The Taking of MH370

by Jeff Wise

  Gibson was born in San Francisco on April 21, 1957. His 69-year-old father, Phil Gibson, had retired after serving as the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court from 1940 to 1969. The job was well-paying but not extravagantly so; the position today pays $256,059 per year. Blaine grew up an only child. When he was 12, his mother, Victoria, took him on a long overseas trip that sparked a lifelong love of travel.

  Gibson finished high school in Carmel and enrolled at the University of Oregon. While working toward a degree in political science he made his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1976, at the age of 19, “just to understand what it was like.” After graduating in 1979, he earned a master’s degree at The School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He then worked briefly at a bank before spending three years on the staff of Washington State Senator Ray Moore, who like Gibson’s father was a staunch progressive.

  Starting in September, 1986, Gibson took a job with the U.S. State Department. He was stationed in Rio de Janeiro and resigned after one year. He was in Red Square when the Soviet Union ended. According to a profile in Seattle Met magazine, “he could see that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and decided to capitalize on it. For 10 years he lived off and on in the newly capitalist Russia, serving as a consultant to new business owners and fattening a bank account that would later fund his globe-trotting.”

  When I interviewed him for New York magazine, he told me that 20 years before, “when I was living and working in Russia, I was the second American to ever go to the epicenter of the Tunguska meteorite.” He explained that “I speak Russian fluently, I have access to Russian scientists, drinking vodka with them, they tell me what they really thought.”

  Russian is not a language that one picks up on a whim. It is considered one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn. Friends who served in the Peace Corps in Moldova tell me that according to U.S. State Department guidelines it takes three years to become proficient in Romanian but five years to become proficient in Russian.

  In 1992, Gibson established a company called Siberia-Pacific Co, domiciled in his Seattle condo, with two co-founders from the Kemerovo Oblast, a coal-mining region of central Russia.

  Gibson also registered a company called Russian-American Pen-Pal Service. Gibson dissolved Siberia-Pacific in 2018, after I started making inquiries. (It’s interesting to note that Brodsky, Deineka, Chustrak, and Gibson all made their fortunes by founding companies in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Wild West era when public assets were being snatched up.)

  In 1993 Gibson wrote a bill for the Washington State Senate that would establish a trade office in the Russian Far East. In 2002, he took part in a conference held in the western Russian city of Obninsk called “Successes and Difficulties of Small Innovative Firms in Russian Nuclear Cities: Proceedings of a Russian-American Workshop.” Gibson gave a talk about navigating the ambiguities between privately and publicly held companies in cities that are home to nuclear power plants, which at that time foreigners were still restricted from visiting. This suggests a deep level of knowledge on Gibson’s part about the workings of Russian business.

  Glenn Schweitzer, who organized the conference, told me that it was hard to find Americans who had experience doing business in nuclear cities, and so was grateful that he found Gibson. Schweitzer said he couldn’t recollect much about Gibson except that he had traveled all over Russia, even to small, obscure places that few Americans ever got to: “I found him to be an interesting guy, because he wasn’t like most of the Americans there.”

  In 2004 Gibson took part in a Department of Commerce conference under the auspices of Siberia-Pacific. The conference was on the subject of “International Travel to the U.S.” This time he did not give a talk, however, so it’s not clear what his connection to the event was. He was involved in a Tajikistan tourism company between 2005 and 2008, and the company seems to have been active until at least 2013.

  Gibson’s ties to Russia are more than professional. Several profiles quote Vladimir A. Gololobov, described in an AP article as a “friend” who “met Gibson nearly two decades ago while the American was in Siberia on business trips.”

  Gololobov was born in 1977 and grew up in Novokuznetsk, a city in Kemerov Oblast. He earned a master’s degree in English and German Languages from Russia’s Kemerovo State University in 1999, when he was 22 years and Gibson was 42. After he met Gibson, Gololobov moved to the US to pursue a master's degree in International Trade Policy Studies/Commercial Diplomacy from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. During that time his listed address was the Gibson family’s home in Carmel. In 2002 Gololobov moved to Washington, DC and started working at the Coalition of Service Industries, a lobbying firm, on issues involving Russian trade. That same year Gibson bought a condo in DC that became Gololobov’s residence. In 2013 Gibson sold the condo to Gololobov for about $100,000 less than its market value.

  When I called Golobov he at first denied that he knew Gibson. “I don’t know the person you’re talking about,” he said, adding: “I haven’t talked to the person you’re talking about.”

  Incredulous, I asked: “You’re saying that you don’t know anything about Blaine Alan Gibson?”

  Gololobov hedged. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time.”

  I asked if he’d tell me about how he knew Gibson.

  He answered, “No.”

  I reached out to Gibson in hopes he could address the issues I’ve raised here, but he did not respond to my email.

  So:

  Did Russia plant the MH370 debris found in the western Indian Ocean?

  We don’t know.

  Does the man who found most of the debris have significant ties to Russia?

  Yes.

  Chapter 32

  The Present War

  Ten days after MH370 disappeared, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian Federal Assembly. “The USA prefers to follow the rule of the strongest and not by international law,” he said. “They are convinced that they have been chosen and they are exceptional, that they are allowed to shape the destiny of the world, that it is only them that can be right. They act as they please. Here and there they use force against sovereign states, set up coalitions in accordance with the principle: who is not with us is against us.”

  His message was clear. Russia was done playing nice. It no longer wanted to be a complaisant junior member of Washington’s club. It had the will, and the means, to assert its rightful place in the world order.

  President Obama was having none of it. “Russia is a regional power,” he said in response to Putin’s speech, “that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but out of weakness.”

  He might well have been paraphrasing his predecessor George W. Bush when he responded to the first stirrings of Iraqi resistance by urging the insurgents to “bring it on.”

  Bring it on Putin did.

  In the months and years that followed, the Kremlin unleashed a combination of military force, covert action, hacking, and propaganda that has been dubbed “hybrid warfare.” It began by testing its neighbors’ airspace with increasing aggression. Its submarines probed their waters. It poured more troops and heavier weapons into eastern Ukraine. It dispatched ground forces and military aircraft to Syria to back wobbling dictator Bashar al-Assad, foiling US plans to usher in a moderate government.

  These conventional military maneuvers stopped short of directly engaging the West. In the shadow realm of information warfare, meanwhile, the gloves were off. Teams of hackers launched widespread attacks against Western institutions, probing for weaknesses and exploiting those they found. Armies of bots and trolls promoted conspiracy theories and misinformation in order to disorient the public and exacerbate existing fault lines in society. National Security Advisor HR McMaster has described Russia’s efforts as a "sophisticated campaign of subversion and disinformation and propaganda that is going every da
y in an effort to break apart Europe and that pit political groups against each other... to sow dissension and conspiracy theories."

  Few in the West took Russia seriously. The old Cold War bugbear was long forgotten. Now their mental model was the crippled relic of the 1990s: drunk, impoverished, hapless. Mitt Romney was roundly mocked when he described Russia as the “greatest geopolitical threat” facing the United States. Liberal democracy, all right-thinking people believed, had proven its superiority. It had no plausible contenders, as the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1992 book The End of History.

  That overconfidence opened to door to catastrophic comeuppance. First, a referendum to pull the UK out of the European Union, supported by a Russian disinformation campaign, succeeded in the face of all expectation, setting Britain on a disastrous course to ruin its own economy and to weaken Putin’s great rival, the European Union. Months later, intense hacking and social media tampering by Russia helped pull off an even more unexpected result: Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

  Once in power, Trump has moved to validate Putin’s critique of American democracy as a hollow shell, laying waste to bedrock institutions through a fusillade of tweets and executive orders. He has attacked the independence of the judiciary, the free press, and Congress. He has inflamed racial tensions and flouted any number of long-standing norms aimed at preventing corruption and nepotism. He has taken a wrecking ball to the world order that the United States forged over the course of the 20th century, trashing America’s alliances in Europe, ripping up trade deals and peace treaties, and threatening nuclear war.

  The one country that Trump has treated with kid gloves is Russia. He has compared Putin favorably to Obama, saying he is “really very much of a leader” with “very strong control over a country.” He has rejected the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election and obstructed efforts to investigate that interference. And when Congress passed a law tightening sanctions against Russia with a veto-proof majority, Trump signed it, then neglected to enforce it.

  It remains to be seen what the ramifications of the Trump presidency will be. Many who oppose him hope that democratic processes will eventually be brought to bear. But it may already be too late. Time and again, in places like Venezuela, Turkey, and yes, Russia, we’ve seen how an autocrat has come to power and gradually subverted the democratic institutions that might have kept a check on his power.

  Some may feel that the United States is different, that its traditions are too entrenched, its civic culture too thoroughly steeped in the values of democracy. If Putin’s hybrid war has shown us anything, however, it’s how thin the veneer of tradition can be. For generations a core principle of the Republican party was opposition to Russia. That antipathy has melted away under Trump. The percentage of Republicans who view Putin positively tripled between 2015 and 2017. In a July 2017 poll, 72 percent of Trump voters said they believed that reports of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia were “fake news.”

  “The Russians succeeded, I believe, beyond their wildest expectations,” James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, told Politico in October, 2017. “Their first objective in the election was to sow discontent, discord and disruption in our political life, and they have succeeded to a fare-thee-well. They have accelerated, amplified the polarization and the divisiveness in this country, and they’ve undermined our democratic system… They’ve been emboldened, and they will continue to do this.”

  With the United States neutralized, Putin continued his efforts to destabilize the rest of the West. Russian hackers and trolls next targeted the French presidential election, where despite their efforts centrist Emmanuel Macron managed to beat back an unprecedentedly strong showing by far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Elsewhere across Europe, oligarchs and right-wing populists surged, taking power in Poland, Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic. While the American mainstream press struggled to come to grips with the new reality, everything was clearer on Russian-language media. “We are at war with the United States,” said member of parliament Andrey Svintsov on state-owned Russia 1. “We may not be using conventional weapons, but we are using intellectual and info weapons."

  Do these changes presage an epochal transformation of world politics? In 1814, the Congress of Vienna established the great power balance of the century to come. In 1914, an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo triggered decades of global upheaval that ended with the establishment of the Pax Americana in the mid 20th Century. It may be that the events of 2014 will prove a watershed of equivalent magnitude in the 21st.

  If so, MH370 will have a special place in history. The significance is not the plane itself, or the lives that were lost. What MH370 represents is a perfect feat of mastery over the new battlefield: the ability to seize the narrative, to control the enemy’s attention so that it can’t properly recognize or react to your attacks. In this new age of information warfare, the ultimate victory is one that your opponent doesn’t even know has been fought.

  Appendix

  A Speculative Scenario

  March 8, 2014. 12.15am. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A line of passengers shuffles down the aisle to their seats, subdued and sleepy. It’s late, and the flight is due to arrive in Beijing at the break of dawn. Most of the passengers are Chinese, with a sizable number of Malaysians and Indonesians and a smattering of Indians, Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans. Here, for the next six hours, they will be pressed together in the forced comaraderie of late-capitalistic travel drudgery.

  It appears to be an utterly mundane example of a ritual that plays out tens of thousands times a day in airports around the world. But if one were aware of the subtlest psychological ripples that can emanate from subconscious gestures, one’s attention would be drawn to three of the passengers in particular.

  The first sits in business class, the highest level of service on this flight. A quick-eyed, broad-shouldered man, mid-40s, not tall but physically imposing all the same. He wears a strange half-smile. You can see from his carry-on bag that he is an avid recreational scuba diver, on his way back from a club trip exploring the coral reefs of Southeast Asia. His bag contains a snorkel, flippers, and air-tank hoses. Only if one were preternaturally perceptive would one notice that the bag also contains not one but three full-face diving masks. He settles into a window seat and puts the bag on the empty seat beside him. He unzips a pocket, takes out one of the masks, and stuffs it into the seat pocket in front of him.

  Two taller men, about the same age, are coming down the aisle past his seat. Both are well-muscled and carry themselves with the self-confidence of men who prize their physicality. One is shorter and broader; the other has the lanky physique of a basketball player. As they pass the first man’s seat, they take no notice of him, but the blond one lifts up the bag with the masks and carries it with him. The quick-eyed man doesn’t seem to notice, and neither does anyone else.

  It’s nearly half past midnight when the doors close. The passengers fasten their seat belts, the flight attendants mime along to the safety video, the plane rolls along the taxiway. If there’s a virtue to traveling when most people are already asleep, it’s that there are few delays. Right on schedule, the plane lines up on runway 32R, the engines spool up, and the 777-200ER is airborne, heading north and climbing through the equatorial night.

  The lights of Kuala Lumpur glitter below, then fall away. Only a few scattered strings of light mark the small cities and towns of the Malayan peninsula, the darker black of the Malacca Strait stretching off to the west. Turning as it climbs, the plane eases to wings level and heads northeast.

  Throughout the cabin, passengers sprawl in the abandon of sleep, mouths hanging open, heads pressed against window shades or into balled-up pillows. But the quick-eyed man sits upright and alert. Over Taman Negara, Malaysia’s largest national park, the plane reaches its assigned cruise altitude, 35,000 feet. Up
in the cockpit, the pilot turns off the seatbelt sign and tells the flight attendants that they can begin their beverage service.

  The flight attendants move through the business class cabin taking orders. The quick-eyed man politely declines. He waits until they have begun to bring out the food and drink, then pulls his regulator and mask from the seat pocket and moves toward the forward lavatory. Seeing that the galley is clear, he kneels and pulls back a patch of carpet to reveal a hatch with a recessed handle. He opens it, scoots down, and lowers the hatch smoothly above his head. A moment later, a flight attendant comes back to fetch a fresh pot of coffee and sees the carpet askew. Huh, that’s weird, she thinks, and puts it back.

  Down below, the quick-eyed man flips on a light and finds himself inside a compartment lined with metal boxes, flashing lights, indicators. This is the electronics and equipment bay, or E/E bay. Kneeling, he unshoulders his pack with graceful efficiency. He’s trained this sequence of moves hundreds of times. With a patch cord the intruder plugs into the plane's Portable Maintenance Access Terminal (PMAT) and begins uploading software. While that’s running, he starts pulling circuit breakers and cuts the ARINC cable coming out of the Inertial Reference System (IRS). A hundred feet away, in the rear of the plane, the Honeywell/Thales MCS6000 Satellite Data Unit (SDU) goes dark.

  In the cockpit, all seems normal. Starting to feel a little sleepy, the captain rings the head flight attendant and asks for coffee. At twenty past one, the plane approaches the edge of Malaysia’s air traffic control zone. Lumpur Radar calls MH370 and informs it that it should switch radio frequencies and call up the controller handling the next zone, Ho Chi Minh. The captain toggles his mic: “Goodnight, Malaysia 370.”