born : Matthew F Pottinger / Birth Date: 5 May 1973 [HL0089][GDrive]
Parents : John Stanley Pottinger (born 1940) and
Siblings include : Dr. Paul Stuart Pottinger (born 1968) (at the Univ. of Washington)
Married to Dr. Yen Tieu (Duong) Pottinger (born 1979)
Johnny Chen (born 1954) ( ... )
...
In office September 22, 2019 – January 7, 2021
President : Donald Trump
Preceded by : Charles Kupperman
Succeeded by : Jonathan Finer
Personal details
Born : 1973/1974 (age 47–48)
Spouse(s) : [Dr. Yen Tieu (Duong) Pottinger (born 1979)]
Children : 2
Father : [John Stanley Pottinger (born 1940)]
Education : University of Massachusetts, Amherst (BA)
Military service :
Allegiance : United States
Branch/service : United States Marine Corps
Years of service :
2005–2010 (active)
2010–present (reserve)
Rank : Major
Battles/wars : Iraq War / War in Afghanistan
Awards : Bronze Star / Combat Action Ribbon / Defense Meritorious Service Medal
[...]
Matthew F. Pottinger is an American former journalist and U.S. Marine Corps officer who served as the United States Deputy National Security Advisor from September 22, 2019 until January 7, 2021.[1] Previously serving as Asia
Pottinger is the son of author and former Department of Justice official [John Stanley Pottinger (born 1940)].[6] He was educated at Milton Academy and was a schoolmate and childhood friend of John Avlon.[7][8][9]Pottinger graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese studies and is fluent in Mandarin.[10]
Journalism
Before he joined the United States Marine Corps, Pottinger worked as a journalist for Reutersbetween 1998 and 2001.[11][6] Then he moved to The Wall Street Journal until his retirement from journalism in 2005.[6] For four years, he was a regular guest on the John Batchelor Show radio program. His stories won awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia. He covered a variety of topics, including the SARS epidemic and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; in the latter assignment, he met United States Marines and was inspired by their courage.[11][6] He spent seven years reporting in China.[12][13]
Military career
Pottinger's career switch was motivated by his experience in China and the Iraq War. By 2004, Pottinger had "sort of a sense of unease that China was not really going to converge with the more liberal order." He believed that when it was powerful enough, China would "influence the world on its own terms, on the terms of the ruling party." As he watched all the first phase of Iraq War unfold from a distant location in China, he was a bit troubled that "as a nation, the administration, the Congress and to a great extent the press as well had misjudged the nature of conflict." China's rise and the Iraq War had made him realize that democracy is "not inevitable and it shouldn't be taken for granted but it is a form of government very much worth fighting for."[14]
In September 2005, Pottinger joined the Marine Corps and served as a military intelligence officer.[6] He was over-aged and out of shape when he joined. To meet the physical qualifications, he worked out with a Marine officer who was living in Beijing.[6] He served three deployments: one (together with Mike Gallagher) in Iraq from April to November 2007, and two in Afghanistan from November 2008 to May 2009 and July 2009 to May 2010.[15] On his second tour in Afghanistan, he met U.S. Army General Michael T. Flynn, with whom he co-wrote a report.[6][16] The report, published in January 2010 through the Center for a New American Security, was titled Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan.[17] After he left active service, Pottinger worked in New York City, including for the hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management.[6]
Politics
A 2018 Politico profile described Pottinger as "a fairly typical conservative internationalist" who "has never been a Trump-style #MAGA conservative" and who donated to both Democrats and Republicans.[18] In 2017, he was hired as a member of the U.S. National Security Councilof the administration of Donald Trump.[19][20][21] Michael Flynn, whom Pottinger had worked for in the military, made him the NSC's Asia director, and he remained in his position under H. R. McMaster and John Bolton.
In 2018, after a proposed summit with North Korea had been cancelled,[22] The New York Times reported that "a senior White House official told reporters that even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed."[23][24] The President subsequently alleged that the New York Times had made up the existence of the unnamed White House official;[25]on Twitter, journalist Yashar Ali later posted audio of Pottinger giving the officially organized background briefing cited by the Times,[26] in which, without actually using the word "impossible", he responded to a reporter's question about the feasibility of the originally scheduled date by saying "We've lost quite a bit of time that we would need" and "June 12th is in ten minutes."[27][18]
In his NSC position, Pottinger advocated a tough stance on China that combined trade policy with national security.[18][28] In September 2019, newly installed National Security Advisor Robert C. O'Brien named Pottinger Deputy National Security Advisor.[29]
Because of his contacts in China, he was an early voice in the Trump administration pushing for more COVID-19 precautions and called for travel ban with China. On January 28th, Pottinger met with President Trump and told him that some people in China were testing positive for COVID-19 with no symptoms, which was later confirmed by a NEJM article.[30][31]
In May 2020, he gave a speech in Mandarin regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.[32] During a virtual conversation hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation on September 30, 2020, Pottinger was asked about the national security implication of Chinese students in the United States. In response, he said "the great majority are people that we're glad to have here and many will stay here and start great businesses." He said it is that one percent of Chinese students that are under contract and have an obligation to bring back everything they know to serve the state back in China.[33]
Pottinger submitted his resignation on January 6, 2021, following the U.S. Capitol protests in which supporters of President Donald Trumpinvaded the U.S. Capitol building to halt the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's lawful electoral college victory.[5][34]
Pottinger has joined the Hoover Institution as a distinguished Fellow and is a participant on its "China's Global Sharp Power Project" research team.[35]
Pottinger is married to Dr. Yen Pottinger, a virologist who immigrated to the United States as a child after she and her family fled Vietnam following the Vietnam War. They have two children and live in Utah.[36] [37]
By Margot Cohen, Peter Fritsch and [Matthew Forbes Pottinger (born 1973)] Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal / March 19, 2003 12:01 am ET
NOTE : This full article is also copied (as of Oct 9 2021) into 2002-2004 SARS outbreak / Johnny Chen (born 1954) / Gilwood Co., Ltd. / Matthew Forbes Pottinger (born 1973)
HANOI, Vietnam -- Before he became the host suspected of carrying from southern China the deadly illness that continues to nettle health officials around the world, American [Johnny Chen (born 1954)] was an ordinary man concerned with the business of making blue jeans.
On Monday morning, Feb. 24, it was business as usual for Mr. Chen and colleagues from the Shanghai office of [Gilwood Co., Ltd.], a small New York garment firm. He had made the short trip to Vietnam from Hong Kong the day before with a simple mission: make sure Gilwood's local contractor, the Hung Yen Garment Co., or Hugaco, on the outskirts of Hanoi, was properly stitching zippers and other accessories on jeans due for export in April.
Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)], whose business card identified him as Gilwood's garment merchandise manager based in Shanghai, looked happy and healthy that day as he checked samples and had lunch before returning to Hanoi, says Chu Huu Nghi, deputy-director of Hugaco's export-import division. There was no hint that the jovial, 49-year-old Chinese-American would soon take ill with a wicked bug -- which still hasn't been identified -- that would kill him two weeks later and elicit a rare global health warning from the World Health Organization.
So far, Mr. Chen's 10-day Vietnam visit has had a serious impact on the country: Health officials believe his illness spread directly and indirectly to 63 confirmed and suspected cases in Vietnam, most of them health workers and their families. A Vietnamese nurse succumbed to the mystery illness.
The toll in Vietnam now accounts for almost a third of the global count of confirmed and suspected cases that has grown in just a few weeks to more than 200 on four continents. Hong Kong, where the cases have also occurred mostly among doctors, nurses and other hospital staff, now counts 123 cases, the most anywhere.
With the blue-jean manufacturing line appearing in fine working order that first morning on the ground in Vietnam, Mr. Chen and his colleagues returned to Hanoi that afternoon. Local [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] employee Nguyen Bao Thuy says she then took Mr. Chen to do a little shopping. They looked at denim material in the busy Hom market on Hue Street and bought some clothes for Mr. Chen's personal use at a shop called Thang Long on Ngo Quyen Street.
[ Note ... As of Oct 7 2021, the first person who shows for "Nguyen Bao Thuy" is "https://www.linkedin.com/in/bao-thuy-nguyen-38541410/" ... who is a biotechnology patent officer .. example includes https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6794152.html ]
That night, Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954) hit the town to partake of Hanoi's bustling night life. Neighbors later recalled a stranger -- it was Mr. Chen -- who returned to Gilwood's office about 11 p.m.
On this visit to Hanoi, Mr. Chen chose to stay in a bedroom atop Gilwood's [Gilwood Co., Ltd.'s] office, a now-shuttered, four-story, light-blue building with turquoise trim overlooking the city's Ngoc Khanh lake, according to Ms. Thuy. His colleagues from Shanghai, including Kenny Liu and two Chinese nationals, stayed at Hanoi's Daewoo Hotel.
The next morning, Feb. 25, Mr. Chen was feeling a little rough. He had lunch that day with Mr. Liu and their Chinese colleagues at the Daewoo coffee shop overlooking the hotel's pool. After eating, Mr. Chen complained of chills. He went out to buy some medicine and headed back to the office. Ms. Thuy says Mr. Chen told her he thought he just needed an early evening to shake the bug.
He turned in early that night. A concerned colleague arranged for a local doctor to make a house call on Mr. Chen early the next morning, Wednesday, Feb. 26. The doctor recommended rest.
Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)] told his colleagues he wasn't feeling strong enough to make another planned trip to Hugaco that morning. Mr. Liu, Ms. Thuy and the others went to the factory without him. When they returned to Gilwood's office later that day, they found Mr. Chen sprawled on his bed with a high fever, clearly in distress.
They hustled him to the capital's lone international hospital, the Hanoi French Hospital. The hospital's staff couldn't identify the pathogen involved but quickly determined they had a serious case on their hands and contacted both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Embassy. After a week of unsuccessful treatment, Mr. Chen was evacuated on March 5 to Hong Kong by private plane at the request of his family. He died eight days later.
At [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] Hong Kong office, a single, bare-walled room where corduroy pants with Nautica labels hang on racks, office head Simon Ho remembers the last time he saw his late colleague. It was on March 7, through a glass window at the Princess Margaret Hospital's Intensive Care Unit. Mr. Chen, whom Mr. Ho had known as sturdy and jocular, lay apparently unconscious with tubes protruding from his body and a respirator doing his breathing.
Mr. Chen's wife, Lisa, who had come from her home in New York, was also there. She occasionally peered through the glass at her husband and sobbed, at times inconsolably, he said. "The doctors said they didn't know what was causing it," Mr. Ho said. The Hong Kong Health Department has declined comment on individual cases of the illness.
Mr. Ho's sadness turned to apprehension as it became clear that Mr. Chen's illness had led to the infection of dozens of health-care workers at the Hanoi hospital where he was treated. Worried he too was at risk, he went to see a doctor. "I saw the TV reports and began to get scared. I've gone in for X-rays," he said. "They didn't turn up anything; I'm healthy."
Mr. Chen's illness hasn't spread to personnel at the Hong Kong hospital where he succumbed; most of the recent Hong Kong cases have been linked to another man who had traveled to southern China before he became ill and who was treated at a different hospital, Hong Kong health officials say.
Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)] potentially infectious trail during his last days is a continued source of worry not only to health officials, but also to employees at [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] concerned that they also may have been infected. But, like Mr. Ho, most fellow workers who came into contact with Mr. Chen before he was hospitalized appear to be unaffected by the disease.
Gilwood's Hanoi office is a small operation, employing a Filipino quality-control manager, Roberto Pedragosa; a part-time administrator, Nguyen Duc Ngoc; Ms. Thuy; two security guards; a driver; and a 42-year-old maid, Chu Thi Phuong.
[ Roberto Pedragosa : " https://cn.linkedin.com/in/roberto-pedragosa-31469a30?trk=people-guest_people_search-card " actually worked for Klaus Steilmann GmbH & Co. Kg and not "gilwood" ]
Ms. Phuong, who regularly cleaned the office and also visited Mr. Chen in the hospital, has exhibited some of the same symptoms as Mr. Chen. She is currently in the state-run Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, which is treating several people that the World Health Organization considers to have only unconfirmed cases of the disease it calls severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Ms. Thuy says that Ms. Phuong "feels better now." Ms. Phuong couldn't be reached for comment.
For her part, Ms. Thuy says she came down with a bad headache and cold flashes after Mr. [Johnny Chen (born 1954)]'s visit, but says she now feels better. As a precaution, Vietnamese health officials have instructed her to remain home for an indefinite period. Mr. Ngoc says he is healthy. Mr. Liu, back in Shanghai and not responding to calls or visits seeking comment, hasn't developed any flu-like symptoms common to SARS cases, says [Gilwood Co., Ltd.] President Charles Haigh in a telephone interview from his home in New York City.
The health status of the two Chinese nationals who traveled with Mr. Liu couldn't be immediately learned.
To date, there are no cases at the Hugaco factory of SARS. The Hung Yen provincial department of health visited the factory last week. One official there says there have been no reported cases of SARS in the province's 13 hospitals.
Mr. Pedragosa, 43, Gilwood's quality-control manager in Hanoi, became so worried after Mr. Chen fell ill that he flew home to Manila on March 10 via Ho Chi Minh City (where several cases have since been reported). "I told him not to fly on a plane, but he just wanted to go home he was so scared," said Mr. Haigh.
Mr. Pedragosa, who couldn't be located for comment, was discharged Monday from Manila's Medical City General Hospital, where he had undergone observation and treatment for diarrhea, according to local health officials. He will remain under observation at an undisclosed health facility for another 10 days, they said, but he hasn't developed symptoms of SARS.
Mr. Haigh, who says he and his colleagues are cooperating fully with the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, says Mr. Chen didn't travel to Hanoi from his Shanghai base, but from Hong Kong where he spent "five or six days." He says of the potentially fatal disease, which officials believe has an incubation period of a week or less: "I think Johnny picked it up in Hong Kong."
Whatever the case, Mr. Chen's demise is having a lasting effect on [Gilwood Co., Ltd.], a company Mr. Haigh began 10 years ago to export garments from Asia. The company came to Vietnam less than six months ago, lured like many other companies big and small by a bilateral trade accord with the U.S., which came into effect in December 2001.
"People are walking into our Shanghai office with masks on, like it's the plague," says Mr. Haigh, nursing a bad cold he attributes to lack of sleep and the stress of the past two weeks. "We've lost three weeks of production over the past month over this; this is really hurting my business."
-- Peter Landers in New York contributed to this article.
https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=03-P13-00014&segmentID=4
2003-04-04-loe-org-shows-segments-from-website-sars-update.pdf
2003-04-04-loe-org-shows-segments-from-website-sars-update-img-1.jpg
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has spread to more than a dozen countries throughout the world. One of the hardest hit places is Hong Kong. The World Health Organization has issued an alert for that region, advising against all but essential travel. Host Steve Curwood talks with Hong Kong based Wall Street Journal reporter Matt Pottinger, who has been ordered by his editor to work from home.
[Also see 2002-2004 SARS outbreak ]
CURWOOD: Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, first appeared in South China four months ago and public health officials are still trying to contain the outbreak that has spread to more than a dozen countries.
The World Health Organization has issued an alert advising against all but essential travel to the diseased hotspots in Asia. Meanwhile, quarantines are becoming commonplace, as are face masks to lower the risk of exposure to SARS, but many workers are simply staying home. One of them is Matt Pottinger. He is a reporter based in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal.
Matt, as I understand it, your boss has told you to keep out of the office. Is that right?
POTTINGER: It's pretty much true. We've--Wall Street Journal is doing what a lot of companies here now are doing--asking staff to work from home if they can, simply as really a preemptive measure in case someone gets sick in the office. If that were to happen at the paper, we're worried that we would be put under some kind of a government-imposed quarantine, and that would make it a lot more difficult for us to actually publish the Asian edition.
CURWOOD: Now, as I understand it, so far more than a dozen people in Hong Kong have died from SARS, and hundreds more have come down with the disease. But as I understand it, more than a third of these cases come from one apartment complex. Can you tell us about the Amoy Gardens and how it came to be the epicenter for Hong Kong for this disease?
POTTINGER: The doctors think now that it probably had something to do with the sewage system. In Hong Kong, most of the water and sewage pipes are actually run down the outsides of buildings. What some of the doctors are speculating now is that one patient who is very ill then infected the sewage system. So it's possible that there was a leak running down some of these pipes and that droplets were actually blown into the windows and homes of people running down that one side of the building.
CURWOOD: Now, how are the Hong Kong authorities dealing with these people, and how would you characterize the cooperation that they're getting?
POTTINGER: Well, it's been tough. On the day a quarantine or an isolation order was delivered to that building, people already knew it was coming, and a lot of people scattered. So the police had quite a job trying to track down those people. But they have since moved most of the residents in that block to a couple of camps, really sort of holiday resorts around the city where there is less of a risk of infection from the environment.
CURWOOD: What territory-wide measures has the government there taken to attempt to halt the spread of this disease?
POTTINGER: The government has had guidelines on hygiene--above all, asking people, even above wearing masks, they've really suggested washing hands religiously--using liquid soap, not touching your face. Because this virus that is believed to be causing it, the corona virus, is actually related to a virus that causes the common cold. And what we know is that the common cold is spread, probably just as often by hand to hand contact and then touching our faces, as it is through actually breathing in the virus.
CURWOOD: In your Wall Street Journal articles you write that many people in Hong Kong are wearing surgical masks to protect themselves from SARS. How difficult is it to get one right now?
POTTINGER: Well, Hong Kong made its name as a trade port, so there are a lot of savvy businessmen here who have been pretty quick. There were shortages in the initial days but now I'm seeing--I'm seeing plenty of masks on the street and in stores.
CURWOOD: Now tell me about these designer masks that have hit the streets there.
POTTINGER: Yeah, exactly. We're seeing--at first it was sort of these cheap paper surgical masks. Now, it sort of runs the gamut from heavy-duty N95 hospital masks to ones that have all kinds of colors and logos on them. Parents have been buying ones with teddy bears and Bambi.
CURWOOD: You can tell us the masks that you're wearing, Matt.
POTTINGER: [laughs] I've managed to score an N95, which, if worn tightly, is supposed to block out even particles the size of a virus. So I've gotten used to wearing it. I've learned the hard way that you should never be around places where they're preparing food when you're wearing it because the smell of the cooking permeates the mask and sort of stays there. It's pretty gross. It's kind of like breathing out of a McDonald's takeout bag for hours on end.
CURWOOD: The business of Hong Kong is business. I'm wondering what kind of toll this outbreak has taken on the economy there.
POTTINGER: It's taking a hard hit. People aren't going to restaurants. You don't see as many people out shopping. All kinds of events have been cancelled, sports events. The Rolling Stones had to cancel their concert. So, it's definitely hurting. The hotel rates are down, the airlines are bringing far fewer people in and are canceling flights. But that said, it's not just a phenomenon that's affecting Hong Kong at this point. Morgan Stanley's chief economist is actually going to advise clients that SARS may create a world recession. It's hurting trade, it's hurting finance, slowing down the rate that companies can find capital, and supply retail chain.
CURWOOD: Matt, what other precautions, other than wearing a mask and working from home, are you taking?
POTTINGER: Really just paying extra close attention to washing my hands. If my contact lenses start to dry out I have to resist the urge to reach up and adjust it. I've got to go scrub my hands first. I'm taking taxicabs instead of the subway. And something I've seen a lot of people doing now is avoid shaking hands. People are now sort of nodding their heads kind of in an abbreviated bow as a way of greeting people.
CURWOOD: Matt Pottinger is a Wall Street Journal reporter in Hong Kong. Thanks for joining us today.
POTTINGER: Thank you.
As new theories emerged about how the deadly form of pneumonia called SARS is incubated and spreads, a prominent Beijing surgeon alleged that China is still playing down the impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Either wrinkle in the battle against SARS could complicate efforts to control the disease as it moves across the globe.
In a study published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine based on a sample of 138 local SARS cases, 14 Hong Kong scientists and medical researchers report that SARS appears to have an incubation period of as many as 16 days. That is significantly longer than the 10- to 12-day surveillance period the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend health authorities use.
Among the study's contributors are Gavin Joynt, head of the intensive-care unit at Prince of Wales Hospital, and Paul Chan, a professor of microbiology at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Separately, Hong Kong health officials Tuesday said a probe into the heavily infected Amoy Gardens building complex disclosed that water seals for sewage pipes running through the old, low-cost housing block had dried out, allowing waste to back up and attract cockroaches and other vermin. Hong Kong Deputy Director of Health Leung Pak-yin said it was possible that cockroaches had carried SARS virus contained in fecal matter from infected people into other residents' apartments, spreading the disease.
The theories could increase anxiety in already nervous SARS-affected regions and prompt a reassessment of how long to quarantine people exposed to SARS and how to contain contagion in densely populated urban areas.
That doesn't mean the theories will automatically find favor. "The data we have so far indicates that the incubation period [for SARS] does not go beyond 11 days," said Klaus Stohr, project leader of the WHO's influenza program in Geneva. "The extremes are important to consider, but for practical purposes we are working on the assumption that the disease becomes full-blown and is being detected before 11 days."
And scientists and health workers combatting SARS in China might find encouragement in initial informal comments from a WHO team that Tuesday completed a six-day visit to Guangdong province. Their remarks suggested that new infections may be tailing off in southern China, where SARS first surfaced in November.
China has come under attack for failing to act swiftly in its initial response to SARS and for frustrating early attempts by the WHO and others to investigate in Guangdong. But now "the outbreak is effectively controlled, and the number of sick people is continuing to drop," said Huang Qingdao, director-general of Guangdong's health department. The WHO team said they have gotten access to detailed Chinese data and believe the numbers are generally accurate.
At the same time, in a highly unusual break with the official line, Jiang Yanyong, former chief of surgery for the city's prominent No. 301 military hospital and a Communist Party member, said the actual number of SARS cases in Beijing is at least several times the official tally. The 72-year-old doctor, who retired several years ago but still sees patients at No. 301 and advises young surgeons throughout Beijing, made the allegations in an e-mail to a state-run television channel late last week. The TV station didn't respond, but The Wall Street Journal reviewed the e-mail, and Dr. Jiang confirmed that he wrote it.
In his e-mail, Dr. Jiang said hospital personnel at another military hospital, No. 309, told him that the hospital was treating 60 people who are infected with SARS and that seven patients had died of the illness at that hospital. A doctor at No. 309 Hospital confirmed the seven deaths.
Chinese health authorities have put the number of infections for all of Beijing at 19 and the number of deaths at four, to date. It remained unclear whether the cases that Mr. Jiang referred to are "probable" SARS cases or "suspected" cases. Unlike many other countries, China doesn't publicize suspected cases of SARS. Beijing also applies more-stringent criteria to confirm a case as probable than those used by other countries, suggesting that some serious cases that might be classified as SARS cases in other countries may not be formally classified as such by Chinese health authorities. One reason for China's conservative estimates, officials say, is that respiratory illnesses are rampant throughout the country.
In his e-mail, which was sent to the government-run China Central Television 4, Mr. Jiang wrote that he and his colleagues were incredulous when the country's health minister, Zhang Wenkang, appeared on television last week to say the disease was under control. But whether Mr. Jiang's figures refer to suspected or probable cases, they suggest that China could see a jump in the number of cases in the future.
The number of confirmed or suspected SARS cases globally nudged upward Tuesday to more than 2,850 from more than 2,770 the day before, with new cases reported in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan. At least 104 people have died around the world, most of them in Asia but with Canada reporting 10 SARS deaths.
-- Karen Richardson in Hong Kong and Kathy Chen in Beijing contributed to this article.
Source: Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2003 / Source : [HN01PT][GDrive]
By Margot Cohen in Hanoi, Vietnam, Gautam Naik in Geneva and Matt Pottinger in Hong Kong.
In late February, Olivier Cattin, a doctor at the Hanoi French Hospital in Vietnam's capital, found himself stumped by the case of an American businessman with a fierce respiratory illness. He knew just whom to call: [Carlo Urbani (born 1956)].
The outgoing, 46-year-old Italian was a physician with the World Health Organization. He was well-known in Hanoi's close-knit medical community as a skilled diagnostician who loved good food and organ music and was devoted to his work de-worming Vietnamese schoolchildren.
Dr. Cattin's hunch was that his patient, Johnny Chen, was suffering from some sort of avian flu. He had heard reports of a mysterious flu outbreak in southern China, where Mr. Chen had been. But Dr. [Carlo Urbani (born 1956)], after examining the patient on Feb. 28, wasn't sure. Those doubts would balloon into dread as 10 hospital employees quickly contracted the mystery illness soon to be known as severe acute respiratory syndrome.
Alarmed, Dr. Urbani and his colleagues at the Hanoi WHO office harangued Vietnam's rigid communist bureaucracy and helped spur its aggressive measures to contain SARS. When Hong Kong reported its own eruption, officials at WHO's Geneva headquarters had heard enough. On March 12, the agency issued a rare world-wide health alert.
At a time when the effectiveness of multilateral approaches to global problems has become a hotly debated subject, the SARS saga so far reflects well on one United Nations bureaucracy. The disease remains mysterious and could still prove devastating. But by taking a zero-tolerance approach to the disease with governments as disparate as China and Canada, the WHO may well have limited the toll of SARS at the crucial early stage.
"Say what you will about U.N. agencies, but here's a group that acted forcefully and quickly," says Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The WHO's decisions haven't been easy. It angered Toronto officials when it slapped a short-lived travel advisory on the city after a nurse there took SARS to the Philippines. It urged people to avoid Hong Kong and southern China, chilling corporate travel to the world's hottest destination for investment dollars and badly damaging the regional economy. Its careful probing of Beijing hospital wards made liars of senior Chinese officials who tried to conceal the extent of the disease within its borders -- and got sacked. At the same time it drew criticism for moving too slowly to publicly criticize Chinese authorities.
The WHO has no regulatory or police powers. Its chief asset is highly motivated people such as Dr. [Carlo Urbani (born 1956)] and the personal relationships they cultivate in corners of countries many diplomats never see. These crucial ambassadors sometimes pay the ultimate price: Dr. Urbani died of SARS in a Bangkok hospital after raising the critical red flag in a war that is now seeing its first apparent victories. Earlier this week, the WHO declared Vietnam, the country he loved, free of SARS.
Established in 1948, the WHO's mission is to improve international health -- whether by mass vaccination campaigns, helping countries respond to outbreaks, or by acting as a clearinghouse of information. For years the WHO had a reputation as an often slow-footed bureaucracy, especially when it came to emerging diseases. By the time the WHO hosted its first meeting on the international implications of AIDS in November 1983, the disease had already been reported in 33 countries on five continents.
When AIDS surfaced, "we were completely unprepared," says Dr. Guenael Rodier, director of the WHO's Department of Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response. "We reacted in a noninnovative way by slowly building a program" instead of trying to prevent the virus from spreading world-wide.
People inside the WHO say Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland, 64, deserves credit for making the agency more responsive and relevant. Previous directors had included good doctors and technocrats, but Dr. Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, brought new political clout to the organization when she took over in 1998.
Under her stewardship, the WHO has pushed drug makers to make AIDS drugs cheaper for poorer countries, has made significant strides in ridding the world of polio and is now going after "life-style" diseases -- heart disease, obesity, diabetes and certain cancers -- that are rapidly becoming the planet's biggest killers.
"She got health off the back burner and made it a globalization issue," says Jim Palmer, a Washington-based consultant to the WHO.
One of WHO's longtime assets is privileged access, through high-level government contacts in its 192 member states, to the health authorities in most of the world's countries. That access would prove critical when Dr. Urbani alerted his superiors on Feb. 28 to what was happening in Hanoi.
At that time, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief of epidemiology for the influenza branch at the CDC, and [Hitoshi Oshitani (born 1959)], a WHO officer based in Manila, were in Beijing looking into reports out of southern China of an outbreak that resembled an extremely deadly strain of avian influenza known as H5N1. But the Chinese were stonewalling, blocking a trip to Guangdong in the south and restricting the two doctors to meetings with health officials in Beijing.
COMBATING GLOBAL DISEASE
Key milestones in the World Health Organization's history:
• April 2003: Oversees network of labs that identifies a coronavirus as the cause of SARS. Forces China to concede it has more cases than it previously admitted. The WHO declares Vietnam to be SARS-free.
• February 2003: Finalizes landmark treaty to stem tobacco use and related deaths globally; it is expected to be adopted in May.
• 2002: Announces with partners that through eradication efforts, countries with new cases of polio declined to seven from 125 in 1998.
• Late 1980s: Working with Unicef, reaches record childhood-immunization rates of more than 80%.
• 1980: Certifies the eradication of smallpox.
Source: WHO
Then Dr. [Carlo Urbani (born 1956)] called from Hanoi. Dr. [Hitoshi Oshitani (born 1959)] urged him to collect blood and respiratory samples. Maybe Mr. Chen was suffering from H5N1. Yet the disease didn't resemble avian flu in its symptoms or transmission patterns. Every test for the influenza had turned up negative.
Meanwhile, the disease was rapidly affecting health-care workers at the Hanoi French Hospital. Dr. Urbani and his boss in Hanoi, 57-year-old Pascale Brudon, decided they needed to enlist the government's help to contain the bug.
By Friday, March 7, the bureaucratic feedback wasn't good: Officials might meet with them on Monday. The WHO officials worked the phones and finally reached Nguyen Van Thuong, vice minister for health. At a four-hour meeting on March 9, the WHO officials argued that the new disease merited systematic preventive measures and outside backup.
But Mr. Thuong got a different message from Vietnamese experts, who believed the disease was influenza type-B and, being limited to one hospital, not particularly worrisome. The talks grew heated, Ms. Brudon recalls. Ultimately, Mr. Thuong sided with the WHO -- a pivotal decision that would place Vietnam and China in stark contrast.
By Monday, March 10, evidence of a potential pandemic was gathering. The mystery disease had cropped up unmistakably in Hong Kong and Toronto. That day, Dr. [Carlo Urbani (born 1956)] called Dr. Klaus Stohr, the WHO's influenza-project leader, in Geneva. Dr. Stohr, who is German, recalls him saying, "We're losing control of the hospital," referring to Hanoi French Hospital.
Hours earlier, Hong Kong's health director, Dr. Margaret Chan, received a call from an official at the city's hospital authority who said that an unusually high number of health-care workers at Prince of Wales Hospital were calling in sick with flu-like symptoms. On March 12, local investigators told Dr. Chan the situation was serious. That afternoon, she called the WHO in Geneva.
Officials there quickly met to decide whether the WHO should issue a global health alert. It was a tricky decision. The last time the WHO had issued such an alert was in 1994, when plague had reappeared in India.
"We wondered: 'Are we mad? Are we going to panic the world?' " recalls Mike Ryan, an amiable Irishman who coordinates the WHO's Global Alert and Response team.
That evening, the WHO issued the alert. The main victims at that point were health workers -- the most vital group needed to deal with the outbreak of an infectious disease. Moreover, "the cause was unknown, we had no clue where it came from and people were dying like flies," Dr. Stohr says. By issuing such an alert, the WHO was essentially asking its member countries to warn their citizens about the atypical pneumonia, and also suggesting they, too, gear up for a potential outbreak.
The alert provoked immediate response -- and some criticism. Health ministries of several countries "asked us why we hadn't informed them first," says Denis Aitken, Ms. Brundtland's right-hand man.
More cases appeared. China, where officials suspected the disease originated, was the most worrisome site. The WHO wanted to send in experts, but Chinese officials put them off, citing an important national political meeting lasting through March 18. "It's never been different," says Dr. Stohr, who in the past had to deal with Chinese authorities over flu outbreaks.
As he and others mulled how to crack the China problem, the stakes were suddenly raised halfway across the world early on Saturday, March 15.
At 2 a.m., Geneva time, Dr. Ryan was awakened by a phone call from Dr. Oshitani's boss in Manila. "He said something important was going down in Singapore," recalls Dr. Ryan. A health official in Singapore reported that a 32-year-old Singapore doctor, who had treated the country's first two mystery-pneumonia patients, had boarded a flight from New York City to Singapore. Shortly before stepping on the plane -- a Boeing 747 carrying 400 people representing 15 nationalities -- he had described his own symptoms to an alert medical colleague in Singapore, who notified health officials.
At 8 a.m., several WHO specialists in Geneva, clad informally in T-shirts and jeans, held a series of impromptu, emergency meetings in a room converted into a war room to plot the agency's next move. They were a hard-core, experienced bunch. Dr. Rodier, a Frenchman who was Dr. Ryan's boss, had buried Ebola-stricken corpses in Uganda. [Dr. David Lowell Heymann (born 1946)], the American head of the WHO's communicable-diseases group, had headed to the Congo in 1995 to contain a deadly outbreak of Ebola. He rushed back from a camping trip to make the meeting.
They decided to quarantine the 400 Singapore Airline passengers in Frankfurt, an intermediate stop. That decision may have proved crucial in preventing the spread of the disease more widely across Europe. "Ten years ago, without mobile phones and e-mail, you couldn't have done this," says Dr. Ryan.
The next key question: Should the WHO issue a rare global travel advisory -- a decision that would have huge implications for world business and tourism. Dr. Heymann pushed hard for the alert, but some others objected. "What if we're wrong?" Dr. Stohr recalls one person saying.
As the hours went by, everyone had become convinced they had a new and deadly pathogen on their hands, and it was spreading ominously via air travel across the world. "Before we were saying, 'Be careful.' With the travel alert we were saying, 'This is a crisis,' " says Dr. Stohr.
With a draft of the news release ready, Mr. Aitken suddenly said: "What are we going to call it?" This was a subtle, but important issue: By giving the disease a name, the WHO would be telling the world that it was something new, something to be feared.
Someone suggested "atypical pneumonia of unknown cause," but that was rejected because the word "unknown" might scare people. Finally, Dick Thompson, a former science journalist and now press officer for the WHO, nailed it. "How about: 'severe acute respiratory syndrome?' " he asked. SARS case definitions and recommendations to hospitals and airlines quickly followed.
As the disease continued to spread in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore and Canada, public annoyance was mounting over China's silence about the extent of its infection. The WHO was going to have to get tougher. But it would be Monday, March 24 before a WHO team of five experts arrived in Beijing for their first meeting with Chinese health officials.
At first, it looked as though the WHO might face a replay of the frustrated mission led by Dr. Oshitani a month earlier. The team's Chinese counterparts were lower-level health officials. The setting -- with microphones on either side of the table and white-gloved women pouring tea -- was formal and awkward.
WHO inspectors were champing at the bit to get to Guangdong, according to Dr. James Maguire, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist from the CDC. But the Chinese asked them to put together lectures for delivery the next day on general topics such as pneumonia and histories of infectious-disease epidemics.
"I guess the conclusion of that meeting was: We were off to a slow start," says Dr. Maguire, who participates in continuing WHO investigations in Beijing.
The next morning the WHO team prodded the Chinese to be more forthcoming, and the Chinese "came through," says team member, [Dr. John S. MacKenzie (born 1943(est.))]. That afternoon and during the next couple of days, Chinese officials provided detailed data on the outbreak in Guangdong that had begun in November. But the WHO team was still left with big questions.
The Chinese officials wouldn't provide them with any data about the situation since February, except to repeat that the situation was "under control," according to the WHO team. The officials also seemed wedded to the notion that the outbreak was caused by a rare respiratory strain of chlamydia bacteria, which had been found in a few of the patients. They seemed uninterested in mounting data that the disease was being caused by a coronavirus -- a theory later affirmed by the WHO. Chinese Health Ministry officials did not respond to questions for this article.
On Friday, March 28, the WHO team pressed for access to Guangdong. Dr. MacKenzie said the message was explicit: "If SARS is not under control in China, there would be little chance of controlling the global threat of the disease." After more frustrating delays, the WHO team members were finally told late on April 2 that they could leave immediately for Guangdong.
Meanwhile, rumors were flying about scores of hidden cases in Beijing. On April 3, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang went on television to announce there were only 12 cases in the capital and the disease was under control. That conflicted with press reports days later of a letter from a prominent Beijing surgeon, Dr. Jiang Yanyong, accusing the health minister of covering up scores of cases.
On April 8, the WHO team met with the health minister and Vice Premier Wu Yi to inform them of their findings in Guangdong. Dr. Henk Bekedam, the WHO's full-time representative in Beijing and a natural diplomat, did much of the talking.
He told the officials that Guangdong had put in place a strong system to cope with disease, including tracing potentially infected people, updating numbers of cases, and instituting infection-control procedures at hospitals. But he delivered a blunt message regarding the situation in Beijing. "I said the international community does not trust your figures," Dr. Bekedam says.
It wasn't until April 16, though, at a news conference where foreign reporters chastised the WHO team for evading questions about whether Beijing was covering up SARS cases, that team members finally made their criticism of the Chinese government public. Alan Schnur, a WHO official who had defended the government's handling of SARS, stated the team's estimate that there were 200 probable cases of SARS in Beijing, and a further 1,000 people under observation as possible patients -- far more than the official tally of 37 cases.
Shortly after that, senior leaders, including President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, appeared on television warning of punishment for any officials attempting to cover up SARS cases. The following Sunday, the health minister and the mayor of Beijing were sacked, and the city announced there were nearly 10 times as many cases in the city as the official tally suggested.
Asked if he thought events would have moved more quickly had the WHO made its criticism public at an earlier stage, Dr. Bekedam said working on Beijing officials privately was the WHO's chosen strategy and didn't mean that the agency had "lowered the bar for China."
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SARS has re-emerged in Asia. So far, there are only three confirmed cases, all in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. The patients are doing well and there isn't any evidence that they have spread the disease.
Given last year's epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome that afflicted 8,098 and killed 774 world-wide, however, questions hover about whether the world should brace for another outbreak of the illness.
Here is what experts say they know:
How did SARS come back?
That isn't clear yet. A World Health Organization team is investigating several possible routes of transmission: person-to-person contact, animal-to-person contact, and possible environmental factors, such as contaminated sewage pipes. One of the cases, a 20-year-old waitress, worked in a restaurant that served wild game. A 32-year-old television producer who was confirmed as having the disease, on the other hand, didn't recall having contact with any animals except for a rat he trapped in his apartment. The WHO says there isn't any evidence that rats spread the disease.
Are wild animals the probable source of this outbreak?
There is mounting evidence in support of that theory, but no proof. Scientists in China's Guangdong province and Hong Kong say they recently isolated SARS-like viruses in numerous animals on sale at wild-game markets in Guangdong. Palm civets were the most common carriers of the viruses, they say.
Genetic fragments obtained from the TV producer matched up exactly with genetic sequences from viruses obtained from the civets, says Guan Yi, a University of Hong Kong microbiologist who led the research. That strongly suggests the virus has jumped recently from animals to people -- a repeat of the scenario believed to have caused last year's SARS epidemic, Dr. Guan says. The findings prompted China to last week begin slaughtering all the civets held in captivity in Guangdong.
Why do these new SARS cases seem milder than last year's?
The cases are indeed milder than the majority of SARS cases in last year's epidemic. But speculation that the virus may have mutated into a less-harmful strain hasn't been proved, scientists say. Medical researchers believe there is a correlation between disease severity and the amount of virus a person is infected with. It is possible these new patients, who are young and were apparently in good health before they became infected, were exposed to minute quantities of the SARS virus. Two men who were infected in laboratory mishaps in Singapore and Taiwan during the second half of 2003 also had mild cases.
Is it possible that humans have harbored the SARS virus since last year's outbreak, and seeded these new cases?
While this scenario is theoretically plausible, scientists say they haven't found any evidence in support of it. In studies conducted in Guangdong, Toronto and Hong Kong, scientists were unable to find any trace of the virus in recovered SARS patients; nor could they detect signs that any recovered patients infected their family members or other close contacts. If the SARS virus is capable of lying dormant in people, only to "reactivate" later, scientists would expect to see cases cropping up in other cities affected by last year's epidemic, not just in Guangzhou.
Is China doing a better job of handling SARS this time around?
Yes. The WHO commends Chinese health officials for isolating all three cases and for quickly tracking down scores of people who had been in contact with the patients. Chinese newspapers, which were forbidden by the government from writing about SARS during much of last year's epidemic, have been publishing frequent reports about the latest cases. But there are still problems. WHO officials complain that they aren't being informed fast enough about suspected cases; they also say they haven't been receiving enough detailed data about the cases and about the diagnostic tests doctors have employed.
Is Asia better prepared for SARS?
Yes. Cities that were affected by SARS last year have gone on alert and have stepped up surveillance at their borders, and in their hospitals, to identify people with SARS symptoms, such as fever and pneumonia. Hong Kong, which neighbors Guangdong, is testing all of its pneumonia patients for SARS. But international health authorities say they are concerned SARS surveillance may be weak in places that weren't affected last year.
Are people panicking?
No. The cases in Guangdong are getting prominent media coverage in Asia, but the mood is calm. In Hong Kong, where the new cases are front-page news, the stock market is nonetheless soaring. Visitor traffic to and from mainland China is holding steady, although Hong Kong travel agents say tourist bookings to Guangdong for the Lunar New Year, which starts Thursday, are lower than in past years. The WHO says Guangdong is safe to visit and that the existing cases "don't pose a significant health threat."
How bad would things have to get before the WHO issues travel advisories, as it did last year?
Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in China, says "there's no benchmark as such: It depends on the situation that's at hand. If we found many cases occurring in clusters -- evidence that patients were infecting many other people -- then we might consider it." But he stresses that the current situation doesn't justify any travel warnings.
A SARS outbreak that apparently began in a Chinese laboratory represents a dangerous turn of events: the medical-science community, which last year played the lead role in vanquishing the disease, is now becoming the chief risk for its potential resurgence.
China yesterday reported four new suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, on top of two confirmed and two suspected cases announced Friday. The four new cases are all in people who came in close contact with one of the confirmed patients, a 20-year-old nurse in Beijing, surnamed Li.
No new SARS infections were reported in Anhui province, where two of the cases announced Friday were located. Nonetheless, the Beijing cases are heightening fears of other infections just days before millions of travelers are expected to jam trains, buses and planes for the May Day holiday, complicating efforts to contain any potential spread of the disease.
"These four cases mean that we're now into a third generation of transmission," said Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Geneva. "It's gone from a 26-year-old lab worker to her nurse, and from the nurse to her family members" and a person staying in the same hospital room, he said. More than 300 people who had contact with the cases in Beijing and Anhui have been quarantined so far.
If the ultimate cause of the cases is confirmed to be a laboratory mishap in Beijing, as Chinese officials believe, it would mark the third and the most-serious such incident since an international SARS epidemic faded away in mid-2003. Lab errors in Singapore and Taiwan last year resulted in two people becoming infected. Those cases were contained and the patients recovered, but the recent Chinese infections are believed to have led to at least six secondary transmissions of the virus, including to one person who has died.
At the request of the Chinese government, the World Health Organization is launching an investigation into the incident that Mr. Thompson described as "intensive." The first members of a WHO team are scheduled to arrive in Beijing today. In addition to biosafety experts, epidemiologists are arriving to help Chinese health authorities track down people who may have come in contact with the patients. "The threat to public health is still small and limited," Mr. Thompson said. But he said the organization can't be sure that the disease has been contained until 20 days have passed without any new cases -- twice the maximum incubation period of the virus.
The cases put an uncomfortable spotlight on safety standards and practices at laboratories that handle the virus. After the disease killed 774 people and infected more than 8,000 world-wide, the chain of person-to-person transmissions of SARS was broken last year thanks largely to the effort of scientists, health-care workers and public-health officials. China has also taken significant steps this year to restrict its trade in wild animals, which are believed to harbor the virus.
With those potential sources of disease kept in check, some scientists believe laboratory infections now pose the greatest risk for a comeback by the disease. After conducting a thorough review of the cause of the Chinese outbreak, the WHO may devise more-detailed safety guidelines for all labs handling the virus.
Still, the WHO lacks the ability to enforce safety standards, and even the best-equipped labs provide no guarantees against human error. "No matter what kind of technical safeguards are put in place, labs are going to be operated by human beings, who may feel sick or may have had a bad night, and who could have a lapse of concentration" that leads to infection, Mr. Thompson said.
Among the eight cases, two of the people had been working at a Beijing laboratory in the China Center for Disease Control's Institute of Virology. SARS-related research has been conducted in the lab. One of the two ill lab workers is a 26-year-old graduate student, a Ms. Song from Anhui province, who worked at the lab from March 7 to March 22. She developed a fever March 25 and was confirmed as a SARS case on Friday. She is being treated at the No. 1 Hospital of Anhui Medical University, according to the Ministry of Health.
Ms. Song was treated at Beijing's Jiangong Hospital from March 29 to April 2, where the nurse, Ms. Li, was apparently infected. Ms. Song's mother, who cared for her after March 31, developed a fever April 8 and died April 19. She was declared a suspected SARS carrier after her death. The other laboratory worker is a Mr. Yang, a 31-year-old postdoctoral student. He reported a fever April 17 and was admitted to Ditan hospital in Beijing on April 22. He is classified as a suspected case. Mr. Yang was doing some SARS-related research at the lab, according to Bi Shengli, the institute's vice-director.
Ms. Song was working as an intern and conducted experiments unrelated to SARS, Mr. Bi said. Officials with the Beijing Center for Disease Control said Ms. Song had been researching adenovirus and syncytial virus.
"We're disappointed by what seems to be a failure of biosafety guidelines in the labs," Mr. Thompson said. "One of the features of a biosafety guideline is that if workers become sick, it should trigger an alarm, and that apparently didn't happen." The virology institute has been sealed off since April 23 and will remain so until May 7, according to the Ministry of Health. Mr. Bi said about 180 institute personnel were put under isolation in a rural area of Beijing.
—Cui Rong contributed to this article
When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines, I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn't a straight line.
It's a cliché that you appreciate your own country more when you live abroad, but it happens to be true. Living in China for the last seven years, I've seen that country take a giant leap from a struggling Third World country into a true world power. For many people it still comes as a surprise to learn that China is chasing Japan as the second-largest economy on the globe and could soon own a trillion dollars of American debt.
But living in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. I've seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I've been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source. I've been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them, and I've been punched in the face in a Beijing Starbucks by a government goon who was trying to keep me from investigating a Chinese company's sale of nuclear fuel to other countries.
When you live abroad long enough, you come to understand that governments that behave this way are not the exception, but the rule. They feel alien to us, but from the viewpoint of the world's population, we are the aliens, not them. That makes you think about protecting your country no matter who you are or what you're doing. What impresses you most, when you don't have them day to day, are the institutions that distinguish the U.S.: the separation of powers, a free press, the right to vote, and a culture that values civic duty and service, to name but a few.
I'm not an uncritical, rah-rah American. Living abroad has sharpened my view of what's wrong with my country, too. It's obvious that we need to reinvent ourselves in various ways, but we should also be allowed to do it from within, not according to someone else's dictates.
But why the Marines?
A year ago, I was at my sister's house using her husband's laptop when I came across a video of an American in Iraq being beheaded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The details are beyond description here; let's just say it was obscene. At first I admit I felt a touch of the terror they wanted me to feel, but then I felt the anger they didn't. We often talk about how our policies are radicalizing young men in the Middle East to become our enemies, but rarely do we talk about how their actions are radicalizing us. In a brief moment of revulsion, sitting there in that living room, I became their blowback.
Of course, a single emotional moment does not justify a career change, and that's not what happened to me. The next day I went to lunch at the Council on Foreign Relations where I happened to meet a Marine Corps colonel who'd just come back from Iraq. He gave me a no-nonsense assessment of what was happening there, but what got to me most was his description of how the Marines behaved and how they looked after each other in a hostile world. That struck me as a metaphor for how America should be in the world at large, and it also appealed to me on a personal level. At one point I said half-jokingly that, being 31 years old, it was a shame I was too old to serve. He sat back for a second and said, "I think I've still gotcha."
The next morning I found myself roaming around the belly of the USS Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier museum moored a few blocks from Times Square, looking for a Marine recruiting station and thinking I'd probably lost my marbles. The officer-selection officer wasn't impressed with my age, my Chinese language abilities or the fact that I worked for one of the great newspapers of the world. His only question was, "How's your endurance?"
Well, I can sit at my desk for 12 hours straight. Fourteen if I have a bag of Reese's.
He said if I wanted a shot at this I'd have to ace the physical fitness test, where a perfect score consisted of 20 pull-ups, 100 crunches in two minutes, and a three-mile run in 18 minutes. Essentially he was telling me to pack it in and go home. After assuring him I didn't have a criminal record or any tattoos, either of which would have required yet another waiver (my age already required the first), I took an application and went back to China.
Then came the Asian tsunami last December.
I was scrambled to Thailand, where thousands of people had died in the wave. After days in the midst of the devastation, I pulled back to Thailand's Utapao Air Force Base, at one time a U.S. staging area for bombing runs over Hanoi, to write a story on the U.S.-led relief efforts. The abandoned base was now bustling with air traffic and military personnel, and the man in charge was a Marine.
Warfare and relief efforts, as it turns out, involve many skills in common. In both cases, it's 80% preparation and logistics and only a small percent of actual battle. What these guys were doing was the same thing they did in a war zone, except now the tip of the spear wasn't weapons, but food, water and medicine. It was a major operation to save people's lives, and it was clear that no other country in the world could do what they were doing. Once again, I was bumping into the U.S. Marines, and once again I was impressed.
The day before I left Thailand I decided to do my first physical training and see what happened. I started running and was winded in five minutes. The air quality in downtown Bangkok didn't help, but the biggest problem was me. I ducked into Lumpini Park in the heart of the city where I was chased around by a three-foot monitor lizard that ran faster than I did. At one point I found a playground jungle gym and managed to do half a pull-up. That's all.
I got back to Beijing and started running several days a week. Along the way I met a Marine who was studying in Beijing on a fellowship and started training with him. Pretty soon I filled out the application I'd taken from New York, got letters of recommendation from old professors and mentors, and received a letter from a senior Marine officer who took a leap of faith on my behalf.
I made a quick trip back to New York in April to take a preliminary physical fitness test with the recruitment officer at the USS Intrepid. By then I could do 13 pull-ups, all my crunches, and a three-mile run along the West Side Highway in a little under 21 minutes, all in all a mediocre performance that was barely passable. When I was done, the officer told me to wipe the foam off my mouth, but I did him one better and puked all over the tarmac. He liked that a lot. That's when we both knew I was going for it.
Friends ask if I worry about going from a life of independent thought and action to a life of hierarchy and teamwork. At the moment, I find that appealing because it means being part of something bigger than I am. As for how different it's going to be, that, too, has its appeal because it's the opposite of what I've been doing up to now. Why should I do something that's a "natural fit" with what I already do? Why shouldn't I try to expand myself?
In a way, I see the Marines as a microcosm of America at its best. Their focus isn't on weapons and tactics, but on leadership. That's the whole point of the Marines. They care about each other in good times and bad, they've always had to fight for their existence -- even Harry Truman saw them as nothing more than the "Navy's police force" -- and they have the strength of their traditions. Their future, like the country's, is worth fighting for. I hope to be part of the effort.
NOTE : Mr. Pottinger, until recently a Journal correspondent in China, is scheduled to be commissioned a second lieutenant tomorrow. He spent the last three months at Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Va. As of early December, his three-mile run was down to 18 minutes and 15 seconds.
Name : [Matthew Forbes Pottinger (born 1973)]
Marriage License Date : 11 Oct 2014
Marriage License Place : Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Spouse : [Dr. Yen Tieu (Duong) Pottinger (born 1979)]
License Number : 29538
I am writing you from Anbar province in Iraq, where I am serving as a U.S. Marine. I don't get much time to read the news out here, but Rupert Murdoch's offer to acquire the Wall Street Journal is a story big enough to reach even this outpost. My comments on this subject come from two vantage points: first, as a reporter who worked for the Journal in China for nearly five years and, second, as someone who gave up that great job to become a Marine.
Reporting the news in a foreign country whose government has little respect for the truth taught me many things, among them the doggedness and skepticism that are helpful in my current job. But mostly it taught me that the Journal isn't a commodity -- it's a vital national resource. It is possible that there are only three or four U.S newspapers of its reach still willing to do what it takes to dig that last foot for a story and to strictly observe the "church-state" divisions among news, opinion and an owner's broader commercial interests.
It is no coincidence that Rupert Murdoch does not own such a paper. His mission is to blur the lines between church and state and infuse the blend with his own distinctive, lively brand of populist values. And let's face it, no one does it better. If you can find someone who doesn't love a New York Post headline, hook him up to a heart monitor, fast.
But while Murdoch's media products in the United States and Britain are well known, his operations in China, where I had a glimpse into their workings, are not. His News Corp. owned a substantial stake in Phoenix TV, a widely watched television network in China that routinely kowtows to the ruling Communist Party. As anyone who has seen Phoenix TV's news coverage knows, its self-censorship is routine.
In 2003, when the deadly SARS virus was threatening to trigger a global pandemic, the Chinese government persistently denied that its country contained the seeds of such an outbreak even though the simple reporting of this fact was the needed first step toward prevention of a monumental public health disaster. In the face of this coverup, a courageous Chinese surgeon drafted a detailed letter identifying SARS cases in Beijing itself and had it delivered to Murdoch's TV network for public broadcast. And what did the network do with the letter? The same thing any other obedient Chinese news agency would have done: nothing.
The surgeon's letter eventually found its way into the hands of Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, which published stories on it. The Chinese government was finally forced to admit it had a health problem and to adopt measures that contained the spread of the virus.
Unfortunately, this example does not stand alone. When a NATO warplane bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, I saw Murdoch's reporters at Phoenix TV use the event to fuel an anti-American propaganda orgy while hesitating to report the Clinton administration's apology and admission that the bombing was a mistake. You expect the Chinese government to behave this way, but didn't Murdoch recently write that he has "always respected the independence and integrity of the news organizations" with which he is associated?
It would be one thing if he confined his self-censorship to his Chinese publishing ventures, but I'm afraid he doesn't. Beijing goes out of its way to punish American corporations that produce news or films it finds offensive. Murdoch understands how the game works. In the mid-1990s, he dropped the BBC from his satellite broadcast system in Asia after Beijing complained about the British channel's news coverage. (He now claims that this was done strictly for commercial reasons.) Not long after that he canceled publication of a memoir by Hong Kong's last British governor, Chris Patten, whom Beijing had branded a "tango dancer" and a "whore" for his pro-democracy policies. (Murdoch claimed in the Financial Times last week that he "told the HarperCollins editors not to publish the Patten book because I did not think it would sell, but they went ahead anyway," thus requiring his kill shot. Again, that was his right, but the result was nevertheless a form of meddling that would greatly harm the quality of news reported by the Wall Street Journal.) Writers for more than one of Murdoch's newspapers say that they have periodically come under pressure to soft-pedal China-related coverage. Can you imagine the Wall Street Journal, which has won two Pulitzer Prizes this decade for its China coverage, considering such a thing?
Murdoch is not an editorial ogre but a smart, charming businessman with a pioneering style of journalism that has its place in a free country. His editorial support of America's troops is generous, and he has created a fresh point of view with Fox News. I'm also told he keeps his hands off the Australian, one of the many newspapers he owns. But the Wall Street Journal is not Fox News or the Australian, and its mission is not their mission. China will be the biggest story of the 21st century. Its policies and progress must be understood and reported fearlessly. Beyond that, the Journal brings us a quality of news that's not only unusual but important to our future.
Several days ago in western Iraq, an unseen guerrilla detonated a bomb moments after my fellow Marines and I had driven over it. Marines call near misses like this a "gut check." I know why I took certain risks working for the Journal, and I know why I take them as a Marine, and while I still haven't figured out how to say it without sounding too earnest, high-minded and patriotic, I'll say it anyway: Some things in America need to be protected, and none more than a free and intrepid press. Because no one exercises that role better than the Journal, the loss of its rigorous, undiluted reporting would be a hole in America's heart deeper than that hole in the road.
The writer is a former Wall Street Journal reporter now serving as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
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Accession Number: ADA511613
Title: Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan
Descriptive Note: Research paper
Corporate Author: CENTER FOR A NEW AMERICAN SECURITY WASHINGTON DC
Personal Author(s):
Report Date: 2010-01-01
Pagination or Media Count: 28.0
Abstract:
This paper, written by the senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan and by a company-grade officer and a senior executive with the Defense Intelligence Agency, critically examines the relevance of the U.S. intelligence community to the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Based on discussions with hundreds of people inside and outside the intelligence community, it recommends sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself -- from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan. The paper argues that because the United States has focused the overwhelming majority of collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade. This problem or its consequences exist at every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy, and pivotal information is not making it to those who need it. To quote General Stanley McChrystal in a recent meeting, Our senior leaders -- the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States -- are not getting the right information to make decisions with... The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from the sensor all the way to the political decision makers. This is a need that spans the 44 nations involved with the International Security Assistance Force ISAF. This paper is the blueprint for that process. It describes the problem, details the changes and illuminates examples of units that are getting it right. It is aimed at commanders as well as intelligence professionals, in Afghanistan and in the United States and Europe.
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WASHINGTON—President Trump has chosen one of his leading policy counselors on China and North Korea as his new deputy national security adviser, according to an administration official.
Matt Pottinger, who served in the Marines and worked earlier in his career as a China-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, will be the No. 2 to Robert O’Brien, who was named as Mr. Trump’s fourth national security adviser earlier this week.
The administration official said that Vice President Mike Pence had been advocating for Mr. Pottinger in recent days given his work on some of the biggest policy challenges facing the Trump administration.
Mr. Pottinger, who currently serves as the National Security Council’s director for East Asia policy, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The appointments follow the departure of John Bolton, who served in the Trump administration for 18 months before leaving amid disagreements over a range of policy issues.
Mr. Pottinger lived in China while reporting for the Journal then left journalism in 2005 to serve in the Marine Corps.
In a 2005 essay in the Journal [included earlier in this page, or here: [HN01UC][GDrive] ], Mr. Pottinger explained his career change, writing, “living in China...shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens.”
“I’m not an uncritical, rah-rah American,” he added. “Living abroad has sharpened my view of what’s wrong with my country, too. It’s obvious that we need to reinvent ourselves in various ways, but we should also be allowed to do it from within, not according to someone else’s dictates.”
By Lawrence Wright / December 28, 2020 / Source as a PDF : [HP0098][GDrive] , as text : [HP009A][GDrive]