[Originally published as "Pattern of Life: Where Would Hosni Mubarak Flee?" on the Recorded Future Blog]

When dictators are overthrown they are typically either killed in short order (think Nicolae Ceauşescu) or they flee. Without too much statistical analysis, we can come up with deposed leaders that left their country for France (Baby Doc of Haiti) and Saudi Arabia (recently, Ben Ali from Tunisia).

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is in trouble. Given the ongoing protests against his government, we may be interested in finding out where, if forced, he would flee. We won’t attempt to make a judgement call on whether he will survive or explicitly find his travel plans since they presumably don’t exist directly in the open source.

In considering where Mubarak might go, we’ll use his patterns of communication and travel over the last 12 months as identified in Recorded Future to provide guidance.

Communciation Patterns

Hosni Mubarak Communication Trends

• Hosni Mubarak had interactions with a large number of world leaders including Obama, Clinton, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Berlusconi.
• Mubarak also privately met with the head of Oman – Sultan Qaboos bin Said – during his visit to Egypt.

Travel Patterns

Inspecting the treemap of President Mubarak’s travel patterns over the last year, we find some interesting clues to where he might go if forced to leave Egypt:

Hosni Mubarak Travel Patterns

• One of the highest momentum cities in the visualization is London. This comes with an interesting indicator on the Huffington Post: “It was reported two days ago that Gamal Mubarak, son of President Mubarak was heading to London with a big entourage and about 80 pieces of luggage along with his mother, Suzanne Mubarak, and high officials, though Egyptian sources dismiss the report as false.”
• Germany stands out in the above treemap, and we learn that Mubarak traveled there for cancer treatment in 2010. Would Germany have him back given that they provided him medical attention? Similarly, Mubarak also travelled to Paris for suspected health reasons.
• Italy has been called out as the strongest European connection for Egypt, and Mubarak seems to have a strong relationship with Berlusconi. Mubarak also stopped in Greece when returning from his last trip to Italy.
• Other web sources (not at all verified) suggest a strong relationship between Mubarak and the rulers of the UAE might make it a prime destination.
• Mubarak has travelled to a number of Arab nations like Libya, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, but those places would be potentially unstable and not necessarily offer protection in the long run.
• Ben Ali, the former leader of Tunisia, recently fled to Saudi Arabia where Mubarak was for discussions in late 2009. The Egyptian president met with King Abdullah in mid-2010 in a peace summit, and the Saudi king very recently expressed his support for Mubarak. Supposedly this chant can be heard in Egypt right now: “Christian or Muslim it’s not important, similar poverty similar concerns! Hosni Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak, the plane is waiting, the plane is waiting. Saudi Arabia is not far!”
  
• Mubarak has also been in the US for peace summits and other political meetings, but the US seems an unlikely place to flee.

Conclusion

Hosni Mubarak has a much broader set of connections and travel patterns than Ben Ali of Tunisia, and potentially has more places to go should he be forced from Egypt. Still, the options seem limited if he wants to establish a long term place to stay.

Even if Mubarak has kept plenty of interactions with the US, France, UK, Germany, and others, it would seem unlikely that any of those countries would take him in although Italy may be an exception.

Saudi Arabia stands out as the strongest candidate given both its recent display of support as well as historical connections. The UAE and Oman might be other relatively safe places.

In the end, our bet is on Saudia Arabia.

As we’ve noted previously, Hu Jintao was a very active traveller in 2009 and an active participant in international meetings. However – after his non-appearance at the global warming summit in Copenhagen (when he was busy doing energy deals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) his travel activity has decreased, his coverage in media as fallen, and finally, his external communications have plummeted.

We will explore these patterns using open source intelligence and discuss their potential implication.

The “official view” on change in leadership in China is that in 2012 both Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao will step down (when Hu’s maximum tenure is up, by the time of the 18th party congress), and the current vice president Xi Jingping will step up to become the new president. We can very easily see this in Recorded Future by just typing EmploymentChange Hu Jintao Future – and get the below result.

Click to enlarge

For updates on the future of Hu Jintao, click the below link and fill in your email address – and you’ll be subscribed to a Future for Hu Jintao (very easy to unsubscribe!).

Travel Patterns

First we review the travel patterns of Hu Jintao in 2009-10 by posing the question Person Travel Hu Jintao 2009-01-01–2010-12-31. We can visually inspect how President Hu’s travel has shrunk across 2009 and even come to a stand still lately (including uncertainty around a trip to the US in April for a key nuclear weapons summit). In 2009 Hu visited a whole set of countries, key meetings, and world leaders.

Timeline view of Hu Jintao travel.

We can also export these travel patterns to Google Earth to visually and geographically review where President Hu has travelled across time. Click here to explore Hu Jintao’s travel patterns in Google Earth.

Travel patterns over Google Earth

To stay abreast of Hu Jintao travel click the below link to subscribe to a Future on travels of Hu Jintao.

Personal Communication

Personal Communications include meetings, phone calls or direct verbal communications – that Recorded Future picks up in news, blogs, government filings, speeches, etc. Just like we reviewed travel patterns we can review the personal communications of Hu Jintao. During 2009 we recorded a large number of public communications including Hu Jintao.

Hu Jintao Network Graph

However, in the first quarter of 2010, Hu Jintao’s public communications seem to have come to a halt as well, with only a few interactions being recorded, including Russian premier Putin, head of North Korea Kim Il, Barack Obama, and Harmid Karzai who recently visited in Beijing.

Fewer Public Communications for Hu Jintao

Quantitative analysis of media flow

Now, the above analysis of reviewing travels and communication patterns may be quite insightful and compelling, however it might be that we miss signals that requires more rigorous quantitative analysis. The below plot shows the volume of media flow on Hu Jintao across the world – in a so called SPC chart allowing us to find extreme levels of media flow – when it goes outside say 3 standard deviations or when there is an improbable run of higher or lower than average levels of media flow. The data is normalized and low media flow/weekend days are omitted in an attempt to show “true outliers”.

The visualization is produced in R using the Recorded Future API. We will shortly share an entry in the Predictive Signals blog on how these were done.

An interesting note: from the end of 2009 President Hu seems to be disappearing off the face of the earth compared to earlier. We can’t answer exactly why – but clearly it is a signal that correlates with the above patterns of communication and travel.

R Process Chart of Hu Jintao on the web.

Now then, when comparing, on a normalized basis, Hu Jintao to Wen Jiabao it gets even more interesting. Whereas both them had a “media lull” around Christmas/Chinese New Year, Wen Jiabao has had an upwards trend in general and has come back strongly after the holidays. We might try to draw some “big conclusion” from that, but probably too early.

Wen Jiabao in the media.

Detecting co-occurrence in media flow

Finally we will explore media co-occurrence of key Chinese leaders over time, to see if we can find anything interesting regarding who is clustering in their behavior. To identify the key Chinese leaders along with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, we consulted the CIA World Factbook/Word Leaders on China and extracted a set of key leaders with good coverage in Recorded Future. The below visualization (done in R) displays a dendrogram with Chinese leader clusters who’s behavior is similar in terms of media coverage over time (i.e. reaches peaks and lulls at same times). The theory would be that co-occurring in media systematically could infer subtle patterns alignment in behavior – such as part-taking in same events, travelling together, co-occurring in same speeches, etc.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is to look at Xi Jinping, the rumoured president to be. By exploring who clusters closely to him we might be able to find clusters of politicians that are close to him that we should watch in terms of their behavior and actions. Yin Weimin clusters the closest, his current portfolio is modest. Yang Jiechi, minister of foreign affairs, has had much more strong views on the US and its relationship to the China. Definitely worth watching.

Clustering of Chinese individuals in the media.