THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALWEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020 N ADuncan Smith, a prominent
Brexit supporter, who has lately
called on the British government
to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned
social media platform, arguing
that it poses as much of a threat as
Huawei.
Mr. Pompeo has said the United
States was looking at banning Tik-
Tok and other Chinese social me-
dia platforms.
With tensions escalating be-
tween Western countries and
China, Britain has taken a series
of more aggressive steps in recent
days. On Monday, it suspended an
extradition treaty with Hong
Kong to protest the new security
law that tightened China’s grip on
the former British colony and is
seen by critics as jeopardizing
long-cherished freedoms there.
The suspension, ostensibly
made in response to fears that
anyone extradited to Hong Kong
from Britain could be sent on to
mainland China to face prosecu-
tion, was another indication that
Western countries’ willingness to
confront China has grown firmer
since Beijing last month adopted
the sweeping security law.
For Mr. Pompeo, who has de-
scribed China as the “central
threat of our times,” the visit was
an opportunity to solidify Britain’s
support for a more confronta-
tional approach to China.
“It’s not about language, it’s not
about words,” Mr. Pompeo said at
a news conference with Mr. Raab
on Tuesday. “We want every na-
tion to work together to push back
against the Chinese Communist
Party’s efforts in every dimension
that I described to you today.”
He added, “That certainly in-
cludes the United Kingdom.”
Within Britain, too, there are
signs that the pressure on Mr.
Johnson to continue his campaign
against China will not abate. Anti-
China lawmakers in Britain are
said to be preparing to try to block
efforts by a state-owned Chinese
nuclear power company to ex-
pand its footprint in Britain.LONDON — Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo on Tuesday cheered
the hardening British posture to-
ward China and appealed for a
global coalition against the coun-
try, blaming the Chinese Commu-
nist Party for what he described
as exploitation of the coronavirus
pandemic “to further its own in-
terests.”
Mr. Pompeo made the remarks
on a visit to Britain, which in itself
was something of a victory lap for
the Trump administration. It had
previously indicated that Britain
had to choose whether to side with
Beijing or Washington on matters
like China’s role in telecommuni-
cations infrastructure.
The secretary of state heaped
praise on Dominic Raab, Britain’s
foreign secretary, for his govern-
ment’s decision last week to ban
equipment supplied by the Chi-
nese technology giant Huawei
from the country’s high-speed
wireless network, among other
things.
“I want to take this opportunity
to congratulate the British gov-
ernment for its principled re-
sponses to these challenges,” Mr.
Pompeo said. “Well done.”
The two men dismissed suspi-
cions that Britain’s decisions had
come at the behest of an American
government locked in a widening
confrontation with China. But an-
alysts said that Mr. Pompeo’s em-
brace of his British counterparts
would only make it more difficult
for Prime Minister Boris Johnson
to walk back from a deepening rift
with Beijing.
China’s ambassador to London,
Liu Xiaoming, had lashed out at
Britain on Monday night, accus-
ing it of interfering in Chinese in-
ternal affairs and violating inter-
national law in its opposition to
China’s crackdown on Hong Kong.
Analysts said Mr. Pompeo’s re-
marks could further aggravate
Britain’s worsening ties with
China.
“Pompeo’s sort of fulsome
praise of how the British govern-
ment has been working with the
Americans is likely to make the
Chinese response harder,” said
Professor Steve Tsang, the direc-
tor of the SOAS China Institute in
London. “Now that may be what
Pompeo wants to see. But that’s
not what Dominic Raab or Boris
Johnson want to see.”
Professor Tsang said that Brit-
ain’s rebuff of Huawei had seemed
calibrated not to provoke an out-
size response from Beijing, since
Mr. Johnson gave Huawei five
months to continue selling equip-
ment for Britain’s 5G networks be-
fore the ban takes effect. Mr. John-
son, a self-described “Sinophile,”
has in the past praised efforts to
take advantage of commercial op-
portunities through trade with
China.
“Johnson is trying to minimize
the damages,” Professor Tsang
said.
But Mr. Johnson has been
forced to change course in recent
months as British public opinion,
and the mood of his own Conser-
vative Party, hardened in re-
sponse to China’s crackdown on
Hong Kong and its handling of the
pandemic.
Some Conservative lawmakers,
among them the same politicians
who once pushed a hard line on
Britain’s exit from the European
Union, have organized what they
call the China Research Group,
demanding that the government
take a more aggressive approach
to China for a number of reasons.
Among them are China’s tough
treatment of Uighur Muslims in
Xinjiang and fears that a United
States-Britain trade deal — one of
the desired outcomes of Brexit —
would be jeopardized if Mr. John-
son spurned President Trump’s
urgings for a more combative
China policy.
Mr. Pompeo met with some of
those anti-China lawmakers from
Britain’s Conservative Party on
Tuesday. Among them was IainPompeo Cheers Britain’s China Stance
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain Tuesday in London.
POOL PHOTO BY ANDY RAINBy BENJAMIN MUELLERROME — The long-awaited ap-
pearance in court of Andrea Varri-
ale, a crucial witness in a murder
case against two young American
men accused of killing an Italian
law enforcement officer last year,
played out in a Rome courtroom
this month.
Three tension-filled days of
sworn testimony shed some light
on how a night of routine police
work ended in tragedy, in a case
that hinges on one fact: whether
the two defendants were aware
that the witness and his partner
were plainclothes officers when
they approached the Americans
on an empty street corner before
dawn.
Officer Varriale and his partner
that night, Deputy Brig. Mario
Cerciello Rega, engaged in a brief
scuffle with the two Americans,
who had been vacationing in
Rome, while on a patrol shift in the
early hours of July 26, 2019.
Brigadier Cerciello Rega was
repeatedly stabbed with a knife,
and the two Americans —
Finnegan Elder, now 20, and Ga-
briel Natale Hjorth, now 19 — are
on trial, accused of his murder.
They have admitted to killing the
officer.
The case has attracted signifi-
cant media attention in Italy and
the United States, in part because
of the youth of those involved.
Brigadier Cerciello Rega, 35, was
a member of the Carabinieri, Ita-
ly’s national military police force,
and newly married. His death
stunned Italians at a time when
the country was being run by a
center-right coalition that stoked
fears — without evidence — that
the nation was being racked by vi-
olent crimes mostly committed by
foreigners.
Proceedings reopened to the
news media this month after a
one-month halt and three months
of closed-door hearings because
of coronavirus restrictions.
Rome’s courthouse remains
closed to the public.
The encounter between the
American teenagers and the offi-
cers had been set up to swap a
backpack the teenagers had stol-
en earlier. Prosecutors say the
teenagers attacked the officers to
avoid arrest, while the defense ar-
gues that the Americans acted in
self-defense, believing the plain-
clothes officers to be ill-inten-
tioned thugs.
On the stand, Officer Varriale
testified that he and his partner
had clearly identified themselves
as Carabinieri as they approached
the teenagers. He said he pulled
out his wallet, flipped it open to
show his badge, then tucked it into
the rear pocket of his jeans so he
could move closer, empty-handed.
A fight immediately ensued,
and he began rolling around on
the ground with Mr. Natale
Hjorth, “clumsily,” he said. Then,he said, “I heard Mario scream,
‘Stop, stop, Carabinieri,’ with a
voice that wasn’t his own,” so he
let the teenager go and attended
to his partner.
Prosecutors played the an-
guished telephone call Officer
Varriale made for an ambulance
as Brigadier Cerciello Rega lay
dying. His widow, Rosa Maria Er-
silia, wept, clutching a laminated
photo of her dead husband in uni-
form. The emotion was too much
for Ms. Ersilia’s father, Mario, who
collapsed and had to be taken to a
hospital last week, abruptly end-
ing that day’s proceedings.
The death of Brigadier Cerciello
Rega was the last act of a convo-
luted drama that began in a
trendy Rome neighborhood full of
nightclubs where the two Ameri-
cans had gone to buy drugs earlier
in the evening. The teenagers
were sold an aspirin substitute in-stead of cocaine, and they
grabbed the backpack of Sergio
Brugiatelli, the Roman who had
acted as a middleman in the deal,
demanding money and cocaine
for its return. The officer died dur-
ing an operation to recover the
backpack.
Over two full days on the stand,
defense lawyers pointed to incon-
sistencies in Officer Varriale’s
earlier depositions and critiqued
actions they said were inappropri-
ate.
Mr. Natale Hjorth was at one
point blindfolded and handcuffed
while he was detained, raising ac-
cusations of unlawful treatment.
Officer Varriale made a video of
Mr. Natale Hjorth in that moment,
asking the defendant several
questions, but he said in court that
he had not wanted to interrogate
him. He admitted that treating a
detained person in such a way“seemed strange,” but he said
many of his superiors were in the
room, so he didn’t think there was
cause to intervene.
The jury also heard that when
he was first interrogated in the
days after the crime, Officer Varri-
ale told his superiors that he and
the brigadier had brought their
guns with them that night, a detail
that was later found to be false. He
is currently on trial in a military
court for not carrying his service
weapon. On the stand, he said that
he had made a mistake in lying to
his superiors, calling the decision
“thoughtless” and “foolish.”
“It was my decision that night”
to go out without a gun, one he had
not repeated since, he said Mon-
day.
But Officer Varriale said his
memory failed him when the de-
fense questioned him on other de-
tails, including calls placed to and
from his cellphone on the night of
the crime. Those calls went to two
off-duty Carabinieri officers who
had been tailing Mr. Elder, Mr. Na-
tale Hjorth and Mr. Brugiatelli for
an hour, believing a drug deal was
about to occur.
As interpreters whispered
translations, both defendants sat
silently throughout the pro-
cedures while their lawyers butt-
ed heads with prosecutors and Mr.
Varriale’s lawyer. Tempers occa-
sionally flared. Ms. Ersilia, the
brigadier’s widow, sat quietly a
few rows behind them with other
family members.
Commemorations were
planned this week in Rome and
Somma Vesuviana, Brigadier Cer-
ciello Rega’s hometown, to mark
the anniversary of his death.
On July 13, a two-story poster
appeared on a palazzo next to the
street corner where he was
stabbed to commemorate what
would have been his 36th birthday
and the 206th anniversary of the
foundation of the Carabinieri, in- Next to a smiling photo of
Brigadier Cerciello Rega, an in-
scription read: “ ‘I’ll send you a
kiss with the wind and I know that
you’ll feel it.’ Your wife.”
Officer Testifies Against Two Americans
In Killing of Military Policeman in Rome
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDOCarabinieri Officer Andrea Varriale, center left, in a Rome court.RICCARDO DE LUCA/ASSOCIATED PRESSA lethal stabbing that
occurred when the
accused were teens.
“No one is,” the report’s authors
said.
“The outrage isn’t if there is in-
terference,” said Kevan Jones, a
Labour Party member of Parlia-
ment who served on the intelli-
gence committee that released
the report. “The outrage is no one
wanted to know if there was inter-
ference.”
The release of the report came
more than seven months after
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s
Conservative Party racked up an
80-seat majority in Parliament
and almost 18 months after the
end of the inquiry by the Intelli-
gence and Security Committee, a
parliamentary body that oversees
the country’s spy agencies.
Still, it was eagerly awaited in
Britain, where anxieties about
Russia’s behavior range from in-
fluence-peddling with oligarchs in
London to the poisoning of a for-
mer Russian intelligence agent
and his daughter in Salisbury,
England.
The report also landed in the
heat of an American presidential
election, shadowed by questions
about ties between President
Trump and Russia, as well as fears
of renewed foreign tampering, not
just by Russia, but also by China
and Iran.
The committee’s account char-
acterized Russia as a reckless
country bent on recapturing its
status as a “great power,” primari-
ly by destabilizing those in the
West. “The security threat posed
by Russia is difficult for the West
to manage as, in our view and that
of many others, it appears funda-
mentally nihilistic,” the authors
said.
Experts said the report showed
parallels between Britain and the
United States in the failure to pick
up warning signs, but also impor-
tant differences. The F.B.I. and
other American agencies, they
said, had investigated election in-
terference more aggressively
than their British counterparts,
while the British were ahead of
the United States in scrutinizing
how Russian money had cor-
rupted politics.
“This is one of the pieces that is
not really well understood in the
U.S.,” said Laura Rosenberger, di-
rector of the Alliance for Securing
Democracy, which tracks Russian
disinformation efforts in the
United States. “Whether there is
dirty Russian money that has
flowed into our political system.”
The report described how
British politicians had welcomed
oligarchs to London, allowing
them to launder their illicit money
through what it called the London
“laundromat.” A growth industry
of “enablers” — lawyers, account-
ants, real estate agents, and pub-
lic relations consultants — sprang
up to serve their needs.
These people, the report said,
“played a role, wittingly or unwit-
tingly, in the extension of Russian
influence which is often linked to
promoting the nefarious interests
of the Russian state.”
Several members of the House
of Lords, the report said, had busi-
ness interests linked to Russia or
worked for companies with Rus-
sian ties. It urged an investigation
of them, though it did not name
any names. That information, as
well as the names of politicians
who received donations, was re-
dacted from the public report,
along with other sensitive intelli-
gence.
“The most disturbing thing is
the recognition of what the Rus-
sian government has gotten away,
under our eyes,” said William F.
Browder, an American-born
British financier who has worked
extensively in Russia and pro-
vided evidence to the committee.
“The government, and particu-
larly law enforcement, has been
toothless.”
The report painted a picture of
years of Russian interference
through disinformation spread by
traditional media outlets, like the
cable-TV channel RT, and by the
use of internet bots and trolls. This
activity dated back to the Scottish
independence referendum in
2014, but it was never confronted
by the country’s political estab-
lishment or by an intelligence
community with other priorities.Focused more on clandestine
operations, the spy agencies were
anxious to keep their distance
from political campaigns, regard-
ing them as a “hot potato,” the re-
port said. Nor was it clear who in
the government was in charge of
countering the Russian threat to
destabilize Britain’s political
process. “It has been surprisingly
difficult to establish who has re-
sponsibility for what,” the report
said.
Despite pressing questions, thereport said the government had
shown little interest in investigat-
ing whether the Brexit referen-
dum was targeted by Russia. The
government responded that it had
“seen no evidence of successful in-
terference in the E.U. referen-
dum” and dismissed the need for
further investigation.
But the committee suggested
that the reason no evidence had
been uncovered was because no-
body had looked for it.
“In response to our request forwritten evidence at the outset of
the inquiry, MI5 initially provided
just six lines of text,” the commit-
tee said. Had the intelligence
agencies conducted a threat as-
sessment before the vote, it add-
ed, it was “inconceivable” that
they would not have concluded
there was a Russian threat.
Among the report’s most politi-
cally salient conclusions might be
about a Russian influence cam-
paign during the Scottish inde-
pendence referendum. National-
ist sentiment is surging again in
Scotland, partly because many
voters consider the Scottish au-
thorities to have handled the coro-
navirus pandemic better than the
government in England. Based on
its previous behavior, some ex-
perts said, Russia would try again
to encourage the fracturing of the
United Kingdom.
“That obviously has implica-
tions for next year’s Scottish elec-
tions, and the polling on referen-
dums,” said Bronwen Maddox, di-
rector of the Institute for Govern-ment, a research institute in
London. “All this is very, very rele-
vant.”
Concerns about Russian med-
dling and aggression stretch back
more than a decade to the death in
2006 of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a
former K.G.B. officer and critic of
the Kremlin, who was killed in
London using a radioactive poi-
son, polonium-210, believed to
have been administered in a cup
of tea. An inquiry concluded that
his killing “was probably ap-
proved” by President Vladimir V.
Putin.
In 2018, another former Russian
spy, Sergei Skripal, and his 33-
year-old daughter, Yulia, were
found seriously ill on a bench in
Salisbury, after a poisoning attack
that left them hospitalized for
weeks. Britain accused two Rus-
sians of using a rare nerve agent
to try to kill Mr. Skripal, and ex-
pelled 23 Russian diplomats in re-
taliation.
Although the report was ap-
proved by Downing Street in 2019,
its release was held up before the
election that gave Mr. Johnson his
decisive parliamentary majority.
Critics said he had been compro-
mised by donations to his party
from wealthy Russians living in
Britain and they argued that the
report was delayed unnecessarily.
After the election, there was a
second delay while Downing
Street agreed on the membership
of a new Intelligence and Security
Committee.
While the publicly available
part of the report unearthed little
new material, one expert said it
underscored the need to widen the
focus and improve the coordina-
tion of Britain’s intelligence appa-
ratus. “We did know most of this,”
said Martin Innes, director of the
Crime and Security Research In-
stitute at Cardiff University, “but
people were not joining the dots
and seeing that quite a serious sit-
uation was developing.”
“What Russia wants is to be
able to play great power politics,”
Professor Innes said. “And one of
the ways of doing that is by de-
stabilizing the U.K. and some of its
close allies to create that space to
maneuver.”Report Blasts U.K. for Ignoring Russian Efforts to Corrode Democracy
From Page AANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCHRIS J RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGESAbove, an anti-Brexit protest.
Left, an inquiry into the 2018
poisoning of Sergei Skripal.