A16 The World


LETTERFROM MOSCOW


EZ SU


KLMNO


MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2010


U.S. says bombswere to be detonated ‘in flight’


planes from A1


the aircraft or theywere intended for the destination, and that’s where theywere going to be deto- nated.” Britishofficialshavebeenmore


categorical.PrimeMinisterDavid Cameron said Saturday that “we believe thedevicewasdesignedto go off on the aeroplane.” AU.S. counterterrorismofficial


said that forensics work is still in its early stages on the packages and that FBI experts are involved. The preliminary conclusion that thedevicesweredesignedtodeto- nate aboard aircraft, and not at the addresses intheChicago area, isbasedinpartonthefact that the parcelswerenot riggedtoexplode upon opening. The devices employed cell-


phone technology, but it remains unclear why they were built that way.Amongthequestionsauthor- ities are asking: How and when, during a transatlantic passage, would the cellphone components have been in range to receive a signal? “There are a whole lot of theo-


WILL ENGLUND/THE WASHINGTON POS Workers at a newplant outsideMoscow, owned by politician turned poultry entrepreneur Sergei Lisovsky, process fresh chickens. In poultrywar, Russia has a leg up onU.S. BYWILL ENGLUND B


ush legs are back, if you can find them. Once, long ago,U.S.


chicken importswere at the top of themarket


here, plump and yellowish at a timewhenRussian chicken tended to be scrawny, bluish and scarce. Thiswas the early 1990s, to be precise. Back then nearly amillion tons


of leg quarters flowed across the Atlantic every year—chicken parts that don’t command very high prices in the breast-meat- cravingUnited States, but that nicely filled aRussian preference for darkmeat.And theywere cheap.Russians liked themso much that they took to calling them“Bush legs,” after the first President Bush. But in the newpecking order,


they come in close to the bottom. For the first ninemonths of this year, theywere banned outright, on the grounds that the chlorine disinfectant used byU.S. producers is unhealthy.Now, after a relentless full-court press by theU.S. industry, and hard- nosed bargaining overRussia’s entry into theWorld Trade Organization, they’re coming in again,washedwith a different antimicrobial solution. But Russian shoppers complain about theirwater content, and worry, after a campaign in the Russian press, about hormones and antibiotics. Youwon’t find Bush legs in the supermarkets ofMoscowor


almost any othermajor city.Who gets them? Poor people in the boondocks, schoolchildren and patrons of fast food restaurants that sell chicken. (Except not one of the largest chains,Rostik’s- KFC,which despite itsU.S. affiliation says it sells only Russian chicken.)Go to a wholesalemarket here,with enticing displays ofRussian and Brazilian chicken, and if you ask around enough a sullen vendor will eventually pull a 15-kilogram box ofU.S. chicken out of the back freezer. Alot of Bush legs are likely to


end up as processed ingredients in other foods. “The customer thinks he’s


eating aRussian sausage,when in fact he’s eating anAmerican chicken leg,” exclaims Sergei Lisovsky, amember of the upper house of theRussian parliament who founded one of the country’s largest poultry producers. Lisovsky, a onetime nightclub


entrepreneur and political operative, is not a fan of the American bird.He says Americans are dumping legs here, at less than cost, because they can’t sell themat home. They drove the old poultry factories out of business in the 1990s. But nowRussia can feed its own, he says, and should stop accommodatingAmericans just because itwants to join theWTO. Also, he says,with brand new factories and strict health requirements,Russia produces a better-quality product. Yes, therewas that survey by the ConsumerRights Protection


Society,which found in June that eight out of 10 samples of domestic chicken purchased in Moscowcarried salmonella. But thatwasmisleading, he says. Most of it probably came during shipping and handling.Not the factories’ fault. There’s a reason, saysAndrei


Teryokhin, executive director of theAssociation ofRussian PoultryMeatOperators, that no one anywhere in theworld eats chicken sashimi—and that reason is salmonella. It’s a question, as he sees it, of educatingRussian consumers on safe handling. The government saysRussia


still needs to importmore than half amillion tons of chicken a year, 14 percent of total sales. Lisovsky says that’s about a half million tons toomuch and accuses the government of inflating its estimate to keep on theAmericans’ good side. On the other hand,U.S.


producers point out that they lost about $400million inRussian sales because of this year’s ban, which followed several others over the past decade—bans that coincidedwith the revival of Russia’s domestic poultry business. Deep-frozenAmerican


chicken, nowarriving from18 plants that stretch fromthe Eastern Shore toGeorgia, really doesn’t competewith the fresh whole birds that are themainstay ofRussian production, says James Sumner, president of the U.S. Poultry and Egg Export Council. “They have very little to


dowith each other,” he says. Achicken is a chicken, say the


Russian producers. They point out that thewholesale price of chicken dropped 5 percentwhen the first shipload fromtheU.S. cleared customs onOct. 1. Both sides have an eye on the


import quotas the government will set for next year. But Sergei Yushin, head of theNational MeatAssociation, says he believesRussiawill continue to be a good customer forU.S. producers, in part because Russians like darkmeat somuch. “At least in the next 10 years,” he said, “we cannot change the number of legs orwings or heads of a chicken.” Sumner acknowledges that


U.S. exporters compensated during theRussian ban by finding othermarkets for chicken leg quarters. But nowthat they’re back inRussia, theywant to stay there—especially because China, which has been the other bigU.S. export customer, just instituted its own ban. China had been buying chicken feet,whichU.S. producerswere only too happy to sell, there being nomarket at home.Nowthe Chinese accuse theAmericans of dumping,while theAmericans believe they’re fairly retaliating forU.S. tariffs on tires and steel. “Unfortunately, poultry often


gets used as a political pawn,” Sumner says. “It’s a visible commodity.Maybe they think our industry hasmore clout than it really does. But it gets attention.”


englundw@washpost.com


ries being kicked around about whether [they were set] on a tim- er, whether somebody was going to call, or another triggering mechanism would set them off,” the counterterrorismofficial said. With early evidence suggesting


that the plot was directed by al- Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, Bren- nan saidU.S. officials cannot pre- sume that therearenomorepack- age bombs circulating, even though some U.S. law enforce- ment officials think they have identified and cleared all packag- es that left Yemen at the same time as the two devices already intercepted. In Yemen, police on Sunday


released a woman they had ar- rested the previous day on suspi- cion of mailing the two bombs. Officials there said someone might have assumed the identity of the woman, 22, a computer engineering student at Sanaa University. A shipping agent could not


identify the woman, and Yemeni officials said that although there are no suspects in custody, they are pursuing a number of leads. A spokesman for Qatar Air-


ways said Sunday that the pack- age discovered at a FedEx facility inDubaihadtraveledontwoof its passenger flights before reaching the United Arab Emirates. The packagewas first routed toDoha, the capital of Qatar, on a flight from Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, thenwas shipped on another pas- senger flight toDubai. The disclosure intensified


questions about the security of cargo and whether it has become a vulnerability in the aviation sys- tem. The United States requires the


scanning of air cargo on domestic passenger flights and on passen- ger flights entering the United States. But it is not a universal practice, and the plot will proba- bly lead to calls for the increased useof sophisticatedimagingtech- nology, at least on cargo coming fromcertain countries. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-


Mass.), who wrote the 2007 law dealing with cargo on passenger planes, said in a statement Sun- day that he plans to introduce legislation that would mandate the screening of everything sent on cargo planes. The two package bombs, how-


ever, appear to have been built to beat existing security systems, as were other recent bombs believed to have been deployed by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, al- Qaeda in theArabian Peninsula. Qatar Airways said the device


found in Dubai would not have been detected by X-ray or bomb- sniffing dogs. British officials missedthe seconddeviceduringa first sweep for it among cargo at a UPS hub near Nottingham, Eng- land. Brennan said the devices were


“very sophisticated” in how they were constructed and concealed. Al-Qaeda in theArabian Penin-


sula is also suspected in the at- tempted bombing of a commer- cial airliner approaching Detroit last Christmas and in a failed assassination attempt several months earlier against a leading Saudi counterterrorism official, PrinceMohammed binNayef. Both bombs contained PETN,


the explosive found in the mail packages. Umar Farouk Abdul- mutallab, the Nigerian who offi- cials say trained in Yemen and sought to carry out the Christmas Day attack, passed thoughairport security, includinginAmsterdam. The plot was foiled, officials say, only when passengers stopped him from detonating the explo- sives hidden in his underwear. The suicide bomberwho killed


himself in trying to assassinate Nayef also passed through a scan- ner before being brought into a roomtomeet the prince. “The individual who has been


making these bombs . . . is a very dangerous individual, clearly somebody who has a fair amount of training and experience,” said Brennan, speaking onABC. Brennan did not name the sus-


pect, but other U.S. officials iden- tified him as Ibrahim Hassan al- Asiri, 28, a Saudi national who is on that country’s most-wanted list. His younger brother, Abdul- lah, had blown himself up in the attempt to assassinateNayef. Asiri is one of a number of


Saudis with prominent roles in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsu- la. Another is the American-born clericAnwar al-Aulaqi. The group has now twice tried


to use the aviation system to launch terrorist attacks in the past 12 months, and has become the focus of U.S. intelligence and military operations, including strikes at its hideouts in Yemen andstepped-upmilitaryaidtothe Yemeni government. U.S. counterterrorism and in-


telligence officials said the latest attack has added new urgency to ongoing discussions within the Obama administration about whether to expand the U.S. arse- nal, perhaps with CIA drones, in the fight in Yemen. finnp@washpost.com


StaffwriterGregMiller contributed to this report.


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