OPINION:
In 2018, my late wife, Kim, and I attended the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner for the first time. Welcoming those in attendance, then-WHCA President Margaret Talev first asked members of the organization, the White House press corps, elected officials, active-duty military, teachers and police officers in attendance to stand.
And when Ms. Talev went on to ask anyone who “cared about freedom and the truth to stand,” Kim leaped to her feet with a wide smile. And I stood by her side in the ballroom, which was transformed into a standing-room-only demonstration of support for the First Amendment.
Freedom of the press is one of the great pillars of our democracy, which is precisely the reason why the concept terrifies autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping more than anything else. They strive not simply to limit the free flow of ideas — which helped bring down totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union — but to create and propagate their self-serving narratives as a tool to exercise control over their populations at home and whitewash their reputations overseas.
Beijing’s Communist rulers are trying to enforce cyber sovereignty through their Great Firewall. Russia’s notorious FSB directs the System of Operational Investigative Measures, or SORM, installing hardware to monitor phone and internet communications, metadata and content. We are witnessing the rise of an alternative, Sino-Russian authoritarian internet, the antithesis of the open and free cyberspace that has served as such a force multiplier for commerce and free discourse in the West.
Over the past few years, China has imprisoned more journalists than any other country in the world. Last November, police in Shanghai arrested and beat BBC journalist Edward Lawrence as he was covering protests over the regime’s draconian zero-COVID policy.
In his past two decades in the Kremlin, Mr. Putin has ruthlessly targeted journalists, falsely accusing them of being a fifth column of “traitors and scum” doing the bidding of the Kremlin’s enemies. In March 2022, he signed a law calling for a prison sentence up to 15 years for anyone publishing “false information” about the Russian military and its operations.
The latest victim of Mr. Putin’s paranoia is Evan Gershkovich, the American reporter for The Wall Street Journal whom the FSB detained on March 29 on false charges of espionage. It might appear counterintuitive, but Mr. Putin likely relishes the Biden administration’s demands for Mr. Gershkovich’s release, which serve to drive up the price the Kremlin will demand for a swap. The U.S. last year traded Russian “Merchant of Death” arms dealer Viktor Bout to secure the freedom of WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner, who was facing an absurdly long prison term after vape cartridges with oil derived from cannabis were found in her luggage on a trip to Russia.
The clue to the Kremlin’s endgame was the transparently false espionage charges leveled at Mr. Gershkovich: Mr. Putin likely wants to create a false equivalency so that he can secure the freedom of deep-cover Russian military intelligence officer Sergey Cherkasov, whom Brazilian authorities recently detained.
The Department of Justice wants to extradite Mr. Cherkasov, who was charged with entering the U.S. under a fake Brazilian persona, acting as an agent of a foreign power, and committing visa, bank and wire fraud. When he was arrested, Mr. Cherkasov was reportedly carrying a hard drive with clandestine locations for covert communications.
If past is prologue, Mr. Putin is already angling to arrange another “spy swap.” But there’s another motive at work, too, for the Russian leader — to demonstrate to his citizens and his own security apparatus that a free press is an enemy of the state.
George Orwell once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” In today’s Russia, saying things Mr. Putin does not want to hear means imprisonment or worse.
And therein lies the vicious circle that makes autocracies so brittle. Dictators and despots must conceal, distort and bury the truth if they hope to remain in power. Killing a free and independent press is just the outward manifestation of their inner vulnerability.
Neither China nor Russia trusts its own citizens to express themselves freely or learn about the world through unbiased media. And when faced with a shock to regime security such as Russia’s failed war in Ukraine or China’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dictators have no other option but to intensify their attacks on those trying to tell the story.
Ms. Talev was right that night five years ago when she said that an “attack on one journalist is an attack on us all.”
But it’s not a fair fight. The free press is in the crosshairs of our adversaries and — as Churchill eloquently warned in his Iron Curtain speech so many decades ago — the world’s democracies must stand together or “catastrophe may overwhelm us all.”
⦁ Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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