The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  56. Riots: Elbegdorj won a new seat in parliament on June 29, 2008, but his party, the Democrats, lost. International election observers called the election clean, but Elbegdorj and others argued that it had been rigged, methods of which in Mongolia were known to include bribery, vote-buying, fake IDs, multiple voter registration, and vote-counting shenanigans, exacerbated by a recently passed law that disadvantaged smaller, poorer political parties. Ever since the democratic transition, all parties had alleged election fraud, so the charges weren’t unusual; yet as bad as it was, the corruption was actually getting worse, the State Department found. A riot unfolded in Sukhbaatar Square on July 1. One witness later told Amnesty International, “The people’s anger had been accumulating for many years, and it just exploded.” Eagle TV broadcast live. Tom Terry, the station director, would always ask himself whether he’d contributed to the mayhem by broadcasting the riot; one local newspaper outright faulted the station: “Eagle TV fully accomplished its goal to urge the public for violence...There is evidence that there are Black Powers (foreign investment) who are interfering in our country’s political life.” Journalists were forced to hand over their footage—then, during the declared state of emergency, the National Police Agency played the footage on state television, overlaying narration that falsely attributed the violence to certain people in the crowd, including reporters, reported Amnesty International. At least four people were shot and killed. The mother of one said, “The Mongolian news said that those shot were instigators and criminals but they were just onlookers at the wrong place at the wrong time.” See “‘Where Should I Go from Here?’: The Legacy of the 1 July 2008 Riot in Mongolia,” Amnesty International, March 30, 2009.

  57. “system whereby a small elite”: See Stephen Noerper, “Mongolia Matters,” Brookings Institution, October 8, 2007.

  58. Millennium Challenge Corporation: Poor countries were eligible for millions of dollars in grants if they met certain requirements, involving, for instance, government transparency. President Enkhbayar traveled to Washington to sign the compact as well as another agreement, on preventing trafficking in nuclear technology.

  59. “tens of billions”: “Mongolian Parliament Passes Long Awaited, Absolutely Essential Mining Deal,” a cable from the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar to the State Department in Washington, August 26, 2009, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. A day earlier, parliament had amended laws, allowing the government to execute the much-anticipated agreement for Oyu Tolgoi, the “world class,” “titanic” copper and gold mine in the Gobi. The deal was made despite “long delays stemming from fears of the loss of sovereignty and resource nationalism,” the embassy noted, and it represented “a success for U.S. commercial diplomacy and has cemented the U.S.’s position among the key players in crafting these sorts of agreements in Mongolia. Other donors are generally positive but lingering concerns remain that the GOM [Government of Mongolia] gave away too much in some aspects of the deal.” Over the next forty years, Oyu Tolgoi was “conservatively” expected to yield “44 million tons of copper and 1,800 tons of gold. At current market prices that equals $264 billion and $55 billion respectively.” In a partly redacted section titled “Company perspectives on the deal,” the cable noted, “The deal is not perfect, but we share the opinion of most observers that it balances state and private interest in a way that allows all sides to claim victory. One of the key accomplishments is that the deal will set a pattern for all sides to follow in similar projects, the next one being the Tavan Tolgoi coal project, in which we have both commercial and policy interests.” The cable in which this information was found was labeled “unclassified but sensitive.”

  60. “a stable, middle-class society”: See Jonathan Kaiman, “Mongolia’s New Wealth and Rising Corruption Is Tearing the Nation Apart,” Guardian, June 27, 2012. A cable from the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar to the State Department, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, noted, “Firms remain highly critical of the Government of Mongolia’s tendency, in recent years, to sometimes be arbitrary, un-transparent, or inconsistent with respect to the implementation of its mining laws.”

  61. “where an oil boom”: Kaiman, “Mongolia’s New Wealth.” Mongolia had leverage. One Beijing-based mining executive told the New York Times, “Mongolia is without a doubt getting more respect from world powers, because it’s got something everybody needs.” But then China had leverage, too, as did Russia, as did the United States. One Mongolian businessman told the press, “If China closed the borders, we would starve to death.” Also see Alicia Campi, “Mongolia’s Quest to Balance Human Development in its Booming Mineral-Based Economy,” Brookings Institution, January 10, 2012.

  62. “abruptly pulled the plug”: See Katusa, The Colder War. Katusa wrote, “The ostensible reason, as he described it, was that the nuclear waste of other countries is a ‘snake grown up in another body....Receiving back the nuclear waste after exploiting and exporting uranium must not be, as I think this is, a pressure from foreign superpowers...’ Perhaps Elbegdorj’s concerns were genuine. But many would see the hand of Vladimir Putin once more at work.”

  63. “Maybe if we caused problems”: See Andrew Higgins, “In Mongolia, Lessons for Obama from Genghis Khan,” Washington Post, June 15, 2011.

  64. “Bellwether Mongolia invests in mining”: bellwethermongolia.com.

  65. Peabody Energy: On November 2, 2007, officials of the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar accompanied Peabody Energy geologists on a helicopter trip deep into the Gobi to “reconnoiter the Little Tavan Tolgoi (LTT) coal mine, a rudimentary facility that...is part of the larger Tavan Tolgoi deposit, which Peabody hopes to develop in partnership with the Mongolian Government,” the embassy reported in a “sensitive but unclassified” cable to Washington, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. “Peabody’s specialists noted that everything from roads to power, and water to food, would have to be built from scratch or transported in—an expensive and time-consuming proposition.” LTT was owned by the provincial government and a private consortium led by Bat-Erdene, a Democratic member of parliament, the cable reported, saying, “The managers declined to explain how a contract with a government entity was awarded to one of the private holders of LTT.” Tavan Tolgoi was the one commercial project in Mongolia “in which the U.S. has a dog in the hunt,” one source told the New York Times. “What the Americans are saying is, ‘We can’t be your best friend and primary third neighbor if all the goodies go to China.’” See Dan Levin, “In Mongolia, a New, Penned-in Wealth,” New York Times, June 26, 2012.

  66. “the latest step”: Levin, “In Mongolia, a New, Penned-in Wealth.”

  67. “What’s next?” and related: Interviews with Robert Painter.

  68. Voting machines: For general information, see Jill Levoy, “The Computer Scientist Who Prefers Paper,” Atlantic; December 2017. (The computer scientist Barbara Simons believes the only truly safe voting technology is paper.) Bev Harris’s website, where she sought to document electronic-voting malfunctions, is blackboxvoting.org. There, you can download, for free, her book Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. “We are not talking about a few minor glitches,” she wrote. “These are real miscounts by voting machines, which took place in real elections. Almost all of them were caused by incorrect programming, whether by accident or by design. And if you run into anyone who thinks we are hallucinating these problems, hand them the footnote section, so they can examine sources and look them up themselves.” The issue calls to mind former Louisiana governor Earl Long, who in the 1950s infamously said, “Gimme five [electoral] commissioners and I’ll make them voting machines sing ‘Home Sweet Home.’”

  69. “Our entire governing system”: Harris, Black Box Voting.

  70. “political or quasi-political capacity”: The Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 requires agents representing the governmental and quasi-governmental interests of foreign powers to make themselves and their activities known to the federal gov
ernment and the American people. The State Department administered the law before passing it on, in 1942, to the counterespionage unit of the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. See fara.gov.

  71. “I thought it would be good for the country”: Interviews with Robert Painter.

  72. “naked attempt” and “vanquish a political foe”: Dan Levin, “Ex-Leader’s Detention Tests Mongolia’s Budding Democracy,” New York Times, May 13, 2012. By 2012 the MPRP had gone back to its 1921 name, the Mongolian People’s Party; in typical Mongolian confusion, Enkhbayar had started a splinter party called the MPRP.

  73. “Mr. Enkhbayar had released internal government documents” and related: See “Steppe in an Ugly Direction,” Economist, April 28, 2012. The magazine reported, “The raid has aroused two reactions in the public. One is surprise at the high degree of force deployed in the raid and the low degree of decorum offered to a former leader...The other is the belief that the case has more to do with rabidly partisan politics than corruption.”

  74. “rather picayune”: Kaiman, “Mongolia’s New Wealth.” An independent observer, Jim Hodes, a former war crimes prosecutor based in Atlanta, agreed that the charges seemed overblown, at one point telling the press, “What I see are huge violations, fundamental violations of his right to a fair trial.”

  75. “Mongolia...has been widely lauded”: Levin, “Ex-Leader’s Detention Tests Mongolia’s Budding Democracy.”

  76. “Everyone had hoped”: Ibid. Illegal detainments and unfair trials were far too common in Mongolia, “including those that used confessions extracted through torture as evidence,” Amnesty International reported.

  77. Bat Khurts: In the long-unsolved murder of Zorig, the government charged Enkhbat Damiran, an ex-con in his early forties with small eyes and bushy eyebrows. Enkhbat had served prison time for theft, assault, and fraud, and had been released early for bad health shortly before the murder. By 2003, he was thought to be living in a hotel in Caen, Normandy, where he had applied for asylum under an assumed name. One May afternoon, he went up the coast to Le Havre, where he planned to meet a fellow Mongolian, a female dissident, at McDonald’s. Four men jumped him in the parking lot, dragged him into a car, smuggled him into Belgium in a Mongolian embassy vehicle, then drove him to Berlin, where he was tortured. Then he was drugged and loaded by wheelchair onto a MIAT flight to Mongolia; his captors explained his unconsciousness by describing him as a government minister who had “gotten into a fight in Brussels and urgently needed to be brought back home.”

  Enkhbat’s torture continued at a secret location in Ulaanbaatar. Enkhbat later said his interrogators tried to bribe him to confess. He did not confess when they shined bright lights in his eyes, or liver-punched him with a pistol, or cocked what appeared to be a loaded gun, held it to his head, and pulled the trigger. Later, once he was in prison, his lawyer managed to sneak a video recorder inside and tape Enkhbat describing the way he’d been treated; after the lawyer paid a TV station to air the interview, both the lawyer and his client were charged with revealing state secrets. Both went to prison, Enkhbat at a “strict regime” facility northwest of Ulaanbaatar. Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, visited him there in early June 2005. By then, the murder charges had been dropped “as they obviously had been fabricated,” Nowak wrote, but now Enkhbat was suffering untreated health problems. Everything that had happened to him had violated international human rights law, Nowak reported.

  The “mastermind” of his kidnapping was said to be Bat Khurts, a GIA operative in his early forties. The son of a prominent architect, he was married with three children and a fourth child on the way. His precise position within Mongolian intelligence at the time of Enkhbat’s kidnapping never quite became clear—he was variously identified as a GIA agent, the first secretary of the Mongolian embassy in Budapest, the chief executive of Mongolia’s National Security Council, and “chief spymaster.” After a German investigation determined that Khurts drove the car that carried Enkhbat across Europe, the Germans charged Khurts with kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment. Investigators issued a European warrant for Khurts’s arrest, which allowed law enforcement in any country of the European Union to pick him up if they found him within their borders. Khurts reportedly never knew about the warrant. In 2010, as Mongolia and Britain talked about supporting each other in anti-terrorism efforts, the British ambassador in Ulaanbaatar, William Dickson, arranged a London meeting between British national security officials and Khurts, who by that time headed the GIA. Khurts arrived on September 17, expecting to participate in talks. “He believed that he would meet senior Downing Street figures as part of preparations for the Mongolian President’s visit to London to meet David Cameron,” the Times of London reported. When Khurts deplaned at Heathrow Airport, he found Scotland Yard detectives waiting with handcuffs. They took him to Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth, in south London, the largest men’s prison in the United Kingdom, where he remained for ten months as the courts argued over whether he could be extradited to Germany.

  Khurts’s defense against extradition consisted primarily of two arguments. First, he’d been set up by the Brits, who had surely “lured” him to London in order to arrest him under the pretext of high-level national security talks on “a new era of intelligence cooperation relating to Muslim fundamentalism.” Although the British government insisted that Khurts hadn’t been baited, the practice—mala captus bene detentus—“the court once in possession of the accused has jurisdiction over the person and all that is required is a fair trial”—was known to happen. “At times governments use deceit, fraud, and tricks to lure individuals from the country of their residence to a location where there is jurisdiction to arrest them,” Bruce Zagaris wrote in International White Collar Crime: Cases and Materials. “Unlike in an abduction by force, weapons are not used to get the suspect to the location where the arrest will occur. Whether a trick can be just as coercive as a gun remains controversial.” Khurts’s second defense was that as a government agent running a “secret mission” for his country he had diplomatic immunity. In one court appearance, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans, and blowing kisses to relatives, he spoke in translated Russian when he called the case against him an “insult”—he’d been invited to London only to be betrayed.

  The Brits argued that the Foreign Office never set up “formal” meetings with Khurts and that he’d been arrested merely because law enforcement authorities had learned of the German warrant and were obligated to detain him. It was true that it made no sense for Great Britain to antagonize Mongolia. The two had been Cold War adversaries but now were allies in Afghanistan, and Britain reportedly wanted a piece of Mongolia’s promising mining sector as well as the contract to build and run its new stock exchange. Khurts wasn’t high ranking enough to qualify for diplomatic immunity—he was a civil servant, not a minister or head of state, a German representative told the court when arguing for extradition. As everyone awaited the court’s decision, the Mongolian government described Khurts’s target, Enkhbat, as a “dangerous career criminal who organized gangs of women shoplifters in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Eastern Europe” and claimed he’d controlled the women with “rape and torture.” Enkhbat’s family insisted he was simply a refugee. Ambassador Dickson, meanwhile, was recalled from Mongolia to London, for “operational reasons,” and soon retired.

  Khurts was ordered extradited. He appealed and lost. His Mongolian supporters demonstrated outside the British embassy in Ulaanbaatar, demanding that “London stop its intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.” But Mongolia ultimately acknowledged the illegality of the kidnapping in Germany and apologized to that country, France, and England. Khurts was extradited to Germany on August 19, 2011; afterward, his relatives complained that British law enforcement had failed to return some of his personal belongings, including a “Vacheron Constantin watch worth 28,000 Euros, his Versace glasses, and Montblanc pens.”


  The Germans scheduled Khurts’s trial for October 24, 2011. The Mongolian government had hired two German lawyers to represent him as they figured out how to navigate a precarious diplomatic situation. Britain and Germany were both interested in Mongolia for its strategic location and its untapped mineral wealth and rare earths; Mongolia wanted good relations with friendly superpowers as well as help developing its natural resources. In fact, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was scheduled to make an historic trip to Mongolia in early October. She would be the first German government leader to make an official trip there and the first G7 leader to visit since George Bush in 2005.