Rosie Blore (3:39)

You say that this is a proposal. Do we know if it's actually been put into play?

Shashank Joshi (3:44)

We don't and here I should be really clear. This document is a 10 page proposal prepared by the GRU, that's Russia's military intelligence service for presentation to Iran. We can't authenticate it ourselves. We don't have direct evidence to confirm it was passed to the Iranians, whether any of these drones actually reached Iran or, or if the promised training program begun. But we have seen some indications fiber optic drones have been used by Hezbollah, which is the Iran backed militia in Lebanon. The document is undated. It was probably drafted, we think, within the first six weeks of this war when Russia thought there was a very real chance of Donald Trump attempting a ground operation perhaps to send ground troops to seize Hog island, that oil terminal that we've talked about on the show before. We have been able to examine the 10 pages. We but we don't know whether this was an active plan that was actually implemented.

Rosie Blore (4:39)

We knew, didn't we, that Russia was giving Iran some kind of support. So exactly how surprising is this?

Shashank Joshi (4:47)

It's not shocking, but it is significant. We know that Russia had provided a limited amount of support intelligence, for example. We know there's a defense industrial relationship between these countries. You know, we've talked about Iranian designed Shahid drones and their transfer to Russia and the way that Russia has improved upon them in the course of the war in Ukraine. We discussed that, I think, think just a month ago, didn't we Rosie? And there's a good working relationship between the irgc, the Revolutionary Guards in Iran and the GRU in Russia that goes back a long way. Russia intervened in Syria. It was operating on the ground in proximity to Iranian proxies. There was that relationship, then there was a relationship over Ukraine. And so this to me fits with evidence that is emerging across the region of closer military cooperation between the two sides. But it would still be, I think, think an escalation. It would still be something that the Russians would have to be careful with because they know it could result in a pretty sharp reaction from the American government.

Rosie Blore (5:48)

Explain to me why the fiber optic drones are such a game changer, how they would actually shift the dynamics of the war.

Shashank Joshi (5:56)

Well, if you take a step back, let's think about the drones used in Ukraine, whether that's for reconnaissance, whether that's for strike missions. Most of these are controlled by sending radio signals to the drone. Some of them are controlled by sending satellite signals. As point about fiber optic drones is that you can have a long tethered cable along which you channel that data. And so the advantage is they're Extremely accurate. They can fly a long way, you know, 40 kilometers. And most importantly of all, these are essentially unjammable because there's no radio signal to jam. Everything's going down this big fiber optic cable. And that idea of a tethered missile isn't new. The Egyptians used Soviet made wire guided anti tank missiles called Sagas in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. They inflicted very heavy losses on Israel. So wire guided munitions go back to the Second World War, I think perhaps even a little bit before that. But the fiber optic element is new. It has been extremely successful in Ukraine. The most skillful Ukrainian operators can weave these things even through a dense forest to get to the other side. And there's been this mad rush to by both Russia and Ukraine to get the fiber optic spools they need to make these things. So they've tried to get them in China, they've run out of supplies. This is a really, really capable kind of weapon and so that's why it's so significant.

Rosie Blore (7:23)

And you also talked about another kind of drones, the long range satellite guided drones.

Shashank Joshi (7:28)

So these are drones equipped with Starlink terminals. And some of our listeners may have Starlink terminals to give them Internet at home. This is the company owned by SpaceX, whose CEO is Elon Musk. And it provides Internet using a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit. Russia and Ukraine have used Starlink. Russia had been using drones equipped with Starlink terminals to attack Ukrainian air defenses and logistics hubs in other sites. And it was pretty effective. What happened earlier this year was that Elon Musk denied Russia's armed forces access to Starlink by effectively blocking all the terminals active in Ukraine, because the terminals know where they are, of course, except for those on a so called white list that is approved by Ukraine's government. So that was very restrictive, but it was a way of blocking Russia from using these things. The Russian proposal suggests that some of these drones could be diverted and used in the Middle east which would have fewer restrictions. There's no geofencing as they call it. And the document speculates that Starlink connectivity would eventually be cut off in due course, but that it could still inflict what they call disorder on American forces in the interim.

Rosie Blore (8:40)

And what about the plan for Russians to train Iranians how to use these weapons?

Shashank Joshi (8:46)

Well, these things are not always immediately easy to use. Right. And in fact, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the White House said that Iran had sent trainers to Crimea to help Russia operate Iranian designed drones. So this would Kind of be full circle. And what the document proposes is recruiting drone operators from among an estimated 10,000 or so Iranian students studying in Russian universities. It says that other communities that could be tapped are people from the Tajik ethnic group, and they speak both Russian and a version of Persian, which the Iranian language, as well as the Alawite minority from Syria. And you may recall that among the Alawites in Syria, there was a great deal of support for the Alstead Assad regime, and therefore that was particularly a strong link to the Russian military in Syria. And the document says all these people could be screened for loyalty, for religious extremism. This document was written at a time when the main threat facing Iran was an amphibious assault, an American amphibious assault, or an airborne assault, perhaps to open the Strait of Hormuz, seize Hague Island. And it notes that American landing craft would be particularly vulnerable to drone attack because of their slow speed. In fact, there's a diagram that illustrates how Russian trained Iranian drone operators could attack a landing flotilla by launching swarms of five or six drones from hidden positions some 15 to 30 kilometers away. And although we now hear the American government saying the offensive phase of the war is over, it seems relatively unlikely we will see a major ground operation. The prospect of this very, very clearly was a source of concern to Russian officials earlier in the conflict.

Rosie Blore (10:30)

Shashank, we're talking about this almost as though it's just about the tech. It's about how war is waged. But doesn't it also represent a shift in the geopolitics as well?

Shashank Joshi (10:41)

Now, we've been debating for years now the strength, depth, significance of what some people call the crink, right? China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. You can call it many different things. And there's been a debate how serious this is. Russia hasn't given Iran all that much help, right? It hasn't helped Iran to substantially rebuild its air defenses since they were smashed by Israel last year. And Russia has many pressing military needs of its own. But I think what this shows is that many of the most significant transfers that we may see between these countries will be not in terms of big defense platforms or in the realm of ships, submarines, planes. It will be in the realm of lessons they have learned from their respective conflicts. Russia in Ukraine, Iran in the Middle East, North Korea from its involvement in Kursk in Russia. And those lessons will flow between them. There are learning communities that exist in these countries, and some of that may be around, for example, Russia telling Iran how it has learned to make faster, quieter, more effective Shaheed drones that originally came from Iran. Some of that may be equally this transfer of fiber optic drones, some of it may be from China passing on to Russia. What it's learned about submarines. That I think is going to be a real challenge to the west in the coming years. And this, I think is a window into what that cooperation might look like on the ground in the moment on a really, really serious matter of war and peace.

Rosie Blore (12:19)

Terrifying stuff. Shashank, thank you very much.

Shashank Joshi (12:22)

Thanks. Ros.

Jeffrey Carr (12:34)

Foreign.

Jason Palmer (12:42)

Let me tell you about what's behind this here velvet rope. Economist Insider. Our video series gives you unparalleled access to our newsroom. Each week, our senior editors take you behind our journalism, from dynamic debates to the latest developing stories explaining what today's events mean for tomorrow. This week on Insider, our editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, sits down with Rahm Emanuel, who's a fixture of the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations and a former mayor of Chicago. He's spent decades at the high stakes center of Democratic power. Now he's got his sights on the presidency. He joins us in Los Angeles to discuss the party's path for the next election. If you're a digital subscriber, you already have access to Insider, nothing extra to sign up for. And if you're listening for free, you can watch extended clips from Insider via the link in the show. NOTES.

Jeffrey Carr (13:47)

Islamic Republic of Iran declared Strait of almost completely closed again

Joshua Spencer (13:55)

Captain Khan and his crew have been stranded in the Strait of Hormuz for almost nine weeks now. Missiles regularly fly above their heads and sometimes they crash down around them. One of them actually hit a fuel tanker just a few meters away from them, which caught fire and exploded. On another occasion, debris from a missile overhead actually sunk a ship just in front of them.

Jason Palmer (14:24)

Joshua Spencer is our Asian news editor.

Joshua Spencer (14:27)

Captain Khan and his crew have actually tried to get through the Strait of Hormuz three times, but the Iranians have turned them back every time. He's just one of around 20,000 seafarers who've been stuck in the Gulf and remain so as the war in Iran drags on.

Jason Palmer (14:43)

And what more do we know about those 20,000 seafarers?

Joshua Spencer (14:47)

One person described seafarers to me as the ultimate key workers. They're people who crew the ships that carry 85% of all traded goods by volume. So everything from clothes, fertilizer, food, energy, all the things that we need to keep living, these sailors are responsible for carrying around the world. Most of them actually come from Asia, where I'm based, mostly from Lower income Asian countries such as the Philippines, India, Bangladesh. But they're increasingly exposed to wars and conflicts, things that they have no part in and they're unprepared for.

Jason Palmer (15:19)

And so for those seafarers stuck in the Gulf, what is life like on board? Nine weeks into this?

Joshua Spencer (15:25)

Pretty awful. I think the first big thing to mention is the physical harm and danger. At least 10 seafarers have actually been killed so far. One crew member I spoke to actually witnessed a missile hit his ship just a few meters away from him, killing someone else that was on board. So they are really on the front lines of this war.

Jason Palmer (15:42)

But what about when they're not directly in the firing line and just subsisting?

Joshua Spencer (15:46)

It varies a lot, right? Some of the ships that are in the Gulf, the owners of those ships have signed up to an agreement that guarantees their workers double pay and also a right to be repatriated from the region. And for some of these crews, actually, they're kind of happy to be getting the higher pay and having a sort of slightly reduced workload. Not everyone is right in the firing line. Some of them describe being bored playing basketball or volleyball on deck and so on. But for most of them, really, there is an increasing hardship and difficulty, even for the people who were covered by the agreement that I mentioned earlier. They're facing shortages of food, of fresh water. A captain of a ship that I spoke to told me that he has to pay $50 for a ton of water now, where he used to pay $2 before the war started. So his crew have started rationing it when they shower or when they're preparing food. But really the sort of biggest hardship across all of them is the sort of mental strain and the uncertainty. They never know what's going to happen when they wake up, they're reading the news headlines just like the rest of us are kind of completely hostage to events. And even actually leaving the Gulf is a risk in itself because a lot of these seafarers are working contract to contract. So if they leave the Gulf, they actually don't know where the next job is coming from. So there's no good options for them.

Jason Palmer (16:57)

But I would imagine nevertheless, that a lot of those sailors would like to get out of the Gulf. Is there a plan to get them out en masse?

Joshua Spencer (17:05)

There have been some suggestions. Donald Trump announced a plan last week to guide stranded vessels out of the straits called Project Freedom. Although details were relatively light later in the week, though, the President then said he was going to pause this plan as he tried to negotiate with Iran over a permanent end to the war. So at the moment, that plan hasn't really taken force properly. And actually, even if some sort of deal to reopen Hormuz is struck, it's not going to be a sudden journey out for the seafarers. That's partly because legally, they can't abandon their ships, so they can't just leave them there without finding a replacement. And as you can imagine, not many seafarers are volunteering or sticking up their hands to be going into a war zone and relieving them off the ship. And then even if seafarers do manage to get to dry land, say the Gulf countries in the Middle east, difficult to get on flights, which are really expensive and there's not many of them. And also, it's hard to get visas to enter Gulf countries in the first place. So all of this sort of means that even if there is a reopening of the strait, it's not going to be an immediate quick fix for seafare. Whereas one person in the industry that I spoke to said it could take six months for any sort of normality to return for them.

Jason Palmer (18:11)

And even the normality we've talked about on the show before is not such an easy life on board.

Joshua Spencer (18:17)

Yes, it's not easy. It's a very dangerous and difficult job, and it always has been. There's been famous films about seafarers being attacked by pirates off Somalia. That remains a risk for them, particularly off the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea. And then there's been several recent hardships and disruptions to their lives, even before the war in Iran. So the biggest one was the pandemic, which was really, really tough for seafarers. One crew member that I spoke to actually spent 20 months aboard his ship without seeing his family, without going home during COVID And he sort of had this feeling that he sacrificed his life and his social life and his family life for the benefit of the world economy, for the benefit of people like us that want our food and our energy to eat our homes. There's also been other issues, such as unscrupulous owners have been abandoning ships more often than they used without paying the wages of the seafarers on board. And then you've got other conflicts. So it's not just in the Gulf where the seafarers are threatened. You've also got the Houthis firing off missiles in the Red Sea, which has killed several sailors in recent months. And then you also have the Ukraine, Russia war. Some Russian missiles have actually hit seafarers in the Black Sea as well. So this is the sort of latest in a series of hardships.

Jason Palmer (19:27)

And is it the responsibility of the sort of home governments of all of these sailors to look after their welfare?

Joshua Spencer (19:33)

The home governments definitely have a role to play. And I think that they know that seafarers are quite an important political and economic force in their countries. They're not just earning money for themselves, they're actually remitting and sending money back home and adding quite a big slice of the country's GDP. So take the Philippines, which actually has 590,000 seafarers, which is the most of any country. They send about $7 billion a year back to the Philippines. Protecting seafarers rights has become a kind of political issue in some countries. And there's even been a political party in the Philippines set up called Ankler or Angkor Party.

Jason Palmer (20:07)

So you add to a difficult and dangerous job what is now quickly becoming almost a humanitarian situation in the Gulf.

Joshua Spencer (20:14)

Yes, exactly. I think governments in Asia are aware of this. India's government, for example, is doing a lot to try and repatriate seafarers. Ministers are making public statements about this and being very clear that they're doing everything they can to get their stranded sailors back home. But really, I think it's not just governments in Asia that that should be worried about the knock on effects of this war on seafarers. I think it's governments all around the world because even before this war there was actually a shortage of qualified seafarers as the Iran war kind of makes this an even less appetizing job to pick up. This is going to make it even more difficult for the world to ship its goods, to ship fuel, to ship clothes, to ship gadgets all around, and for us to continue trading as we have.

Jason Palmer (20:56)

Josh, thanks very much for joining us.

Joshua Spencer (20:58)

Thank you, Jason.

Jeffrey Carr (21:13)

I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Thus James Watson describes his collaborator in the unravelling of DNA's structure in the opening words of his book on that quest, the Double Helix.

Jason Palmer (21:26)

Jeffrey Carr is a senior editor at the Economist and this week is standing in for Ann Roe. Our obituary's editor.

Jeffrey Carr (21:33)

Substitute Craig Venter into this sentence and you have the measure of a man who, though not Crick's equal as a scientist, was in his own opinion, only a rung or two below him on the ladder of scientific merit. But he also felt that his worth was never fully recognized because he was never quite a member of the club. That perhaps is what you get for growing up on the Wrong side of the tracks. Or in his case, of the runways at San Francisco Airport. A beach bum slacker at high school, he was drafted into the Navy as a hospital corpsman during the Vietnam War. Only after a Damascene in sight, while attempting to drown himself off the coast of Da Nang to escape that conflict's horrors, did he realise his vocation. If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life. Illegitimi non carborundum. The bastards tried. His PhD got him into the National Institutes of Health as a researcher at the outer fringes of the genome project, which had started under Watson's watchful eye in 1990. The next year he published a neat idea for speeding the project up by tagging where genes sat on chromosomes. So neat that the National Institutes of Health wanted to patent the result until, after a public storm during which Watson excoriated both Dr. Venter's technology and the whole idea of patenting human genes, they didn't. After this, he realised that the only institutions in which he could comfortably operate in future would be those he created himself. So create them he did. First, the Institute for Genomic Research, where, to the chagrin of the powers that then were, he worked out a way to speed things up even more by reimagining the process of DNA sequencing that lay at the genome Project's heart. Then Celeragenomics, a commercial outfit which sought to use that idea to race and beat the official Human Genome Project to the winning post. And then, after the genome was done and dusted and Celera no longer had need of his services or he of its, the modestly named J. Craig Venter Institute at Solera's high point. He was a centimillionaire. The real draw, though, was not riches, but recognition from the wider world. He got that in spades. Feature articles galore, including in the Economist and his picture on the covers of Time and Business Recall, all proudly displayed on the walls of the J. Craig Venter Institute. But no Nobel Prize. His fellow scientists are too frequently among the irigitimi for that to happen. Sulston, knighted for his services, accused him of wanting to establish a monopoly over the human genome, and said he had gone morally wrong. This was rich, considering that it was only by adopting his methods that the official project was able to catch up with Dr. Venters private one, and thus arrive at a politically brokered tie in the resulting race. Dr. Collins, with whom he shared the glory in June 2000, when President Bill Clinton announced that tie in the East Room of the White House, was more measured. But he did observe of his rival, we'll never find ourselves going out for a beer on Friday nights just for the heck of it. We're wired in a different way at bottom, in the minds of the Sulstans and Collinses of this world. That wiring had led Dr. Venter to sell his soul to the devils of commerce. He, by contrast, regarded Salera's creation pragmatically as the only means available to achieve his desired end. As to riches, the easiest way to make a small fortune was to start off with a large one, and a good way to effect that transition was to have an expensive hobby, which he did. Yachts. Two of them, though not at the same time. He called both sorcerer. As his second wife, Claire Fraser, herself no mean microbiologist, put it, we'd be rich if it wasn't for that boat. More science followed. The first synthetic bacterial genome, a stripped down minimal genome that is the smallest a microbe can get away with and remain alive. And numerous, though ultimately unprofitable, excursions into the elusive field of synthetic biology in which living organisms would be rebuilt, the better to serve human needs. Ironically, considering his epiphany in the South China Sea, his last big idea was life extension. The real thought, not the reputational. First, in 2013, he helped found Human Longevity, a firm that proposed to extend human lifespans by understanding and subverting the biological processes of aging. That lasted five years before he parted company with it, either depending on who you talk to by storming out or being fired. Then this January, he had another go with the ventricle diploid genomics, after the paired chromosomes of human cells in which he felt the secrets of longevity lay. However, though he himself was prodded, poked and scanned to the nth degree during his time at Human Longevity and said such attention to detail had saved him from undetected prostate cancer, in the end, it was to no avail. Still, he had indeed done something meaningful with his life, and the bastards had certainly not ground him down.

Jason Palmer (27:14)

Jeffrey Carr on Craig Venter, who's died aged 79. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Sarah Larnyuk and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Alize Jean Baptiste. Our senior creative producer is William Warren and our senior development producer is Rory Galloway. Our producer is Anne Hanna and our assistant producer is Kunal Patel. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Eleanor Sly, we'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence. This week we're back on the topic of civil defense. Back in February, we reported from Lithuania, where civilian society is gearing up to defend itself from a potential attack from neighboring Russia. My colleague Tim Judah, recently returned from a reporting trip in Ukraine. Having seen what happens when a nation had to react to an invasion, he got to wondering what his native Britain has in the way of plans. What he found was hardly reassuring. It.