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Evil needs company: These are the men behind the world’s most dangerous leaders
You might think of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khameini as ruling absolutely – but each has a colleague driving their agenda.
ALAN HOWE
Evil loves company and through the ages has easily found fellow travellers. Uganda’s Idi Amin had former English soldier Robert Astles, who in the 1970s helped set up Amin’s State Research Bureau, where thousands of arrested Ugandans were taken for interrogation, tortured, then never seen again …
Astles would have known the owners of the human organs and heads Amin kept in his fridge. One of Astles’ roles was to calm Amin when he fell into homicidal rages, many of which ended in deaths. In Amin’s house.
Adolf Hitler had grimly efficient henchmen. He would not have risen to power without Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering. And once fuhrer, he was enthusiastically supported by Joseph Goebbels. But it was Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, who was most faithful. And he was a complete self-starter; he’d never even read Mein Kampf.
Across his failed and viciously enacted schemes to remake the Chinese economy – Five-Year Plans, the perversely named Great Leap Forward (which may have claimed 46 million lives) and finally the Cultural Revolution, there was a single constant in Mao Zedong’s life: Zhou Enlai.
Urbane, educated, well-travelled – he was everything his uncouth boss was not. He had been on the Long March and defended Mao, who envied him. It was tricky to navigate survival in that revolutionary court and few did. But this lapdog – Zhou was first premier of the People’s Republic of China – not only played a key role in the insane barbarity of the Cultural Revolution, he allowed it to consume his daughter. Sun Weishi was a brilliant and beautiful theatre director, writer and actor who years before once annoyed Jiang Qing, Madame Mao. In 1968, Jiang ordered Zhou to sign his daughter’s arrest warrant. He did. She was jailed without charge or trial, tortured and raped for seven months, and died, her broken body discarded. Zhou stayed at his desk.
The phrase “axis of evil” was uttered by US president George W. Bush in January 2002 during his State of the Union address. It referred to Iran, Iraq and North Korea. These days the axis has swung a little. Bush was mocked when no weapons of mass destruction were found there after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nonetheless, 35 years of corrupt, brutal Baathist rule were brought to an end and Iraq’s greatest weapon of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, was captured and turned over to his people.
Today’s axis of evil looks different. It includes the unholy stalwart Iran, while Vladimir Putin had pushed Russia on to the shortlist along with China as the world’s biggest navy bullies its neighbours in the South China Sea, its ships and fighter jets stalk democratic Taiwan, and China works to erase the cultural identity of its 11 million Uighurs in the northwest province of Xinjiang. It was estimated in 2019 that more than a million Uighurs were detained in re-education camps.
Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping described the two countries having a “no limits” partnership, and Ukrainian war veterans recently in Australia confirmed that they were finding increasing numbers of Chinese components in the weapons being used by their enemies.
The leaders of Russia, Iran and China are men we know well. But behind each is another – not necessarily in line to succeed – on whom these infamous autocrats depend for guidance, sometimes survival. They may be relatively unknown, but their quiet influence is key to our increasingly dangerous world.
PATRIARCH KIRILL
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is not your ordinary clergyman. For a start he wears a Breguet Reveil Du Tsar wristwatch, a brand favoured by the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, King George III and Queen Victoria. The wristwatch is valued at almost $70,000. No wonder Kirill has it airbrushed from official photographs.
Like Putin, Kirill has a neurotic view of the world and between them they hope to turn back the clock many centuries. As both are effectively leaders for life, they can afford to be patient, but neither is.
Kirill’s official title states that he is Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus. “All Rus” is a provocative medieval term for people who lived across Russia, Ukraine and parts of Poland. Putin needed little convincing from the patriarch that all of Ukraine was really Russian territory that it needed to bring violently back into the fold.
Kirill’s smokescreen was that he wanted to reunite the Orthodox Churches of Ukraine and Russia that split in 2019. And he knows better than most when Putin illegally crosses a border; Kirill worked as a cartographer for the Leningrad Geological Expedition for three years.
He was well aware that the invasion would be a ferociously violent land grab and that Putin would claim Ukraine – at least its valuable eastern flanks – to “Russify” it once more. Once Putin had placed up to 190,000 troops along his neighbour’s border it was clear that this had little to do with Kirill’s church and that many innocents would be killed.
Russians, too. According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as of May 1 this year Russian losses included 469,846 soldiers – that is more than the population of the ACT.
But Kirill – who praised Putin as “a miracle of God”, and who preached in a televised address on New Year’s Eve 2021 that “peace on our planet is very dangerous” – was up for it. Keep in mind that Putin revealed in 2012 that he had been secretly baptised in 1952 by Kirill’s father.
On March 9, 2022, days after Russian troops began their slaughter of the innocents, bombing schools, hospitals and apartment blocks, Kirill stated in church: “We have entered into a struggle that holds not a physical, but a metaphysical significance.”
He had given moral cover for Putin’s unprovoked, illegal invasion. The following month, Pope Francis, appalled by Kirill’s support for the war, said Kirill “cannot become Putin’s altar boy”.
Later, when thousands of young Russian men fled the country to avoid being drafted, Kirill again stepped in to support the war effort and help Putin, stating: “If someone, driven by a sense of duty … dies in the line of military duty, then he undoubtedly commits an act that is tantamount to a sacrifice.” He added: “We believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.”
The captain of the religious wing of Putin’s war machine was promising them martyrdom, even likening the sacrifice to that of Christ on the cross.
Kirill has an image of Christ on his headdress, a symbol of his deep Christian roots – believed only by the symbol-minded. He dismissed his fellow faithful in Ukraine with lordly condescension: “There will be no trace of (them) because they are fulfilling the evil, devil’s will, destroying Orthodoxy in the land of Kyiv.”
The late leader of the Ukrainian diaspora, Stefan Romaniw, told me last year that Kirill “has bluffed his way through”.
“There are priests now leaving his church because they don’t believe what is happening,” Romaniw said. He is part of the problem. He encourages Putin and he encourages Russian fascism.”
ESMAIL QAANI
At first, Esmail Qaani appears an odd choice to have replaced the long-serving Qasem Soleimani as brigadier general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and commander of its Quds Force.
Those roles are uniquely influential as Iran forcibly exports its Islamic revolution across the Middle East and plans the destruction of Israel. West of Iran was Soleimani’s realm; for years the lesser-known Qaani had made his trouble to the east – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
Both born in 1957, neither man was well educated: Soleimani left school for labouring work on a construction site at 13; Qaani’s early years are barely recorded until he joined the IRGC shortly after the Iranian Revolution. But both were veterans of the eight year Iran-Iraq war that – with up to 1.2 million dead – can only be described as the most costly draw in history.
Soleimani, who spoke in simple terms, nonetheless commanded authority from his men, was able to grow into and then reshape his role through Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia group formed in 1982 in honour of and named by Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s post-revolution leader. Rising through the ranks, Soleimani boasted of his part in the 1986 Lebanon war sparked by a series of cross-border attacks that killed seven Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah kidnapped two others. Soleimani oversaw operations for the first days, flew back to brief Khomeini, then returned for the duration of the conflict.
As IRGC boss he was responsible for the store of rockets smuggled from Iran, across Syria and into Lebanon where, in the south, those not pointing at Israel are stored. During the 34 days of the 1986 conflict, Hezbollah fired 4000 of them from a stockpile of 15,000.
Under Soleimani’s, and more recently Qaani’s guidance, Hezbollah is estimated to have 130,000 rockets, many now made in Syria, including chemical-loaded Scud missiles whose range easily takes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. (Just this week Hezbollah fired 55 rockets into Israel in just two minutes.)
It’s quite a threat when you understand Iran’s view that “the very existence of (Israel) is an insult to humanity”. A former president said not “one cell of them” should be left when Iran had its way, which is why the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran frightens the world. Iran’s nuclear plant at Bushehr across the Persian Gulf from Kuwait and just 1500km from Jerusalem is Qaani’s as IRGC boss. Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s former director of nuclear energy and one-time foreign minister, said earlier this year: “We have (crossed) all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology.”
It was Qaani who last year sponsored the training in Iran of 500 or so savages from Hamas and had them rehearse the raids that took place on October 7 during which 1200 Israeli women, men and children were raped, blown apart, shot and burned alive.
Qaani is reported to have attended those training sessions.
While the original idea was that the guards would be the ideological custodians of the revolution, the IRGC is more powerful in and outside Iran than any other defence force in the world. It also controls a substantial part of the country’s economy. Qaani is the only Iranian who could, if so provoked, challenge the authority of the ayatollahs. But that is not his style.
His predecessor was assassinated in a drone attack at Baghdad airport ordered by then president Donald Trump. Qaani quickly went to work ordering one of his staff, Shahram Poursafi, to arrange the deaths of former US national security adviser John Bolton and former CIA boss and secretary of state Mike Pompeo. The plots unravelled when Poursafi’s encrypted phone calls were decoded.
WANG HUNING
On November 17, 2014, China’s Xi addressed a joint sitting of the Australian parliament. His carefully crafted words were warm and engaging as he spoke of broadening our relationship.
He said years of “mutual understanding and friendship” had created a “vast ocean of goodwill between China and Australia”.
“China remains unshakeable in its resolve to pursue a policy of promoting co-operation and development in the Asia-Pacific,” said Xi, adding: “China remains committed to building friendly relations and partnerships with its neighbours.”
Every Australian federal MP rose for the standing ovation that followed. Of course, we were naive. They were just words. Xi could not utter them today even with a wry smile and no matter what he said no Australian would stand to applaud it. In much less than a decade Xi showed his true face, and China its. Rather than warm hugs of neighbourly trust, Xi has China acting like the bullyboy he promised it would never become.
Japan owns the small archipelago of land lumps and rocks that form the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. It has controlled them for centuries (but for a few decades after World War II) and old maps in Taiwan and China showed them as Japanese. In 1970 news that there might be oil nearby piqued China’s interest in these dots. When bold tourists planted flags on them in 2012, thousands of Chinese rioters on the mainland burnt Japanese flags and smashed up Japanese cars and restaurants. Police did little to stop it.
Xi states emphatically that reunification with Taiwan is “inevitable” and has not ruled out war to accomplish it. Meanwhile he has been increasing military pressure on the democratic island, even simulating full-scale attacks. China claims 80 per cent of the South China Sea and harasses, steals catches from and even sinks its neighbours’ fishing vessels. Its wild claims trespass on the internationally recognised territories of Vietnam, The Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia.
Then there are its confrontational, aggressive representatives who act out its wolf warrior diplomacy. It is no coincidence that this bellicose antagonism coincided with the rise of one man: Wang Huning. He drives the ideology as the Chinese Communist’s Party’s leading political theorist. A professor of international politics, he is a hardline Marxist who has worked for the CCP for almost 30 years. These days he is chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Conference. Wang significantly influenced the thinking of Xi’s immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. The wolf warrior strategy is his.
Rowan Callick, an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute and this newspaper’s former China correspondent, said: “It would be mistaken, then, to attribute the shift within China towards more intensely centralised and ubiquitous control and surveillance by the CCP – and a more combative regional and global thrust – purely to the ascent of Xi Jinping as general secretary.”
Xi may have drawn China back into a personality-cult era from which the country thought it had emerged with Mao’s death, but Xi is not a lone leader, Callick said. “He is surrounded by supporters. Indeed, today virtually everyone playing a significant role in the People’s Republic of China has signed up to the trenchant agenda championed by Xi. And this agenda has been provided with a veneer of intellectual party justification by Wang Huning.”
Callick believes this makes Xi a very different leader from Putin and most autocrats. He is a sincere believer in the CCP above everything else. Ideology and the party’s control of history – including the spurious claim that China has owned Taiwan “as of ancient times” – matter intensely, and personally. Xi believes in the destiny of China – meaning essentially of its core Han ethnic group.
“And Xi’s party, with Wang prominent as a symbol of ideological continuity, today fully sides with him,” said Callick, adding that Xi was a brilliant and ruthless organiser, leaving no space for disagreement to fester.
In 2021, the wolfish ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, warned of a trade war if Canberra sanctioned Beijing over its mistreatment of the Uighurs. China would not swallow that “bitter pill”. In any case the Uighurs story was “fake news”.
The year before he warned us not to push for an inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 – it was dangerous. The average Chinese might no longer want to “drink Australian wine, eat Australian beef”, he menaced. That week China started imposing import tariffs on our timber, wine, barley, cotton, beef, lobsters and lamb, citing a series of improbable justifications. That’s Wang’s work.
Wang addressed a conference in the Uighurs’ homeland last year days after a UN report judged the atrocities there as “crimes against humanity”. He kept a straight face as he asked locals for social stability so they could fully and faithfully implement China’s policies to build a beautiful, modern Xinjiang.