rare earth metals. And just about all of them come from China.
Silicon, magnets, and batteries form the building blocks of the conversion of electrical to mechanical energy and vice versa. They’re in wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, laptops, servers, and smartphones. Improving battery performance, miniaturizing magnets, and supercharging conductivity depend on an ever-expanding pool of mined rare earth metals. Your iPhone contains seven of them. Extra credit if you’ve ever even heard of your phone’s yttrium, lanthanum, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, or dysprosium.
We’ve become flat-out addicted to metals like these. The continued proliferation of digital devices and a new green energy model will require doubling rare metal production approximately every fifteen years. The next three decades alone will require mining more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the previous 70,000 years. Should we have sustainability concerns?
Yes—but not because these minerals are hard to find. The term “rare earth” is something of a misnomer as the metals are geologically abundant in the earth’s crust. Refining them to usable purities is the rare part, the dirty underbelly of clean tech that no one wants to talk about. Akin to enriching uranium, it’s a toxic, polluting regimen that’s both carbon and water intensive. The process spews tons of waste, often with high levels of radioactivity. For these reasons, we don’t like doing it in the US.
We’ve outsourced clean tech’s dirty business to China, which does 85% of global rare earth refining. The largest site is in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, operated by China’s state-owned mining concern Baogang. By offering refined rare earths at cut-rate prices, Beijing has cornered the global market.
But in the name of ecology, we’ve also outsourced an environmental and human rights disaster. Just ask the citizens of Baotou. It was once a pleasant place with grassy hills, a lake, and a fishing village. Then, as Baogang dumped ever more acid into the ground to help extract rare earth metals, the runoff turned the lake white, sometimes red. The ethnic Mongolians who lived in the fishing village developed unusually high rates of cancer.
By 2015, the villagers had had enough. Led by Chinese human rights lawyer Qin Yongpei, they began to protest. “Mountains of gold and silver are not better than mountains of blue and green,” went the chants before riot police. The protests spurred Beijing into action. They arrested Qin Yongpei on a subversion charge, razed the town locals called the “cancer village,” and barricaded access to the poisoned lake.
Eight years later, the mining at Baotou goes on and Qin Yongpei is still behind bars. The Chinese government is building a Ghengis Khan theme park nearby to distract the populace—anything to keep Beijing’s pipeline of rare metals flowing to the hungry west.
Does East Asia have a resource advantage when it comes to rare earths? Was North America dealt a weak geological hand?
No. In the 1980s, most rare earth metals came from the US. Believe it or not, the world’s largest rare earth mine is Mountain Pass, only 54 miles south of Las Vegas. Though it’s the only rare earth mine in the western hemisphere, it went bankrupt in 2016 because the environmental clean-up costs wouldn’t pencil out. A new firm is operating it today with a better business model: it ships its rare metals to China for processing.
But China’s rare earth processing dominance is more than just a narrative-defying ecological and human rights disaster. By moving up the value chain to rare earth magnet production, it’s also become a major vulnerability for the US military.
As an example of just how dependent the Defense Department is on Chinese magnets, note that the Lockheed Martin F-35—the new jet standard across all our services—comes equipped with them in its radars. After several congressional reviews, the Pentagon had little choice but to accept this irony since China manufactures 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets.
There is, at least, a single bullet point in the National Security Strategy about the rare earth metals Achilles Heel. And it should be noted that congress has appropriated $253M for a stockpile of rare earths maintained by the US Defense Logistics Agency. This investment will bring the total stockpile value to approximately $1B. While this is 98% less than the $42B stockpile (today’s dollars) held by the DOD at the height of the last cold war, it’s a start.
But that stockpile is for the military. No reserve could sustain us when our entire green-tech economy depends on rare earth metals. As the Chinese Communist Party increases defense spending by 7% year over year and sends fleets of fifth-gen fighters over the Taiwan Strait, Beijing could weaponize its rare earth monopoly as another form of diplomatic bullying.
Far-fetched? “…the Chinese government has blocked exports of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines, and guided missiles,” wrote the New York Times in 2010 when the Japanese detained a Chinese trawler captain who’d illegally fished the Senkaku Islands. Note that this was Beijing’s tactic for an insular sovereignty dispute when we were less dependent on Chinese rare metals. You don’t suppose they would try this when it comes to Taiwan?
History repeats, or rhymes, or—as the case here—smacks you right in the head. In 1939, the Japanese cut the US off from antimony, a rare earth metal used in the manufacture of ammunition. To head off the shortfall, FDR opened an antimony mine in Idaho. We still use antimony to make ammo today. But the FDR mine closed in 1997 and no other domestic source exists. China now sells 85% of the world’s antimony. Fear not though. Russia is the second-largest supplier.
Another President, JFK, famously wrote a 1940 Harvard thesis turned book that advocated unsentimental realism in world affairs. It was titled Why England Slept. Perhaps the refined mineral our national security team needs most right now is smelling salts.
For further reading on our growing rare earth metals dependence, consider reading The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Tech by Guillaume Pitroi.
Sign up for my newsletter at HTTP://www.mpwoodward.com
July 18, 2022
Geopol Thriller Villains IRL
Hi Friends,
If you've been following international events recently, you'll notice a few key themes in the world of geopolitics, many of which are showing up as the backdrop for current geopolitical thrillers.
First, we have for the first time since the end of the Cold War, significant "great power competition" between the US and China. China's rise has been inevitable. We'd all hoped that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could be integrated into the international order through trade. But to a significant extent, that appears to have backfired. The CCP is militarizing at a rapid clip, buying off small countries to gain military basing rights, and saber rattling whenever it doesn't get what it wants (Taiwan, the Spratly Islands, etc). We see this as the backdrop for several great thrillers out there. One of my favorites for playing this out was 2034 2034: A Novel of the Next World WarElliot AckermanJames Stavrides
Second, of course, we have the Russians playing the part of the bitter imperialists. As with China, in the post Cold War nineties, we encouraged Russia to privatize and move to a free enterprise system. Boris Yeltsin attempted a system of de-nationalization that gave regular Russian citizens shares of stocks in formerly state owned companies like Gazprom. But the average Russian citizen had no idea what these shares of stock were for and soon the effort was overtaken by a handful of clever Russian operators who amassed all the shares of these companies. These are the "oligarchs" we speak of today. When Yeltsin hand-picked Vladimir Putin to succeed him, Putin quickly realized all he had to do was join with the oligarchs in a symbiotic association of kleptocracy. There are no shortage of thrillers with the Russians as villains, but one of my recent favorites was Mark Greaney and Rip Rawlings book Red Metal Red MetalMARK GREANEY (author)
Finally, there are the Iranians. The tragedy of Iran is that it is rooted in Persian greatness. Unfortunately it was ruthlessly repressed by the last Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), which led to a virulent theocracy, hell bent on expanding into other countries. Iran's global activities often fly under the radar, but using the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and specifically the Quds force, Iran's goal is to stoke similar movements around the world. The most obvious example is Hezbollah, which is a de facto state within a state in Lebanon, but just this morning I read an article about Quds operators arriving in Venezuela and Argentina. Like China, Iran has been militarizing at an alarming rate, building up its drone and ballistic missile forces, while continuing to espouse a dogma that seeks to wipe Israel off the map. An Iran with nuclear weapons--which seems more likely every day--is a terrifying prospect and may end up being THE big geopolitical story in 2023/2024. There are plenty of thrillers with this as the backdrop, of course, but a book on the background of US/Iran tensions that I enjoyed is The Twilight War. The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran. My next book, Dead Drop, is set against this backdrop and will be out in May 2023 from Penguin Random House.
If you've been following international events recently, you'll notice a few key themes in the world of geopolitics, many of which are showing up as the backdrop for current geopolitical thrillers.
First, we have for the first time since the end of the Cold War, significant "great power competition" between the US and China. China's rise has been inevitable. We'd all hoped that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could be integrated into the international order through trade. But to a significant extent, that appears to have backfired. The CCP is militarizing at a rapid clip, buying off small countries to gain military basing rights, and saber rattling whenever it doesn't get what it wants (Taiwan, the Spratly Islands, etc). We see this as the backdrop for several great thrillers out there. One of my favorites for playing this out was 2034 2034: A Novel of the Next World WarElliot AckermanJames Stavrides
Second, of course, we have the Russians playing the part of the bitter imperialists. As with China, in the post Cold War nineties, we encouraged Russia to privatize and move to a free enterprise system. Boris Yeltsin attempted a system of de-nationalization that gave regular Russian citizens shares of stocks in formerly state owned companies like Gazprom. But the average Russian citizen had no idea what these shares of stock were for and soon the effort was overtaken by a handful of clever Russian operators who amassed all the shares of these companies. These are the "oligarchs" we speak of today. When Yeltsin hand-picked Vladimir Putin to succeed him, Putin quickly realized all he had to do was join with the oligarchs in a symbiotic association of kleptocracy. There are no shortage of thrillers with the Russians as villains, but one of my recent favorites was Mark Greaney and Rip Rawlings book Red Metal Red MetalMARK GREANEY (author)
Finally, there are the Iranians. The tragedy of Iran is that it is rooted in Persian greatness. Unfortunately it was ruthlessly repressed by the last Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), which led to a virulent theocracy, hell bent on expanding into other countries. Iran's global activities often fly under the radar, but using the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and specifically the Quds force, Iran's goal is to stoke similar movements around the world. The most obvious example is Hezbollah, which is a de facto state within a state in Lebanon, but just this morning I read an article about Quds operators arriving in Venezuela and Argentina. Like China, Iran has been militarizing at an alarming rate, building up its drone and ballistic missile forces, while continuing to espouse a dogma that seeks to wipe Israel off the map. An Iran with nuclear weapons--which seems more likely every day--is a terrifying prospect and may end up being THE big geopolitical story in 2023/2024. There are plenty of thrillers with this as the backdrop, of course, but a book on the background of US/Iran tensions that I enjoyed is The Twilight War. The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran. My next book, Dead Drop, is set against this backdrop and will be out in May 2023 from Penguin Random House.
To Catch a Spy
Blogging on the verities of writing espionage fiction and showing how life imitates art in the genre.
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