Sex, politics and the Vice-Squad

This article, published in France's Le Monde, analyzes the use of the police's investigations and information, by successive French Presidents….

De tout temps, la police a été l'instrument du pouvoir. Avant d'accéder à la présidence de la République, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac et Nicolas Sarkozy sont tous passés par la Place Beauvau    

[Throughout history, the police has been the instrument of those in power. Before becoming president of the Republic, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy have all passed through Place Beauvau]

It's in French, so use the Google translator tool to help you read it in the language of your choice.

Sexe, politique et police des mœurs - LeMonde.fr

Avertie en continu, la Préfecture de police de Paris centralise les informations sensibles.AFP/ERIC FEFERBERG

L'Elysée, bien plus que les médias, n'ignorait rien de la vie privée de Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Le pouvoir, alimenté par ses relais dans la police, sait tout des secrets les plus intimes des hommes politiques, jusqu'à user des informations graveleuses dont il dispose.

Ainsi, des proches de Nicolas Sarkozy avaient pris soin de laisser "fuiter" auprès du Monde, ces derniers mois, l'existence d'une note, rédigée peu avant la présidentielle de 2007, par un policier de la base. Quelques lignes signalant la présence de M. Strauss-Kahn, surpris en fâcheuse posture dans une voiture, à l'ouest de Paris, dans un haut lieu des rencontres tarifées, à l'occasion d'un banal contrôle.

Sollicités, ni la Préfecture de police de Paris ni le ministère de l'intérieur n'ont souhaité confirmer – ou démentir – l'existence de cette note. Trois sources différentes ont pourtant assuré au Monde que ce rapport avait existé, et qu'il avait été porté à la connaissance de l'entourage de M.Sarkozy.

Selon l'une de ces sources, l'original de cette note a été passé au broyeur. A l'époque des faits, il fut décidé, en haut lieu, de ne pas donner de suites à cette affaire sur le plan pénal – ou médiatique. Candidat malheureux à la primaire du PS fin 2006, DSK ne présentait pas alors le même enjeu pour le pouvoir. Et c'est en parfaite connaissance de cause que M. Sarkozy, une fois élu, le propulsa à la tête du Fonds monétaire international (FMI).

Mais ces derniers mois, au fur et à mesure de la progression de DSK dans les sondages, des hommes de confiance de M.Sarkozy se sont vantés devant des journalistes de "tenir" le patron du FMI, dont ils menaçaient de révéler les frasques. C'est ainsi que cette note a refait providentiellement surface. Au même moment, le chef de l'Etat se posait en "moine trappiste", par opposition à la réputation de coureur de jupons de DSK.

ÉQUIPE LA MIEUX RENSEIGNÉE DE FRANCE

C'est un fait : M.Sarkozy, depuis 2002, connaît certains aspects de la vie privée des personnalités susceptibles de présenter un jour un danger électoral. A son arrivée au ministère de l'intérieur, il a constitué une équipe de fidèles qui lui doivent tout. De Bernard Squarcini, patron de la Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI), à Claude Guéant, ministre de l'intérieur, en passant parAlain Gardère, directeur adjoint du cabinet de ce dernier, ou Michel Gaudin, préfet de police de Paris, cette équipe est la mieux renseignée de France.

Fin avril, DSK avait d'ailleurs identifié le danger, comme l'a rapporté Libération : son appétence pour les femmes, certes, mais surtout les méthodes supposées de M. Guéant, à l'origine selon lui de la propagation des rumeurs sur sa vie intime.

De tout temps, la police a été l'instrument du pouvoir. Avant d'accéder à la présidence de la République, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac et Nicolas Sarkozy sont tous passés par la Place Beauvau. Lors de son retour à l'intérieur, en juin 2005, M.Sarkozy avait confié :"Je serai mieux protégé."

In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue

September 29, 2010

By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID E. SANGER

Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.
That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.
Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.
There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran’s most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.
“The Iranians are already paranoid about the fact that some of their scientists have defected and several of their secret nuclear sites have been revealed,” one former intelligence official who still works on Iran issues said recently. “Whatever the origin and purpose of Stuxnet, it ramps up the psychological pressure.”
So a calling card in the code could be part of a mind game, or sloppiness or whimsy from the coders.
The malicious code has appeared in many countries, notably China, India, Indonesia and Iran. But there are tantalizing hints that Iran’s nuclear program was the primary target. Officials in both the United States and Israel have made no secret of the fact that undermining the computer systems that control Iran’s huge enrichment plant at Natanz is a high priority. (The Iranians know it, too: They have never let international inspectors into the control room of the plant, the inspectors report, presumably to keep secret what kind of equipment they are using.)
The fact that Stuxnet appears designed to attack a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, used widely to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many kinds of nuclear plants, may be telling. Just last year officials in Dubai seized a large shipment of those controllers — known as the Simatic S-7 — after Western intelligence agencies warned that the shipment was bound for Iran and would likely be used in its nuclear program.
“What we were told by many sources,” said Olli Heinonen, who retired last month as the head of inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, “was that the Iranian nuclear program was acquiring this kind of equipment.”
Also, starting in the summer of 2009, the Iranians began having tremendous difficulty running their centrifuges, the tall, silvery machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium — and which can explode spectacularly if they become unstable. In New York last week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shrugged off suggestions that the country was having trouble keeping its enrichment plants going.
Yet something — perhaps the worm or some other form of sabotage, bad parts or a dearth of skilled technicians — is indeed slowing Iran’s advance.
The reports on Iran show a fairly steady drop in the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant. After reaching a peak of 4,920 machines in May 2009, the numbers declined to 3,772 centrifuges this past August, the most recent reporting period. That is a decline of 23 percent. (At the same time, production of low-enriched uranium has remained fairly constant, indicating the Iranians have learned how to make better use of fewer working machines.)
Computer experts say the first versions of the worm appeared as early as 2009 and that the sophisticated version contained an internal time stamp from January of this year.
These events add up to a mass of suspicions, not proof. Moreover, the difficulty experts have had in figuring out the origin of Stuxnet points to both the appeal and the danger of computer attacks in a new age of cyberwar.
For intelligence agencies they are an almost irresistible weapon, free of fingerprints. Israel has poured huge resources into Unit 8200, its secretive cyberwar operation, and the United States has built its capacity inside the National Security Agency and inside the military, which just opened a Cyber Command.
But the near impossibility of figuring out where they came from makes deterrence a huge problem — and explains why many have warned against the use of cyberweapons. No country, President Obama was warned even before he took office, is more vulnerable to cyberattack than the United States.
For now, it is hard to determine if the worm has infected centrifuge controllers at Natanz. While the S-7 industrial controller is used widely in Iran, and many other countries, even Siemens says it does not know where it is being used. Alexander Machowetz, a spokesman in Germany for Siemens, said the company did no business with Iran’s nuclear program. “It could be that there is equipment,” he said in a telephone interview. “But we never delivered it to Natanz.”
But Siemens industrial controllers are unregulated commodities that are sold and resold all over the world — the controllers intercepted in Dubai traveled through China, according to officials familiar with the seizure.
Ralph Langner, a German computer security consultant who was the first independent expert to assert that the malware had been “weaponized” and designed to attack the Iranian centrifuge array, argues that the Stuxnet worm could have been brought into the Iranian nuclear complex by Russian contractors.
“It would be an absolute no-brainer to leave an infected USB stick near one of these guys,” he said, “and there would be more than a 50 percent chance of having him pick it up and infect his computer.”
There are many reasons to suspect Israel’s involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.
Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.
He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.
“They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought,” he said.
Then there is the allusion to myrtus — which may be telling, or may be a red herring.
Several of the teams of computer security researchers who have been dissecting the software found a text string that suggests that the attackers named their project Myrtus. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.
It was Mr. Langner who first noted that Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively.
“If you read the Bible you can make a guess,” said Mr. Langner, in a telephone interview from Germany on Wednesday.
Carol Newsom, an Old Testament scholar at Emory University, confirmed the linguistic connection between the plant family and the Old Testament figure, noting that Queen Esther’s original name in Hebrew was Hadassah, which is similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle. Perhaps, she said, “someone was making a learned cross-linguistic wordplay.”
But other Israeli experts said they doubted Israel’s involvement. Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”
“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.”
Mr. Blitzblau noted that the worm hit India, Indonesia and Russia before it hit Iran, though the worm has been found disproportionately in Iranian computers. He also noted that the Stuxnet worm has no code that reports back the results of the infection it creates. Presumably, a good intelligence agency would like to trace its work.

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Israel, and William J. Broad from New York.

 In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue - NYTimes.com

Share this |

________________________

Lunch with the FT: Tony Blair FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT -

Lunch with the FT: Tony Blair

By Philip Stephens

Published: September 10 2010 18:54 | Last updated: September 10 2010 18:54

I had hoped I might meet Tony Blair at one of London’s more bustling venues – mainly, I confess, because I wanted to measure the reaction of the throng. But the rules of Lunch with the FT leave the choice with the guest. So, after a certain amount of cloak and daggery, insisted upon by the police protection officers who still accompany him everywhere, I arrive at Blair’s local Italian, Locanda Locatelli.

It is one of those restaurants comfortable with celebrity. On a weekday lunchtime most tables seem to be occupied by business types but Madonna is said to be among the evening regulars. Our corner booth offers a panoramic view of polished wood, fabric wall coverings and soft leather banquettes. A head or two turns discreetly as Blair enters. No one is impolite enough to stare.

Britain’s former prime minister presents a conundrum. His memoir has invited torrents of invective from enemies (critics is much too soft a word) among metropolitan elites. Yet copies of A Journey are flying off the shelves as “real people” open their wallets to read Blair’s version of events. He did, after all, win three elections and put Britain back on the international stage. Then again, he also stood shoulder to shoulder with George W Bush in Iraq.

I am getting ahead of myself. The Michelin-starred Locanda Locatelli is around the corner from Blair’s central London home. Its proprietor-chef Giorgio Locatelli, I will discover, is an exquisite cook. But first I concentrate on my guest. Blue suit, white shirt and no tie (I had worn one for the occasion), he is visibly at ease. The slings and arrows of media outrage don’t seem to have left any scars. He has just cancelled a signing at a bookstore in London because of promised disruption by protesters. But he’s still getting all those clicks on Amazon.

It cannot feel very nice, though, to have people call you a war criminal? Blair doesn’t blink. “I’ve always had a, I mean truthfully, a better relationship with the country than with the media because the media divides into a left and right of a pretty traditional sort. And the left always regard me as not sufficiently left and the right hate me because I win. Or I won.”

The style of, and reaction to, the book mirrors the division of opinion between liberal intelligentsia and voters. It’s racy. In places, it badly mangles the English language; the colloquialisms sometimes slip into cringe-making confessionals. We really don’t need to know about that night of unbridled passion with his wife Cherie. The book is everything, in other words, that the chatterati don’t like about Blair.

Yet it carries the reader along. There is plenty about politics and policy – more than in many political memoirs. He is way ahead on some things – particularly on what progressive politicians have to do to adapt to change; and, to my mind, profoundly mistaken on others, as in his reading of the struggle against violent Islamism. But A Journey reads as a story, not a chore.

“I wanted to write it in a different way and I wanted to write it in a way that is more open.” It was time for someone to explain that politicians are also human beings. “One of the worst things happening in politics today is this assault on politicians when they get … they do something that’s wrong or people think it wrong, or whatever, and yet no one actually sees it from the other side.”

He warms to the theme. “If you’re not careful what happens is your political leaders have to be all sort of buttoned up; meanwhile they’re subject to a degree of intrusion that in times gone by was completely unknown. I think it’s therefore quite helpful ... to understand that they are human beings and to understand things from their point of view.” That’s why he has now owned up to the inner fears that had often lain behind the apparently supreme confidence.

There is more to this than artifice dressed up as candour, or indeed the desire to speak directly to people over the head of a hostile media. He thinks he has something important to say about the tumultuous pace of change in the world, the west’s response to the rise of Asia, the future of centre-left politics.

“I want people to read me unmediated rather than mediated because I think if they read it they will at least understand what I’m trying to say and it’s very much a book that’s prospective in a sense, because a lot of what I’m saying ... is about where are we now and where we need to be.”

As we talk I am nibbling on Parmesan-infused grissini and picking small pieces from a basket of freshly baked bread. Blair resists the temptation. He likes to keep in shape. I have long abandoned such fantasies. Meanly, I take private satisfaction that the price he pays for keeping his weight down is to look his age.

The antipasti arrive. Blair has the salad of broad beans, rocket and ewe cheese. I hesitate before opting for the green bean salad with potato and truffle. The truffle always tips it. Mine is scrumptious. His salad likewise, says Blair. The plates go back scraped clean to Locatelli’s kitchen. “Local Italian” no longer seems an apt description of the cuisine on offer here.

We are sticking to sparkling water – a cue to tease my guest. He has admitted that as prime minister he fretted that an habitual whisky or gin followed by a couple of glasses of wine (sometimes even half a bottle!) over dinner left him close to the edge of alcohol dependency.

Guffaws all round. “All my friends have been saying it was quite the most pathetic and sad admission they’d ever come across. John Reid’s [a former cabinet colleague] comment was the best. Did you hear that? He said, ‘Where I come from in Glasgow they give more than that to the budgie.’”

There are moments in the book when Blair sounds almost melancholic. Politics, he explains, is lived backwards. Leaders are at their most powerful when they are least practised. Time brings experience but it also drains political capital.

He would have stayed on as prime minister had Gordon Brown, his chancellor and bitter rival, not forced the timing of his departure. Yet he bridles at the idea that he is now a lost soul. “That’s true ... I do say [I would have stayed] because I have the confidence to say it – without actually spending my life desperately troubled I’m not still there.” So he has gotten over not being prime minister? Yes. “I really don’t miss it. The only time I missed it was during the global financial crisis.” Ah yes, that would have been a moment for him to stride the world stage again. As it was, Brown got quite a lot of credit.

But, he says, “I’m happy to go out there doing the things I’m doing ... I’m fascinated by the Middle East peace process and I want to work on it. And my faith foundation is now operating in 15 different countries, I’ve got the Africa governance initiative, that’s operating in three African countries.” Then, of course, there are the speeches, the advisory work for a bank and the consultancy contracts for Tony Blair Associates.

Once during the lunch I think I off-balance him. I remind him that Peter Mandelson, a co-conspirator in the modernisation of his party, had once observed that New Labour was “intensely relaxed” about people becoming “filthy rich”. So how does Blair feel about living in private jets? Hasn’t he been seduced by the bling?

This evokes a pained frown. Most of his time, he protests, is spent on unpaid work – the role of Middle East envoy that a few days earlier had taken him to Barack Obama’s White House, his faith foundation, the work on governance in Africa and the rest. The speeches and the consultancy pay the bills for the pro bono.

“I would have been happy to carry on with being prime minister; I’ve been in public service for 25 years. I would have been happy taking the European job and going on a European salary ... I’d be happy to go back to a public service job one day but if I don’t I’ve got the ability to make money, and I make it, and I provide for my family and I can do the things that I believe in doing.” The proceeds of the book – something upwards of £4m – have been pledged to a military charity helping the casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stuffy people like me are troubled by the idea of former prime ministers trading off their political careers. But Blair has a point. The flip-side of political leaders getting younger is that they retire in their prime. Can we really insist that fit fifty-somethings disappear into retirement or accept a cap on their earnings?

In any event, I don’t think the money is the motivation. What Blair really wants is to remain at the centre of things; to be a player. Wealth is an adjunct.

By now, we are finishing our main courses. I have opted for the day’s special – a sublime ravioli filled with spinach and ricotta. Blair nods approvingly at his char-grilled squid with chilli and garlic. Trying to trip him up reminds me why he was so good. When he was prime minister I used to see quite a lot of him. Before each encounter I would tell myself that this time I would not be bamboozled. Maddeningly, 20 minutes into the conversation, I would be thinking “Well, maybe he’s right after all.”

Blair told visitors to Downing Street what they wanted to hear – sometimes, as he admits in the book – bending the truth to that aim. I remember a colleague remarking that he “always believed what he said at the moment he said it”. So, you could add, did the visitors.

His gift, though, is about more than charm and the emotional intuition of a natural communicator. The big thing about Blair is that he knows how to frame an argument. Most politicians get lost in the foothills of tactics. He has a strategic brain – a view of the world – and the self-belief to follow it through.

The self-belief bit, of course, turned out to be his weakness as well as his strength. I would like to say that when the conversation turned to Iraq, I succeeded in pushing Blair up against a wall until he repented. I didn’t. Partly because I was ambivalent about the war at the time – I always thought getting rid of Saddam Hussein was rather a good thing. And partly because I deprecate the implicit assumption of many of the anti-war crowd that the world would be such a great place if Iraq and Iran were still fighting themselves to a standstill.

In any event he has heard the charges too many times to change his answers now: “We acted on the information that we had at the time; we also acted with a certain sense of urgency after September 11. I think people forget that.”

Yes, of course, he regrets the loss and damaged lives of the war but he is not going to say he regrets the decision to go to war. “We used to have a policy of supporting Saddam, to be a brake on Iran, and look what happened: it didn’t work, in the same way we actually armed some of the Mujahaddin in order to take on the Russians – it didn’t work, let’s learn the lesson.”

You could say Iraq tested to destruction his doctrine of liberal interventionism. On the other hand, are we to conclude that everything will be hunky-dory if only we leave the tyrants alone?

We opt for coffee rather than dessert, but it comes with a small selection of home-made sorbets and petit fours. This time I consider my waistline and stick, like Blair, with the sorbet.

Time is passing. Blair’s account of his titanic struggle with Gordon Brown grabbed even more headlines than Iraq. Some consider his description of his former colleague to be overly harsh; others wonder why he admits that, as prime minister, he did not feel strong enough to sack him.

The only point he makes now is that the struggle was more about the direction of the New Labour government than about who should be prime minister. “I think you need to make it clear there was a policy disagreement. People used to write this whole relationship up as if it was just a personal spat about a job – it wasn’t for me at all,” he says.

Our chef stands by the front desk as we leave. It’s my first lunch with a politician for a long time where the food has left a real impression. Usually it gets in the way.

Back in the office I pick up The New York Times to read the columnist Maureen Dowd’s take on the memoir. It seems I had been lunching with a delusional maniac. The thought occurs that perhaps I should have carted him off to Guantánamo. That’s the thing, though, about Blair. He awakens in many liberals the unhinged rage that Barack Obama draws from America’s Tea Party crowd. What to do, though, about all those people who are buying – even enjoying – his book?

Philip Stephens is the FT’s chief political commentator

..................................................

Locanda Locatelli

8 Seymour Street, London W1

Contribution to charity £1

Bottle sparkling water £3.50

Broad beans, rocket and ewe cheese salad £9.50

Green bean salad, potato and black truffle £16.50

Char-grilled squid, chilli and garlic £28

Ravioli with ricotta and spinach £12.50

Espresso x 2 £5

An assortment of sorbets and petit fours (on the house)

Total (including optional service) £90

..................................................

How successful has Blair been as Middle East envoy?

Of the many jobs and functions that Tony Blair has taken on since leaving 10 Downing Street, only one has provided the former British leader with any kind of international clout: his role as Middle East envoy, writes Tobias Buck.

Blair with Jenin governor Qadoura Mousa, left, and Israeli vice prime minister Silvan Shalom, 2009

Blair was appointed representative of the Middle East Quartet – the US, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia – almost immediately on leaving office in 2007. The post meant returning to a region where he is remembered, above all, for his role in the deeply unpopular invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the time, a number of analysts and diplomats cautioned that this association made him an improbable figure to advance peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. That concern was gradually dispelled once Blair set up his office in Jerusalem's famous American Colony Hotel. He made an early impression on his Israeli and Palestinian interlocutors, who noted both his dedication and easy-going charm (a rare commodity in Middle Eastern political circles).

More importantly, it soon became clear that Blair had not arrived with the intention of remaking the Middle East. He was, in fact, never supposed to play the role of peacemaker: his Quartet mandate spells out clearly that his primary task is to help improve the governance of the Palestinian territories and boost the Palestinian economy. According to his advisers, this was the mandate Blair himself wanted, believing that economic growth and good governance were a crucial – and previously overlooked – part of the strategy to end decades of bloody conflict.

What it means in practice is that Blair has been engaged above all in unglamorous aspects of Middle East politics: persuading Israel to lift a checkpoint in the West Bank; getting the Israeli army to approve the shipment of sewage pipes to the Gaza Strip; or calling on Gulf sheikhs to increase their funding for the Palestinian Authority.

There is no doubt that both the Palestinian economy and the quality of Palestinian governance have improved drastically since Blair entered the arena. However, many observers say most of the credit for the recent upswing goes to Salam Fayyad, the US-educated economist who serves as Palestinian prime minister. Blair has certainly contributed, in his role as a facilitator and mediator between the two sides, to the economic and political improvements in the West Bank but it is not easy to quantify how influential his actions have been.

“It is hard to say,” replied one senior adviser to the Palestinian Authority when asked about Blair’s contribution. “Many people work on many issues, but every word helps. Blair has tried his best to be successful but it is not always easy.”

Tobias Buck is the FT’s Jerusalem bureau chief

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy | Terms

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2010.

FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Tony Blair

Share this|

________________________

In Chile, Trapped Miners Dig in for the Long Haul - WSJ.com

Underground Dreams: Beer, Hugs and Weddings

By MATTHEW MOFFETT

SAN JOSÉ MINE, Chile—Claudio Yáñez wants beer and a hot dog. Esteban Rojas wants to finally have a real church wedding with his wife of 25 years. Raúl Bustos wants to hug his five-year-old daughter.


For Chileans, these men and their colleagues are known simply as "Los 33"—the 33 miners who have been trapped half a mile below ground since the Aug. 5 collapse of the San José mine. The men have captured the attention of the world by surviving longer underground than all but a handful of mine accident victims.

The Miracle of the San Jose Mine

View Slideshow

Zuma Press

Ranging in age from 19 to 63, they include a former professional soccer player, a Bolivian immigrant in his first week at the mine, a salty former seaman who had premonitions about an accident and a man in his 50s who is still waiting to see the grandson born just before the cave-in occurred.

What Chileans are calling the "Miracle of the San José Mine" is the tale of how unthinkable adversity turned this motley collection of miners into a doggedly disciplined unit, how a recently elected billionaire president risked his reputation in spearheading their rescue and how family members never lost hope.

The story isn't by any means over. It will take three to four months for a 30-ton drill to gouge a 2,200-foot tunnel down to the chamber where the men are holed up. The plan is to hoist the men out one-by-one, a journey that could take about 40 minutes for each miner.

Footage released showing trapped Chilean miners in good spirits, as they come to terms with their months long wait to be freed.

In the meantime, rescuers send food, water and letters to the miners in tubes that whoosh down the four-inch shaft that serves as the miners' umbilical cord. Doctors are gradually ratcheting up the caloric intake of the men who each lost an average 20 pounds on rations, according to health workers. On Thursday the miners got their closest thing to a full meal in weeks: stewed apples and bread with quince jelly.

In a video released Thursday, the men—shirtless, scrawny, with scraggly beards, but big smiles—showed the world their temporary home. "This is the famous shelter," said one of the men. They pointed to a makeshift "casino," where they played dominoes, and demonstrated how they had divided tasks needed to keep the refuge running. One miner was keeping a journal on all that had happened. "Get us out of here soon," said another, in the spectral lantern-light of the mine.

The men can walk a distance through some unblocked tunnels, but spend most of their time in a couple of shelters that are relatively well ventilated and protected from cave-ins.


Physiologically and psychologically, the miners have entered seldom-explored territory, says Jeff Dyche, a James Madison University psychologist, who studied submariners when he served in the U.S. Navy.

View Full Image

Without sunlight serving as a regulator, the human body clock runs about 24 and a half hours, Mr. Dyche says, which means the miners are "going to be completely disengaged from what time it is in the outside world." To make sure the miners are alert on the day of the rescue, he says, doctors will have to try and re-sync the men's body rhythms by putting them on the same sleeping and waking schedule as people above ground.

Rescue planners at the state copper company, Corporacion Nacional del Cobre, have been discussing whether it would be necessary to blindfold the miners during the extraction or or conduct the operation at night, so they aren't overwhelmed by the light when they come out.

More immediately, government rescuers are grappling with the question of how much control to place on the miners' communication with loved ones. Earlier this week, family members said government psychologists had asked to review the letters they send down to the miners to make sure they avoided potentially upsetting issues, such as the fact the men may not be getting out of the ground until Christmas. Luciano Reygada, whose father is in the mine, said a psychologist told him, "Don't say that we hope you come out soon. Just say that we'll be waiting for you when you come out." Rescuers have since said they gently told the 33 of their estimated time of departure, and the miners seemed to take it in stride.




Sergio Donoso, the uncle of Raúl Bustos, feels responsible for his nephew's predicament. Six months ago, after one of the biggest earthquakes in a century along with a roiling tsunami smashed the southern shipyard where Mr. Bustos worked, Mr. Donoso suggested he travel north, to the mines. "He was worried about future catastrophes, so I told him there were stable jobs in mining," said Mr. Donoso, who has been keeping vigil above the mine.

Miners trapped underground for three weeks in Chile are offered unusual help from the space agency NASA as they prepare to endure further weeks below ground. Video Courtesy of Reuters.


Mr. Bustos' mother, Rosa Ibañez, came to the mine right away from her home in far-off southern Chile. It was the first time she'd flown on a plane. In Mr. Bustos' first letter to his family this week, he said that he'd come up with a nickname for the diamond-tipped drill that rescuers had used to locate the men's underground shelter: He called it "María Paz," in honor of his five-year-old daughter, who relatives say is a handful.

Gregory Belenky, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, says the Israeli military found during the 1973 Yom Kippur war that the wrong kind of communication with family could add to stress. But Mr. Belenky, who served 29 years in the U.S. Army working on combat stress and other issues, thinks he would level with the miners about the rescue strategy "so they can plan, adjust expectations and so everyone is on the same page."

The plight of the 33 men has been an eye opener for many Chileans. One of Latin America's most advanced economies, Chile has been a darling on Wall Street for its free-market ethos. Its capital, Santiago, is clean and modern, with a scaled-down version of the Chrysler Building. But despite the emergence of other industries, including finance and construction, mining remains the bedrock of the economy, accounting for the biggest share of exports and output. The accident and rescue have allowed Chileans to get acquainted with people who are responsible for much of the country's prosperity, but remain largely hidden from view due to the very nature of their work.

When the miners broke out into a ragged chorus of the national anthem after the first telephone contact was made with them on Monday, it was as "as though we couldn't believe that some countrymen are still that way, of that caliber and that timber," wrote Daniel Mansuy, a professor of political philosophy, in the Santiago newspaper La Tercera. Family members holding vigil above the mine said it more simply on a message emblazoned in marker on a Chilean flag: "Chile without miners isn't Chile."

The miners had no way of knowing what was in store for them when they showed up for their shift that fateful Thursday, Aug. 5. Like many of the miners, Mr. Yañez, who had worked eight months in the mine after leaving a low-paying construction job, "was just desperate for a paycheck" says his half-brother Pablo Lagos.

Twenty-four-year-old Bolivian Carlos Mamani, who emigrated to Chile to find work, was only in his first week at the mine, his brother Cesar Mamani told Chilean television.

While Chile on the whole has a good mining safety record, smaller to mid-sized mines like San José often escaped scrutiny by the understaffed mine regulator, according to unions and workplace-safety experts. After the accident, Chile President Sebastián Piñera cleaned house at the regulatory agency and announced the government would take a tougher line in the future.

The 121-year-old mine, operated by Chile's Compañia Minera San Esteban Primera, had been shut down for about a year by regulators in 2007 after an explosion killed a miner. Mario Gomez, a former sailor who at 63 is the oldest of the trapped San José miners, had a nephew who lost a leg in an accident at the mine several years before that. Mr. Gomez's wife, Lilian Ramirez, said her husband told her he was afraid of going to work not long before the collapse.

The collapse occurred at around at around 2 p.m., sending up a massive dust cloud. "We felt like the mountain was coming down on top of us and without knowing what was happening," Luis Urzua, one of the leaders of the trapped men, would later say in a phone hookup with Mr. Piñera. "Then came the dust cloud, like four or five hours in which we couldn't see anything." The men lost a chance to escape through a ventilation duct in the first days of the crisis because mine managers hadn't installed an emergency ladder, as required by law, Chile's mining minister, Laurence Golborne said.

Firemen weren't alerted of the accident by the mine managers until about six hours after it had occurred. The delay in reporting the collapse is part of a wide-ranging investigation into the mine by regulators and Chile's Congress. Minera San Esteban Primera's owners have said they tried to run a safe operation. They didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

The day after the cave-in, civil defense officials had mustered a 40-man rescue crew to go in after the missing miners. But the mission nearly wrought another tragedy, as the rescuers confronted a cascade of falling rock and buckling walls. "Rocks, dust, darkness, heat," said fire captain Rafael Gonzalez Perez. "It was impossible."
The mine collapse presented a challenge for President Piñera, a billionaire airline and television mogul, who took office in March. Chile's first conservative president in two decades, Mr. Piñera has promised to run Chile as efficiently as he had his businesses. In a gamble that might have backfired if the rescue had failed, he cut short a trip to Colombia to go to the mine and has made three follow-up trips since. "It was a big bet but also a very important one at the core of his political message" of competence, said political scientist Patricio Navia.

Unable to send in rescuers to fetch the miners, the government shifted to Plan B: Drilling down from the surface after the trapped men.

But after a couple of days, the effort was looking like a geological shot in the dark. Engineers were finding the maps of mine weren't accurate. "The situation is very complex," President Piñera said at the time. "The mine continues collapsing. It has a geologic fault. The mine is alive and that enormously obstructs rescue work."

Families at the site started hunkering down for a long haul, putting up tents or crude lean-tos made of garbage bags stretched above poles. Dubbed Campamento Esperanza, Camp Hope, the place took on a somewhat surreal air. The government started trucking in water and food, as well as sending counselors, cooks and kindergarten teachers. Shrines with votive candles and statues of baby-faced Saint Lorenzo, the patron saint of miners who is often decked out in a hard hat, sprang up alongside television satellite trucks and portalets. Other iconic figures were called on for luck. Relatives of 34-year old Edison Pena put the miner's picture on a placard along with Elvis Presley, assuring him that "you will be bigger than Elvis" after emerging from the mine.

Below ground the 33 miners were also getting organized. Mr. Urzúa, a soccer coach in his spare time, was one of the leaders. He oversaw the rationing of their food stores, so that miners could have a couple of mouthfuls of tuna, along with a canned peach and some milk every 48 hours. But after two weeks the miners had almost exhausted their provisions, Mr. Urzúa said.

Worry also spread through the camp full of families. Ana Funes, a social worker from a nearby town, organized art classes for children as a diversion. But some kids' anxieties consumed them, says Ms. Funes. On a bulletin board, along with crayon drawings of Spiderman and a fairy princess, was a self-portrait of a pig-tailed girl with tears streaming down her cheeks. "I love you, cousin," was the caption.

By the end of last week, a number of the families were losing faith in the government drilling strategy. They pressed Mr. Piñera's rescue team to let 10 volunteers into the bowels of the mine to bring out their loved ones. Government officials said that was foolhardy.

"We have done and will continue doing what's humanly possible," President Piñera said. "But not everything is in the hands of our engineers and technicians. It's also in the hands of God."

A little after 6 a.m. last Sunday the probe broke through an underground chamber, a short distance from the miners' main shelter. The 28-year-old drill operator, Eduardo Guerra, thought he felt some vibrations coming from below. Some engineers came over with stethoscopes and said they heard something, too. When Mr. Guerra pulled the probe out of the ground, a plastic bag had been attached to the drill tip with cable and rubber bands.

Inside the bag was a note painted in red: "We are well in the shelter the 33."

Write to Matthew Moffett at matthew.moffett@wsj.comCopyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
www.djreprints.com
In Chile, Trapped Miners Dig in for the Long Haul - WSJ.com

Share|