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Before I really got to work, Boehme handed me a piece of paper on which was mimeoed Kelly’s “riot act”—ten basic rules we worked by. A few of them: “There shall be only one object: to get a good airplane built on time.” “Engineers shall always work within a stone’s throw of the airplane being built.” “Any cause for delay shall be immediately reported to C. L. Johnson in writing by the person anticipating the delay.” “Special parts or materials shall be avoided whenever possible. Parts from stock shall be used even at the expense of added weight. Otherwise the chances of delay are too great.” “Everything possible will be done to save time.”
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
Putin himself is hardly uninvolved. Evidence suggests that he also pillages the state, on an even grander scale. Some of Russia’s wealthiest men are Putin’s personal friends, including Gennady Timchenko, the head of the Gunvor oil trading company, who is believed to be worth $15.3 billion; Yuri Kovalchuk, an owner of the Rossiya Bank ($1.4 billion); and the Rotenberg brothers, Arkady and Boris, whose combined wealth is estimated at $5.6 billion. All of these men made fortunes on the assets of the state. Gazfund, the largest nongovernment pension fund, Gazprombank, Russia’s second–most important bank, and Gazprom-media were all removed from state-run Gazprom and put under the control of the Rossiya Bank. Gunvor, little known in 2000, has since become the world’s third-largest oil trader, and the Rotenberg brothers, besides owning intermediary firms that sold pipes to Gazprom, received approximately $7 billion in contracts for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.23 According to Boris Nemtsov, the former first deputy prime minister who was murdered in Moscow on February 27, 2015, and Vladimir Milov, the former deputy minister of energy, “There is reason to assume that all of these Timchenkos, Kovalchuks, Rotenbergs—are nothing more than nominal owners of big property and that the real beneficiary is Putin himself.”24 Stanislav Belkovsky, a Russian political analyst who once worked as a speechwriter for Berezovsky, told the German newspaper Die Welt in 2007 that Putin’s secret assets were worth $40 billion, which would make him the richest man in Europe. Citing senior figures in the president’s own administration as his sources, Belkovsky said that Putin was the beneficial owner of 75 percent of Gunvor, 37 percent of Surgutneftegaz (a principal supplier of oil for Gunvor), and 4.5 percent of Gazprom. This ownership structure was concealed behind a “non-transparent network of offshore companies,” with the final points in Zug, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein. When asked whether he could prove his claims, Belkovsky said that Putin’s wealth is no secret among the elites. “And you should note that Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] has never sued me.”25 Belkovsky’s estimates of Putin’s private wealth track closely with those of Western intelligence.
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
was getting toward dusk, and everyone knew how bad the whole thing was. Paul O’Dowd was with the artillerymen who by then were buttoning up their guns, preparatory for the last move. If they went south, it was going to be a very bad trip, they all knew, because they had two spotter planes flying over the road and the reports on the destruction were shocking. It sounded like a massacre to O’Dowd. But for the moment he had only one job, getting those guns out of there. Lieutenant Colonel John Keith of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion had told him to load up their guns, and he was doing just that, sure that they had fired their last round in the Kunuri region. Just then one of his forward observers, First Lieutenant Patrick McMullan, showed up and started screaming, “Fire mission! Fucking Chinese! Fire mission! Fucking Chinese everywhere! Fire mission!” O’Dowd had never seen McMullan so out of control—he thought maybe he was drunk, for some of the men in other units had been drinking that day. “Fire mission! More fucking Chinese!” “We’re on closed station march orders,” O’Dowd told him, which was the exact phrase they used for the moment when they had closed it up and were ready to get out. But gradually O’Dowd got more information: the Chinese were moving in for the kill right out in the open in daylight, seemingly thousands of them. Just then Colonel Freeman walked by and asked O’Dowd what was going on, and O’Dowd explained what McMullan had seen. “Get the goddamn guns into fire positions,” Freeman ordered. There they were, all those Chinese, perhaps five thousand yards away, a vast field of them closing in just as McMullan had said. Freeman told the men that their mission was to delay the Chinese, even if they did not get out in time themselves, even if they did not get out at all. The regiment, Freeman later remembered, unloaded all its weapons and ammo, and the men laid everything out in front of them. This is where they were going to make their last stand, he thought, and quite possibly die. The artillerymen had unloaded the big 105s from the trucks and pointed them in one direction—eighteen howitzers in all, the last guns of Kunuri. It was called a Russian front in the artillery. Paul O’Dowd had fought in two wars, survived the worst of the Naktong fighting, and he had never seen anything like this. Everyone in the unit—cooks, clerk typists—helped take shells off the trucks and carry them to the guns. They fired everything they had in what seemed to O’Dowd about twenty minutes, though it probably took longer. There was a lot of ammo because they had shells that two other artillery units had left behind. They were firing so fast that the guns were overheating and the paint was peeling, just rolling off the guns in giant chunks. The recoil systems on those guns were going to be ruined, O’Dowd decided, but there was no time to worry about that. He was just a little scared that the chambers were so hot the guns might blow. It was an…
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
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