Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said he suspects that U.S. agents provoked last month's brief war in Georgia.
The Kremlin's Exhibit A? Russian soldiers say they found a passport belonging to Michael Lee White, a U.S. Army veteran from Texas, in an outpost used by Georgian special forces last month to attack pro-Russian separatists. On Thursday in Moscow, military spokesman Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn brandished a blowup of the passport at a news conference and declared that Mr. White's presence on the battlefield 'together with Georgian commandos is a fact.'
Mr. White, it turns out, is an itinerant 41-year-old English-language teacher in this booming city in southern China. On Tuesday, he answered the door at his spartan faculty apartment at the Guangdong University of Business Studies wearing flip-flops. He says he's never been to Georgia.
'I don't know why the Russian general would say that,' he said during a 90-minute interview. 'I don't know who would believe it.'
Russia's invasion of Georgia last month set off a wave of condemnation in the West. Since then, the Kremlin has been scrambling to play offense in the public-relations war. Mr. White's passport was portrayed on Russian state television as a 'gotcha' moment akin to Nikita Khrushchev's unveiling of downed spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1960, at the height of the Cold War.
In the world of covert action, there's no sure way to identify undercover operatives. But a look at Mr. White's recent past, as well as interviews with him and his family, turned up nothing to suggest he's a U.S. agent who helped instigate a major global crisis.
A spokeswoman for the Central Intelligence Agency said Mr. White doesn't work for the CIA. 'While we do not as a rule confirm or deny employment with the agency, in this case, any suggestion that Michael Lee White is a CIA officer is wrong,' said Marie Harf. A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the umbrella organization for U.S. intelligence agencies, declined to comment.
The passport the Russians showed off last week does appear to have been Mr. White's. He says it looks to be the one he accidentally left in the seat pocket of a Moscow-New York flight in October 2005. 'It seems probable that some Russian person on the flight picked it up,' says Mr. White.
The U.S. State Department confirms Mr. White reported the passport missing in 2005 and that it was canceled. Mr. White was issued a new U.S. passport that year, and another in 2008, both of which he showed a reporter.
Mr. White says that, back in early August, when fighting in the Georgian province of South Ossetia intensified and Russian troops moved into Georgia in force, he was in Austin, Texas, helping to care for his 85-year-old father, who suffered a stroke in the spring. Mr. White's brother, reached by phone in Austin, confirms that account.
Mr. White left China on July 18 and returned on Aug. 28, the day of Col. Gen. Nogovitsyn's Moscow announcement, according to the exit and entry stamps in his current passport. There was no entry stamp from U.S. authorities, who don't always mark the passports of returning Americans.
That same day, Mr. Putin told CNN and Germany's ARD network that Russia had found evidence that U.S. citizens were on the battlefield alongside Georgian troops. 'We have serious grounds to think there were U.S. citizens right in the combat zone,' Mr. Putin said. 'If my suppositions are confirmed, then that raises the suspicion that somebody in the United States purposefully created this conflict' with the aim of 'creating an advantage' for one of the U.S. presidential candidates.
The White House dismissed Mr. Putin's statements as 'patently false' and 'not rational.' A senior Georgian official described the allegations as 'silly KGB propaganda.'
That's not how many Russians see it. Since the conflict started, legislators, officials and local analysts have embraced the theory that the Bush administration encouraged Georgia, its ally, to start the war in order to precipitate an international crisis that would play up the national-security experience of Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.
Milton Bearden, a highly decorated former CIA operative, dismissed the notion that an intelligence agent with any intelligence would carry his passport with him in the field, much less lose it. He characterized the Russian claims as 'slapstick,' saying that if a passport is going to be held up as evidence of U.S. meddling, 'it shouldn't belong to some guy teaching English in China.'
Alexei Kondaurov, a KGB veteran and critic of the Kremlin, said that 'using a 'found' passport to expose the Americans seems really small-time,' adding that 'the Soviet Union's secret services never stooped that low.'
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, defended the prime minister's allegations, saying Russian military and intelligence officials would release further evidence of U.S. involvement 'when they are ready.' He said Mr. White's passport bore entry and exit stamps from the period after 2005, but didn't elaborate.
Mr. White says he first became aware of his role in the geopolitical drama last weekend, when he started getting email queries about it after his mother, unbeknownst to him, did a radio interview in the U.S. denying his involvement.
His family first became worried Friday after seeing news reports of the Russians' claims about Mr. White's passport. The family feared the Chinese government would hand Mr. White over to the 'Russians to be tortured to get a confession out of him,' Michael's brother, John, said. 'It was excruciating.' (Russian law forbids torture.)
Mr. White finally connected with his family by email on Saturday.
In recent days, Mr. White says, he has been trawling the Internet, trying to get a grip on what is being said about him and pondering how he can get Web sites to 'stop publishing all these stupid stories.'
Russian accounts highlighted his military service as a sure sign he's a government agent. Mr. White says he was in the U.S. Army from 1992 to 1997 working as a petroleum-supply specialist. He drove tank trucks and fueled helicopters during postings in Fort Campbell, Ky., Germany and Bosnia, where he served with peacekeeping forces.
The Army confirmed Mr. White's account of his military service.
After leaving the Army and finishing his bachelor's degree, Mr. White says he decided that, having seen Eastern Europe, he wanted to head to Asia for work. He got his first teaching assignment in Beijing in 1998.
Since then, he says, he has largely hopped from school to school in China, Vietnam, Japan and Kazakhstan, with occasional breaks for studying in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. In 2005, in the midst of a separation from his Kazakh wife, he was traveling from Moscow to New York when he lost his passport, he says.
From February to July of this year, he taught English and business at a private preparatory school in the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, according to Mr. White and a teacher at the school responsible for recruiting foreign instructors.
Mr. White has a Wikipedia entry now, which includes links to an old resume he posted online when looking for English teaching jobs, as well as one to a Web site for a book he is writing with his father, Philip L. White, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas in Austin.
The book, 'Nationality in World History,' includes a chapter called 'The Evolution of the Russian National Identity,' which Mr. White says he drafted himself. There is nothing in the book about Georgia, Mr. White says. Though there is a Georgian flag, among others, at the top of the book's Web site.
'I didn't even know that,' he says. 'I was trying to choose ones no one would recognize.'
Gordon Fairclough / Gregory L. White |
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