in the United States has led companies to adopt a variety of public relations measures to reassure the public, including the employment of former military personnel with training in psychological warfare operations. According to Matt Pitzarella, the communications director at Range Resources, employees trained in the Middle East have been valuable to Range Resources in Pennsylvania, when dealing with emotionally charged township meetings and advising townships on zoning and local ordinances dealing with hydraulic fracturing. There have been many protests directed at hydraulic fracturing. For example, ten people were arrested in 2013 during an anti-fracking protest near New Matamoras, Ohio, after they illegally entered a development zone and latched themselves to drilling equipment. In northwest Pennsylvania, there was a drive-by shooting at a well site, in which someone shot two rounds of a small-caliber rifle in the direction of a drilling rig. In Washington County, Pennsylvania, a contractor working on a gas pipeline found a pipe bomb that had been placed where a pipeline was to be constructed, which local authorities said would have caused a "catastrophe" had they not discovered and detonated it. U.S. government and Corporate lobbying The United States Department of State established the Global Shale Gas Initiative to persuade governments around the world to give concessions to the major oil and gas companies to set up fracking operations. A document United States diplomatic cables leak published by WikiLeaks show that, as part of this project, U.S. officials convened conferences for foreign government officials that featured presentations by major oil and gas company representatives and by public relations professionals with expertise on how to assuage populations of target countries whose citizens were often quite hostile to fracking on their lands. The US government project succeeded as many countries on several continents acceded to the idea of granting concessions for fracking; Poland, for example, agreed to permit fracking by the major oil and gas corporations on nearly a third of its territory. The US Export-Import Bank, an agency of the US government, provided $4.7 billion in financing for fracking operations set up since 2010 in Queensland, Australia. Alleged Russian state advocacy In 2014 a number of European officials suggested that several major European protests against hydraulic fracturing (with mixed success in Lithuania and Ukraine) may be partially sponsored by Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas company. The New York Times suggested that Russia saw its natural gas exports to Europe