JDN - Was that Warnecke Jr? H said that "he and Al Gore had spent many a night together nearly 30 years ago imbibing cognac and smoking opium-laced marijuana"
World Net Daily
Monday, October 16, 2000
CIA official: Gore compromised by secret past
Says Russia has dossiers on VP's former drug use, Hammer connection
By Charles Thompson and Tony Hays
(c) 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
According to a former high-ranking official in the CIA, Russian intelligence agencies possess thick dossiers concerning Al Gore's heavy usage of drugs three decades ago as well as his father's questionable dealings with Armand Hammer, a dedicated Soviet operative for 70 years.
The CIA source, speaking to WorldNetDaily on condition of anonymity, has since the 1970s routinely advised American presidents, including President Clinton, on Russian intelligence.
There is credible evidence, says the source, that these dossiers have already been employed to alter Gore's behavior on issues affecting Russia. As an example, he cited Gore's acquiescence to the corruption of former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who co-chaired a commission with Gore to encourage Americans to do business in Russia. Chernomyrdin accumulated from $1 billion to $5 billion in personal assets from the systematic looting of the Soviet state treasury during the time he co-chaired the commission with Gore.
Republican presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush brought this exact point up during last week's second debate with Gore.
"We went into Russia," said Bush. "We said, 'Here's some IMF money,' and it ended up in Viktor Chernomyrdin's pocket and others. And yet we played like there was reform."
As WND has reported previously, American businessmen, who were threatened with death by the Russian mafia and/or had their assets expropriated by these gangsters, say their complaints were brushed aside by Gore and his aides while the vice president chaired the committee meant to help them.
"Chernomyrdin didn't have to show Gore the incriminating dossiers; Gore knew he had them. It's akin to blackmail and extortion, but it's really using highly embarrassing information on a sustained basis," said the source, who has been associated with America's foreign policy elite for three decades as a chief adviser on intelligence matters.
"The situation will get much worse if Gore's elected president. Russian president Vladimir Putin [a former KGB colonel who has mob connections] will tell Gore, in effect, 'I've got the files and this is what we want you to do.' And Gore will do it," he added.
Earlier this year, John C. Warnecke Jr., a former Tennessean newspaper reporter in Nashville, told Newsweek reporter Bill Turque that he and Al Gore had spent many a night together nearly 30 years ago imbibing cognac and smoking opium-laced marijuana. Warnecke worked with Gore in 1971 and remained a good friend through 1976. Ken Jost, another former reporter for the newspaper, backed up Warnecke's account after Turque's biography, "Inventing Al Gore," was published.
In years past, The Tennessean had treated Warnecke as if he were royalty due to the fact that his father has close connections to the Kennedy family, as did John Seigenthaler, the former editor and publisher of the paper. Seigenthaler considered himself to be a king-maker and recruited both Warnecke and Gore to join the paper's staff, largely because of their respective fathers' political clout. Seigenthaler was the one who first convinced Al Gore Jr. to run for Congress.
Even so, after his revelations about Gore's alleged drug use, the paper didn't waste any time training its editorial guns on the 53-year-old Warnecke.
It was quick to bring up the fact that he had once suffered from depression. Warnecke admitted he had been depressed 20 years ago, but said he had obtained treatment then and was fine now. The paper cited 31 former Tennessean staffers who had worked with Gore and Warnecke in the early 1970s who said they had never seen Gore smoke marijuana. Three others deferred comment.
Gore called the story "old news" and said he used marijuana "when I came back from Vietnam, but not to that extent." One of the trio who refused to discuss Gore's drug usage was the top editor, Frank Sutherland, who had allegedly partied with Gore and Warnecke.
"If Al Gore wants to talk about his private life, that's fine," Sutherland said. "But I'm not going to talk about my private life. That's nobody's business." An ardent Gore supporter, Sutherland went so far as to appear in a Gore campaign video.
In early June, Sutherland couldn't find space in his newspaper to report the story about the overflowing sewage in a ramshackle house Gore rents on the edge of his 80-acre estate in Carthage, Tenn., to a disabled man, his wife and their five handicapped children. Even though the story appeared on the Associated Press and on the front page of almost every major newspaper in America, Sutherland said it didn't merit sending a reporter from Nashville to Carthage, about 60 miles away.
One of the tenants, Tracy Mayberry, said she had complained repeatedly about clogged toilets, overflowing sinks and the odor of sewage that permeated the house, but received no satisfaction from Gore. Even after he was widely chided as a "slumlord," Gore apparently didn't take the matter all that seriously, because the repairs were carried out in a slipshod, grudging manner. Disgusted, Mayberry and her family vacated the premises and moved to the Midwest, where she said she was going to vote for George W. Bush.
Whatever the Russians have in their dope dossiers regarding Gore, the material can't match what's apparently in the Gore/Armand Hammer files. The squalid Gore/Hammer relationship, according to one longtime observer of Hammer, is much like a B-grade gothic movie, replete with spying, murder, bribery, art forgery, jewelry theft and exploitation of workers and the environment.
'Remarkable life'
Until Armand Hammer's death on Dec. 7, 1990, at age 92, a story such as this could probably not be written. During his lifetime, Hammer commissioned three vanity biographies, including one entitled "The Remarkable Life of Dr. Armand Hammer," to camouflage his dealings with Russia.
His public relations staff doled these volumes out to reporters, and over time fiction became accepted as fact. Any reporter who dug too deeply into Hammer's background was threatened with a lawsuit. Steve Weinberg, a well-respected journalist and University of Missouri professor, was the only writer to produce an unauthorized biography about Hammer. Published nearly two years before Hammer's death, the well-researched book drew Hammer's ire. He had his attorneys file a lawsuit in England alleging that 156 passages were defamatory.
Weinberg did not have the same defenses against libel in England that he would in the U.S. He had the burden of proving that all 156 passages were true. If just one were proven false, Weinberg would have lost the entire case. As it was, his publisher was forced to pay millions of dollars in legal expenses. The case was dropped when Hammer died.
Hammer's attorneys also threatened retired Marine Lt. Col. Bill Corson for what he wrote about Armand and his father, Julius, in Corson's 1985 book, "The New KGB." Corson, who died earlier this year, was a legendary expert on intelligence who had served in combat in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He told attorney Louis Nizer, who was famous in his own right, to pound sand after Nizer threatened to bring legal action. Nizer never followed up on his threat to sue.
In the past 10 years, a glut of CIA and FBI documents concerning Hammer's extensive dealings with Russia have been declassified. In addition, a hard-hitting book, "Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer" by Edward Jay Epstein was published four years ago. This material provides rich insight into Hammer's treasonous activities on behalf of the Communist Party.
Interestingly enough, only a trickle of documents have been released concerning the Gore/Hammer relationship from the Russian archives. This, despite the fact that millions of documents on other subjects have been dislodged since the dissolution of the former Soviet Union 10 years ago.
"The Russians don't want anybody chasing down that rat hole, poking into those side corridors involving the Gores," the CIA source said. "Al Gore Jr. is clearly still a valuable asset to the Russians."
Armand Hammer was born on May 21, 1898, in Manhattan. His father, Julius Hammer, told friends that he named his son for the arm and hammer emblem of one of the Communist Party predecessor organizations. Julius, a dedicated revolutionary most of his life, was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa in 1874. He spent his youth in Russia, and when he was 16 moved with his family to America.
One of the founders of the Communist Party in America, Julius Hammer raised huge sums of money for radicals both before and after the Russian Revolution, sometimes by theft. A graduate of Columbia College's medical school program, Julius was primarily an abortionist. He also controlled eight drugstores from which he siphoned off assets for the benefit of the Bolsheviks.
Armand followed in his father's footsteps to Columbia College and was a second-year medical student in 1919, working afternoons in his father's clinic, when tragedy struck. Julius Hammer was charged with manslaughter after a 33-year-old woman underwent an abortion in the clinic located in the Hammer home and later bled to death. Although Julius admitted performing the abortion, he claimed it was medically justified. However, author Edward Jay Epstein asserts that it was Armand, not Julius, who actually performed the abortion on Marie Oganesoff, the wife of a Russian diplomat who had come to America for the czarist regime during World War I. Not long after his father was arrested, Armand dropped out of medical school. Despite this, he referred to himself as "Doctor Hammer" for the rest of his life.
Julius's trial dragged on for almost a year. It was interrupted by a charge that William Cope, a public relations man retained by him, had attempted to bribe a juror. The jury finally found Julius guilty and sentenced him to three-and-one-half years of hard labor at Sing Sing State Prison.
Julius's imprisonment left the Hammer family in a quandary. At that time, there seemed to be a good chance that the worldwide embargo of Russia would be loosened, allowing foreign entrepreneurs to make a financial killing in that impoverished country. Julius had been planning on returning to Russia to take advantage of the situation, but now Armand was designated to go. A callow youth with no business experience, he couldn't even speak Russian. Nevertheless, he was shrewd and could capitalize on his family's sterling relations with Lenin, Leon Trotsky and other communist luminaries. Armand was later joined in Russia by his brothers, Viktor and Harry, and by his father after he was released from prison.
In 1921, Armand drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, then a 26-year-old lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice spearheading the "red round-ups." The future FBI director heard from an informant that Hammer was a courier for the newly organized Communist International, or Comintern. Hoover alerted British authorities, and Hammer was searched when his ship reached Southampton, England. A propaganda film was found in his possession. Scotland Yard detained him on the ship for two days and then allowed him to go his own way. Although Hoover kept close tabs on Hammer for another half century, he never arrested him, possibly because Hammer's Russian spymasters had amassed so much dirt on the FBI chief.
After a meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin in 1921, Armand later recorded in his dairy: "If Lenin told me to jump out that window, I probably would have done it." He said he was "captivated" by Lenin and agreed to do anything he asked. Lenin granted Hammer the first U.S. concession in Russia, a run-down asbestos mine. Josef Stalin, Lenin's brutish successor who murdered millions of his countrymen, later granted Hammer a concession to manufacture pencils in Russia.
In addition to these ventures, Hammer spent much of the 1920s serving as a courier and paymaster to a multitude of active spies salted away in 20 countries. It was a miserable existence for Hammer, one-night stays at down-at-the-heel hotels, constantly dodging counter-intelligence agents who pursued him.
In 1922, embittered by the atrocious working conditions and miserly pay at the asbestos mine, the workers revolted. Hammer quickly got in touch with Felix Dzerzhinski, head of the Cheka, the dreaded Soviet secret police for help. The Cheka brutally suppressed the strike. Hammer wrote glowingly about Dzerzhinski's tactics. He said he had been with the police chief in the Urals, and when a train was late, Dzerzhinski became enraged. He ordered a detachment of Cheka troops to take the chief train administrator and his assistant to a courtyard and shot as a "lesson" for the other workers. Hammer was impressed by Dzerzhinski's brutal methods, telling colleagues that he had witnessed an example of the ends justifying the means.
After Armand's return to New York in late 1931, he separated from his Russian-born wife, Olga, a former cabaret singer, and his young son, Julian. He later divorced Olga and was reconciled with Julian. The divorce was part of his attempt to obscure his dealings with the Soviet Union. For the next decade, Hammer devoted much of his time to promoting and running Hammer Galleries in New York. These galleries were a Soviet front used to peddle fake Romanoff jewelry and counterfeit art. Russia was strapped for money, and this was a desperate attempt to raise hard currency. The shipments that arrived from Russia included everything from costume jewelry to Torah scrolls stolen from synagogues and icons ripped from the walls of orthodox churches.
Almost none of it had been owned by the czars. Faberge Easter eggs were also faked. Hammer was allowed to keep very little of the profits. A master of disinformation, at one time when Hammer had only $2,000 in his banking account, he was widely touted in the press as being a multi-millionaire.
In 1940, even though he had signed a non-aggression pact with Adolph Hitler, Stalin was mistrustful of his German allies and enlisted Hammer to influence President Franklin Roosevelt to help Russia if she were invaded. Roosevelt was well aware of Hammer's background from J. Edgar Hoover and from British intelligence. Roosevelt met once with Hammer, for just five minutes. Hammer's mission was a failure. The Roosevelt administration was well aware of who Hammer's real masters were and shunned him.
Hammer was nervous during the 1950s as the Korean War was being fought and anti-Soviet sentiment grew throughout America. He saw himself being jailed as his father had been. Somehow, that never happened, although others were imprisoned or deported for much lesser offenses.
Enter Al Gore Sr.
During this same time, Hammer brazenly petitioned the U.S. government for a license to export synthetic nitrogen-based and ammonia fertilizer to Russia. This fertilizer could also be used to make military explosives and munitions. Most of the fertilizer would be manufactured at a $75 million West Virginia plant owned by the U.S. Army. Hammer submitted the highest bid for a 15-year lease on the plant. Denied access to the Truman administration, he enlisted key members of Congress, most notably Albert Gore Sr., to lobby in his behalf. He put Gore on his payroll.
Hammer cut Gore in on a sweetheart deal when Occidental purchased Hooker Chemical Company in 1969. According to author Bob Zelnick, who was then an ABC News correspondent, the Tennessee senator was allowed to purchase a thousand Hooker shares at $150, far less than the stock was worth. Gore was also made a partner in Hammer's cattle-breeding business, from which the Tennessee senator earned tidy profits. Gore reciprocated by doing favors for Hammer, such as cutting through Justice Department opposition to make an FBI agent available to testify for Hammer in a civil suit.
Zelnick lost his job at ABC News after he refused to honor the network's demands that he break his contract with Regnery Publishing, Inc. to write his book, "Gore: A Political Life." He now teaches graduate courses in journalism at Boston University.
The House Armed Services Committee looked into Hammer's fertilizer deal and grilled him about his dealings with Russia. The Army refused to do business with him. The FBI was also hostile, and the Hammer deal ultimately went down in flames. |
