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Putin Plays the Philippines

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Kremlin spymasters have their eyes on Rodrigo Duterte. To understand why, first consider the long list of other foreign leaders the Russians have targeted.

(Part One of a Two-Part Series)

 By Greg Rushford

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been wooing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, in what appears to be a Kremlin-directed agent-of-influence operation. It is a matter of public record that Russia and the Philippines have established an intelligence-sharing arrangement. The publicly announced deal appears to be the standard fare: sharing intelligence on the threat the Philippines faces from Islamic terrorists in Southeast Asia, a gift of 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles and ammo, training of Duterte’s presidential guards. But whenever the Russians are involved, there are always, well, curiosities.

Curiosity number one: Duterte has boasted that a “foreign” power has given him telephone transcripts of one of the critics of his human-rights record, an American citizen of Philippine origin who lives in New York City. To anyone familiar with the tradecraft, that sounds straight out of the Putin playbook.

Curiosity number two: Duterte’s presidential communications office has sought “media training” for the official Philippine News Agency (PNA) from TASS, Moscow’s mouthpiece.  Why would the Philippines, a democracy with a free press, seek any journalistic assistance from one of the world’s most disreputable propaganda operations?

Curiosity number three: In February, a solidly-researched article by Natashya Gutierrez, a leading Philippine investigative reporter, revealed that “a Russian-linked Twitter account used to interfere in polls in Spain is now tweeting exclusively about the Philippines.” Gutierrez’s article, published in the online investigative news outlet, Rappler, also disclosed that this was “one of several disturbing developments that may suggest Kremlin influence.”

Add up the curiosities, and it appears that Putin and Duterte have been hiding in the open, which often comes with the territory in Moscow’s influence operations. But Philippine officials deny that, even as they acknowledge it is a matter of public record that their country has struck an intelligence-sharing relationship with Putin’s Russia.

Manila’s side of the story

Duterte’s national security adviser, Sec. Hermogenes Esperon, says he has “no comment on [the] telephone transcript.” And he brushed off a query about the Russian propaganda directed from Spain. But to insinuate that an agent-of-influence operation is going on “is really insinuating too much,” Esperon added. It’s in “our national interest” to deal with Russia, as well as neighboring China, the secretary noted. “It is always good to have friendly relations or, at the least, open lines of communications with neighboring Asian countries.”

Esperon also stressed that “retaining standing alliances is also beneficial,” referring to the close security ties the Philippines has enjoyed since the 1950s with the United States.

Martin Andanar, the head of the Philippines’s presidential communications operations office, insists there is nothing untoward about the Philippine News Agency’s relationship with Russia’s TASS. The PNA also has “a standing partnership with Kyodo News of Japan and Press Trust of India,” and other “media/information counterparts in South Korea, Japan, and Cambodia,” he adds.

Tradecraft can strengthen a weak hand

Before taking a closer look at the emerging Moscow-Manila intelligence ties, some essential background history illustrates the nuances of how Russia has long used secret intelligence in its dealings with many other foreign leaders.

Putin’s main goal in cultivating the Philippines’ Duterte is a familiar one: to exploit Duterte’s well-known visceral dislike of Americans, looking for opportunities to weaken the Philippines deep-rooted security ties with Uncle Sam. No wonder: Beyond their expertise in influence operations, the Russians don’t have much else to offer foreign leaders.

The anemic Russian economy (GDP of $1.3 trillion, and going nowhere fast) is puny compared to big players like China ($12 trillion GDP) and America ($19.3 trillion). In their dealings with foreign leaders anywhere in the world, the Russians — who were humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union — look to leverage their foreign policy aspirations to be taken seriously.  So they reach into their historically proven bag of dirty tricks to buy influence, and respect.

Vladimir Putin is only the latest Russian leader to play this game.

Indeed, there is a rich historical context associated with how the Kremlin’s spymasters have long practiced the art of cultivating the secret affections of foreign leaders.

Active Measures, Past…

Aktivnyye meropryiyatiya— Russian for active measures —isanold Soviet KGB term for an array of clandestine intelligence operations aimed at furthering the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals. The covert-operations toolkit includes a variety of dirty tricks. Classic subversion. Kompromat, Russian for blackmail operations. Under-the-table cash. An array of deceptions including propaganda, mis- and disinformation campaigns. Plus, thinly-disguised “little green men” like those who showed up in plain green uniforms to destabilize eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014.

Intelligence experts generally agree that a high percentage of the Kremlin’s active measures have traditionally involved information warfare and covert assistance aimed at supporting sympathetic foreign politicians who will toe the Moscow line.

The best-documented illustration of how Soviets operate stems from the Kremlin’s manipulations in India during the Cold War.

A now-declassified secret 1985 CIA assessment noted that “the Soviets enjoy nearly unfettered access to the pages of Indian newspapers,” planting more than 160,000 articles in the Indian press.” The American intelligence report added that “access to the Press Trust of India, New Delhi’s largest English language news agency, “has become so automatic that some Soviet officials have come to call it Press TASS of India.”

And renowned Cambridge University intelligence historian Christopher Andrew has written of the “suitcases” of cash that were routinely delivered to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who dominated Indian politics from 1967 until her assassination in 1984. Seems that Mrs. Gandhi even kept the suitcases.

Due to the inherent secrecy associated with clandestine operations, it took decades for such facts from Cold War intelligence battlegrounds to dribble out.

…and Present

But in recent years, Russian active measures have become the stuff of daily headlines. With varying degrees of success, Vladimir Putin has directed influence operations aimed at an array of politicians of both left and right.

The politicians who have been targeted share one thing in common: their anti-American, or anti-European Union, proclivities. True, the details of how these operations have played out will likely remain the stuff of history that will take years to be fully documented. But meanwhile, thanks to various press reports, academic studies, and official announcements, it doesn’t require access to secret intelligence information to perceive what the Russians have been up to.

On the left, those targeted have included British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (election help); South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma (whispers of those proverbial suitcases of cash); and Latin American strongmen like Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela (too many dirty tricks to summarize briefly).

And of course the Castro brothers, going way back. Just this week, a headline in Cuba’s communist mouthpiece, Prensa Latina, demonstrated that old-fashioned Russian propaganda is very much alive in the region: “Russia Condemns U.S. Interference in Latin American Affairs.”

In 2012, then-Ecuadorian President Rafel Correa gave Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder whose name always seems to come up when the subject is Russian influence operations, refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London. And two other anti-American populists, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega have paid their Moscow benefactors back shamelessly, expressing support for Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, to cite just one example.  (As we will see in the second part of this series, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, an unashamed Putin admirer, is not known to have gone so far.)

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, another leftie who has termed American global influence as “monstrous,” while calling Putin a “flawless democrat,” went on the Russian payroll shortly after he left office in 2005. Schröder had championed the still-controversial Nord Stream natural gas pipeline that connects Germany to Russia. Today he chairs the board of the government-controlled Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, which has close personal ties to Putin.

And on the right…

Putin works hard-right foreign leaders also. There’s the pro-Moscow Czech president, Milos Zeman. France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen (who has enjoyed Russian bank loans). Hungary’s anti-immigrant Viktor Orban. Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Several other right-wing parties from Italy and Germany to Scandinavia have also received Moscow’s support.

Of course, the world of secret intelligence being, umm, secret, the Kremlin’s successes in each of these individual cases remain speculative. Authoritarian-minded rightists like Erdogan and Orban, while their Eurosceptism would be pleasing to Moscow, also come from countries that are traditionally sensitive to any hints of untoward Russian influence. Plus, wily leaders like Erdogan and Orban have their own agendas. So it’s sometimes difficult for outside observers to determine exactly who is playing whom.

Putin’s most famous current success story is well-known to anyone who follows developing headlines. The U.S. intelligence community has identified the main goal of Putin’s several influence operations during America’s 2016 presidential elections: helping Donald Trump defeat rival Hillary Clinton. Clearly, the Russians had a hand in Trump’s victory (although there were other reasons for Clinton’s defeat, arguably the most important of which was her unattractiveness as a candidate).

But Putin didn’t fare so well last year during the United Kingdom’s general election, when his operatives energetically worked various social media outlets to promote the fortunes of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Labor lost the 2017 election.  As has America’s Trump, Corbyn has a history of denigrating British intelligence reports on the Kremlin’s political influence operations directed his way. And to complicate matters further, a lot of murky Russian money is also believed to have been directed towards supporting various British Conservative Party politicians.

Given such a history of active measures aimed at so many prominent world leaders, as we turn to Southeast Asia it is not surprising that Putin has also had his eyes on Rodrigo Duterte.

To be continued in Part Two…

How Hanoi’s Hidden Hand Helps Shape a Think Tank’s Agenda in Washington

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 By Greg Rushford

 Next Tuesday, July 18, will be another big day for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has been one of Washington’s most prestigious think tanks for more than a half century. The Seventh Annual CSIS South China Sea Conference, as have its previous incarnations dating to 2011, will once again draw public attention to Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea. Speakers with impressive national security credentials will be flown in from Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia. They will be joined by leading American authorities from such respected institutions as the U.S. Naval War College and its Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican from Colorado who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee’s Asian panel, will kick off the day with a speech on “Renewing American Leadership in the Asia-Pacific.”

So who has been generously paying for conferences aimed at encouraging the importance of renewing American leadership in Asia? CSIS President and CEO John Hamre has been ducking the question for the past six years. Last July, for instance, CSIS informed the public that its sixth annual South China Sea conference had been “made possible by general support to CSIS.”

That’s not only too vague to convey real meaning, but a flat-out “misrepresentation,” according to a source who prefers to remain anonymous. To substantiate that charge, the source has provided me internal “Confidential” CSIS documents that show exactly where the money has been coming from.

The memoranda, e-mails, and other records reveal that Hamre has had a secret angel — in Hanoi.

And the angel has had an important say in who has been invited to the annual CSIS maritime conferences, and who hasn’t. CSIS’s secret benefactor is an arm of Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The unit, called the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, reports to Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and the Communist Party, according to it’s official website. Pham Binh Minh, currently Vietnam’s deputy prime minister, is a senior Party member who has served as foreign minister since 2011.

Since 2012, Vietnam’s government has given CSIS more than $450,000 to hold the annual South China Sea conferences. Over the years, CSIS has added another $55,000 from the think tank’s internal accounts, the sources of which are not identified in the documents I have been shown. CSIS chief Hamre declined to respond to persistent requests for his comment.

Questions about transparency

This is not the first time that questions have been raised in the press about CSIS and shadowy contributions from foreign sources. On September 7, 2014, for instance, the New York Times published an article headlined “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks.” Reporters Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams and Nicholas Confessore tracked millions of dollars from foreign governments that have been flowing into influential Washington think tanks, including CSIS, in recent years. The murky money “has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom,” they noted, citing instances of scholars whose opinions seemed to be unduly influenced by financial considerations.

In response to the inquiries from the Times, CSIS agreed to release a list of more than a dozen foreign government donors including Japan, Sweden and Turkey. But the disclosure from CSIS chief Hamre was semi-transparent at best. CSIS “declined to disclose details of its contracts with those nations or actual donation amounts,” the newspaper reported.

Currently, the CSIS website discloses eleven foreign governmental donors. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has contributed “$500,000 and up,” for unspecified “regional studies.” Saudi Arabia and Turkey have chipped somewhere between $100,000 – $499,999,” again unspecified. And donations between $5,000 – $99,999 have come from five other governments including Kazakhstan and Germany. No contributions are now listed from the government of Vietnam.

Hanoi’s Hidden Hand

That some Vietnamese money has been given to CSIS, however, is noted elsewhere on the CSIS site — tucked away under gifts received from 48 foundations, non-governmental organizations, and “Nonprofit Donors.” The Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam is listed as having donated at least $5,000 to CSIS, but not more than $99,999. What the DAV is, or what the money was intended for, other than the usual unspecified “regional studies,” is not disclosed.

There is nothing anywhere on the CSIS site to indicate that the DAV is an official arm of Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nothing to suggest that the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam advises the foreign minister “in the formulation, planning and implementation of the foreign policy of the State,” as it notes on its own website. To glean that DAV also participates in “academic exchanges” with research institutions, inside Vietnam and overseas, one has to go to the DAV website, where CSIS is not mentioned.

The official connections between CSIS officials and the Vietnamese government, according to the documentation I have been shown, date to April 25, 2012. That’s the day the first memorandum of understanding between CSIS and a Vietnamese diplomat was inked. Ernest Bower signed on behalf of CSIS as the think tank’s senior adviser and director of its Southeast Asia Program. Since 2011, Bower has also been the president and CEO of the BowerGroupAsia, an international consulting firm that has offices in Vietnam and other Asian countries.

Tung Nguyen Vu, who in 2012 was the deputy chief of mission of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, signed on behalf of DAV. Hanoi contributed $129,236 to hold the second CSIS conference that July. CSIS added another $20,000.

Diplomat Tung — who is also referred to as Nguyen Vu Tung — is now a senior official with DAV; he appeared on a panel at the 2016 CSIS South China Sea conference, held last July 12. And at next Tuesday’s seventh CSIS event, Dang Cam Tu, the deputy director of the DAV’s Institute for Strategic Studies, will appear on a panel moderated by CSIS senior adviser Murray Hiebert.

Conflicted interests

Hiebert is also a senior adviser to the BowerGroupAsia. His work as a private business consultant does not appear on his CSIS bio, nor does he does not disclose his corporate affiliations in his public CSIS appearances. Hiebert has declined to explain his dual roles, and CSIS chief Hamre and the think tank’s board of directors have also remained silent.

In 2015 Hiebert admitted that a CSIS study on U.S.-Vietnam relations he had co-authored had been paid for by the Vietnamese government — a fact that the published study had not disclosed. Hiebert has drawn previous attention for his unwillingness to offer critical analysis of Vietnam’s tarnished human-rights record. He once even summoned a security guard escort a prominent Vietnamese-American pro-democracy advocate from the CSIS premises, after being pressured to do so by Vietnamese security officials. (For further details, see How Hanoi Buys Influence in Washington, D.C., and Obama’s Vietnam ‘Legacy’ Trip: A Reality Check, on www.rushfordreport.com.)

These days Vietnam’s chief paymaster to CSIS is Tran Truong Thuy. Thuy is a veteran DAV official who has been involved with the annual CSIS maritime conferences since the first one in 2011. On July 11, 2016, Thuy signed the confidential CSIS memo of understanding which set the budget for last year’s conference. He was then wearing another hat: director of the Foundation for East Sea Studies.

FESS describes itself on its website as a non-profit that DAV and senior Vietnamese diplomats launched in 2014. FESS and the DAV share the same address in Hanoi. FESS’s mission is basically to explain to domestic and international audiences the Vietnamese government’s positions on its maritime disputes with China. The short explanation of the bureaucratic arrangements: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — and ultimately the Communist Party — calls the shots for both DAV and FESS.

Last year’s CSIS conference budget was typical of its predecessors. The Vietnamese agreed to pay $94,935 of the total costs of $104,935. CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative chipped in the other $10,000. The money was to be used to pay for CSIS staffers’ time spent on the event, travel and hotel costs from various Asian locations for invited speakers, and other conference costs such as those associated with meals and printing documents. CSIS agreed, as it had in previous years, to send all of the receipts to Hanoi.

While the contractual arrangements with Hanoi specified that both CSIS and the Vietnamese would “together draft the agenda and the list of participants,” CSIS also asserted its rights to full editorial independence and its “total discretion and final decision-making authority.”

Those rights were put to the test in the days before last year’s conference, which was held on July 12, 2016. That same day, an international tribunal in The Hague issued a ruling that determined that China has been acting in violation of its international legal obligations by destroying coral reefs to build weaponized artificial islands in waters with the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone — putting both Manila and Hanoi in range of Chinese jet bombers.

The Paymasters’ Power Play

Given the likelihood of intense public interest in the wake of the tribunal’s ruling, CSIS staffers Murray Hiebert and Greg Poling asked China’s ambassador in Washington, Cui Tiankai, to speak at the conference. Considering the beating that Beijing would be taking that day in light of the legal ruling, Hiebert and Poling thought that was only fair, and said so in their e-mail correspondence.

Poling informed Thuy on July 7 that he had heard from the Chinese embassy, and that Cui was willing to speak.

Thuy hit the roof.

“Murray, we cannot agree with the way you handle the conference,” the Vietnamese diplomat informed Hiebert in one July 8, 2016 e-mail. “You invited Chinese Amb without consultation with us and now saying that you cannot disinvite him. Please understand that to create a forum for promoting Chinese propaganda is not our purpose.”

Hiebert shot back: “Our goal is not to create a form for Chinese propaganda, but to create a credible forum that shows China’s unacceptable behavior in the SCS [South China Sea]. Amb Cui won’t convince anyone that justice is on his side. Allowing him to speak will give our all day event and the event’s sharp criticism of China much more credibility without detracting from our message.”

Finally, after the flurry of e-mails with the CSIS staffers had reached an impasse, Thuy put his foot down. “Murray, not allowing Chinese Amb to deliver his speech is not only my personal opinion but a strict requirement from our ‘sponsors’ and I don’t have chance to convince them anymore.”

Faced with the implacable attitude of the men with the money in Hanoi, Hiebert and Poling crafted a compromise position. “Thuy, Amb. Cui will not speak at the SCS conference tomorrow,” Hiebert informed his Vietnamese benefactor on July 11. “Instead, he will speak later in the day after the conference has ended at the invitation of the China Power Program, which is not related to the SE Asia program that organized the conference.”

As Hiebert had promised Thuy, the July 12 conference that the Vietnamese government had paid for adjourned at 4:30 p.m. Fifteen minutes later, at 4:45 p.m., the Chinese ambassador delivered his remarks, which were live-streamed.

 Enter Irony — and Moral- and Intellectual Failures

There is an irony to this story. CSIS has earned genuine respect in leading foreign-affairs circles for its success in focusing the American public’s attention on China’s misconduct in the South China Sea. The rub is the evasiveness concerning who was paying the bills. That has been compounded by the business affiliations of CSIS officials who were raising money from the Vietnamese government at the same time they were promoting private business dealings in Vietnam.

Readers will draw their own conclusions as to what the Vietnamese government has gotten for its money. During the years covered in this article, Vietnam’s agenda in Washington has had several key parts. Hanoi wanted to create a climate of opinion to foster a closer diplomatic and security relationship with the United States. CSIS analysts also wanted that. The Vietnamese wanted President Barack Obama to visit Vietnam, to help deepen the relationship. CSIS also advocated that trip. Hanoi wanted Washington to lift its ban on the sale of lethal arms to the communist regime. CSIS analysts shared that part of the agenda also. And Vietnam wanted American support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. CSIS was on the same page.

To be sure, CSIS officials could plausibly argue that the agenda they have been pressing on behalf of better U.S.-Vietnamese relations was reasonable.

But there’s more to this story that raises troubling questions. Above everything else, the Vietnamese government has wanted foreign policy elites in Washington to avert their eyes on Hanoi’s gross violations of human rights. The Communist Party sees its very survival as dependent upon its continued ability to suppress even peaceable dissent. And as I have reported previously in How Hanoi Buys Influence and Obama’s Vietnam Legacy Trip, John Hamre, Ernie Bower, Murray Hiebert, and Greg Poling have been careful not to cause undo offense to the powers in Hanoi when awkward questions about political prisoners have arisen.

To refuse to speak out when courageous Vietnamese citizens are imprisoned merely for peaceable exercising their universal rights to free speech is surely a moral failure.

And there’s also an intellectual failure. Vietnam, a member of the United Nations, is a signatory to various international legal instruments that guarantee its citizens universal freedoms of speech and expression. Any analyst who criticizes China for flouting international law in the South China Sea surely is obligated to point out that Vietnam’s continuing persecution of some of its best citizens also is in violation of accepted UN international legal norms.

Except, perhaps, if there is money to be made by looking away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Collaborator

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 Last week marked some memorable history being made — and some key dates perhaps fraught with deeper historical significance than either Philippine President Rodrigo Roa Duterte or China’s Xi Jinping would care to be reminded of.

On Oct. 17, Xinhua reported that the president of the Philippines — then enroute for an official state visit to China — had admitted he would not fight for his country. “There is no sense in going to war” to recover Philippine territory that Chinese forces have seized in the South China Sea, Rodrigo Roa Duterte had declared. “There is no sense fighting over a body of water.” Also on Oct. 17, Duterte told Hong Kong’s Phoenix Television that he wanted to hold war games with China — and no longer with the Philippines’ longstanding treaty ally, the United States. “I have given enough time for the Americans to play with the Filipino soldiers,” he said.

On Oct. 20, speaking in the Great Hall of the People, Duterte delivered on what he had promised would be the “defining moment of my presidency,” sticking the knife into the Americans. “In this venue, your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States.” Duterte went on to say this: “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to [President Vladimir] Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world — China, Philippines and Russia.” America, he added, “has lost.”

Also on Oct. 20, a triumphant-looking President Xi delivered his part of the bilateral bargain. In return for the Philippine president’s willingness to look the other way regarding Chinese naval- and air bases in the South China Sea, Beijing would start delivering more than $13.5 billion of soft loans and an array Chinese-controlled joint development projects to fill Duterte’s begging bowl.

Professor Erwin Tiongson of Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and a man with a keen historical eye, helps put last week’s chronology in a fitting context. October 20, as Duterte was venting his scorn for Americans in Beijing, marks the 72nd anniversary of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s landing in Leyte. Five months later, a future President Rodrigo Roa Duterte would be born into freedom — on the island of Leyte.

The historical record is silent — and Duterte himself has not responded to a written invitation to clarify it — on how his parents, Vicente Duterte and Soledad Roa Duterte, might have celebrated when the Americans freed them from foreign aggression. We don’t know (yet) whether Vicente and Soledad were among the brave Filipino patriots who harassed Japanese forces on Leyte and passed valuable intelligence on to the U.S. Sixth Army — or whether they, like others, were collaborators. But we know what to call the son, who has admitted he is eager to look the other way in the face of foreign aggression, in return for money.

Also on Oct. 20, while Duterte was venting his spleen against Americans in the Great Hall of the People, the U.S. Embassy in Manila dispatched Col. Kevin Wolfla to Leyte. The decorated U.S. Army attaché spoke to an audience in the town of Palo that had gathered to mark the 1945 Leyte Gulf landing. “Our relationship with the Philippines is broad and our alliance is one of our most enduring and important relationships in the Asia-Pacific region,” Col. Wolfla (rightly) noted. “It is a cornerstone of stability for over 70 years.”

The Philippines News Agency reported that Leyte Gov. Dominico Petilla “repeatedly thanked the US for its role in the Philippines’ liberation and massive assistance of the US government after super typhoon Yolanda.” The governor’s mother, Palo Mayor Remedios Petilla, “assured that US officials will always be invited in future Leyte Gulf Landing celebrations,” the news report added.

Seventy two years after the landing that set the stage for the largest naval battle in history — and the liberation of the Philippines, Filipinos still mark the date with a MacArthur Landing Memorial National Park. And it turns out that President Duterte has a most personal reason to remember American sacrifices for his country. But for reasons that have yet to be explained, Rodrigo Duterte’s historical memories are shorter.

Duterte was born on Leyte on March 28, 1945. While his mother was giving birth, Japanese forces sunk an American submarine, the USS Trigger, which had been patrolling in Japanese waters. Eighty-nine Americans under the command of CDR David Rickart Connole lost their lives that day. The Trigger had already sunk “at least fifteen enemy vessels for a total of more than 85,000 tons of shipping,” according to the United States Navy Submarine Force Library and Museum, in Groton, Connecticut. Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class Constantine Guinness, one of the Trigger’s intrepid men, had captured the Trigger’s spirit with a poem: “I’m the Galloping Ghost of the Japanese Coast.”

The names of the Trigger’s crew are also remembered in the missing-in-action memorial in the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Duterte’s foreign secretary, Perfecto Yasay — who has also been busy expressing his disdain for Americans these days — was living in Hawaii with his family when his old friend Duterte tapped him for the Department of Foreign Affairs. As I reported in a column published on ForeignPolicy.com on Oct. 17, Yasay has professional ties to Filipino-Chinese tycoons with high-level connections in Beijing.

Duterte has not responded to questions as to whether he has ever been to the American Cemetery in Manila. Tucked away on 152 peaceful green acres, the cemetery honors the memories of the 16,632 Americans and 570 brave Filipinos who are buried there — and whose lives will be eternally marked by their sacrifices to free the Philippines from foreign occupation. There is also a chapel and a memorial honoring 36,285 Americans, Filipinos and other members of the allied armed forces who were killed in action — including the eighty-nine Americans from the Trigger who died the day Duterte’s mother gave birth.

There are other dates worth contemplation as the Duterte presidency continues down its anti-American path. But one stands out.

On September 9, 1945, Japanese forces surrendered in China. President Xi Jinping and other senior members of the Politburo like to pretend that China’s armed forces threw out the Japanese. The chest thumpers in today’s Beijing are loath to acknowledge that Americans, Australians, British, New Zealanders, Canadians and others also had their hands in that victory, to understate the matter considerably.

The missing date in the chronology is the time that China helped another country secure its liberty, at the cost of considerable Chinese lives. That’s because such a historical event has yet to happen.