Blowout

by Rachel Maddow

  Aside from benefiting from Russell Gold’s book Boom, I was greatly helped by his deep dive published in The Wall Street Journal in 2014, “Energy Boom Puts Wells in America’s Backyards.” Gold and a colleague turned up the notable fact that in that year, as he said, “15.3 million Americans lived within a single mile of a well that has been drilled since 2000. That is more people than live in Michigan or New York City.”

  George P. Mitchell’s op-ed co-authored with Michael R. Bloomberg appeared in The Washington Post on August 23, 2012.

  The admission that way back in 1967 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Geological Survey had determined that “significant seismic events in the vicinity of Denver, Colorado,” were caused by the “deep, hazardous waste disposal at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal” was buried on page 9 of the Environmental Protection Agency’s eighty-one-page report, “Technical Program Overview: Underground Injection Control Regulations,” published in December 2002.

  The full text of the OGS statement on the Prague earthquake sequence of 2011, sent out on March 22, 2013, can be accessed at the survey’s website: ogs.ou.edu/​earthquakes/​OGS_PragueStatement201303.pdf.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Atlantic has an excellent photo essay on the building of the Sochi Olympics, and a transcript of remarks from Putin’s meeting with Tillerson at Sochi is accessible at archive.premier.gov.ru. Steve Coll also detailed that meeting in Private Empire. Contemporaneous reporting by Andrew Kramer at The New York Times and Douglas Busvine at Reuters provided context and texture to the Sochi meeting. The state of ExxonMobil in the summer of 2011, as perceived and heralded by ExxonMobil, can be found in contemporaneous press releases available on the corporate website. I very much appreciated the neutral take on the Russian oil and gas industry in “The Analysis of Russian Oil and Gas Reserves,” by Yulia Grama, at the Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi University, Taiwan, which was published in the International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy.

  The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck did some of the best reporting on BP’s Bob Dudley’s dangerous slalom through Moscow and the Russian oil and gas industry.

  CHAPTERS FOURTEEN AND FIFTEEN

  The following were key sources for biographical information and color on Igor Sechin: his bio page at Rosneft.com; Dawisha’s aforementioned Putin’s Kleptocracy; “Factbox: Russia’s Energy Tsar: Who Is Igor Sechin?,” Reuters, June 2010; “Igor Sechin: Rosneft’s Kremlin Hard Man Comes out of the Shadows,” The Guardian, October 2012; a 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable titled “Russia: Bringing Sechin into Focus”; “Oil Boyar,” The Economist, December 2016; Dexter Filkins’s 2017 profile of Tillerson in The New Yorker; Mikhail Zygar’s 2016 book, All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin; and Alec Luhn’s colorful February 2017 story in Vox, “The ‘Darth Vader’ of Russia: Meet Igor Sechin, Putin’s Right-Hand Man.”

  The median household income data in various countries come from a Gallup study released in 2013. Aside from contemporaneous reporting, the outlines and specifics of the early Putin strategy and tactics for using Russia’s oil and gas sector to further his political and geopolitical goals are described in detail by Zygar in All the Kremlin’s Men, Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy, Senator Cardin’s report “Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security,” and writings and lectures by former U.S. Energy Department official Leonard Coburn. “Putin and Gazprom: An Independent Expert Report,” by Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, and translated by Dave Essel, is a cogent and early explanation of the consequences of Putin’s use of Gazprom for state ends. And for the lay of the land in the Russian oil and gas sector circa 2012, I am indebted to Thane Gustafson for his book Wheel of Fortune and his various (and always entertaining and informative) public talks and lectures.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The assessment of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic comes from the U.S. Geological Survey’s fact sheet “Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal: Estimates of Undiscovered Oil and Gas North of the Arctic Circle,” announcing the results of the study completed in May 2008.

  The tale of Royal Dutch Shell’s mishaps in the Alaskan Arctic in the 2012 drilling season is laid out in official government postgame reports, including “Report to the Secretary of the Interior: Review of Shell’s 2012 Alaska Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration Program” (March 2013); the U.S. Coast Guard’s “Report of Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Multiple Related Marine Casualties and Grounding of the MODU Kulluk” (December 2012); and the National Transportation Safety Board’s Marine Accident Brief, “Grounding of Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Kulluk” (December 2012). The various legal transgressions Shell and Noble were forced to cop to are detailed in official announcements by the Department of Justice (December 2014) and the Environmental Protection Agency (September 2013).

  Besides McKenzie Funk’s excellent “The Wreck of the Kulluk” in The New York Times Magazine in December 2014, I benefited from contemporaneous reporting in the Anchorage Daily News and Marine Log. The Taranaki Daily News provided great coverage of the Disco’s brief, unhappy stay in New Zealand. Alaska-based reporter Jim Paulin first elicited the remarkable fact that Shell decided to make the ill-fated Kulluk tow, at least in part, to save on the fairly meager tax bill the corporation would have had to pay to the State of Alaska had it stayed put in Alaska that winter.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The portrait of the two sad-sack Russian spies in New York (including contact with Carter Page) was laid out in telling detail in the twenty-six-page criminal complaint United States of America v. Evgeny Buryakov a/k/a “Zhenya,” Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Pobodnyy. Garrett M. Graf’s “Spy Who Added Me on LinkedIn” (Bloomberg, November 15, 2016) had additional color about the FBI’s infiltration of the spies’ supposedly secure quarters.

  Thanks to Steve Horn, at DeSmogBlog, who turned up the registration papers Carter Page filed at the office of the Oklahoma secretary of state for the establishment of Global Natural Gas Ventures LLC in Oklahoma City—among other Page-related memorabilia. And thanks to Carter Page himself for his strange testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Committee on Intelligence on November 2, 2017. The official record of those proceedings also includes Page’s letters to then FBI director James Comey, and a number of Page’s self-selected essays in which he lays out his feelings about Igor Sechin, the Magnitsky Act, and the unfair treatment of Russia and its government officials by the U.S. State Department in the Obama administration. It’s not hard to see why the Russians thought there might be an especially Putin-friendly candidate in the hunt for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination after Donald Trump plucked Carter Page off the funny pages and named him one of his five key foreign policy advisers.

  Aside from the postarrest reporting by Matei Rosca and Andrew Higgins, the sketch of Marcel Lehel Lazar (“Guccifer”) is drawn from the criminal complaint, the plea agreement, the statement of facts, and the prosecutors’ sentencing letter in the case of United States of America v. Marcel Lehel Lazar filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Oh, and the Guccifer Archive itself is still floating around out there in what Lazar called “the cloud of Infinite Justice.”

  “The Weird History of How the Hillary Clinton Email Story Was Broken—and Buried” by Callum Borchers (The Washington Post, July 5, 2016) is a nice little windup of how the Blumenthal-Clinton email exchange—and thus Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state—was uncovered by Guccifer first.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The world owes its knowledge of Putin’s corruption in the construction projects for the Sochi Olympics to the investigations done by Russian dissidents Boris Nemtsov and Alexey Navalny. Much of their work was published in English in The Interpreter. Many other journalists, as detailed in the text of the book, followed their lead and added
to it. Human Rights Watch’s February 2013 report, “Race to the Bottom,” detailed life and pay, such as it was, for the locals and the migrants who served as the labor for the Sochi construction boom.

  The official archive website of the Russian Federation presidency reveals a surprisingly frank rendering of Putin’s reaction to what he perceived as Yanukovych’s weakness in the face of the escalating Revolution of Dignity protest in Kyiv.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The twenty-year-old Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, was suddenly back in the news and much talked about after Putin’s forcible annexation of Crimea in 2014. I was able to access text of the original agreement at the Security Council Report website (www.securitycouncilreport.org). SCR is a not-for-profit organization founded “to advance the transparency and effectiveness of the UN Security Council.”

  Details of Russia and Putin mucking around in the politics of Ukraine come from Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy; Oleksander Andreyev’s “Power and Money in Ukraine,” at Open Democracy, February 2014; Senator Ben Cardin’s “Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security,” 2018; and Mikhail Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men. The portrait of Dmitry Firtash is drawn in part from his wide-roaming talks with U.S. State Department officials in Kyiv. I was greatly aided in understanding the general structure of Ukraine’s energy sector as well as its energy needs by Simon Pirani’s 2007 analysis for the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, “Ukraine’s Gas Sector.” Nemtsov and Milov, in “Putin and Gazprom: An Independent Expert Report” (2008), helped with the Ukrainian energy sector and Firtash’s place in it. As did the brilliant “Comrade Capitalism” series published by Reuters. Firtash’s general business practice and philosophy are also detailed in prosecutorial filings in United States of America v. Dmitry Firtash et al., filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

  Paul Manafort’s work for, and compensation received from, the Putin-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine is spelled out in indictments, trial testimony and exhibits, statements of offenses, plea agreements, and sentencing memoranda in the recent federal criminal cases brought by the Office of Special Counsel against Manafort. So too is his energetic work tearing at the reputations of the Party of Regions’ leading political opponents, including Yulia Tymoshenko. The exquisite details of Manafort’s business relationship with Firtash bubble up in exhibits produced in various civil suits brought by Tymoshenko, as well as employees of CMZ LLC.

  The mercenary activities of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom are laid out in the settlement agreement reached between the firm and the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in January 2019. As this book was going to press, a further criminal complaint against the former Skadden attorney Greg Craig was pending.

  For the final curtain of the Revolution of Dignity in Maidan, the ouster of Yanukovych, and the immediate consequences thereafter, I was greatly helped by Steven Lee Myers’s 2015 book, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, and by staff of the National Security Council at the Obama White House. For understanding both the hopes and the experiences of Ukrainians on the ground during the siege, the 2015 documentary film Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, directed by Evgeny Afineevsky (and available on Netflix), was a very helpful resource.

  The Guardian produced a textual and photographic tone poem of Yanukovych’s presidential palace soon after Putin’s puppet fled Kyiv for safe haven in Russia. It is unforgettable.

  If you want a little insight into how Rex Tillerson felt about Putin, check out his talk to the Undergraduate Business Council at the University of Texas on February 9, 2016. I accessed it at www.dallasnews.com/​business/​business/​2016/​12/​13/​exxon-ceo-rex-tillerson-words-favorite-ut-prof-became-engineer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  To understand the contours and the depth of the downward turn for Aubrey McClendon and Chesapeake Energy, I was especially helped by Russell Gold in The Boom, reporting by CNN’s Maureen Farrell, Forbes’s Christopher Helman, and the Boggs lawsuit. Abrahm Lustgarten’s reporting on Chesapeake Energy chiseling landowners due royalties, in ProPublica and The Daily Beast in 2014, was an eye-opener for many—including, apparently, the U.S. Department of Justice.

  Details of Harold Hamm’s history and personality and general philosophy come from Adam Wilmoth’s “Q&A with Harold Hamm” in The Oklahoman, June 2007; Nathan Vardi’s “Last American Wildcatter” in Forbes, January 2009; “Birth of a Wildcatter—How Harold Hamm Got His Start” in Hamm’s own words (Forbes, December 2012); Josh Harkinson’s December 2012 report in Mother Jones, “Who Fracked Mitt Romney?”; Hamm’s own statements in his many appearances on the cable TV business channel chat-fests; and his occasional testimony on behalf of the oil and gas industry before Congress. But thanks especially to Mike Cantrell, in Oklahoma City, for his help in humanizing Hamm.

  Thanks to James MacPherson of the Associated Press for his reporting on the radioactive oil filter socks strewn willy-nilly about the North Dakota landscape.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Data about the state of Oklahoma’s economy and the ebb and flow of its tax receipts comes from the monthly reports from the office of the state treasurer, including the newsletter Oklahoma Economic Report. A number of organizations—left, right, and center—tracked revenue from oil and gas production and spending on education and other state needs in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Policy Institute, and especially its founding director, Dave Blatt, were founts of information about Oklahoma politics and budgeting in this time period. I was also helped by the 2014 and 2017 studies—“Oklahoma’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry: Economic Impact and Jobs Report”—commissioned by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, in conjunction with the Steven C. Agee Economic Research and Policy Institute at Oklahoma City University, and by the Oklahoma Academy for State Goals’ 2018 report, “Aligning Oklahoma’s Tax Code with Our 21st Century Economy.” The National Education Association does a bang-up job of collecting data on school spending and student population in every state across the nation in its “Rankings & Estimates” publication.

  The National Conference of State Legislatures, RegionTrack, and Headwaters Economics all compiled statistics that put Oklahoma’s oil and gas tax revenues and state spending in context with other major oil- and gas-producing states. The Oklahoman (and its digital arm, NewsOK.com) and Matt Trotter at Public Radio Tulsa provided great coverage of the 2014 budget fight both on the inside and on the outside of the Oklahoma state legislature. Thanks to longtime legislative staffer, state legislator, and 2014 gubernatorial candidate Joe Dorman for taking the time to explain the intricacies of state government as it has been practiced in Oklahoma City in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Dorman was the best-versed parliamentarian in the state legislature until he lost his seat to term limits, a bumper-sticker-friendly but shortsighted provision in state law that has wiped away institutional memory and capability in the state’s legislative bodies. (And same goes for every other state that tries it, too.) And thanks again to Mike Cantrell for his clear-eyed view on the varied and various constituencies in Oklahoma policy making.

  The National Weather Service has a roundup and details of the biggest tornadoes in Oklahoma at www.weather.gov/​oun/​tornadodata-ok.

  CHAPTERS TWENTY-TWO AND TWENTY-THREE

  A transcript of Putin’s remarks on the occasion of the initial drilling by ExxonMobil-Rosneft in the Kara Sea, along with photographs, was available at the official website of the Russian Federation presidency, en.kremlin.ru. You can also watch the RT feed of the video linkup at www.youtube.com/​watch?v=AIi_14i8ACA. Glenn Waller’s remarks were quoted in coverage by Reuters and later by The Australian Financial Review in Waller’s home c
ountry.

  Sam Greene, a sociologist at King’s College London, and Graeme Robertson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reported the Levada Center’s polling numbers on Putin’s popularity within Russia in the aftermath of the Crimea annexation in a guest post in The Washington Post. They also parsed, expertly, the reasons behind the post-annexation surge in popularity for Putin within Russia.

  There has been a slew of excellent reporting and analysis surrounding the reasons for Putin’s putsch in Crimea and the east of Ukraine, as well as the contours of the operation itself. Among the most helpful sources for understanding Putin’s mind-set at the time were Myers’s New Tsar and Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men; Julia Ioffe’s 2018 piece in The Atlantic, “What Putin Really Wants”; Vladimir Sorokin’s “Let the Past Collapse on Time!” (New York Review of Books, May 2014); and “Russia’s Breakout from the Post–Cold War System: The Drivers of Putin’s Course,” by Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, in December 2014.

  There has been a lot of great reporting on the ground in Ukraine, but once again a Boris Nemtsov–led investigation is critically helpful for understanding the view from the Russian side. It was Nemtsov’s team that unearthed the story of “Cargo 200.” You can access “Putin. War. An Independent Expert Report,” which Nemtsov did not live to see finished, at www.4freerussia.org/​putin.war/. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin’s War in Ukraine,” by experts at the Atlantic Council, is another valuable resource. The Atlantic Council in general stayed busy training a bright and unflattering light on Putin’s activities in Ukraine from the beginning of the war there. Elena Kostyuchenko, graduate of Moscow State University, did remarkable reporting on the unhappy (and often fatal) experiences of Russian soldiers in Ukraine in Novaya Gazeta. Some of her best work was translated and published in part in The Guardian. Anna Nemtsova has done great reporting work inside Ukraine. And Alec Luhn’s “Life in a War Zone” in The Guardian in July 2014 was a very human article about the very human cost of that war. As was his September 2014 piece in Foreign Policy, “Anatomy of a Bloodbath.”