A natural-gas project off Alaska may be a Russian ploy

This story was originally published by ProPublica.
To an outsider, the research boats bobbing in the frigid and stormy Beaufort Sea off Alaska would seem little cause for alarm. Oil and gas companies have regularly explored the area for decades. For this project, businessmen from the United Arab Emirates were touting a plan to tap the vast natural gas reserves that lay beneath the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope. They promised the operation would eventually be American-owned. No one could disp