the times | Thursday December 3 2020 2GM 39
The man in charge of America’s fight
against Islamic State has been fired and
his unit disbanded, the latest victims of
a pre-departure purge of the Pentagon
by President Trump.
The Pentagon said that Christopher
Maier, whose title since 2017 had been
head of the Defeat Isis Task Force, had
been a victim of his own success, but he
is one of multiple officials to have been
removed since Mr Trump lost the US
presidential election last month.
Critics have said that at best Mr
Trump was hoping to cement his legacy
by declaring that he had “defeated Isis”,
and installing loyalists to make this
claim. However, Mr Maier was also said
XINHUA ALAMY LIVE NEWS; WANG LONGHUA/VCG/GETTY IMAGESUS accuses ally of
funding Russian
fighters in Libya
Catherine Philp
Diplomatic CorrespondentThe Pentagon has said that the UAE is
funding Russian mercenaries to fight
the US-backed government of Libya as
the Trump administration prepares to
sell the Gulf state $23 billion of
weapons.
President Trump is attempting to
rush through the proposed arms sale to
Abu Dhabi, including F-35 fighter jets
and armed Reaper drones, before he
leaves office.
A report by the Pentagon’s inspector
general, however, determines that the
UAE is the main financial backer of
Wagner, the Russian mercenary group
in Libya, as its agents fight against the
internationally recognised government
in Tripoli, in the first official public
linking of the two.
One US diplomat said that it
amounted to a warning to the UAE
over their aggressive role in a conflict,
which pits them against the interests of
their western allies. Nato has warned
that Russia may be using the conflict in
Libya to establish a presence on
Europe’s southern flank.
Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the
Senate foreign affairs committee,
called the proposed sale “massive and
unprecedented” and said it was “hard to
overstate the danger of rushing this
through”.
Mr Murphy, one of the main interloc-
utors between the British government
and the Joe Biden transition team, said
there were “a mind-blowing number of
unsettled issues and questions the ad-
ministration couldn’t answer”, includ-
ing any guarantees the UAE might
have given about the use of the weap-
ons in the region, the potential for tech-
nology transfer to China and Russia,
and the threat of fuelling a new arms
race in the Middle East.
The UAE weapons deal would be the
second largest American sale of dronesafter Israel. “Query whether what the
Middle East is missing is lethal weapon-
ised Reaper drones?” Mr Murphy
tweeted. “Fuelling an arms race in the
Middle East is just bad policy — Iran
will respond with its own ramp-up, and
every other Gulf nation will want simi-
lar weapons to keep up with the UAE?”
Israel has traditionally opposed such
sales and has an agreement with the US
that American weapons sales in the
region would not impair its “qualitative
military edge” over its neighbours.
However, it quietly dropped its objec-
tions when the Trump administration
announced it had brokered an agree-
ment normalising relations between
Israel and the UAE, paving the way for
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, to
announce the arms deal. JaredKushner, Mr Trump’s senior adviser
and son-in-law, is on a trip to Qatar and
Saudi Arabia, where it is thought he
would pressure the Saudis over
reaching a similar normalisation deal
with Israel as the UAE.
Mohammed bin Zayed, 58, the de
facto leader of the UAE, is arguably the
most powerful man in the Arab world.
During the Trump administration, he
has forged a bellicose path in the
region, targeting his twin obsessions of
the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. In
Libya, he aims to blunt the influence of
Islamist factions while in Yemen he
co-operated with the Saudis to bomb
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.Mohammed bin
Zayed, the UAE
de facto leader,
aims to blunt
the influence
of Islamistscould provide
scientists with answers
as to how the moon
was formed and its
precise age.
The Chang’e-5
touched down
successfully at 3.11pm
on Tuesday, China’s
space administration
said, and began
drilling for rocks two
metres below the
surface, sweeping up
soil with a mechanicalarm. After the
collection operation is
completed the probe’s
ascender will lift off
and dock with a
module that is orbiting
the moon. The module
will then head home,
aiming to deliver the
first fresh moon
samples to Earth since
1976.
That will mark
another success for
China’s spaceprogramme, which the
Communist Party sees
as a symbol of
national prestige. Last
year China became
the first nation to land
a probe on the largely
unexplored far side of
the moon. The
Chang’e-5 is the third
spacecraft to
successfully land on
the moon in the 21st
century; the other two
were also from China.The Chang’e-5 touches down on the surface of the moon, painstakingly
monitored by the space administration team in Beijing. The craft was carried
up by a Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang launch site last weekPresident sacks adviser in
charge of war against Isis
to be playing a key role in preparing the
incoming Biden administration.
Mr Maier’s role involved co-ordina-
tion of the military and strategic cam-
paign against Isis. Having served under
George W Bush and Barack Obama, he
was a career national security adviser of
the sort Mr Trump resented.
The Pentagon said the task force’s
work and employees would be ab-
sorbed into the department after “the
success of the military fight to destroy
the so-called physical caliphate of Isis”.
The two officials who will take over
Mr Maier’s work, Ezra Cohen-Watnick
and Anthony Tata, defence undersec-
retaries for intelligence and policy re-
spectively, are Trump loyalists appoint-
ed when their predecessors were fired
immediately after the election.Richard Spencer
Middle East Correspondent
Beijing ‘plot’ to steal from Harvard
A Chinese research student accused of
stealing medical samples from a
Harvard laboratory and attempting to
smuggle them out of the United States
in his luggage will plead guilty to lying
to customs officials and be deported.
Zheng Zaosong, 30, arrived in 2018 to
conduct research work on cancer cells
at one of the laboratories of the Har-
vard Medical School in Boston, in a
placement sponsored by the university.
On December 9 last year he was
stopped by customs officials at Boston
airport as he was about to board a non-
stop flight to Beijing. Kara Spice, an FBI
agent, said in an affidavit that Mr Zheng
had been identified as “a high risk for
possibly exporting undeclared biologi-
cal material”.
Customs officials found 21 vials
wrapped in a plastic bag and stuffed ina sock in his luggage, Ms Spice said. She
said that when officials had approached
Mr Zheng as he prepared to board his
flight, he had denied carrying biologi-
cal items or research material.
His case was announced in the midst
of a flurry of arrests targeting what
prosecutors described as a plot by Bei-
jing to steal proprietary information
from American universities.
At around the same time, Yanqing Ye,
29, a Chinese national who had been
working at a Boston University re-
search department, was accused of
concealing that she was also a lieuten-
ant in the People’s Liberation Army.
She is believed to be in China.
Charles Lieber, 61, the head of Har-
vard’s chemistry department, has been
charged with lying to the defence
department and National Institutes of
Health about his links to a Chinese
university. He has pleaded not guilty.Prosecutors alleged that Mr Zheng
had been receiving a monthly stipend
from an institution affiliated with the
Chinese government. In court docu-
ments he was said to have acknowl-
edged stealing eight vials from the
Boston laboratory where he worked
and admitted secretly replicating 11
vials based on a colleague’s research.
In an interview at the airport he said
that he planned to take the vials to a lab-
oratory in Guangzhou where he would
begin working with them, Ms Spice
said. If the research was successful “he
planned to publish a paper in his own
name”, she said.
Mr Zheng has now agreed to plead
guilty to making false statements to
customs officials, prosecutors said. He
is expected to be sentenced this week to
the time he has already served in custo-
dy, and to be deported. His lawyer did
not respond to a request for comment.Will Pavia New YorkThe World at Five
Why did coronavirus
disappear from Yemen?
In depth and online today at 5pm
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