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Less than a month after the anti-austerity Syriza party swept to victory in Greece, a major dispute has broken out between Greece’s new leaders and European finance ministers. On Monday, talks between Greece and its European creditors collapsed amid disagreement over the future of German-backed austerity. Greek negotiators rejected a deal to extend the terms of the current bailout scheme with no alterations to the austerity terms. Greece is reportedly now planning to submit a request to the eurozone to extend a "loan agreement" for up to six months, but Germany says no such deal is being offered and that Athens must stick to the terms of its existing international bailout. Lawmakers from the ruling Syriza party say Greek voters had rejected the terms of the bailout and that Greece would not be intimidated into accepting them. The breakdown in talks has raised fears Greece may be on the verge of leaving the eurozone. We are joined by British journalist Paul Mason, who has closely covered Greece’s economic crisis for years.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Less than a month after the anti-austerity Syriza party swept to victory in Greece, a major dispute has broken out between Greece’s new leaders and European finance ministers. On Monday, talks between Greece and its European creditors collapsed amidst disagreement over the future of German-backed austerity. At talks in Brussels, Greek negotiators rejected a deal to extend the terms of the current bailout scheme with no alterations to the austerity terms. Greece is reportedly now planning to submit a request to the eurozone to extend a loan agreement for up to six months, but Germany says no such deal is being offered and that Athens must stick to the terms of its existing international bailout. Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis spoke in Brussels on Monday.
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: We were offering to refrain from effectively implementing our own program, the program that we were elected to implement, for a period of six months. And all we were getting back was a nebulous promise of some flexibility that was never specified. Under those circumstances, ladies and gentlemen, it proved impossible for the Greek government, despite our infinite goodwill, to sign the offered communiqué. And so the discussions continue.
AMY GOODMAN: Lawmakers from the ruling Syriza party say Greek voters had rejected the terms of the bailout and that Greece would not be intimidated into accepting them. Dimitris Stratoulis is Greece’s new Deputy Social Security Minister.
DIMITRIS STRATOULIS: [translated] The government remains unyielding to its position. They won’t accept an extension of the bailout. The Greek people have rejected this with their vote and with their presence in the streets, as have the people of Europe, who have openly and steadily expressed their solidarity to our own people.
AMY GOODMAN: The breakdown in talks has raised fears Greece may be on the verge of leaving the eurozone. The talks in Brussels came after some 20,000 people rallied in Athens to support Syriza’s stance against austerity.
To find out more about the significance of these negotiations, we’re going to London to speak with Paul Mason, the economics editor at Channel 4 News. He covered the Greek elections and is working on a documentary called Greece: Dreams Take Revenge. His most recent blog for Channel 4 was headlined "Leak and Counter-Leak: How Not to Achieve a Greek Deal."
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Paul. Well, how don’t you achieve a Greek deal?
PAUL MASON: Right now, Amy, as we speak, there are phone calls and briefings going backwards and forward between Athens, Brussels, even here in London, because the Greek government has, today, requested this six-month extension to the loan, but has not put forward any conditions that it might accept to get that loan. It’s like having a loan from your bank and saying, "You know what? We’re going to extend it by six months, and any conditions you attach to it, we’re not going to obey." I read that right now as a kind of delaying tactic, because this afternoon the European Central Bank—well, it’s meeting right now, and they’ll break up from that meeting this afternoon. Every meeting in the European Central Bank holds over Greece the possibility that they just pull the plug on Greece’s effectively busted banking system.
So, it’s really tense stuff, and this is how not to do it. The Greeks elected a government that wants to cancel austerity, but they owe the rest of the world 320 billion euros, and it’s very difficult to see how they get what they want without a confrontation. And time is running out, because all the emergency extensions to loans and bank—bank liquidity facilities run out at the end of this month.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain, Paul, what austerity means.
PAUL MASON: Well, austerity in Greece means something like a 50 percent measurable increase in male suicides. It means real wages fell by 25 percent in five years. It means that the economy lost a quarter of its capacity: It has shrunk by 25 percent. And on the—if you sit at a coffee table, sit in a café in Athens, talk to the person who’s serving you, they’ll be a graduate, they’ll be living probably more than one person to a room, and their income will be on—the average income is about 500 to 600 euros a month, so think the same in dollars. But you talk to people, they’ll be earning 400 a month, so a hundred euros a week. And that’s for graduates. That is austerity. And then you’ve got the 300,000 families who can’t afford electricity. And something like—you know, something like sort of 15 percent of people now are on the edge of or have lost their healthcare. And Greece has a healthcare system based on insurance. When you lose it, you join the queue with the undocumented migrants at the Red Cross.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking on Tuesday after the talks collapsed, the German finance minister said it was unclear whether Greece wanted a bailout program. He also said he wanted the eurozone to remain intact.
WOLFGANG SCHÄUBLE: [translated] Greece needs to decide whether they want the program or not. Nobody among my colleagues understands what Greece wants in the end. And if Greece knows what it wants is also a question. An extension of the program is only possible when the goal is to end the program. We all want the Eurogroup to stay together. We have worked for years on it. I am the one who has been here the longest of all the finance ministers, but everybody has to do its bit, and the decision is now only in Athens.
AMY GOODMAN: The German finance minister also expressed skepticism regarding his counterpart, the new Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.
WOLFGANG SCHÄUBLE: [translated] He is not so efficient in trying to convince others. That is what I can say from observing him. I know my colleague, and I know a bit about how he reacts. And there is room for improvement.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul, you wrote in a piece in The Guardian recently, that was headlined "Germany v Greece is a Fight to the Death, a Cultural and Economic Clash of Wills," you said, "Germany is eating itself over Greece. It is eroding its moral authority, and seems prepared to destroy the eurozone’s integrity just to make a point." Explain what you mean.
PAUL MASON: Well, look, inside German decision-making circles, there is a culture of extreme parsimony towards public spending. They passed their own law that said they couldn’t run a budget deficit. They regard the rest of southern Europe—Spain, Italy, Portugal—as profligate, as just big spendthrift, inefficient. That’s the general feeling.
But with Greece, it’s personal, because Greece just elected a government led by a party that about a third of which are, you know, far-left Marxists, and the rest of which are—belong to that new left tradition in Europe that would put them way, way to the left of any Democrat politician. So, we’ve got—this is just about more than money. It’s about a cultural and political clash. The Greeks are going to be sending to the European institutions people who indeed have been trained as Marxists, so Marxist lawyers. There is a Marxist criminologist in charge of the police force. This is something that nobody in Europe expected, least of all the Germans. And the Germans just basically now—I think that Schäuble there and the German political class just can’t get their head around the idea that a party has been elected that wants to do something so radically different, that they can’t do it without breaking the rules that the eurozone has been formed around. So it’s becoming cultural.
And remember, of course, the oldest member of the European Parliament for Syriza, this left-wing party that now runs Greece, is Manolis Glezos. He’s 94. And in World War II, he was jailed by the Nazis for ripping the swastika down from the Acropolis. So, this is living memory stuff. And you bet, in the mountain villages of Greece, there are people still alive who remember when the Germans occupied their village. That’s how cultural and personal it is getting.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain why Germany should help Greece.
PAUL MASON: Many Germans believe they shouldn’t help Greece. The rational case for Europe giving debt relief is quite simply that that debt is not repayable. It’s at 320 billion euros. It’s 175 percent of GDP. And even to service the debt, the government has to run a 4 percent primary surplus. Now, imagine if America could run itself in surplus for year after year. It would have to slash public spending. Greece, for example, has—it’s one of the few Western countries that meets its NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on its army, navy and air force. Now, this is only possible because the debt is being rolled over and rolled over. The conservative government that was defeated—the conservative-led coalition that was defeated in the January election also needed to roll those debts over, but it wanted to do it in a kind of euphemistic way, where they—effectively, the demand was to roll them over 'til 2060, the year 2060. I don't expect to be alive then, but those debts would eventually be paid back then.
The current government is saying, "Look, the country is bust. And you’re in denial. We need to write them off, as you do with all countries that are bust. We take the hit. We’ve taken a 25 percent of GDP hit to our—you know, to the size of our economy. We are"—the Greek government is running a surplus. That is, it doesn’t need to borrow, because so much has been cut. But what they want is a kind of radical debt relief, of the kind that Latin American countries sought in the 1980s, and of the kind given to some heavily indebted, poor countries under the Millennium Development Goals. But right now, it doesn’t look like they’re going to get it. What we’re fighting for now, what the two sides are looking at now, is a four-month stay of execution, because the execution is really clear: You pull the emergency lending from the European Central Bank, and goodbye to the four major Greek banks.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking after the breakdown of the talks on Tuesday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras criticized the German finance minister’s attitude toward the Greek people. This is part of what the Greek prime minister said.
PRIME MINISTER ALEXIS TSIPRAS: [translated] The German finance minister, Mr. Schäuble, yesterday lost his cool, not because he spoke against the Greek government—that is his right—but because he expressed himself in a derogatory manner about the Greek people. I would like, with all due respect, in the spirit of friendship, to point out to him that it would be better to pity those that walk with their heads bowed low and not to pity those who held their heads probably high.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras. If you could talk, Paul Mason, about further what he’s saying, and also where he comes from? Again, for those who aren’t following Greek politics, the significance of his being prime minister right now?
PAUL MASON: The significance of Tsipras being prime minister is that this is a guy who was a far-left communist in the 1980s. And although he has moderated his positions and the government is only really trying to run a kind of Swedish-style or Scandinavian-style social democracy right now, the background of these guys is Marxism. OK? So that’s the first thing to get your head around. We haven’t had a government of the far left in Europe since the 1920s or ’30s in an elected democracy.
The next thing is to understand what people in Greece feel. The sort of 36 percent who voted for this party, plus the other 10—maybe 10 percent who voted for other left parties, are feeling like there is a social and psychological revolution going on. This is not just about the election. My day job is to be a news reporter on networks, and every day I sit down when I’m in Athens and I look at rushes from cameramen who are shooting what looks like a crisis. Working on the documentary with some young independent Greek filmmakers, I look at their rushes, and it’s like they’re shooting a dream. And I mean not as in their dreams come true, but like "Pinch me. Wake me up. Is this really happening?" They’re going on demonstrations, which usually end in riot charges, tear gas, baton charges, dogs and the lot, where the cops suddenly have to—they’re appearing with empty holsters, they’re appearing unarmed. The barricades around the Parliament have been removed. And I think this is removing a lot of barricades in people’s minds, as well.
So when all the—everybody is focused on Tsipras. Varoufakis is very photogenic, West—Texas University economist. And while we’re focusing on them, ordinary Greeks are seeing not yet real change economically, because we’re only two, three weeks into the government, but they’re feeling an atmosphere change. And so, as a result, Tsipras, who won the election with 36 percent and was able to form the government, is now riding, in terms of his popularity, on 70 percent. And even the party, if there was an election now, they’d get 45 percent. And all the difference between the election result of January 25th and now comes from members of the Greek equivalent of the Republicans, so the New Democracy conservative party, switching their support, in opinion polls, to the current left government. That’s how weird, how crazy and, if you’re Greek, how disorientating the situation is.
And that’s what the pressure is on Tsipras. That’s why he says, "We’re in no hurry. We’re going to fight for what we were elected to do." And make—I’ve spoken to Tsipras at length. I did two big interviews with him, and Varoufakis, at length. These are not people who came into politics to compromise. They can quite happily go—they were a tiny group on 4 percent 15 years ago. They’re talented people who thought they would spend their days in universities. They’re in power now, and they’re not going to stay in power by massive compromise. They’d rather—as was put to me, if they’re forced out of the euro, they’ll slam the door so hard, the building falls down.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go to a clip from the short documentary, Paul, that you’ve been working on called Greece: The End of Austerity?, which is part of a larger, ongoing film project on Syriza. I want to go to the clip which features Syriza member Polymeris Voglis, but first we hear from Avaaz member Spyros Limneos.
SPYROS LIMNEOS: I think the problem is that people don’t see any hope anymore in the austerity that is imposed to Greece. They can’t see this solving their problems. They’ve been told for five years now that this is the only way to solve our problems, but I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that that’s not the solution.
POLYMERIS VOGLIS: When you have a family and you suddenly lose your job, you come to a place that you can’t pay for your electricity bill. You come to a place that you can’t even buy your food from the supermarket. And even worse, the house that you have bought, the bank takes it away from you. So, the despair is the worst thing that we faced through the crisis, and I believe that the most big win for us in the society is that we brought hope to the people.
AMY GOODMAN: That is a clip from Paul Mason’s film that he’s working on called Greece: The End of Austerity? If you’d like to add to that, and then talk, Paul, about what it would mean if Greece left the eurozone, and in that case, start by explaining what the eurozone is.
PAUL MASON: Well, look, the documentary I’m working on, I’m basically mentoring a team of young Greek journalists who want to tell the story from the grassroots up. And what you saw there was just two—the latter guy was a Syriza candidate, the other guy is an NGO member. But they’re people who, in America or in this country, England, would probably not naturally end up supporting or being members of a far-left party, still less a far-left government. But what’s happened is that the center-left got smashed and vacated. The center-left did the austerity. And so, the Greek equivalent of the Labour Party, the Greek equivalent of the—say, the Elizabeth Warren Democrats, has disappeared. It doesn’t exist. It gets 4 percent in elections. So people sort of from that technocratic, networked, trendy generation, who want democracy—and they’re not—they want a decent life, and, you know, the ability to start a small business, maybe. They are voting for this far-left party in the droves. And when we’re working on the documentary, we’re going out into rural areas, onto the waterfront, and what you see is just ordinary people, who have had enough, switching. Now, this is just the start. We don’t know where this goes. This is why I’m so keen to document the outcome of it. This could go all the way through to a social phenomenon as we saw in Spain in the 1930s, where people begin taking control. So that’s where we are.
The eurozone, well, eurozone is an alliance of 19 countries which pooled their currencies and pooled their central banks, without pooling their tax system. So, you know, you can have one country like Germany growing rapidly, quite rich, and a country like Greece bankrupt, but the euro has to fit both ends, as it were, of the spectrum. And it doesn’t. Greece, I think it’s still 50/50, and I could revise that in an hour when the European Central Bank comes out of its meeting, but 50/50 whether they stay in. If they leave, after the shock and the disruption and a new currency and capital controls, I think there is a possibility that it will be better for them economically.
But the Greeks didn’t sign up to the euro as an economic project. For them, as a young democracy, recent dictatorship, they signed up to it as a kind of guarantee that they would always be part of the European family. And they’ve been treated, they believe, so harshly by that European family that many of them now are starting to say—and I mean since the election. Since the election, there’s been a big nationalist feeling, a big feeling of, you know, "Germany and the eurozone are kind of kicking us, while we did everything we could to try and elect a kind of a young, kind of forward-looking, anti-corruption government, and then we get kicked." That’s changing their view of things. And even in here, you see behind me, you see Westminster. Westminster is now engaged in a debate about whether we, the Brits, should leave Europe, let alone the—we’re not in the eurozone. And Greece is playing very, very hard into that debate, because people are looking at Germany and thinking, "Hold on a minute." And I know it’s distasteful to say this, but there are people who remember World War II. "Did we fight World War II so that Germany could destroy democracy in Greece?" is being said in that building behind me.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Paul Mason, I want to thank you for being with us, economics editor at Channel 4 News, covered the Greek elections, is working on a documentary called Greece: Dreams Take Revenge. His most recent blog for Channel 4 we’ll link to, "Leak and Counter-Leak: How Not to Achieve a Greek Deal." And, of course, we’ll continue to follow this story, as well as following what’s happening in Spain with Podemos, very much like the Syriza party in Greece. You can go to our democracynow.org website to see our interview with Pablo Iglesias, the young 36-year-old political science professor who heads up Podemos. Some polls predict it could take the next national elections in Spain. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
A new report by The Intercept tells the story of the Obama administration’s prosecution of former North Korea expert Stephen Kim for violating the Espionage Act. Kim is one of nine such cases under the Obama administration — twice as many as all previous presidents combined. The former State Department contractor was accused of discussing classified documents on North Korea with Fox News reporter James Rosen. Last year, he was sentenced to 13 months in prison. But Kim always maintained his innocence. During the year before he went to prison, he shared his story with The Intercept. Journalist Peter Maass of The Intercept details the prosecution of Kim in a new article out today, "Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story." We speak to Maass about Kim’s case and broadcast an excerpt of "The Surrender," a documentary that accompanies The Intercept’s report.
Image Credit: Stephen Maing, Praxis Films for The Intercept
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Over the past several years, Democracy Now! has closely looked at the government’s crackdown on whistleblowers, from Army Private Chelsea Manning to former National Security Agency contractor Ed Snowden to CIA analyst John Kiriakou. Well, today we bring you the story of another whistleblower, one whose case has received far less attention, the jailed former State Department analyst Stephen Kim. He’s currently serving a 13-month sentence at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Cumberland, Maryland, for violating the Espionage Act by leaking classified documents on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen.
Journalist Peter Maass of The Intercept details the prosecution of Kim in a new article that’s just out today headlined "Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story." In a few minutes we’ll be joined by Peter Maass. But first, this is an excerpt from The Surrender, a new short film that accompanies the report on The Intercept's website. It's directed by Stephen Maing and produced by Peter Maass and Laura Poitras, director of Citizenfour, the Oscar-nominated film about Ed Snowden. This clip begins with Stephen Kim.
STEPHEN KIM: In June 2009, I had a new life ahead of me. I had recently gotten married, and I was about to go work for the secretary of state on foreign policy and national security. I had no inkling that the dark clouds would suddenly be appearing.
NARRATION: In the spring of 2009, State Department analyst Stephen Kim was introduced to Fox reporter James Rosen. The meeting was arranged by the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs.
STEPHEN KIM: I remember meeting him right outside the State Department. You know, it’s just like when you first meet. We talked about many things—Pakistan, the Iranian Revolution, the nuclear fuel cycle. He didn’t know about South Korea, let alone North Korea. So I had to explain like the basics.
STEPHEN KIM EMAIL: To: James Rosen. I am new to this. Do you have any good suggestions on things you might be interested in doing? [Stephen Kim]
JAMES ROSEN EMAIL: To: Stephen Kim. I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses about the state of [North Korea’s] nuclear program. [James Rosen]
JAMES ROSEN: As a reporter, I will always honor the confidentiality of my dealings with all of my sources.
BILL O’REILLY: Yeah, sure.
JAMES ROSEN: That’s it.
BILL O’REILLY: And if you don’t do that, you’re no longer a reporter. And you’re one of the best.
NARRATION: After several meetings, James Rosen published an article about North Korea that referenced parts of a classified government report.
LIZ WAHL: Well, starting off this hour, another name has been added to the list of people charged under the Espionage Act.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Stephen Kim was one of the U.S. government’s top experts on North Korea. He’s now facing trial and 15 years in prison for allegedly leaking classified information to a Fox News reporter, a charge Kim adamantly denies.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Fox News reporter James Rosen reporting back in 2009 that North Korea would respond to sanctions with more nuclear tests.
JON STEWART: That’s it? That’s the leak they needed to quash? North Korea answers everything with more nuclear—what? That’s—they a nuclear test-based economy!
STEPHEN KIM: I did not consider the conversation to be so memorable or so blazened in my mind that it was because of that conversation that these things are happening.
ERIC BOLLING: We’re now learning the Obama Justice Department invoked the Espionage Act, one of the most serious wartime laws in America, to justify its investigation.
ABBE D. LOWELL: The Espionage Act is this 100-year-old statute. It was passed as a result of World War I to address spying, but it is the principal tool the government uses to go after both real spying and for somebody like Stephen Kim, who’s accused of having a conversation with a member of the media.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the attorney Abbe Lowell.
REPORTER: This administration in the last four years has prosecuted twice as many leakers as every previous administration combined. How does that reflect balance?
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: The president firmly believes in the need to defend the First Amendment and the need in—you know, for reporters to be able to do their jobs.
NARRATION: The Fox reporter James Rosen was named in court documents as a co-conspirator in violation of the Espionage Act. But he was not indicted.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Court records obtained by NBC News show that in their efforts to convict Stephen Kim, prosecutors obtained phone and cellphone records of Fox News journalists.
NORAH O’DONNELL: The FBI naming Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen a criminal co-conspirator in the leak.
NARRATION: James Rosen declined to be interviewed.
ABBE D. LOWELL: One of the disconnects about this case is that here he is somebody who’s been accused of a national security offense, and I can assure you that Stephen always thought, in all of his work, that his job was to help make the United States stronger.
STEPHEN KIM EMAIL: Call me idealistic or radical but I refuse to play this game that deeply undermines our national security.
STEPHEN KIM EMAIL: James, I was thinking that perhaps it would be good for you to write a longer piece on why the Intelligence Community got so many things wrong about North Korea. Just a thought–... Stephen.
JAMES ROSEN EMAIL: Dear Stephen, The only way to do this is to EXPOSE the policy, or what the North is up to, and the only way to do that authoritatively is with EVIDENCE. Yours faithfully, James.
ABBE D. LOWELL: When a reporter is dealing with somebody who could be exposed for what the reporter is doing, it comes with a degree of responsibility. But this was information out there in the world in nonclassified sources that you could google and learn without it being classified.
NARRATION: In February 2014, after fighting charges for four years and depleting his life savings, Stephen Kim accepts a plea deal.
STEPHEN KIM: Probably the toughest decision that I’ve had to make in my life was to plead guilty. It went against every fiber of my being to give up the fight.
YURI LUSTENBERGER-KIM: As the family spokesperson, I would like to make a short statement. The government’s prosecution, which started in 2010, has taken a horrific toll on my brother and our entire family. His life has been in limbo for the past four years. There will be difficult months and years ahead, but we look forward to Stephen returning to our embrace soon.
NARRATION: On April 2, 2014, Stephen Kim is sentenced to 13 months in prison. He must report to prison when notified by the government.
STEPHEN KIM: The culture in Washington is pretty cutthroat, pretty ruthless. And maybe it’s because of my academic background, I thought that my intelligence assessments would pierce through the politics. I guess I’m naïve. I was about to go to the policy planning staff, working under Hillary Clinton. Basically, the style and thrust of my analysis has always been, the way we analyze a country like North Korea, that everybody says is unknowable, needs a reassessment. And to me, that all came down to how the United States understands how another nation thinks. And we can’t view that through our lens. There’s a term for it. It’s called mirror imaging. "Well, I would do it this way, so therefore they must do it that way." I think that’s—that’s not very helpful. And if abused, that can be actually quite dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: Jailed State Department whistleblower Stephen Kim in an excerpt of the film The Surrender, which was produced by The Intercept. You can go to their website to see the full video; it accompanies a major new report by Peter Maass of The Intercept. His report is called "Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story." You’ll hear that story when we come back with Peter Maass. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue looking at the case of jailed State Department whistleblower Stephen Kim, we’re joined by Peter Maass, a senior writer at The Intercept. His new article just out today is titled "Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story."
Peter Maass, welcome back to Democracy Now! You’ve been on this story for a while now. You actually accompanied Stephen Kim on his journey to jail, where he sits right now. But let’s go back, and you tell us the whole story. What happened to Stephen Kim? Who was he? How did he end up at the State Department?
PETER MAASS: Well, Stephen Kim was a expert on North Korea. He worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is where the nuclear weapons in the American arsenal are designed and where they’re analyzed. So he was privy, when he was there, to some of the kind of deepest, most sensitive secrets of all. And then he became an official at the State Department working as an expert on weapons of mass destruction, in particularly North Korea. And in 2009, he was introduced to James Rosen of Fox News by John Herzberg, who is an official, actually, a press official, at the State Department. And they were introduced in order to talk. And they talked about all kinds of things—Pakistan, North Korea, etc.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, this is extremely important. Kim didn’t reach out to Rosen. It was the State Department press person who got Kim in touch with Rosen, is that right?
PETER MAASS: Exactly. And this is one of the—it’s not an irony. It’s one of the kind of tragedies of this case, is that Stephen Kim ended up being prosecuted by the FBI and the Department of Justice for talking to a reporter whom Kim had been introduced to by another arm of the government—that is, the State Department’s press office. So—
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about where that first meeting took place. What did Herzberg set up?
PETER MAASS: What Herzberg set up was this kind of, you know, very ordinary, by Washington standards, meeting, first meeting between a journalist and a State Department official. It took place outside of the State Department. Again, this is arranged by a State Department official. Because Herzberg, as, you know, a kind of savvy press official does, knew that it wouldn’t be so good for this first meeting to take place in Kim’s office—it was in a very sensitive area, everybody would have to put away their classified documents, etc.—not so good to have them meet in the cafeteria—whatever other journalists and other people would see, etc.—so Herzberg arranged for them to go outside of the State Department and meet in a park right outside of the State Department.
AMY GOODMAN: Meet in a park?
PETER MAASS: Meet in a park right outside the State Department, which is what they did. And they—
AMY GOODMAN: And Herzberg was with them?
PETER MAASS: And Herzberg was with them, and Herzberg introduced them. "Stephen Kim, this is James Rosen. James Rosen, this is Stephen Kim. I think you guys have a lot to talk about." First meeting, 10 minutes, they just exchanged pleasantries, etc. Another—and again, "irony" isn’t quite the right word with this, but later on, when Stephen Kim had this one conversation with James Rosen that is the subject of the Espionage Act prosecution, they left the State Department and talked outside of the State Department, and the FBI portrayed this fact, that they left the department in order to talk, as something very suspicious, that they were doing something that they weren’t supposed to do, even though that precise act of leaving the State Department to talk is what they had done the very first time when they were introduced by a State Department official.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Stephen Kim was not used to speaking to reporters. He was asking the State Department for guidance on why he should be doing this.
PETER MAASS: Stephen Kim was very—had very little experience dealing with reporters, basically had not talked to any American reporters, had talked to some Japanese reporters that had been sent—brought into his office somewhat recently before this. He was interested, he told me, in talking to a reporter and asked for suggestions from Herzberg, and Herzberg suggested James Rosen. Kind of unusual for a State Department official, press official, to kind of first go, perhaps, to Fox News, which isn’t loved in the State Department, which isn’t loved in the Obama administration. But the bureau where Stephen Kim worked, which was in charge of basically seeing that—making sure that arms control agreements were complied with, was kind of a redoubt of hardliners. And Herzberg himself, actually, had donated to the Bush-Cheney campaign, etc., so he had some sympathies and had a friendship with Rosen. And so, the decision was made Rosen would be the person that Kim would be introduced to. And that decision was made by Herzberg.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, take it from there. What happened next?
PETER MAASS: That was in the spring of 2009, and they continued talking on their own, without Herzberg or anybody around. And then, on June 11, 2009, Rosen calls Stephen Kim, calls him a number of times. And then they leave the State Department building once in the morning, and they go out and talk, and then they come back in. And then Stephen Kim looks at—back at his office, at a classified—a new classified government report on North Korea. And then they go back outside again, Kim and Rosen, having arranged to do so. And they talk for—maybe it was 15 minutes, something like that. Kim goes back into the office.
Three hours later approximately, Rosen publishes a story on the Fox News website that says, according to a new classified report, North Korea—U.S. government report, North Korea is planning, in response to the United Nations sanctions, to detonate another nuclear weapon, etc., etc. And that report, the classified report that Rosen’s story was based on, and Rosen’s story itself, is the subject of the Espionage Act prosecution, because the government contended that this was classified information, harmful to national security, and Stephen Kim leaked it to James Rosen.
The curious thing about this whole prosecution is, A, no document ever changed hands. The government never accused him of actually providing a document. It was just a discussion about a document. And then one of the things that I found out in the course of reporting this story, going through, for example, this very kind of lengthy court docket that a lot of people hadn’t looked at, is that the FBI interviewed government officials about what happened and about the report, and one of these government officials told the FBI, "This classified report that they talked about, it’s a nothing burger." That was the phrase that was used, a "nothing burger." This is what an official told—
AMY GOODMAN: A nothing burger.
PETER MAASS: And another official said, about the Rosen story, about this nothing burger of a classified report, said that the report, Rosen’s report, was nothing extraordinary. So, the government even had people that it interviewed inside of the government who were saying, "Look, this report wasn’t a big deal." Now, of course, there were people in the government who thought it was a big deal.
The biggest problem for Kim, though, I think—and this kind of came out in the course of the reporting—was that his timing was terrible, because he talked to Rosen at a time when the Obama administration had pretty much had it with leaks and had decided, unlike previous administrations—and all administrations, they don’t like leaks, unauthorized leaks. Official leaks, that’s fine, they help the administration, it’s for PR purposes. Unofficial ones that they don’t control, they hate. The Obama administration, in contrast to the ones that preceded it, decided to use the Espionage Act to prosecute people who leaked, who talked without authorization to reporters. And Stephen Kim happened to be a person who talked to a reporter without authorization about a subject that the government did not find very flattering.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, he had original authorization.
PETER MAASS: Well, he had original authorization to talk with Rosen, exactly. There wasn’t explicit authorization for him to go out and talk to Rosen about this particular report. So that was kind of a slight distinction there. But his timing was terrible, because that story, the Rosen story, came out just at the moment when the Obama administration, when Dennis Blair, as head of national intelligence, was looking it over and saying, "We’ve got to stop this. We have to prosecute people. We need to," as Blair told The New York Times later on, "hang an admiral, make an example of somebody." And Stephen Kim popped up onto the radar screen right then.
It was very unfortunate for him that Rosen, unfortunately, had not been terribly careful in his contacts with Kim. So, for example, when the government decided, like, "OK, we’re going to investigate this leak," it was very easy for them to figure out where Rosen got it from, because Rosen had used his phone at the State Department—he was a State Department reporter then—to call Stephen Kim several times that day. He had used his cellphone to call Stephen Kim several times that day. They left the building at the same time. They returned at basically the same time. So, for the FBI, you don’t have to be a very good FBI agent to figure out very quickly who James Rosen talked to, who had access to that report. And they zeroed in on Stephen Kim quite immediately. And then they found a series of emails that Rosen had sent to Stephen Kim asking Kim for internal documents from the State Department. Case closed. I mean, not case closed, but that, for the government, was the entire case, basically.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Peter Maass, an award-winning investigative journalist, author and senior writer at The Intercept, who has just published a major report headlined "Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story." So let’s take it from there. Talk about how Stephen Kim was first approached by the FBI, questioned, and what happened next.
PETER MAASS: This is one of the many surprising things. The FBI came to him in his State Department office, and they told him they were there to talk about an investigation. Stephen Kim did not know what the investigation was. And they asked him a lot of questions, and some of the questions were about the story that Rosen had reported. They didn’t tell him that he was the target of the leak investigation. He didn’t know at the time, when he was first talking with the FBI, that he was the target. They did not tell him that. And that was, in some ways, what at least Stephen Kim’s lawyer refers to as kind of a perjury trap—not in those precise words, but basically that—
AMY GOODMAN: And this is Abbe Lowell, who is—
PETER MAASS: This is Abbe Lowell, who’s—
AMY GOODMAN: —a well-known attorney, who even represented President Clinton.
PETER MAASS: President Clinton during his impeachment hearings, exactly. He regards it as something close to a perjury trap, wherein the FBI—and this is something the FBI has done and law enforcement does quite frequently. They go to suspects, interview them very casually, don’t tell the suspects, "You’re actually the target of our investigation," and they get the suspects sometimes to not tell the entire truth, because the suspects don’t know that they’re under investigation, that it’s a big deal, etc. And so, Stephen Kim, when the FBI first came to him, didn’t tell the entire truth. He said, "Well, I’ve only met James Rosen once. I wouldn’t talk to him about, you know, anything else, and I never talked to him again," which was not true. If he had known that he was the target of an investigation, he would have probably lawyered up, and he would probably have been very careful about what he said.
When the FBI came to him the second time, which was about nine months later, then they kind of laid down everything they had. They said, "You’ve broken the Espionage Act. There’s a body of work," is the phrase that they used, according to Stephen Kim. They threatened him with multiple counts of the Espionage Act. And this was in August of 2010 that he was finally indicted under one count of the Espionage Act and one count of lying to the FBI. That was 2010.
He decided to fight against the government, and for four years he fought. And he got Abbe Lowell, who’s a very good, but very expensive, lawyer to take his case on. It cost millions of dollars, only part of which actually Stephen Kim could afford to pay. And it took everything out of him. And this is one of the things that to me was—I guess it’s not surprising, because we’ve seen this happen. But when the U.S. government goes after somebody, and goes after somebody in what the government considers a high-priority case, it has virtually unlimited resources. And the effect that this had on Stephen Kim was to deplete his life savings, deplete his family’s life savings. His marriage broke up. His young son had to move away. He contemplated suicide. And he talked to me about this. You know, when you’re kind of accused of basically—of espionage, which is what the name of the act is, your entire reputation is shot even before you have the first chance to stand up in a court and say, "I’m innocent, and this is why." And he googled how many sleeping pills it would take to kill himself. He thought of jumping in front of a train, not because he was guilty, but because he was innocent and didn’t feel that he would be able to get a fair trial, that he would end up spending many years of his life in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, then explain what happened, how this was, if you could call it, resolved.
PETER MAASS: Well, basically, not long before the trial was scheduled to start, the government made an offer to Stephen Kim’s lawyers, which was that he would have to spend a slightly modest amount of time in jail—and it ended up being 13 months—plead guilty to the Espionage Act violation, but—
AMY GOODMAN: This was after they had said he was threatened with 30 years, then he should serve seven years to a plea agreement—
PETER MAASS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —and now it’s down to 13 months.
PETER MAASS: Exactly. And this is—I mean, this is, you know, often a process where the government kind of threatens to throw the book at somebody unless they plead guilty, and it creates an enormous amount of pressure. And Stephen Kim compared himself—or, didn’t compare himself, but said that he really understood, for example, what happened to Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz being the brilliant computer programmer who was accused, after having downloaded academic articles from a commercial database, accused of computer crimes that would have landed him in jail, the government was saying, for, I think, more than a decade or something like that. And it was a terrible burden for Aaron Swartz to take, and he ended up taking his own life. Stephen Kim came very close himself to that. The government doesn’t only crack down on leakers and whistleblowers. It cracks down really on—very strongly, on anybody who disseminates data beyond the borders that the government deems appropriate, whether it’s corporate or government data.
And so, for Stephen Kim, it became a kind of—he described it to me as like a brutal calculus: "OK, if I plead guilty and get 13 months in jail, that’s it. I’ll be out, maybe after good behavior, after 11 months. If I take this to trial, if I go to trial, I could end up in jail for 12 years. It will be another million dollars in legal fees that I don’t have the money to pay for. Which is the better route to go?" And he took the route of pleading guilty and taking the 13-month sentence.
AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to James Rosen, the Fox reporter?
PETER MAASS: He is a very well-known Fox reporter still. He’s based in Washington.
AMY GOODMAN: He was under investigation.
PETER MAASS: Yeah, well, James Rosen—and this is one of the aspects of the case that got actually more attention than what happened to Stephen Kim, is what happened to James Rosen, which is, the government, in order to acquire emails, James Rosen’s emails, more than they actually already had, they applied for a search warrant. And in the search warrant, they referred to Rosen as a potential co-conspirator in violating the Espionage Act. They accused him of basically kind of being this minstrel who was trying to operate, aspiring with Stephen Kim collecting data, and maybe unnamed other people collecting data. Rosen came that close to being indicted himself. When this was revealed, that the government, A, called him an unindicted co-conspirator, and, B, got his cellphone records, got his emails, tracked his physical movements, when this was finally revealed—and this came out in 2013—it was a huge controversy in the press, because it was taken, legitimately so, as an attack on the freedom of the press, that you—
AMY GOODMAN: You had James Rosen at Fox and James Risen at The New York Times.
PETER MAASS: Yes, it can get confusing at times.
AMY GOODMAN: Different stories.
PETER MAASS: Different—very different stories and very different journalists, but there was something very similar in both of their cases, which is that the force of the government was brought to bear on journalists in order to connect them to crimes or get them to talk about alleged crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: And meanwhile, Stephen Kim continues to serve this 13 months in jail in Cumberland, Maryland.
PETER MAASS: He is in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: That does it for the show. Peter Maass, award-winning investigative journalist, we’ll link to his piece at The Intercept called "Destroyed by the Espionage Act: Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This is His Story."
Headlines:
Admin Delays Executive Actions on Immigration as it Appeals Judge’s Order
The White House is delaying President Obama’s executive actions on immigration after a federal judge blocked them earlier this week. Obama’s move to shield millions from deportation was supposed to begin taking its first applications today. But U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, issued an injunction after a motion filed by Texas and 25 other states. The administration says it will comply with the ruling and delay accepting applications for work permits and deportation reprieves. Speaking at the White House, President Obama said he is confident the decision will be struck down on appeal.
President Obama: "This is not the first time where a lower court judge has blocked something, or attempted to block something, that ultimately was shown to be lawful. And I’m confident that it is well within my authority and the tradition of the executive branch’s prosecutorial discretion to execute this policy, which will help us make our borders safer, will help us go after criminals and those that we don’t want in this country, will help people get on the right side of the law and get out of the shadows."
Hanen is an open opponent of Obama’s reprieve for undocumented immigrants, previously calling it "an open invitation to the most dangerous criminals in society."
Immigrant Rights Protesters Denounce Court Ruling Blocking Reprieves
Protests for immigrant rights were held across the United States on Tuesday. In Los Angeles, a recipient of Obama’s deferred immigration action for undocumented youths denounced the court decision.
Stephanie Ramirez: "I stand here today very disappointed learning about the injunction of the implementation of DACA and DAPA [Deferred Action for Parental Accountability]. But also I am here determined and confident that through our fight we will allow the implementation of these programs and continue the benefits for more potential DACA and DAPA recipients."
U.N.: Assad Regime Agrees to Halt Bombing of Aleppo
The top U.N. envoy on Syria says the regime of Bashar al-Assad is willing to halt the bombing of the flashpoint city of Aleppo for up to six weeks. In a briefing to the Security Council, Staffan de Mistura announced the breakthrough, while saying he has no illusions about its chance of success.
Staffan de Mistura: "The government of Syria has indicated to me its willingness to halt all aerial bombing — all aerial bombing, all sorts, all types of aerial bombing — and artillery shelling for a period of six weeks all over the city of Aleppo, from a date which we will be announcing from Damascus. Let’s be frank. I have no illusions because, based on past experiences, this will be a difficult issue to be achieved. But we will engage also very much the opposition hopefully to see them to respond to a similar request from the U.N. to halt mortar and rockets on all over the city of Aleppo for six weeks."
Aleppo has seen intense violence in the government’s clashes with rebel groups. The Syrian civil war enters its fifth year next month.
Report: U.S. Coordinates Strikes with Syrian Rebels
The United States has expanded military coordination with rebels inside Syria. The Wall Street Journal says rebels deemed to be "moderate" now have the ability to call in U.S. airstrikes on enemy fighters. The United States is set to begin training a group of Syrian rebels on March 1 in Jordan.
Ukrainian Forces Pull Back from Besieged Town After Heavy Casualties
Ukrainian forces are withdrawing from the besieged town of Debaltseve after an offensive by pro-Russian rebels. Clashes have continued despite the ceasefire agreement that went into effect over the weekend. The rebels say the truce does not apply to the town, which connects their strongholds, Donetsk and Luhansk. The European Union says the rebels are in clear violation. The Ukrainian military has reportedly sustained heavy casualties over the past few days.
U.S. Accuses Russia of Violating Ceasefire; U.N. Security Council Calls for End to Violence
The Ukrainian withdrawal comes one day after the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a Russian-drafted resolution urging all sides to halt the fighting. Despite voting for Russia’s measure, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power denounced Moscow for supporting the rebels.
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power: "If Russia is committed to peace, it doesn’t need a U.N. Security Council resolution to prove it. There are actually easier ways to prove it. You could stop arming the separatists; stop sending hundreds of heavy weapons across the border, in addition to your troops; stop pretending you’re not doing what you are doing; and start calling on and insisting upon the separatists observing the ceasefire around Debaltseve."
In response to Power, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said his government is not responsible for starting the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin: "She accused Russia of starting the crisis. But did we topple the legally elected president? Throughout all these events that took place in Ukraine a year ago, Russia kept calling for a bloodless political solution. We supported the 21st February agreement. We insisted on its implementation even after the lawfully elected president was being toppled. We support the communiqué on April 17th calling for constitutional dialogue. We supported the initiative of the OSCE chair. What was the impetus for the armed conflict? The impetus was the support by certain Western countries, the decision of the Kiev leadership to militarily suppress the dissatisfaction of the people in the east."
U.N. Security Council to Meet on Libya as Egypt Calls for Global Intervention
The U.N. Security Council is holding an emergency session on Libya today amidst Egyptian airstrikes targeting the Islamic State. Egyptian warplanes bombed northeastern Libyan areas after Cairo vowed to avenge the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, shown in an ISIS video. On Tuesday, Egypt called for a global military campaign in Libya to remove the Islamic State. ISIS is one of several militant groups that have emerged inside Libya since the U.S.-backed ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Also Tuesday, the Islamist-backed rival government in Tripoli, one of two claiming power in Libya, sent fighters to confront the Islamic State in the city of Sirte.
Greece to Seek Six-Month Loan Extension as Austerity Standoff Grows
Greece will reportedly submit a new request that the eurozone extend a "loan agreement" for up to six months following the breakdown of talks on revising the terms of an international bailout. Talks between Greece and its European creditors collapsed this week amid disagreement over the future of German-backed austerity. Germany says no new deal is being offered and that Athens must stick to the terms of its existing bailout. On Tuesday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said his government wants a deal but will not compromise on its rejection of crippling austerity.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras: "We are not in a hurry, and we will not compromise. We are, however, working hard for an honorable and mutually beneficial solution—in other words, a solution without austerity, without the bailout which destroyed Greece in the last years, for an agreement without the toxic presence of the troika."
U.S. Will Let Foreign Allies Purchase Armed Drones
The Obama administration will allow foreign allies to purchase U.S.-made armed drones for the first time. Under a new policy, American firms can sell their drones abroad, but will be subjected to a case-by-case review. Buyers will also have to justify their need for the drones and commit to "proper use" principles. But those standards are classified, so it is unknown if other countries will be able to use drones for extrajudicial killings like the United States does in conflict zones abroad. The Washington Post reports the policy partially comes out of U.S. military corporations intent to tap into the $6 billion global arms market. Speaking to the website Common Dreams, William Hartung of the Center for International Policy called the drone exports "one of [the Obama administration’s] worst policy decisions," adding: "Regardless of what guidelines are established for their use, history tells us that once the United States transfers a weapon to another nation it is extremely difficult to control how it is used. The U.S. should be reining in its own drone strikes, not making it easier for other nations to use them."
Ashton Carter Sworn In as Pentagon Chief Following Senate Confirmation
Ashton Carter has been sworn in as the new defense secretary following his overwhelming Senate confirmation vote last week.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter: "I have a commitment to the future, to building a force for our future. That involves not only securing the resources we need, but making sure that we make the best use of the taxpayers’ dollar, make sure that we embrace change, so that years from now and decades from now we continue to be a place where America’s finest want to serve."
President Obama tapped Carter after forcing the ouster of Chuck Hagel late last year. Carter has a long history at the Pentagon, where he once served as the chief arms buyer. In 2006, he backed a pre-emptive strike against North Korea if the country continued with a planned missile test. Carter has recently voiced support for arming Ukraine and opposing the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay.
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