The Plow — February, 28th
From: elisabeth.viner
To: richard.hallberg
Subject: RE: NATO Memo
Richard,
Thanks again for the dinner yesterday, it was wonderful. I have to say, I didn’t expect that fish pie. It’s been years since I ate one, maybe college…
Anyway, I wanted to get back to you about the Roller.
I think you were right about Viktor Orbán. I have a source in his entourage that tells me it’s madness in his government. He got rid of most of his political advisors and is now only talking to the generals. The army is withholding the intel they have and the country’s internal situation reports from the SHAPE folks, and they’re still mute about Budapest. Rumor is that the guy is preparing some kind of coup.
We don’t have anything official, much less printable, so I’d like you to work on that, see if you can shake something out of your sources over there.
That said, it looks like it’s business as usual with operation Trajan. Andréi is supposed to report back on that over the weekend. I mean I say usual but it seems complicated to secure a moving exclusion zone, they don’t have procedures for that, and they constantly have incursions in the perimeter — just look at the hundreds of videos on social media.
Do you know what pisses me off with all this? It’s that, in truth, we have no facts. At all. We’ve been writing non-stop about this fucking thing for two weeks yet we still don’t know squat about it. What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it moving? Why towards Budapest? Towards us? How do we stop it? All the Guardian’s journalists are on it and no one has been able to give me the smallest answer. I honestly don’t know where to get anything. And everybody’s silent! Come on, all those politicians and experts and pundits that can’t shut up for a minute normally, now that we have a real problem, nothing? Really?
And we also have to get back to the rest of the world. I understand that we have an insane, miles-high object, from fucking nowhere, coming at us. I get that it’s still hard to wrap our heads around that. But other things are still happening on this planet, and we might as well talk about it instead of blabbering pointlessly. For example, we’re about to have a massive Coronavirus pandemic and it’s not even on the front page. Boris Johnson just said he won’t have an emergency security council until Monday, we have to cover that. Don’t you agree?
Sorry for letting it out like that, in an email, but I didn’t want to make a scene in the middle of the press meeting.
See you in a couple of hours.
Oh, almost forgot. Trajan was a Roman emperor. He conquered what is now Romania during the Dacian Wars, somewhere around 100 AD. It’s probably from Antonescu, it couldn’t have escaped him. See, no need for interns :)
Regards,
Elisabeth Viner
Editor-in-chief, The Guardian
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